One of the top experts on the Wehrmacht at the Stalingrad Front was Captain Pyotr Andreyevich Zayonchkovsky, the head instructor for enemy propaganda in the 7th Section of the political department of the 66th Army.169 The 66th Army was stationed north of Stalingrad and took part with other Soviet armies in the failed bid to break through the German cordon north of Stalingrad in September 1942. It took the army until January before it was able to advance to Stalingrad. Though their units had been decimated, on February 2 they took the Tractor factory from the Germans. After the north Kessel surrendered, Zayonchkovsky led the interrogations of captured German officers and soldiers. The interrogation reports are presented in the next chapter.
The thirty-nine-year-old captain earned his post in the enemy propaganda unit due to his good German language skills, which he acquired at home and in the Cadet Corps prior to the revolution. Enemy propaganda required thorough knowledge of the enemy—the names of the commanders (which Zayonchkovsky shouted through a bullhorn to urge German surrender) but also of the ways the Germans thought and acted. The objective was to “break down” the morale of the enemy soldiers.170 In his interview Zayonchkovsky analyzed the soldiers of 6th Army, their social background, and their “political and moral state.” He describes in detail how the confidence they expressed in letters and diaries in the summer of 1942 gave way increasingly to exhaustion and resignation in the face of heavy Soviet resistance. He believed that the Soviet antiwar propaganda had a great effect, especially after the Germans were encircled. He criticizes the Germans’ “robber morality” and lists the baby carriages and infant clothing he found in the abandoned shelters of the Germans. Zayonchkovsky took these thefts as evidence of the enemy’s degeneracy: only a morally unhinged soldier could commit such militarily useless crimes against the civilian population.
Zayonchkovsky’s comments on Soviet military leadership are similarly astute: the poor coordination between units, the pitiful performance of the air force during the first phase of battle, and the widespread lack of discipline among the troops. At the same time, he notes approvingly the high levels of discipline and order among the Germans.
Before Zayonchkovsky volunteered for the front in 1941, he had studied history at the university and subsequently earned his doctoral degree. His testimony is that of not only an eyewitness but a historian. He consulted letters and diaries of captured or killed German soldiers and checked the sources thoroughly. At one point he remarks that a German letter he cites was not sent by mail but personally handed to the addressee—the implication being that the author could speak openly without fear of military censors. For Zayonchkovsky, the historian, this gave the letter a high value as a historical source.
For historians today, the beginning of Zayonchkovsky’s testimony is especially interesting. He proudly announces that he is a descendant of Russian admiral Pavel Nakhimov, who in 1853 destroyed the Osman fleet in the battle of Sinop and later defended the besieged city of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. By World War II the name Nakhimov had come back into favor; in 1944 Stalin created the Nakhimov Medal for members of the Soviet fleet. This was in keeping with the Soviet regime’s decision in the late 1930s to cultivate the Russian tradition. (The name “Great Patriotic War” was chosen as part of this strategy.)171 Before the late 1930s Zayonchkovsky would not have been able to make these remarks about his family without fearing incarceration or worse. As a descendant of an aristocratic family he had been one of the “former people” in the founding years of the Soviet Union, someone who could neither vote nor study and was suspected of helping the counterrevolution. Concealed behind Zayonchkovsky’s brief remark in the interview that he had “worked for seven years as a carpenter in a factory, joined the party in 1931” was a young man’s attempt to gain acceptance in the Soviet system. Zayonchkovsky attended the Cadet Corps in Moscow. When it closed in 1918, he transferred to the cadet school in Kiev. In the following years he worked for the fire company and the railroad and at the above-mentioned engineering works.172 Other young people deemed “class enemies” at this time tried to cleanse their “contaminated” past through “resocialization.” It may be the case that Zayonchkovsky worked in a factory in order to develop a proletarian mentality.173 He likely lied about his family background when joining the party.
While working at the factory, Zayonchkovsky completed a night school course in history at the prestigious Moscow Institute for History, Philosophy, and Literature (IFLI). In 1937 he completed his studies and three years later defended his dissertation (kandidatskaya) on the Cyril and Methodius society, a secret association of Slavophiles in the nineteenth century.
After the battle Zayonchkovsky continued to work in the enemy propaganda unit of the 66th Army (renamed the 5th Guards Army on May 5, 1943). After sustaining a head injury in December 1943 he was discharged from the army with the rank of Guards major and returned to his profession as a historian. From 1944 to 1953 he headed the manuscript division of the Lenin State Library in Moscow. From 1948 on, he taught history at Moscow State University. (He was made professor in 1950 after completing his doctoral work.) He wrote eight monographs and edited a multitude of source editions, primarily on political and military aspects of the closing years of the tsarist period. In his field of research there was no one better. The multivolume bibliography of prerevolutionary Russian memoirs and diaries he edited remains an indispensable aid for historians.174 During his tenure as professor he supervised numerous doctoral candidates from the Soviet Union as well as from American and Japan. In 1968 he received Harvard University’s MacVane Prize for European History and in 1973 became an honorary member of the British Academy. However, he was never permitted to travel abroad to accept his awards. During his life Zayonchkovsky’s source-based methodology made him ideologically objectionable because it operated outside the prevailing framework. This “positivist” perspective shaped the testimony he provided in Stalingrad.
