STALINGRAD : Worst Battle of World History

STALINGRAD: July 17, 1942 - February 2, 1943

The Battle Of Stalingrad lasted from July 17, 1942 to February 2, 1943. Two million Germans and Russians died. The entire city was destroyed. So was the myth of invincibility of the German War Machine

1942. Germans close into Stalingrad

Early on the morning of 23 August 1942, the 16th Panzer Division raced eastwards over the steppe from the river Don. That same evening, it halted on the bank of the Volga. The tank crews gazed across towards Asia. They had reached the designated boundary of the Third Reich's eastern territories. Messerschmitt fighters performed victory rolls above their heads. Many soldiers thought that the war was won. To their right, the city of Stalingrad blazed from the first of General von Richthofen's air raids, which killed 40,000 civilians. The only resistance the panzer crews faced came from anti-aircraft guns operated by young women barely out of high school. 'We had to fight shot for shot', the division reported, 'against thirty-seven flak positions manned by tenacious fighting women until they were all destroyed.' Thus began the most pitiless, and perhaps the most important, battle in history.

Hitler had told General Friedrich Paulus that with his Sixth Army, the most powerful in the Wehrmacht, he could 'storm the heavens'. But then, in a bold encirclement by Soviet armoured forces, over a quarter of a million Germans were trapped far from home, and increasingly far from help. Stalingrad marked not just the psychological turning-point of the war, it was the first major modern battle fought in a city, with thousands of helpless civilians caught up in its horrors. In this titanic struggle between Stalin and Hitler, men were driven beyond the limits of physical and mental endurance. National loyalties were also dislocated. Paulus's Sixth Army depended on 50,000 Soviet citizens in German uniform, while the NKVD used German Communist writers in its tactics to wear down the besieged.


In the harsh Russian winter of 1942, the German army was besieged at Stalingrad, their swift advance across the steppes halted by the bitter cold and fanatical Russian resistance. The entire German Sixth Army was surrounded by a ring of steel. The Germans’ supply lines were cut and the army was starving to death.





Christmas was coming and the soldiers were at the end of their strength. Without any hope of relief, that Christmas of 1942 became particularly poignant, writes Antony Beevor in Stalingrad, his mammoth account of the battle. “From quite early in the month, men started to put aside tiny amounts of food, not in preparation for a break-out across the snow, but for a Christmas feast or for gifts. A unit in the 297th Infantry Division slaughtered a pack-horse early so as to make horse sausage as Christmas presents. Advent crowns were fashioned from tawnysteppe grass instead of evergreen, and little Christmas trees were carved out of wood in desperate attempts to make it ‘just like at home’.

JULY 17, 1942
The German General Staff receives a report of a secret meeting of the Stavka ,13 July 1942, from an intelligence agent at Moscow : Retreat of the Soviet forces to the Volga and into the Caucasus. Defend there so that the German forces would be forced to spend the winter in inhospitable areas. Evacuation of all important industries to the Urals and Siberia. Hitler considered the report a hoax.



General Chuikov finds out that his troop do not have a high morale. It seems that they lost faith in their commanders and officers.

Hitler, who thinks that the Red Army is almost beaten, denies the stratigical redraw of the Red Army. Once Stalingrad and Astrachan are captured and the Volga is reached the war will be over at the Eastern Front. It will take only a few weeks.

German panzers reaching Voroshilovgrad, also the Don at Tsimlyansk is reached.

German Panzer moving on towards Rostov, Hitler tells General Franz Halder that the Russians are finished. Halder replies : I must admit, it looks like it.



The Germans are reaching Rostov. On their way to Rostov they are not capable to make any prisoners. The summer campaign had been a failure in the matter of prisoners.

For the second time the German Army attacks Rostov. Again General Eberhard von Mackensen III th Panzercorps attacks the city with 14th and 22th Panzer Division. The first time had been a failure.



Colonel Rodts 22th Panzer Division is fighting northeast of Rostow. 204th Panzer Regiment moves south and 14th Panzer Division is heading for Nowo Tsjetkask.

01, October, 1942
The Germans are attacking the Orlovka salient. The trapped battalion holds out for 5 days !

Some divisions of the 62nd Army are down to 2.000 men.

The luftwaffe attacked the city's oilreservoirs.

By radio Hitler ordered General Strecker personally to hold the northern Stalingrad pocket to the last man. The Russians were very angry at their refusal to stop fighting, and many of them were not allowed to surrender when they ran out of ammunition, but were shot down or clubbed to death.

02

08.40 AM : General Strecker sent a message to Hitler : " Eleventh Corps and its divisions have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany."

The last German holdouts in Stalingrad’s northern pocket; the 11th Corps under General Strecker, capitulated at 10.00 am.

