Battle Of Stalingrad Quotes

Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.

That the Soviet regime was almost as unforgiving towards its own soldiers as towards the enemy is demonstrated by the total figure of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the battle of Stalingrad.

American doctors did not of course know then what the Germans had discovered after the battle of Stalingrad. The combination of stress, exhaustion, cold and malnourishment upsets the metabolism, and gravely reduces the body’s capacity to absorb calories and vitamins.

I had been imagining what war was like - everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it really turned out to be like that, only more terrible.

Joseph Stalin: Joseph Stalin was the Soviet dictator who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist and was responsible for a number of the decisions made during the battle of Stalingrad. He was born on December 18, 1978 in Gori, Georgia. He was an only child who grew up in a poor family. His father was an alcoholic shoemaker who beat Joseph and his mother was a

Panse, along with approximately 5,000 others, finally returned to a divided Germany in the early 1950's. 500,000 men went to Stalingrad. Some were evacuated during the battle, but not many. Five thousand came home.

Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad not based on tactics or technology, but on numbers. The same proved true for follow-on battles at Kursk and the Mius and Belgorod and Kharkov and Smolensk and the Dnieper and Kiev and the Crimea and Narva and Debrecen. In each fight, the Russians brought wave after wave of disposable troops. Most of these Soviet wins took a second attempt. Some took four. In some battles, the casualty ratios were five to one against the Soviets, but they . . . just . . . kept . . . coming.

Vasily Zaitsev was the most popular and well-known sniper for the Soviets. During the battle he had over 242 confirmed kills. Zaitsev was part of a corps of snipers. Some thirty students were under his wing. During the war, these students killed more than 3,000 German soldiers.

It was too much for Adolf Hitler. In the summer of 1944, he began to vent his anger at the Luftwaffe for its failures from the Battle of Britain to Stalingrad and now Normandy. ‘Goering! The Luftwaffe’s doing nothing,’ he railed at the Reichsmarschall during one conference. ‘It’s no longer worthy to be an independent service. And that’s your fault. You’re lazy.’ Tears rolled down the Reichsmarschall’s cheeks. He reported himself ‘sick’ for future conferences and ordered his generals to deputize.

A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.

even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be

Zaitsev records in his memoirs one difficult duel he had with a German sniper. While there is no actual proof of the identity of the German sniper, many believe that he was Heinz Thorvald, the head of the Berlin sniper school. Thorvald was also known as Erwin Konig. Zaitsev stated that the German sniper was difficult to find but when two Soviet soldiers were shot in the same area, Zaitsev and his partner Kulikov began searching the area for the German sniper. While searching, Zaitsev spotted a flash of light beneath a scrap of metal. As soon as Zaitsev’s partner, Kulikov placed a helmet on a rod and lifted it up to a window, Konig shot the helmet. Then when Konig peeked out of his hiding spot to determine if the victim was dead, he got a headshot from Zaitsev.

As Grossman’s passage indicates, women made a significant contribution to Soviet combat operations, at Stalingrad, as elsewhere on the Eastern Front. A million women served in the Red Army, about half of them on the frontline. As well as auxiliary roles – often the most dangerous of occupations – Soviet women served in the full range of combat capacities Particularly noteworthy at Stalingrad was female service in anti-aircraft batteries protecting the lifeline across the Volga from air attack. More generally, women were one of the mainstays of the Soviet war effort. The number of women working in industry rose from 38 per cent of the total in 1940 to 53 per cent in 1942. In the countryside it was women who brought in the harvest, with the help of old men and young boys (including a certain Mikhail Gorbachev).

He guessed the NKVD didn’t even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn’t have one. He’d been classed as a non-combatant, as he’d said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was. But Volsky’s confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, ‘And the vat of incense?’ ‘I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,’ Richter said, truthfully. ‘Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn’t go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant’s house. It’s from Hong Kong, I think.’ Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, ‘Why go to all the trouble?’ That’s a good question, Richter thought. He stifled a smile. ‘To mask the smell.

When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”: We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels: But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . . Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners, And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

Man aspires to greatness, but all too often his hopes are submerged by the primitive instinct to survive at any cost.

Contrary to popular belief at the time, German armies were far from total mechanization. In Sixth Army alone, more than twenty-five thousand horses moved guns and supplies.

Stalin never forgot or forgave. He once told a Russian writer that Ivan the Terrible had not been ruthless enough because he left too many enemies alive.

The Italians not only had been given the job of containing any Russian threat from across the river, they also served as a buffer between the Hungarians and the Rumanian Third Army, which was to hold the territory from Serafimovich to Kletskaya deep in the steppe. The German High Command had inserted the Italians between the other two armies to avoid conflict between ancient enemies, who might forget the Russians and go at each other’s throats.

Had he won the battle of Stalingrad, he would have been sitting there, too; for any war against our Soviet Union must be a lost war. (That

As a result, Stalin refused to put his armies into a war footing. He told his generals . . . Germany is up to her ears with the war in the West. They will not risk a second front by attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler is not such an idiot.

It was at this point that Stalin seemed to finally grasp the enormity of the disaster. He raged at his generals, even reducing the stolid Zhukov to tears.

waiting to see who would try to seize the reins during this time of crisis. Others are of the opinion that he came close to a nervous breakdown. What Stalin faced was not just military defeat, but the collapse of everything he had worked for within Russia.

Of course the partisans were crueler—they came at night and to their own kind.

The people inside the city were literally starving to death. A diary account by a little girl named Tania, who watched her whole family starve to death, concludes . . . Mummy, 13th May at 7:30 morning, 1942. They are all dead . . . only Tania remains.

Nobody thought about women as combat troops—nobody, that was, except the Soviet Union.

It is completely wrong to describe Russian women as soldiers in skirts. The Russian woman has long been prepared for combat duties and fill any post of which a woman might be capable. Russian soldiers treat such women with great wariness . . . they were even more fanatical than the men.

Nadezhda accused her husband of being inconsiderate toward her. He responded by humiliating her in front of their guests. He flicked cigarettes at her and addressed her as “Hey, you.” The following morning, servants found Nadezhda dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

Although he was a monarchist through and through, he was a favorite of Hitler, who said of him . . . Nobody in the world but Bock can teach soldiers how to die.

People hid inside their homes and made no sound so that the Soviet soldiers would assume the building was unoccupied.

but by 1925, Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad in recognition of the role that both the city and Stain had played in the defense against the White Russians.

Hitler not only ignored the lessons of Napoleon’s failed invasion a century before, but that he failed to prepare the German industrial sector for a more intense military endeavor than it had seen thus far.

Order No. 227 was issued: civilians were not to evacuate, and the defenders of Stalingrad were not to take a step back. His reasoning was that with the civilians in the city, the army would fight harder to protect them and the city that bore his name. Stalingrad felt the force of the Nazi might on August 23, 1942, when one thousand planes began to drop incendiary bombs on the city, which is especially effective in a city with so many wooden buildings. One raid consisted of 600 planes and killed 40,000 of the city’s residents

the typical life expectancy of a soldier arriving to reinforce the city was twenty-four hours

Each commander, Red Army soldier and political commissar should understand that our means are not limitless. The territory of the Soviet state is not a desert, but people - workers, peasants, intelligentsia, our fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, children. The territory of the USSR which the enemy has captured and aims to capture is bread and other products for the army, metal and fuel for industry, factories, plants supplying the army with arms and ammunition, railroads. After the loss of Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic republics, Donetzk, and other areas we have much less territory, much less people, bread, metal, plants and factories. We have lost more than 70 million people, more than 800 million pounds of bread annually and more than 10 million tons of metal annually. Now we do not have predominance over the Germans in human reserves, in reserves of bread. To retreat further - means to waste ourselves and to waste at the same time our Motherland . . . This leads to the conclusion, it is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan.” —Josef Stalin

one Russian sniper managed to kill 224 Germans before November ended.

