part0019

E ven though we failed to conquer Russia, we still had remarkable success. In the summer of 1942, the German army commanded huge parts of Russia. Before the war, 40% of the Russian population lived in the areas the Germans now occupied in the north. We’d reached the city of Leningrad close to the Finnish border and continued down past Moscow to the front.

In the south, we were close to the Volga River and got as far as the Caucasus mountains, only 100 miles from the Caspian Sea. We’d killed millions of Soviet citizens, and millions had fled further east. Now it was August 1942, and after more than a year of fighting, our German Sixth Army was fast approaching Stalingrad. It was named after the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the city had great symbolic importance for both the Soviets and us. We were determined to fight as if the outcome of the entire war depended on our victory, and perhaps it did.

I was with the German Sixth Army. As we arrived at the outskirts of Stalingrad, we were foreshadowed by a vast cloud of dust thrown up by our marching feet. The tanks, artillery, and trucks rolled through the parched steppe of late summer. Many of the soldiers were still young, fresh, and in good spirits, the odds were on our side. Most of us who hiked the thousand or so miles from the German border to the banks of the Volga felt we were as invincible as the Nazi propaganda told us.

Our armies shocked the world with our string of victories. But when the Sixth Army got to Stalingrad, we were no longer swept through vast open plains, and we became bogged down in street fighting. It was the kind of warfare that every soldier dreads. Brutal, personal, terrifying hand to hand combat. We fought with bayonets grenades, anything we could grab to kill each other in the most violent, bloody way.

I remember fighting 15 days in a row for a single house. The front was a corridor between burned-out rooms and a thin ceiling between two floors. Our faces were black with sweat. We've bombarded each other with grenades in the middle of explosions. There were clouds of dust and smoke heaps of mortar and floods of blood fragments of furniture and human beings littered everywhere. The street was no longer measured by dimensions, but by corpses.

Stalingrad was no longer a town. It's an enormous cloud of burning blinding smoke, like a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrived, the dogs plunged into the river and swam desperately to the other side of the bank. The nights were a terror for them. Animals fled this hell. Only the men could endure.

The battle for Stalingrad raged from August 1942 all the way into February of the next year. It was an exhausting and terrifying battle. The morale of each side would become a deciding factor in the outcome. We arrived convinced that victory would soon be ours. The Russians fought desperately to cling on to what remained of their frontline positions. They must’ve been in awe of the German Army. We had yet to face serious defeat. There was one point in the battle that over nine-tenths of Stalingrad was in our hands. We were so confident in our victory that the commander of the German Sixth Army had already designed a medal commemorating the capture of the city.

The casualty rate among the Soviet army was incredible. The reinforcements were rushed to Stalingrad to prop up its crumbling barricades. On the other side of the Volga river, they'd be hustled out of cattle wagons and greeted by the scary sight of a city in flames. It looked literally like a vision of hell. From the railhead, men were transferred across the river by ferry. And even if they survived the machine gun and artillery bombardments. The strafing of our Stuka dive bombers decimated the new soldiers. They would be lucky to live for 12 hours.

As each area of the city was overtaken by intense fighting, Stalingrad was reduced to little more than a massive pile of rubble. Some of my fellow soldiers described the fight as the War of the Rats. Because men scurried and burrowed through the debris. The commander of the Russian forces understood that the key to survival in the city would be through small individual encounters with the enemy, not a war of tanks, artillery, and bombers. He believed the most lethal soldier of all would be the sniper.

In the bizarre landscape of the city with its acres of demolished and burned out factories and apartment buildings, Stalingrad was perfect sniper territory. A soldier could be killed at any moment by a sharpshooter perched atop some derelict building. A handful of good snipers could demoralize an entire frontline regiment. Because of their importance, the Soviet snipers were rewarded well for their efforts. If a Soviet sniper became a marksman with 40 kills, he won the title Noble Sniper and was given a medal. Being a sniper is a highly specialized job that requires distinct skills and a unique personality. It's one thing to kill a soldier when he is charging at you with a bayonet. It's an entirely different matter to observe him grimly from a hiding place. You could be talking to a friend, writing a letter, shaving, or even squatting over a latrine. A sniper must kill in cold blood, and at the moment when he's least likely to give away his own position. Sniping is a skill that requires patience and cunning, especially when a sniper is sent to stalk another. Expert knowledge of camouflage is also essential.

At Stalingrad, skilled snipers learned to fire against a white background with a flash of rifle shot that’d be difficult to see. Some snipers improvised special attachments to their rifles—which hid the flash of shot—some setup dummy figures to act as bait regularly returning to move their position.

I t was early September and a desperate time in the battle. It was then that I decided to make a name for myself in the Russian 62nd army. In my first 10 days in the city, I killed over 40 German soldiers. I was a long way from the Elinsky forest and the Ural Mountains. I'd learned to shoot as a young boy and was already a skilled marksman before I joined the army.

Russian propaganda used me for the model of fighting spirit. And because I had the broad open face of a Russian peasant, they put my picture and deeds all over the Russian newspapers. I was now known as the perfect people's hero. But I didn't care about that. I was a sniper. And as my fame grew, my story was also taken up by national newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts.

My success and fame had grown so much that the army set up a sniper training school close to the front, where between forays to the German lines, I’d pass on my skills to eager recruits. Conceal yourself like a stone I told them, observe, study the terrain, compile a chart, and plot distinctive marks on it. You must remember that if in the process of observation, you ever reveal yourself to the enemy. You will receive a bullet through your head for the trouble.