On September 30, 1983, Zayonchkovsky died of heart failure in the Lenin State Library while working on a history of the Russian officer corps.
TRANSCRIPT
of interview with Major Pyotr Andreyevich ZAYONCHKOVSKY
May 28, 1943
Interview conducted by comrade G. N. Anpilogov175
Stenography by A. I. Shamshina176
I was born in 1904. My father was an army doctor177 who came from a noble family.178 My grandmother was a cousin of Admiral P. S. Nakhimov.179 I’m from a long line of officers. My great-grandfather received the Cross of St. George180 for Borodino,181 and I spent three years in the cadet corps.
From a very young age I was brought up on the heroism of the Patriotic War of 1812. I can remember, for instance, being six or seven and knowing all the heroes of that war. The traditions of the Nakhimov family played an important role, of course. We kept a number of letters. One in particular was from Nakhimov to my grandfather, written after Sinope. I gave it to the Military Historical Archive.182
Red Army soldier Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, 1942
I was expected to become a naval officer, of course. In the beginning I went to the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps. The traditions and honor of the Russian army, the honor of the Russian officers—that made a strong impression on me. I remember 1917, the October Revolution. What did my father think of it all? He must have been more or less in line with the Kadets and the Octobrists.183 I was thirteen years old. I figured I could get along with the Bolsheviks so long as they kept the epaulets. I can remember a time in November [1917] when my father was swearing, saying that they were getting rid of them. He started crying, I was crying, and my younger brother, who was eleven, was also crying. I was glad when they came back again.184 These traditions played an important role in our family.
My father never was in the army. He was a doctor, and he died in 1926. My mother is a pensioner. Did my father buy in to the Soviet platform? Of course not.
My father was sick for a long time. So the burden of responsibility for the family fell on me. I was still finishing school. My father died after I graduated. I was always doing correspondence courses, and that’s how I graduated from the institute and completed my graduate studies. I spent four years working as a plane operator in a factory. I joined the party in 1931. In 1940 I defended my dissertation, and it was 1937 that I graduated from the institute. In December 1941 I volunteered for the army. I joined the home guard on July 3. After a few days our regiment was given leave until further notice. Then I was sent to work for the aerial reconnaissance and warning services. It seemed I wasn’t fit for anything better than sitting in a tree looking for airplanes. I was unlucky and ended up in the Political Administration of the Siberian Military District. A doctorate? You can be a lecturer. I spent three months as a lecturer. I asked the head of the political administration to either let me go or send me to the front. I didn’t join the army so that I could hang around in Novosibirsk. And because a unit was being formed at that time, I was made an enemy propagandist in the 315th Rifle Division. We left for Kamyshin, a town in the Stalingrad region, as part of the 8th Reserve Army.
The 8th Reserve Army’s headquarters was in Saratov. Soon I was transferred to the army political department as an officer in 7th Section, which dealt with work among enemy troops. On August 26—which was after the German’s 14th Panzer Corps broke through at Vertyachy, crossed the Don and reached the Volga—the 8th Army was called to the front and renamed the 66th Army. [ . . . ]
Our army got to the front on September 4, and that night we took up position on a twelve-kilometer line running from the west bank of the Volga to the area of the village of Yerzovka, sixteen kilometers north of the Tractor factory. The army joined the battle on September 5. Our task was to break the German defenses along this twelve-kilometer stretch. The army was made up of six rifle divisions: the 64th, 299th, 231st, 420th, 99th, and 84th. We also had two tank brigades and two rocket regiments. Our assault, which lasted eight days and cost us heavy casualties, did not result in any real successes. We were unable to move forward or break through the German defensive line. Our losses were staggeringly high. We lost nearly all of our tanks and a great number of men. On top of that, looking at it from an army-level perspective, there was a whole series of bad mistakes. For example, we started fighting without any intel on the terrain or the battle. We ought to have taken a day or two to bring our troops in line. After all, they’d just come a long way. Some of them had marched from Saratov. But taking a broader view, it must be said that a one- or two-day delay might have cost us Stalingrad.
The Germans were taking extremely heavy losses. I can quote from a letter we found on a dead soldier. The letter was written on September 23. The letter belonged to Private 1st Class Hubert Hüsken, Field Post 06388. It was addressed to Franz Dahlin, a friend in Germany. He didn’t intend to mail it but rather to have someone deliver it in person.
Dear Franz,
Greetings from your friend Hubert! I’m finally getting around to writing you a few lines. You know how it is with letters, especially here, where there are things we can’t write about. Many of the men in our company are gone. Of 180 there are only 60 left. Our first taste of battle was especially brutal. Sprenger will tell you all about it. The war is very different from what I thought it would be. It doesn’t seem so important to me anymore. Everyone has to experience it for himself. The fighting on the Don wasn’t as bad, but there was often a lot of hand-to-hand combat.