Stalin failed to react as swiftly as he should have, in part because he believed that Hitler had not authorized the invasion and that the nonaggression pact which the two countries would prevent Germany from breaking its word. This delay led to the loss of Soviet territory and troops.

On the first day, the German air attack destroyed over 1,400 Soviet aircraft. Within three days, the losses were over 3,000, causing Herman Göring to have the numbers rechecked out of disbelief because they were so high.

The Germans had advanced 200 miles into the Soviet Union. By September, the Germans had captured 600,000 prisoners from the battles that encircled Kiev

There were positions in the city that saw control switch from German to Russian possession as many as fifteen times.

on February 23, 1943, Great Britain celebrated Red Army Day, and King George VI had a commemorative sword forged, the Sword of Stalingrad,

Many Japanese soldiers also carried cameras into battle, and as was the case with the Germans on the Eastern Front, their snapshots came to constitute a comprehensive photographic record of their own war crimes.

The battle for 203-Meter Hill had been one of the bloodiest episodes of the entire Russo-Japanese War,

With more than twenty million Soviets already killed in the war, Stalin allowed his soldiers to “celebrate.” Twenty-four-year-old Hildegard Kristoff recalled what that meant . . . The Russians came. We weren’t allowed to lock our doors. Holding machine guns, they herded us into an empty house. Other young women had also been dragged in. The beasts pounced on us again and again, day and night—the whole mob of them. At dawn they disappeared. We crept back to our family—many committed suicide. As many as two million German women were raped.

The Battle of Stalingrad during World War II was the largest battle in history. With it came equally staggering stories of how people dealt with risk. One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of them worked. Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice.

In Russia, they teach every school kid about the Battle of Stalingrad. Every child knows the story. One rifle between five soldiers as they charged the German lines. So long as one soldier was left to pull the trigger, losses didn’t matter. At Stalingrad, the peasants bought time for everyone else, and not just for Mother Russia, for the English and the Americans. Without Stalingrad, Hitler’s armies would have remained at strength and continued to ravage Europe.

Most appalling was the growing realization, formed by statistics I uncovered, that the battle was the greatest military bloodbath in recorded history. Well over a million men and women died because of Stalingrad, a number far surpassing the previous records of dead at the first battle of the Somme and Verdun in 1916. The toll breaks down as follows: Conversations with official Russian sources on a not-for-attribution basis (and it must be remembered that the Russians have never officially admitted their losses in World War II) put the loss of Red Army soldiers at Stalingrad at 750,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action. The Germans lost almost 400,000 men. The Italians lost more than 130,000 men out of their 200,000-man army. The Hungarians lost approximately 120,000 men. The Rumanians also lost approximately 200,000 men around Stalingrad.

One of his storm groups concentrated on the potato cellar that Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser had held since late October.

In the end, Hitler was to learn a bitter lesson . . . Stalingrad wasn’t worth it.

The townspeople, having survived the bombing, now had first contact with their attackers. For some of them it was a surprise. Boris Stepanov, a young boy at the time, related in later life . . . They had broad shoulders, they walked upright. They didn’t have horns, as we kids thought they would. They were just nice, ordinary lads.

Imagine us in house-to-house fighting. We took the third floor, and the Germans took the first and second floors. By midday, both sides get tired and the Germans shout, “Hi, Russians?” “What do you want, Germans?” we’d say. “Can you send us some water?” they’d answer. And we’d shout, “Let’s swap pots filled with water for a pot filled with cigarettes.” And then, one hour later, we’d

It was Stalingrad...the most terrible battles. The most, most terrible. My precious one...there can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.

Stalin and Hitler shared much in common: difficult relations with their fathers, an early interest in the priesthood, immersion in ideologies which supported oppression in the achievement of political goals, a willingness to engage in violence and brutality, and phenomenal egos that convinced them they were the saviors of their nations.

The man who hoped to avenge Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and who committed himself to the promise that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years was actually born in Braunau, Austria, a city close to the German border,

but Adolf wanted to become an artist. The boy rebelled against his father and did poorly in school, a decision that, according to Mein Kampf, was because he wanted to convince his father to let him follow his dream.

received the Iron Cross Second Class in 1914 and the Iron Cross First Class in 1918; that same year, he also received the Black Wound Badge. His commanding officers, one of them Jewish, spoke of his bravery and Hitler regarded his military experience as a positive one.