I told my students how to use dummies and other tricks to bait enemy snipers into giving away their position. Sometimes we taught an opponent with a firing range target. Then when we were confident, we’d discovered our enemy's hiding place. We'd hurry back to where the dummy had been and swiftly catch the opponent off guard. This was a common game played between snipers. I warned my students never to become angry at such tactics. The way to stay alive as a sniper was to look before you leap. I told them that a sniper needed to be intimately familiar with the territory in which he operated. Anything different, a pile of bricks here, a slightly shifted pile of wooden planks there, told an experienced soldier that an enemy sniper was lying in wait.

Among my students was a young woman named Tania. She was like many Russian women and fought as a frontline soldier. Most of her family had been killed in the war, and she carried a deep hatred for our German enemy. She called them targets and refused to think of them as human beings. She was a talented sniper and often fought alongside me. We shared the hardships of frontline soldiers. We snatched meals with a spoon kept in our boots. We used buckets of cold water to bathe, and we slept huddled together in dark, overcrowded shelters. It was hardly a courtship with flowers and candlelit dinners. But in this brutal, bloody atmosphere of the front with death an instant away. We became lovers.

I was told by Soviet intelligence that the Germans soon learned about me. The German Sixth Army High Command realized what a prize it would be to kill me. Besides the success of our snipers. We were making life so unpleasant for the ground troops that no one dared to raise their head above the rubble during daylight. An SS Colonel named Major Koning was the head of the sniper training school near Berlin. He was flown to Stalingrad, to find and kill me.

He was said to have been the best and had many advantages over the regular Soviet sniper. He knew my techniques because Soviet newspapers and army training leaflets full of my information had been passed on to him. I knew nothing about him. I was just tipped off the Germans had sent their best sniper. For the next few days, I kept my eyes and ears open for any clues as to where this Nazi Super Sniper would be. Two of my sniper comrades were shot and killed the next day. They were both excellent snipers, but they were outfoxed by a sniper with even more exceptional talent.

I hurried to the section of the front line where my comrades had been shot. It was in the Red October factory district, a landscape of twisted machinery in the skeletal framework of demolished buildings. I felt like a police inspector investigating a murder. I asked soldiers who witnessed the shootings exactly what had happened, and where my comrades had been hit. I made use of my considerable experience and decided the shots came from a position directly in front of the area where these men had fallen.

Across the lines, through the tangled Rubble, was the hulk of a burned-out tank. This was too obvious a spot for an experienced sniper to lay in wait. But to the right of the tank, there was an abandoned concrete pillbox. The firing slit had been boarded up with a piece of iron, right in front of my own position. This was the perfect spot for sniper hide, and then crawl away and cover of darkness.

I caught sight of the top of a helmet moving along the edge of an enemy trench and reached for my rifle. I realized by the way the helmet was wobbling, it was a trap. Major Koning must’ve had an assistant who placed the helmet on a stick and waited for me to reveal my position by firing at this dummy target.

I put my theory to the test and placed a glove on the small plank. I raised it above a brick parapet. At once, a shot rang out through the glove and plank in an instant. I looked at the plank carefully. The bullet had gone straight through it. My opponent was obviously directly under an iron sheet. After dark, I scouted the area for a suitable firing spot. That night had occasional bursts of rifle fire, followed by sporadic artillery and mortar barrages every now and then. A flare would shoot high into the air in a graceful arc and float down in a bright blaze that cast harsh shadows over the still sinister landscape.

When the sun rose the next morning, it fell directly on me. I waited to fire. If the sunlight caught my rifle or telescopic sight it would have been way too risky. By the early afternoon, the sun moved across to the German lines. At the edge of the iron sheet something glistened in the bright light. Was it Major Koning’s rifle, or just a piece of broken glass? I decided to offer the German sniper a target. I carefully raised my helmet above the broken brick where we sheltered. A shot rang out and pierced the helmet. I rose slightly and screamed as if I had been hit.

Unable to contain his curiosity Major Koning raised his head a little from behind the iron sheet to get a better look. It was finally the chance I'd been waiting for. I fired one shot, and Major Koning’s head fell back. That night I crept up to his position and took his rifle as a souvenir. You can still see the telescopic sight on display at the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.

The Battle of Stalingrad made up one of the greatest horror stories of modern history. The Germans, along with their Axis Powers, lost over 850,000 men. While we lost nearly three-quarters of a million. Stalingrad was not just the scene of a vast prolonged battle. It was also a city of over half a million people. In the first days of the fighting, nearly 50,000 of them were killed by German bombers, by the end, there were less than 1500 men and women still alive among the rubble.

Some who’d lived in the city before the Germans came, fled east to other parts of Russia. The battle finally ended when our forces outside Stalingrad surrounded the Germans. Not a single healthy man remained at the front in the German Sixth Army. Everyone at least suffered from frostbite. And there were several hundred soldiers who had frozen to death. The German High Command still refused to allow their starving, demoralized Sixth Army to give in. Another two weeks of needless suffering continued before the Germans surrendered. We captured over 90,000 Germans, and less than 5,000 ever returned home. The rest died in captivity.

I looked for Tania shortly after my encounter with Major Koning but heard she’d been critically wounded. She led a small squad of soldiers to assassinate a German Colonel. On the way to the German front lines, one of them stepped on a mine and in the explosion, Tania received a fatal stomach wound .

I was told she was not expected to live. But later I heard she survived. She recovered several months later in a hospital far behind the front lines and also received terrible news. She was told that I was killed in an explosion in the final weeks of the Battle of Stalingrad. I was sunk in despair at the thought of losing her, and for years afterward, I’d just stare into space. Eventually, I recovered and even got married.