Early Politics

Between December 1918 and March 1919 Hitler worked at a prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein before returning again to Munich. Shortly after his return he witnessed a takeover bid by local Communists who seized power before being ousted by the army. After he gave evidence at an investigation into the takeover he was asked to become part of a local army organization which was responsible for persuading returning soldiers not to turn to communism or pacifism. During his training for this tasks and during his subsequent duties he was able to hone his oratory skills. As part of his duties he was also asked to spy on certain local political groups, and during a meeting of the German Workers' Party he became so incensed by one of the speeches that he delivered a fierce harangue to the speaker. The founder of the party, Anion Drexler, was so impressed by Hitler's tirade that he asked him to join their organization. Hitler, after some thought, finally agreed to join the committee and became their seventh official in September 1919.

Leader of the Nazi Party - 1921

By 1921 Adolf Hitler had virtually secured total control of the Nazi party, however this was not to the liking of all Nazis. In July of that year, whilst Hitler was away in Berlin, the discontent members of the party proposed a merger with a like-minded political party in Nuremburg in the hope that this would dilute Hitler's influence. On hearing the news of the proposed merger, Hitler rushed back to Munich to confront the party and threatened to resign. The other members were aware that Hitler was bringing in the lion's share of funds into the organization, from the collections following his speeches at meetings and from other sympathetic sources. Thus they knew they couldn't afford his resignation. Hitler then proceeded to turn the tables on the committee members and forced them to accept him as formal leader of the party with dictatorial powers.

Hitler in World War I

Hitler in World War I (1914-1918)

In the muddy, lice infested, smelly trenches of World War I, Adolf Hitler found a new home fighting for the German Fatherland. After years of poverty, alone and uncertain, he now had a sense of belonging and purpose.

The "war to end all wars" began after the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was gunned down by a young Serbian terrorist on June 28, 1914. Events quickly escalated as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany urged Austria to declare war on Serbia. Russia then mobilized against Austria. Germany mobilized against Russia. France and England then mobilized against Germany.

All over Europe and England young men, including Adolf Hitler, eagerly volunteered. Like most young soldiers before them, they thought it would be a short war, but hopefully long enough for them to see some action and participate in the great adventure.

Corporal Hitler was a dispatch runner, taking messages back and forth from the command staff in the rear to the fighting units near the battlefield. During lulls in the fighting he would take out his watercolors and paint the landscapes of war.

Hitler, unlike his fellow soldiers, never complained about bad food and the horrible conditions or talked about women, preferring to discuss art or history. He received a few letters but no packages from home and never asked for leave. His fellow soldiers regarded Hitler as too eager to please his superiors, but generally a likable loner notable for his luck in avoiding injury as well as his bravery.

On October 7, 1916, Hitler's luck ran out when he was wounded in the leg by a shell fragment during the Battle of the Somme. He was hospitalized in Germany. It was his first time away from the front after two years of war. Following his recovery, he went sight seeing in Berlin, then was assigned to light duty in Munich. He was appalled at the apathy and anti-war sentiment among German civilians. He blamed the Jews for much of this and saw them as conspiring to spread unrest and undermine the German war effort.

This idea of an anti-war conspiracy involving Jews would become an obsession to add to other anti-Semitic notions he acquired in Vienna, leading to an ever-growing hatred of Jews.

In October 1918, he was temporarily blinded by a British chlorine gas attack near Ypres. He was sent home to a starving, war weary country full of unrest. He laid in a hospital bed consumed with dread amid a swirl of rumors of impending disaster.

On November 10, 1918, an elderly pastor came into the hospital and announced the news. The Kaiser and the House of Hollenzollern had fallen. Their beloved Fatherland was now a republic. The war was over.

Hitler described his reaction in Mein Kampf: "There followed terrible days and even worse nights - I knew that all was lost...in these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed."

Not the military, in his mind, but the politicians back at home in Germany and primarily the Jews.

Era of Hiter's Life

Adolf Hitler (born on 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party. He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and, after 1934, also head of state as Führer und Reichskanzler, ruling the country as an absolute dictator of Germany.

Founder and leader of the Nazi Party, Reich Chancellor and guiding spirit of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945, Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on 20 April 1889. The son of a fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the backwoods of lower Austria, the young Hitler was a resentful, discontented child. Moody, lazy, of unstable temperament, he was deeply hostile towards his strict, authoritarian father and strongly attached to his indulgent, hard-working mother, whose death from cancer in December 1908 was a shattering blow to the adolescent Hitler.

Hitler ultimately wanted to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in Europe. To achieve this, he pursued a foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Aryan people; directing the resources of the state towards this goal. This included the rearmament of Germany, which culminated in 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. In response, the United Kingdom and France declared war against Germany, leading to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
Within three years, Germany and the Axis powers had occupied most of Europe, and most of Northern Africa, East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. However, with the reversal of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onwards. By 1945, Allied armies had invaded German-held Europe from all sides. Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians,[3] an estimated six million of whom were Jews targeted in the Holocaust and between 500,000 and 1,500,000 were Romanis.[4] Others targeted included ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun and, to avoid capture by Soviet forces less than two days later, the two committed suicide on 30 April 1945. ( source url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler)