Among the documents collected by the Historical Commission in Stalingrad were two excerpts from the diary of a German private 1st class. Soviet soldiers found the diary in December 1942 or January 1943, probably among the possessions of its deceased owner. The diary was turned over to the military intelligence unit of the 62nd Army, and several extracts were translated into Russian. The preserved sections of these translations begin on November 22, when the soldier’s regiment, stationed in Kalach-on-Don, was attacked by the spearheads of Operation Uranus from the north and southeast. The joining of these spearheads in Kalach completed the Stalingrad Kessel. The diary documents the ensuing confusion, the Germans’ failed attempts to break out of the pocket, their eastward retreat toward Stalingrad, and how the men fought while subsisting on near-starvation rations. The excerpts end on December 18. By then the diary’s author sensed that death was near and wrote nostalgically of home and family. The final entries are a moving testament to the depths of human anguish.
The desperation Wehrmacht soldiers experienced in the Kessel has been well known in Germany since the publication of the anthology Last Letters from Stalingrad (original: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad) in 1951.14 Less well-known is how the Soviets responded to these enemy voices in distress. Following the presentation of the diary excerpts, I discuss how they were read and utilized by Red Army propagandists.
TRANSLATION
From captured documents received by the 7th Section, Political Department, 62nd Army, January 1 1943
Diary of a private 1st class in the 10th Company, 578th Regiment, 305th Infantry Division
November 22—Left Kalach at night.
November 23—Russian planes, constant air raids.
November 24—Got up at 3:45 A.M. and started the difficult march, over sandy ground, to the Don. Constant shooting. On the steep bank of the Don there were Russians. You could see them perfectly. I was always hearing shells exploding. At night we left those positions. Spent the night on frozen ground.
November 25—We lost a unit. Bombs, pilots, artillery.
November 27—A hasty retreat over the sand. We’re surrounded, it’s so cold. I’m frozen stiff. They’re shelling us.
November 28—It’s dark, and we’re all loaded up, ready to leave. Me and eight of my own. No one knows where we’re going.
November 29—We wait for some time on the highway, don’t know what to do next. I’m terribly hungry. There have been problems lately with food. What’s going to happen? Other neighboring units are cooking, and here I can’t even get a spoonful of soup. We kept going. Stopped in a ravine. Started looking for our company. In the next village it was a complete mess: Romanians, Russians, Germans. After a long search we found our company.
November 30—Early in the morning we got to our platoon. We entrenched in the cold ground. Brutal fighting day and night. Russian tanks broke through by evening, and we had to defend against them. Air raid, mortar fire. I haven’t eaten in thirty-six hours. Now I’ve got 1/8 loaf of bread, 1/16 can of tinned meat, a few spoonfuls of pea soup and a sip of coffee.
December 1—Spent the night in a trench: same rations. Mortars exploding constantly. Frightfully cold. We were on the front lines, then we came back. At the nearest village we slept in a barn. Right in the muck and manure. Everything is wet, terribly cold.
December 2—Shelling in the morning. Some killed and wounded. I barely made it. All my stuff got stolen: All I’ve got left is what I had on me. We marched twelve kilometers, we’re dead tired, starving. Another whole day without food. I’ve lost all my strength.
December 3—Again we march, again no water. Can’t get anything to drink. I feel terrible. I’ve been eating snow. Tonight we didn’t find any quarters. It’s snowing, I’m completely soaked, water in my boots. We managed to find a dugout. I’m staying there with six other comrades. We cooked up a little horsemeat in snow water. What will the future bring? We’re surrounded. 1/12 loaf!
December 4—Heavy march, nineteen kilometers. Everything covered in ice. We got to Gumrak, spend the night in railcars.
December 5—It keeps getting worse. So much snow, my toes are frostbitten. I am so hungry. This evening after a long march we entered Stalingrad. We were welcomed by exploding shells. We ended up in a cellar. Thirty of us. Absolutely filthy, unshaved. We can barely move. There’s very little to eat. Three or four cigarettes. A dreadful, savage group of men. I am so unhappy! All is lost. People are fighting constantly, everyone’s on their last nerve. The mail’s not getting through, it’s terrible.
December 6—Same as yesterday. We’re lying in this cellar, barely allowed out in case the Russians see. Now at least we’re getting 1/4 loaf daily, a can of meat for every eight men, a little butter.
December 7—Everything’s as it was. Lord, please help me get home in one piece. My poor wife, my dear parents. How difficult it must be for them! Almighty God, make this come to an end. Let us have peace again. That we may go home soon, go back to a human life.