Hitler had a chance to make use of his artistic skills when he designed the Party logo, a swastika inside a white circle on a red background.

Chinese loyalists at heart, had been waiting for. In the early hours of July 29, they sent their men spilling out into the streets. Long swords glimmered in the faint moonlight as the chilling chant of “Kill! Kill!” echoed down the narrow alleys. Most Japanese men had departed, and what followed was not so much a battle as a massacre. Years of pent-up anger was released in an orgy of blood. The Chinese police officers cut off the arms of old women and raped the young ones, before stabbing their genitals with bayonets. They decapitated others and lowered their heads in wicker baskets from the parapets.22 Japanese soldiers rushing to Tongzhou after the massacre encountered a horrific spectacle. “I saw a mother and child who had been slaughtered. The child’s fingers had been hacked off,” said one of them, Major Katsura Shizuo. He went on to describe the grisly scene at a Japanese store near the south gate of the city: “The body of a man, probably the owner, who had been dragged outside and killed, had been dumped on the road. His body had been cut open, exposing his ribs and his intestines, which had spilled out onto the ground.”23 A survivor told the Asahi Shimbun of the torture inflicted on some of the Japanese civilians before they were killed: “I chanced to see a man being dragged along by a wire. At that time I thought that he was only bound with it, but now I know that it was pierced through his nose.”24 After Tongzhou

Any Soviet leader who had read Mein Kampf was already aware that Hitler’s future included plans to invade the Soviet Union.

The Battle of Stalingrad during World War II was the largest battle in history. With it came equally staggering stories of how people dealt with risk. One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of them worked. Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice. You can imagine their disbelief. This almost certainly never crossed their minds. What kind of tank designer thinks about mouse protection? Not a reasonable one. And not one who studied tank history.

Sixth Army and elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had been encircled in an offensive that was an ominous sign for the Wehrmacht. Joachim Wieder wrote: ‘We have never imagined a catastrophe of such proportions to be possible.’ The Sixth Army was in dire straits. Caught with no winter clothing and little food and fuel, it was too weak to try to break out of its confines. But Hitler did not want Paulus to break out and instead directed him to establish ‘Festung Stalingrad’ – Fortress Stalingrad – and to ‘dig in and await relief from outside’. Although he was placing this formation in a desperate situation, Hitler demanded that the Sixth Army pin and fix as many Soviet troops as possible around the Volga in order to give Army Group A the best possible chance to extract itself from the Caucasus. In the meantime, Field Marshal Erich von

The German Luftwaffe targeted the evacuees, bombing trains filled with women and children.

series

Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad

More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front.

(Boog et al, 2001, p.1117).

The Germans dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Stalingrad but most explosions contributed little more than reconfiguration of existing rubble.

but the outcome of the battle depended on nerve as much as resources.

Ernst von Paulus,

The Battle of Stalingrad changed perceptions that the Nazis were invincible.

Aside from military calculations, Hitler was counting on a great mythical sacrifice that would inspire the remaining German armies and restore flagging morale on the Eastern Front. Again, Hitler’s sense of the psychology of the moment was more acute than posterity has generally credited him. As Gerd Ueberschar argues: ‘Stalingrad provided a foretaste of the brutal, senseless fighting that would be continued right to the bitter end of total defeat in May 1945’ (Muller and Ueberschar, 1997, p.118). It is often asked why the Wehrmacht did not collapse as it retreated to Berlin in 1943–5 and why, with no prospect of anything except death and defeat, the great mass of German soldiers fought to the very end. Part of the answer lies in the inspiration provided by the sacrifice of their comrades in the 6th Army at Stalingrad.

From the Battle of Clontarf to Stalingrad: history brought to life

Paulus continued, “We already speak from a different world than yours, for you are talking to dead men. From now on our only existence will be in the history books.…