A great battle began on August 22 around Stalingrad, right down to the Volga. We moved from the Don to the Volga in a single day, we were already there by 7:00 P.M. On the first day the Russians completely lost it. Ten of us took 150 of them prisoner, and sixty of them were girls aged eighteen to twenty—there’s no way you’re going to win a war like that. But by the next day they’d pulled themselves together, and then something started coming at us from all directions, something unimaginable, and it’s been like that up to this day.
Second Battalion was supposed to head north to keep the Russians from getting into Stalingrad. It was about ten kilometers from our positions to the outskirts of the city. But I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t that easy. Their tanks broke into our sector every day, and that put all our units in a panic. So you can imagine why we had such losses. In one division’s sector the Russians had dug in around a hundred tanks. It gradually got to the point where your nerves couldn’t take it. I’ve never been in a situation like this. We’re not getting anything, everything is late, even the food. The Russians captured all of the canteen equipment and other things that were brought in by 5th Company, which was on our left. That company was disbanded yesterday. They only had twenty-seven men left. Twenty-six men from the 7th Company were sentenced to hard labor for cowardice and retreating in a panic. The same thing happened with 1st Battalion, which was left with even fewer men. We have four men left in our unit, and I’m in charge. Now you have an idea of how things are. Every day we wait to be relieved, which we hope will happen soon. We haven’t washed in four weeks.
I’ve got to say that this letter is typical. It describes the mood of the German soldiers. We have a great number of letters and diaries from dead soldiers, and I use this one as an illustration.
A few words on the enemy. The 6th Army’s main attack force was the 14th Panzer Corps, which included the 16th Panzer Division and the 3rd and 60th Motorized Infantry Divisions. The 14th Panzer Corps was led by Lieutenant General von Wietersheim.185 [ . . . ] I want to emphasize that all these divisions were made up of Germans only. Also, there weren’t any Sudeten Germans. The Germans in these divisions were exclusively from northwestern and western Germany, Westphalia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Prussia. The soldiers were between twenty and twenty-five years old and had spent many years in the Hitler Youth school.186 That was what ensured their morale and political reliability.
One shortcoming of our September operation, for which there is of course no objective excuse, was the severe lack of cooperation between our tanks and infantry. One small example will confirm this. Private 1st Class Johann Weingrann, of the 79th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, 16th Panzer Division, said the following about his capture on September 25: “The Russians broke through our defenses. Their tanks came in the evening. We were in our bunkers. The tanks stopped for a while and then moved back. After some time, before morning, the tanks returned. There wasn’t any infantry, and it was something like two hours later that the infantry arrived and took us prisoner.”
A second shortcoming was our disposition in depth, which led to massive and unnecessary losses. Finally, there were cases of divisions failing to take up position until it was light. [ . . . ]
Our air force was weak. Throughout September the Germans ruled the skies unchallenged. Our planes were not up to much; there were few and they accomplished little. They rarely hit their targets. There were times when they bombed not only our own forward positions but also our divisional command posts. On September 7 nine of our planes bombed the command posts of the 64th and 231st Divisions.
On September 13 the army moved into an active defense. But by the end of September our section of the front was extended some twelve kilometers because we were given more divisions, including both the 38th and the 41st Guards Divisions. These Guards divisions were formed somewhere near Moscow out of brigades of paratroopers who had already fought behind enemy lines. They had exceptional personnel. They fought the Germans near Kletskaya,187 and they literally fought like lions. When they were assigned to our army, they had 5,000–5,500 men each. They got reinforcements sometime in the last week of September. These reinforcements had not been specially chosen, so these Guards units saw a lot of self-inflicted wounds among the reinforcements, and there were some who crossed over to the Germans. I’ve seen how hard that is on the Guards. It’s hard for them to see their Guards banner being soiled by these incidents, which they had absolutely nothing to do with. That shows you how important it is not to put just any reinforcements into a Guards unit. Perhaps they ought to create some sort of Guards reserve regiment.
I’ve got to say, there still isn’t any real system for reinforcements in the Red Army like there is in the German army. In the Russian army, ever since 1812, our regiments have had two active battalions—the first and third—and one—the second—in reserve. The Germans do the same thing, but they also have special reserve battalions that supplement a particular division. That way, a soldier gets to know his division even when he’s in the rear. He’s trained by officers who are in that division, he learns their traditions, and by the time he gets to his unit, he already knows it, and this has a significant impact on the unit’s cohesion. We don’t have that.188 Perhaps it’s too much to have divisions keep a reserve regiment in the rear, but in any case it’s essential that a soldier knows where he’s going. Let’s say you have a wounded man, an officer who winds up in an army hospital—it’s a big hassle for him to get back to his division. But when a German is wounded, he goes back to his reserve regiment in the rear, and after six months he’s back in his own unit, his own company. We ought to give this serious consideration. We do not have a clearly defined system of reinforcement. [ . . . ]
I’d like to talk about the Germans’ morale and political reliability. As I said earlier, this was stable at the beginning, for a number of reasons. But the Germans were taking very heavy casualties in September, and to a certain degree this put them in a state of extreme fatigue. They were constantly hoping that once they took Stalingrad, the 14th Panzer Corps would spend the winter in France. They lived by that hope. It should also be mentioned that the fighting in September and October made them very receptive to our antiwar propaganda. We found our leaflets on the prisoners, on the dead. The German prisoners told us that one of the leaflets—“Daddy Is Dead”—left a particularly strong impression. It has a picture of a four-year-old girl. She’s holding a letter, and there’s also a dead German soldier. One prisoner told me that one of his comrades sent that leaflet home with someone he knew.