December 9—Our servings at dinner were a bit bigger, but we got only 1/12 loaf, 1/12 can. Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. I’m depressed. Life has lost all meaning. The arguments and fighting never stop. Hunger can have that effect.
December 10—I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday. Just some black coffee. I have lost all hope. God, will this go on for long? The wounded are here with us. We can’t send them anywhere. We’re surrounded. Stalingrad is hell. We boil the flesh of dead horses. No salt. A lot of us have dysentery. Life is so terrible! What have I done to deserve such punishment? Thirty men are packed into this cellar, at two o’clock it starts to get dark. The night is long. Will there be a day?
December 11—Today we got 1/7 loaf, some lard, and we’re meant to get some more hot food. But tonight I collapsed from weakness.
December 12—Still in Stalingrad. We’ve been given a new unit. The food situation is still very bad. Yesterday I brought in some horsemeat. Today, unfortunately, there’s nothing. I keep hoping I can keep going. It should get better. There was quite a storm last night: artillery fire, shells. The earth shook. Our NCO went off to fight. We’ll be following him soon. We have people here with dysentery. I am so hungry. If only it were a little easier. If we weren’t sick or wounded. God help me. The guns are shooting constantly. You can hear the whistle of incoming shells. Today I wrote a letter. I hope that my family gets it soon. Right now I can see my wife so clearly before me.
December 13—This evening we got rice flour and 1/16 can. I was happy to have it. Nothing new apart from that. I’m feeling very weak, very dizzy.
December 14—I’m still feeling faint. No help to be had. There are a lot of wounded here who aren’t being looked after. All because of the encirclement.
I smoked my last cigarette. Everything is coming to an end. The things I’ve gone through this past week—it’s too much. I’m always so terribly hungry. This past year in Russia was nothing compared to what’s going on right now. This morning I ate 1/7 loaf, a tiny piece of butter. They’ve been shelling us since last night. What a harsh existence! What a terrible country! I am putting all my hope with God. I have lost my faith in mankind.
December 15—We’re needed at the front. We stumbled and crawled our way through the trenches and the ruins of Stalingrad. We crossed paths with a seriously wounded soldier being carried out. We arrived at the command post. Then we went down into a factory basement, and then most of our unit went out to fight. Only thirteen of us remained. I was the highest-ranking one there. There was dirt and debris all around. No way out. Everything shifting and cracking under the Russian artillery fire.
December 16—I’m still here. They bring the wounded down here. In the cellar it’s dark both day and night. We built a fire right on the floor. At 4:00 P.M. the food delivery came: soup, 1/8 loaf, a little butter, a bit of canned meat. I ate all of it at once and lay down. Twenty-four hours until the next meal. On December 15 I sent a letter by airmail. I hope it gets there by Christmas. My poor, dear wife and parents.
December 18—The day goes by, just like all the other ones. We eat in the evening. Once every twenty-four hours we get food, then there’s nothing. I had to drag in a wounded man. We searched for a long time before finding the doctor, who was also in the basement of a building that had been completely destroyed. I found a dead man when I got back to my trench. It was Rill, I talked with him three days ago. I’m sitting in this trench with another soldier. He’s a twenty-year-old from Austria, he has dysentery, the stench is unbearable. Constant shelling. My ears hurt, and I’m really cold. Fifty meters away is the Volga. We’re right next to the enemy. I don’t care about anything anymore. I can’t see a way out of this hell. The wounded aren’t taken away, we just leave them in the villages, inside the encirclement. All I can hope for is a miracle. Nothing else can help. Our artillery have gone completely silent, they’ve probably run out of ammunition. I’m starving, I’m frozen, my feet are like ice. Neither one of us says a thing—what’s there to talk about? We’re approaching the happy Christmas holidays. What wonderful memories I have of it, childhood. [ . . . ]
My dear parents, I greet you from far away. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you trouble. I never meant to. My poor Mama, what will you do? My sweet sister, it’s hard for me to think about the times we played together, from the bottom of my heart I wish you happiness in your future life. There is no one I love as much as you, my sweet wife, my blonde Mitzi. I would give anything to know that we were going to meet again. If that is not to be, let me thank you for all the happy hours you have added to my life.
I don’t know whether these lines will ever reach your hands. Writing relieves me of the loneliness and emptiness. May God give you strength and comfort if something happens to me. But I don’t want to think about that. Life is so beautiful. Oh, if only we could live in peace! I’m still not able to come to terms with death, but that diabolical music of battle, bringing death, just keeps going and going.
