Most visitors to Stalingrad - Volgograd as it is now - make the sad pilgrimage to Mamayev Kurgan. This tall hill, a Tatar burial mound, was the white-hot crucible of the battle. At the end of the war there was so much shrapnel embedded in the earth that no grass grew here, but today it is, as it was before the war, a quiet green park. It is also a war cemetery for thousands of Russian dead. A cavernous hall of remembrance has been carved out of the eastern face of the hillside. All must pass through it, filing past the eternal flame and the honour guard, on their way to view the astonishing object at the summit.
For on the crown of Mamayev Kurgan stands the colossal statue of a female figure. Rodina-Mat’ - ‘Motherland’ - is the largest free-standing sculpture in the world. This furious giantess, 160ft (49m) tall, strains forward and holds aloft an avenging sword. She is an overpowering sight: it is as if the Statue of Liberty had leaped down from her pedestal and charged screaming into battle.
Some people find this kind of Communist monumentalism rather tasteless. But the towering Motherland figure certainly does what any work of art should: it tells a compelling and worthwhile story. It says that something of unbelievable enormity happened here, something as immense, unique and awesome as the statue itself.
But the statue does not tell the whole story. In its vastness it conveys little of the ordinary combatants’ experience of Stalingrad (and says nothing about the German ordeal). Those stories are compelling and worthwhile too. And the aim of this book is to give an account of the epic of Stalingrad from the standpoint of those who were there: Germans and Russians, men and women, soldiers and citizens.
The war archives in Volgograd contain thousands of accounts written by Russian servicemen. Some are barely literate, and that is why they have never been published. Other accounts have gathered dust because the writers speak of incidents in a way that would have been considered un-Soviet by the regime at the time. In recent decades, a small proportion of this material has seen the light of day, but only in Russian and in tiny print-runs.
So Russian accounts are a rich resource. But German testimony is comparatively scarce, because barely one in a hundred of the German soldiers who fought at Stalingrad came through it. Consequently, many German eyewitness stories are not after-the-event reminiscences, but extracts from letters written to loved ones during the fighting. Sackloads of these intimate documents were captured by the Russians, and a few that reached their addressees later found their way into German archives. In this book, the names of certain letter writers have been obscured at the archives‘ request (hence, ‘Hans S— wrote ...’), because the young soldiers often express Nazi views that they might have lived to regret, had they lived at all. And their objectionable opinions still have the power to distress or embarrass living relatives.
It is not just what they said; it’s what they did. Some of the Wehrmacbt soldiers whose voices are heard here surely committed appalling crimes in Russia. But as one reads anguished first-hand descriptions of the Germans‘ suffering at Stalingrad, there is little way of knowing who is receiving a dose of something like poetic justice, and who is a hapless pawn caught up in Hitler‘s megalomanic scheme. This is not just a Nazi conundrum: though right was ultimately on the side of the Russians, Red Army men too were implacably brutal - to the enemy and to each other, and subsequently to blameless German civilians.
As I gathered voices from Stalingrad, I was often confronted by this problem of pity. How far can one sympathize with an individual, not knowing what horrors he had seen or done, or might yet do? I decided that the answer was not to judge. And I choose to pity both the misguided henchman and the wretched victim, because in this most cruel encounter, they were all too often one and the same man.
Jonathan Bastable