In general, the social propaganda, whose goal was to denounce Hitler’s regime, didn’t do much good,190 but our antiwar propaganda was more successful. With the anti-war propaganda they can come to their own conclusions—and you know how dull and narrow-minded the Germans are.
“Daddy is dead.” “Blame Hitler! He did it!” Soviet leaflet disseminated in Stalingrad.189
In mid-October I made broadcasts from a field radio near the Volga and the Dry Ravine. We made those broadcasts from a bunker 180 meters from the Germans. As soon as the loudspeaker started up, I would see movement along their communications trenches. The Germans rushed to get closer to the loudspeaker. As a rule, they stopped shooting during the broadcast. They started shooting again afterward.
There was a very interesting case in that same sector in the middle of November, before the encirclement, which I ought to talk about. On the morning of November 19, Lieutenant Duplenko, the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 197th Rifle Regiment, 99th Division, noticed a soldier climb out of the German trenches, curse, and throw his rifle to the ground. A while later two more soldiers climbed out and did the same thing. Then Duplenko went and yelled: “Fritzes! Over here!” The Germans came about forty meters and stopped. Duplenko left with two submachine gunners to meet them. They arrived. The Germans offered him a cigarette. He took one of their cigarettes and then started communicating in gestures. Then he grabbed both of them by the hand and started moving toward our trenches. The Germans went about twenty meters. But this sergeant of some kind came out of the German trenches and started shouting something at them. They started freeing themselves, saying: “Rus, night . . . ,” and walked away. Duplenko left. No one shot at anyone else. Preparations were made for that night. That regiment’s intelligence chief and Lieutenant Makarov, the instructor who was responsible for working with enemy troops, lay in wait for the Germans. Since this might be a provocation, two dozen scouts and submachine gunners were put in position. What happened that night was most unexpected. The Germans didn’t come straight along the front—this was on the bank of the Volga—but rather went down to the Volga and then started to make the climb. They were unarmed. Our sentry held out his hand to the first German—and there he was. And then the reconnaissance company’s commissar gave the order to shoot. Apparently they’d been asleep and had had a shock when they woke up and saw Germans. The Germans ran back. The next morning we found eleven duffel bags with blankets and all of their things. [ . . . ]
During our offensive in October the Germans took especially heavy losses. This was confirmed by prisoner statements and a number of documents we have in our possession. So, for example, the captured rifleman Johann Schmitz—from the 8th Company, 8th Motorized Infantry Regiment, 3rd Motorized Division—said that on the 18th, 19th, and 20th, the 8th Regiment took heavy losses, mostly from artillery. According to Schmitz and other POWs, the companies were left with around twenty-five to thirty men. The Germans were surprised by how determinedly our units fought. An unsent letter was found on the body of a Sergeant Steinberg, who had written: “The Russians who defend this sector are especially fierce and determined. They really understand the importance of this city and what consequences its fall will bring.”
Among the sergeants you can find fairly well educated Germans, often with higher education, usually with a secondary school degree.
So that’s how things were before the encirclement. In mid-November, when the Germans were hit at the Don and to the south of Stalingrad, the ring started closing in on the 6th Army. From November 19 the Germans were frantically moving units from Stalingrad to the Don. On November 20, 21, and 23, I saw lines of German vehicles with infantry moving west. On November 17 the 16th Panzer Division, except for some small individual units, was pulled out and sent to Kalach to prevent our forces from closing the ring. That evening and night of November 22 I witnessed the constant explosions in the German rear. At the same time the Germans were launching fierce barrages, particularly at our left flank. I wasn’t able to get to the front line myself. You had to go four hundred meters across the steppe, which was impossible. It was like that until 5:00 A.M., and then it went quiet. By 8:00 A.M., when our scouts moved up to the German trenches, no one was there. On our army’s left flank, along a line some eight to ten kilometers west from the Volga, the Germans had all left. On November 23 the 99th Division just walked into Tomilin, Akatovka, Vinnovka, and Latoshinka, and that day they met up with units of the 62nd Army. It was only after that meeting near Rynok that the 99th Division met stubborn German resistance as they attempted to take a dominant height. Nevertheless, the height was taken. They didn’t have a single fatality the entire time.