It’s day now, the sun is shining, but the shells are constantly exploding all around. I am completely exhausted. Is it possible to survive this? Everything is moving, like in an earthquake.
Graves of German soldiers in Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode
In Soviet hands the diary acquired a life of its own. The Russian translation was done by Major Alexander Shelyubsky, the director of military intelligence for the 62nd Army. This was similar to Zayonchkovsky’s position in the 66th; like his colleague, Shelyubsky was a historian by trade and spoke fluent German.15 During the battle of Stalingrad he drafted reports at several-week intervals on the “political and moral state” of the German forces that fought against the 62nd Army. The reports addressed specific divisions and commanders and, drawing on captured documents and prisoner statements, presented a detailed picture of the mood in the 6th Army. Shelyubsky appended his January 5, 1943, report to the diary of the German lance corporal.16
Shelyubsky also spoke with the Moscow historians and provided his assessment of the enemy.17 The soldiers fighting against the 62nd Army were almost all from “elite squads” and “cadre divisions” consisting of “pure-blooded Aryans,” not from their Romanian or Italian divisions, who in Soviet experience did not fight as well.18 Until the beginning of October the German soldiers held the hope of “taking Stalingrad by storm.” They believed that the large German offensive initiated by the 305th Infantry Division in the industrial district represented a turning point: “let the thunder of victory roar!”19 “That’s how one could describe the mood in the division. It entered combat around October 14. In two or three days its losses were tremendous. That division was thrown against the Barricades works. After such a morale boost along the lines that everything is good here, that Stalingrad is ours, when they started to be worked over by us they simply didn’t understand what was going on. We tried to make them understand and dropped various leaflets.” This passage shows that Shelyubsky sought to gauge the mood of the enemy strategically and find ways to influence it.
Shelyubsky explained how the pervasive fatalism in many letters in October 1942 gave way to desperation after the 6th Army was surrounded in November. He saw this development as an expression of the Germans’ deficient “moral” stability. In particular, he noted that the many thefts and other forms of assault on the civilian population had “become so routine for German soldiers and officers that prisoners of war tell about this without any embarrassment.”20 He was also struck by the Germans’ inability to withstand hunger:
Another aspect that played a great role in the morale of the surrounded enemy has to be noted here: food. Germans don’t know how to starve. Our Russian soldier not only during the Patriotic War but also the Civil War and all other wars knew how to starve. Germans cannot do that: when they fight, they are used to stuffing themselves like pigs. That can be proven by their letters. It is almost disturbing: all they talk about is food. I have interrogated dozens of prisoners of war and so did my workers. There wasn’t a case where a prisoner did not start with food. Eating is their priority. Their entire brain is filled with chow. Toward the end the situation was very tough for them. The rations would be as low as one hundred grams of bread.
Shelyubsky and other political officers of the Red Army read the German messages through Soviet-tinted glasses, projecting onto the enemy their ideas of what constitutes a soldier. In their view, a soldier’s will was firm and “healthy” when it served a higher purpose: the “fight against fascism” and the “liberation of enslaved peoples.” An army that did not espouse such aims and merely conquered, pillaged, and destroyed could produce nothing but moral cripples. The inability of Paulus and the other captured German generals to identify the army’s higher aims—they claimed that as members of the military they were not in charge of political questions—was interpreted by their Russian interrogators as weakness. The discipline of the Wehrmacht commanded the Soviets’ respect, but when it came to political conviction they saw the Red Army as superior.
From Shelyubsky’s report the diary of the German lance corporal made its way into the Soviet media. On January 25, 1943, short excerpts were read over Soviet radio and appeared in Pravda several days later.21 The newspaper mostly keeps to Shelyubsky’s translation, but presents the diary as a fight to survive within the Wehrmacht, stressing the infighting between the soldiers and their frayed nerves. In place of the drama of the soldier left to his fate is the moral decay of the German army. Pravda even goes so far as to falsify a passage. In Shelyubsky’s original the lance corporal writes, “I see no way out from this horrible hell [ . . . ] I can only hope for God’s miracle.” The newspaper invents another perspective: “I see no way out of this horrible hell but capture.”
As the end of the battle of Stalingrad neared, Shelyubsky, Zayonchkovsky, and the other enemy propaganda officers strengthened their efforts to convince German soldiers to surrender. They aimed to dispel the widespread belief among the Germans that Soviet captivity meant torture and death. The dogged resistance of the Germans, fueled mostly by fear of imprisonment, fanned the flames of hatred among the Soviets. As the Stalingrad transcripts document, there were scores of instances in which German soldiers were beaten or shot by Red Army soldiers after they surrendered.