[ . . . ] On our right flank the Germans were their usual selves. It was a hasty withdrawal: they blew up stockpiles and vehicles, torched bunkers, buried things in the ground. In the Dry Ravine, for example, we dug up a stockpile of uniforms, boots, and so on. German battalions and rear units had been there. I visited most of their bunkers. That was the first time I’d been in a German bunker. We found shocking things there, things that summed up the nature of German plundering only too well. One example should be enough. I get that the logic of victory and the logic of war might lead someone to take a feather bed or some warm things, maybe a mirror. But why on earth would you bring a child’s stroller down there? And to top that off, the nearest village was ten kilometers away. Or baby clothes—I’ve seen them myself, in a bunker. It’s like something out of the Bible. The clothes you can at least send back to Germany, but what are you planning to do with a stroller?
I heard things from civilians. A peasant woman’s ragged old shirt is hanging out to dry. A German comes and stuffs it in his pocket. He’s got no use for it, but his need to loot and steal is so out of control that he’s got to take everything, regardless of whether he needs it or not. [ . . . ]
As evidence of the Germans’ confusion and panicked withdrawal in November, we have both the statements of prisoners and some captured diaries and other documents. Here I quote excerpts from the diary of the soldier Heinz Gossman, Field Post 12387 Z.
November 21. Yesterday they woke us suddenly at 3:00 A.M., and at 5:00 A.M. we started our withdrawal. The Russians have broken through in the Italian and Romanian sectors. The Italians and Romanians abandoned everything and took off, and now we’re the ones who have to take care of their mess. At 5:00 P.M. the Russians cut the road we needed to get out. At 6:00 P.M. we were surrounded. Three guns, our only means of defense, were destroyed.
8:00 P.M. After a two-hour siege we eventually found a way out. Any vehicles that were out of fuel were destroyed.
November 22. 6:00 A.M. Finally the road is clear again. We can dare to go. The road is covered with the bodies of horses left by the Romanians. Nearly all the animals have frozen to death. Scattered everywhere are guns, ammunition, vehicles, and everything else that the units had. After being shelled three times we made it to the crossing at the Don. At 1:00 P.M. we made it safely to Karpovka, but here the Russians are pushing up from the south.
The diary entries of Corporal Horeski, who was killed at the end of November, were to the point:
November 23. Running from the Russians from one place to the next.
November 26. The Russians have broken through, we’re moving on.
November 27. Stopping at the ravine. Building bunkers again.
November 28. The bunkers were almost finished, but then we left in the morning. Everything’s shit.
December 1. Surrounded again. Not much food, the supply routes are cut off.
December 2. We’re not getting any mail and we can’t send any. Hoping we can get out of this trap.
The Germans, as I mentioned earlier, were destroying their equipment and stockpiles. Sergeant Rudolf Bormann, from the 4th Company, 267th Regiment, 94th Infantry Division, said so in his statement. They burned a depot near Orlovka with an enormous amount of food and clothing. They destroyed food stores that were there for Christmas, including a lot of wine. Whatever wine the officers couldn’t drink was destroyed.
The diary of Private 1st Class Heinz Werner from the 24th Panzer Division, who was captured at the time of surrender, contains the following:
November 22. Because of the lack of fuel, at one airfield we blew up twenty of our own planes.
November 23. Most of our vehicles and tanks were blown up this morning.
In the early days of the encirclement the Germans were literally thrashing about like rats in a sack. They were throwing everyone into the front line: supply personnel, clerks, even sick and lightly wounded soldiers from the hospital in Kalach. Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry in the Romanian division, who had fled after their defeat and wound up in the encirclement, were also seized and sent into the German units, three to five men per company. Among the prisoners were clerks, supply personnel, and other noncombatant staff. Somehow we got hold of the master of ceremonies from the largest variety show in Berlin. He said: “You know, captain, I’ve never found myself in such a comic situation as I have here with you.”
However, the German commanders managed to quell this panic and confusion by early December. General Paulus issued an order saying that the army’s task was to hold Stalingrad at all costs—that this city would play a decisive role in the outcome of the war. His order ended with the words: “Hold on. The Führer will get you out!”191 This order was quoted in an address written by Hitler in a pseudo-Napoleonic style: “Comrades, you are locked in and surrounded. This is not your fault. I will do everything to free you from your situation, because the battle for Stalingrad has reached its apogee. You have hard times behind you, and it will only get harder. You must defend your positions to the last man. Retreat is not an option. Anyone who leaves his post shall bear the full force of the law.”192
In this way the Germans managed to secure a defensive perimeter and establish some relative order by the beginning of December.
Turning now to the question of atrocities. On November 26 I was told to go to the 99th Division in the area of Akatovka-Vinnovka-Rynok to conduct propaganda work and to document atrocities. I should mention that on November 1–2 elements of the 300th Division conducted a landing operation on the west bank of the Volga.193 This operation did not end well. Some died on the river but the rest managed to get to shore, where all of them were either slaughtered or taken prisoner. I visited some of the German bunkers in the area. This was not the precise location of the failed landing, and this confirms that the bodies I found there were not of men who had died in battle, but of men who had died as a result of brutal torture. For instance, there was the body of a Red Army soldier whose skin had been pulled off his right hand together with his fingernails. His eyes were burned out, and there was a wound on his right temple from a hot iron. The right side of his face had been covered in some kind of fuel and set on fire. I have the report and a photograph.
If I may digress, I’d like to highlight two things. First of all, when I got to the place where the bodies of these tortured men were, some of them had already been buried, and I had to dig them up. We had buried the bodies of these heroes in a pit, and there were no grave markers. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. We don’t respect the dead, and despite strict directives from GlavPURKKA and the People’s Commissariat of Defense, our treatment of corpses is disgraceful. We haven’t been able to develop a proper respect for the dead.
Now I’ll move on to the work we did to demoralize the enemy forces during the encirclement. Beginning in December, such work was conducted on a large scale. [ . . . ] Verbal propaganda took up a particularly large part of it. We spoke to the Germans every day using field radios and megaphones. The main document we used in our propaganda was an appeal to German officers and soldiers that was signed by General Yeryomenko and General Rokossovsky. This was the first appeal to their officers. The document said, for example, that there were many times in military history in which brave men and officers found themselves in a hopeless situation and surrendered. This wasn’t an act of cowardice, but of good judgment.
During this period we were giving the Germans daily reports through the megaphone, the latest bulletins from Informburo. Usually they stopped shooting, though they would open fire again at the end of our talk. There was an increase in the number of men who surrendered or came over to our side. Our propaganda was getting better by the day. I can tell you this: On the night of January 10–11, I went to the front line with Quartermaster-Technician Gershman, a translator from the 116th Division, to speak about Paulus’s refusal to surrender. It was morning, around 6:00 A.M.We arrived at the front line. Since we were advancing, we were some way away from the Germans, about two hundred meters. You can’t talk to the Germans at two hundred meters. The two of us went past our forward line into no-man’s land, eighty to one hundred meters from our trenches, and we started talking. The Germans were sending up flares around then, and we could see a group of German soldiers listening to us about fifty to sixty meters away. It was scary, to be honest. Be we said our bit once, then again, and the Germans didn’t shoot, even though they could see us. After we’d been through it twice we ran back. They didn’t shoot at us then, even though it would have been easy to kill us.
A Soviet soldier megaphones a German translation of the newscast Final Hour to the enemy. Photographer: Leonidov
Sending back prisoners was a particularly effective method. This method was in wide use from mid-December. Usually after capturing them we’d take them directly to the battalion or regimental command post, feed them, and then send them back just like that. Just go tell the truth about how you were captured. That had a strong effect, since the German propaganda had them all convinced that the Russians would gouge out their eyes, cut off their ears, and so on.
I remember a Private 1st Class Werner, who was captured at the end of December. He was a musician and composer, and a member of the Nazi party since 1928. I questioned him in a bunker and then brought him to another bunker where the prisoners were. He was limping from a small wound in his leg. It was slippery. We were going uphill. I held him by the arm to help him. I said: “Do you know who I am? I’m a commissar.” I’m not sure what was wrong with him, but he immediately backed away from me.
As I was leading him to the bunker with the Germans we were sending back to the front line that night, I told him about life in Russian captivity. I introduced the others to Werner and had them tell him what they’d seen. That evening when I went into the bunker, Werner had a favor to ask: “Captain, would you allow me to tell my comrades what I’ve seen here today?” And Werner got in front of the microphone that night and spoke to the men two hundred meters away in the same trenches he’d been in the night before.
But our propaganda did, of course, owe most of its success to the fact that our military victories had put the Germans in a very difficult position.
We used two means of communication to talk to the Germans. Once a cat came into one of the bunkers of the 149th Brigade, and he’d come all the way from a German bunker about sixty meters away. The cat came because the Germans had nothing for him to eat. We used this cat in our work to demoralize the enemy troops. First we tied a leaflet to his tail and sent him to the Germans. After a while the cat returned. We did this a few times, and then we made him an apron that could hold about a hundred leaflets. For two weeks he would go over to the Germans and come back empty, until the Germans shot him in the back legs, and he arrived, dying, at our bunker.194
The Germans regularly listened to our broadcasts and read our leaflets. There are numerous reports of this from prisoner statements. One day after the surrender I wanted to see how effective our propaganda had been, so I stopped a group of about five hundred prisoners in Dubovka. After telling them about the situation on the front—we had just taken Rostov—I asked how many of them had read our leaflets and listened to our radio shows. All but a few of them raised their hands.
In the final days before the surrender, at the time of the assault on the Tractor factory, we used a radio with a powerful loudspeaker to provide the Germans with more information about the military situation, and to relay the “Final Hour”195 program. All this could be heard throughout the grounds of the Tractor factory.
A few words on heroism. It’s no exaggeration to say that throughout the fighting at Stalingrad, the men and officers—with a few exceptions, of course—showed great heroism. I was often on the front line with them, and the men never stopped asking me questions: How long are we stuck here for? When are we going to attack?
One negative aspect of this heroism—if you can put it that way—is its rash, senseless aspect, and a readiness to take what is at times completely unnecessary risks. Here’s the kind of thing that happens during the day on the front line: “Vanya, give me a smoke,” and Vanya gets up and runs straight over to his comrade. Or people are walking as if everything is quite normal in places where they really need to crawl, and they die one after the other.
Much has been said and written about the heroes of Stalingrad. I have something to say about one army heroine, Marusya Kukharskaya,196 who carried out 440 wounded soldiers. I saw her on the battlefield. She is indeed fearless. She was sitting in a bunker and doing some counting: “Well,” she said, “another sixty and I’ll be a Hero of the Soviet Union.” Then there was Captain Abukhov,197 a battalion commander in the 1153rd Regiment, 343rd Division, whose battalion held off several dozen tank counterattacks, even though he was down to thirty men. In mid-January he was accidentally killed by an exploding mortar shell. And there were the artillerymen of the 803rd Artillery Regiment, 226th Division, who dragged their guns themselves throughout our entire advance from the steppe ravine at Yablonevaya, where they had initially taken up position, to the Stalingrad Tractor factory. Because of the snowdrifts the horses were useless, and the men themselves didn’t really grasp what a heroic act they were performing. They didn’t see anything special about it, and it became part of their normal life.
I want to talk about the strength of the Germans’ mechanical discipline. Despite the recognized success of our propaganda and the demoralization of the encircled units, the fact remains that the general mass of soldiers followed their officers’ commands without question. This increased the difficulties we faced while eliminating this group. And it shows us the power of this mechanical discipline. It’s clear enough, if you talk to individual German soldiers, that none of them really want to fight. Nevertheless, all it takes is one sergeant yelling “Fall in!” and they form up in ranks and stay there. I’ve seen this myself. On the night of February 2–3, there were a number of regiments that had surrendered and were being taken prisoner, and they concentrated in the area of the Stalingrad state farm, a few kilometers from the Tractor factory. We took them there, counted them up, gave them 250 grams of bread each, assigned them an escort, and sent them on to Dubovka. That night was extremely cold. I remember going to one of the regiments, about a thousand men. They were standing around, all disorganized. I ordered them to fall in and yelled: “Sergeants, over here!” I said we had to get them in groups of ten, which were to get two loaves of bread each. Then they would wait for their escort. They ended up waiting for several hours. At times you could hear an inhuman wail. That was the ones who were freezing. They fell, and they died, but the men stayed in formation. They’ll line up as soon as you get a sergeant in there. The strength of that mechanical discipline was very rightly noted by Ehrenburg.198
During the surrender there were a lot of amusing and interesting things. For example, there was General von Lenski’s farewell speech to his officers in the 24th Panzer Division. They were already at the 343rd Division’s command post, and he asked the divisional commander, General Usenko, for permission to say good-bye to his officers. One of his division’s regimental commanders, Colonel von Below, had the officers line up, reported to von Lenski, and then stood on the right side. Von Lenski walked up to his officers and gave the following speech: “Gentlemen, I thank you for always precisely following my orders during our time fighting together. You did your duty to the end. I wish you all a safe journey.” This speech, in the spirit of Napoleon’s Farewell to the Old Guard, had a strong effect on his officers. Many of them cried.
Then we put the officers in vehicles and sent them off. I approached one of the German staff officers. It was a colonel sitting there. I said: “Colonel, I need to put a few officers in here with you.”
He told me in broken Russian that there was a lot of stuff in there, and he doubted there’d be enough room. He smiled. I asked him: “How do you know Russian?”
“Well,” he said, “this is the second time I’ve made this trip. I was captured in 1915 and spent three years in Krasnoyarsk. It seems I’m headed in the same direction.”
On January 22, under pressure from our forces, the Germans started falling back to Stalingrad. I was there on the 23rd and 24th, when we saw the endless flow of vehicles moving toward the Stalingrad Tractor factory. A very large number of Germans were concentrating there. We thought that there were three thousand of them, but then, as everyone knows, we took around five thousand prisoners.
On the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 26th, our units approached the factory from the west. On the north side we took up position right at the edge of the factory grounds. One battalion from the 149th Rifle Brigade was located in the so-called Boots—the factory grounds. There was a brick factory there. We’d taken a pit and a few shacks on the hillside. Everything else belonged to the Germans. From the 25th to the 26th our forces approached the factory from the west. We had nearly surrounded the Tractor factory. Moreover, our units to the south had divided the southern and northern parts of the factory.
The assault on the Tractor factory began on January 27. On the night of the 26th I was told by a member of the Military Council and the head of the political department to go make contact with the Germans and ask for their surrender. The Germans were in possession of the Tractor factory, and there were several small ravines running toward it—the area called New Park. They held those ravines. Our bunkers were on the other side of Mokraya Mechetka,199 which was where the German bunkers were. I went there knowing the name of the German battalion commander. That was the 274th Regiment, and its commander was Kannengiesser. Under international law I could only speak to someone of equal rank. It was about fifty meters to their bunkers. I started to say that I was Zayonchkovsky, an officer of the Red Army, speaking on behalf of the army commander. I invited Captain Kannengiesser to negotiate. I was in a trench, and I’d emerged just a little so I could speak through the megaphone. Nothing. I tried again. A machine gun started shooting at me. I started to egg him on: “You’re a German officer, obviously a brave man, so how is it that you’re too afraid to answer?” They shot again. Then I turned to the soldiers. I didn’t want to talk to that sonofabitch when he was captured six days later, so I just sent the translator. He claimed that he hadn’t heard me, that he was at his command post. He was lying. I had asked the Germans to shoot three times in the air, but they didn’t shoot. He said that he couldn’t possibly shoot at the Captain! So we got nowhere.
The assault on the Tractor factory was set for January 27. We had very few men. On the night of January 26–27 the Germans left the ravines and fell back all the way to the Tractor factory. Here’s how we found out. I was talking to them all night long. At 6:00 A.M. I returned to the command post and lay down in a bunker. An hour later the company commander woke me to say: “Listen, captain, you did well—here are some captured deserters.” They happened to be three Romanians. These Romanians said that the Germans were gone. We didn’t believe them. But an hour later this German showed up, another deserter—and, he made out, “a former Komsomol member.” His name was Otto, and he had a large stash of pornographic cards and various other items necessary for love.200 He confirmed that they were all gone. I said: “Okay, you go on ahead, and we’ll follow. Keep in mind that if you’re lying, we going to put a bullet in your head.” The place was empty when we arrived. They really had left.
The assault on the Tractor factory began at noon or one o’clock. I was on the northern side. We went down the Mokraya Mechetka ravine and managed to take a number of small buildings that were on the slopes. They put up a strong resistance. We were taking extremely heavy fire from a machine gun and everything else. We had almost no artillery shells, but we had a lot of rifle and machine-gun cartridges.
Something terrible took place there. You couldn’t imagine how many of our planes were there, thirty to thirty-five of them coming in wave after wave. I’d never seen so much artillery in my life. They were really piling up the cannons, and all of them were shooting at the Germans. Everything was there, even rockets, absolutely everything. This was not the wisdom of our commanders, but of comrade Stalin himself. It was brutal. We had no men, ten per battalion, couldn’t we get some reinforcements? We had no one. But this assault was really an air and artillery assault. If we’d had ten thousand infantrymen we wouldn’t have needed them.
You can’t really talk about a fight for the Tractor factory itself because there no longer was a Tractor factory, just a few individual buildings. The force of the artillery fire and aerial bombardment left all the basements packed with wounded soldiers. In those final days the Germans had no communication between the regiments. All their communication lines were severed by artillery fire, and this contributed to their surrender. The Germans were astonished, they kept asking where our infantry was. The Germans were in different buildings, shooting. There was no front line as such, but their firepower was still substantial. They kept on firing for all they were worth.
On the morning of February 2, when the surrender was already under way, our tanks moved right up to them, and they started to surrender in an organized manner. Our infantry, between you and me, had all been killed. Did we still have fifteen thousand men left? Yes, if we include those in the rear, we certainly did. Each division still had four thousand, but that’s because of the artillery, and they barely had any casualties. There were mortar men, communications companies, and medical battalions—but as for combat soldiers, there were almost none left. Eventually the 149th Brigade held the line at the Boots. The front there was roughly two hundred meters long. There were perhaps thirty men left. The Tractor factory was taken primarily through the actions of our artillery and air force, not by our infantry.
The infantry was unable to advance, but the powerful artillery fire that fell on the Tractor factory made it impossible for the Germans to keep resisting. The Tractor factory was a red-hot cauldron into which so much steel and iron kept flying that it was impossible to withstand. [ . . . ]
The NKVD chief for the Tractor factory district really is a fearless man. I don’t know his name. First of all, he never evacuated but stayed the whole time in Spartakovka and Rynok. When the Germans entered Rynok for half a day, none of the residents knew where he was. Starting in January, or even in December, he lived in Spartakovka, right here, some two hundred meters from the Tractor factory, and he ran an intelligence network of residents from the factory district. Every day we got reports on the number of Germans being sent in. We received an unexpected telegram from the political department of the 49th Division saying that a woman and a lieutenant had been sent in. It turned out that the NKVD chief had been telling us this every day from the Tractor factory. He lived there, he helped get the leaflets and his female agents carried them. This man really was there all the time. Rynok and Spartakovka were part of his district. There may not have been anyone living there, but that was his district. He did his work on the front line as an NKVD man. He kept in touch, made contact with the army, and was always with the brigade’s commander and commissar. But he only kept in touch—he never interfered with our assignments. Before the war he received the Order of Lenin.
I saw the director of the Tractor factory at a battalion command post. This was during the assault, before the surrender. He had come back to Spartakovka, and so had a few other men. People were already getting ready to rebuild.