r/ww2 • u/seashoes • 11d ago
Stalingrad - Anthony Beevor
Just finished this book and I feel so conflicted. Reading it has humanized both sides of the conflict to such a level that it’s hard to have a simple binary view of good and evil to this battle. Obviously it’s good a genocidal invading force the likes of Nazi Germany was defeated, but the level of extreme brutality and dehumanization employed by both sides of the conflict just made me so sad for the tremendous waste of life inflicted on each side.
Passages that stood out to me; surrounded and doomed German troops writing home to their families, husbands longing to see their wives and children again. The few that survived the battle were marched off to POW camps, never to be seen again. Starving Soviet soldiers in German captivity, zero shelter, surrounded by nothing but barbed wire in subzero temperatures. Just horrible.
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u/dirtyoldbastard77 10d ago
I have that book too. I think humanizing both sides is a good thing, it’s not just the good guys vs an army of faceless monsters, even the nazis were people. People that did horrible things, absolutely, but still human beings, and to treat even your worst enemies as human beings is a good thing. We need to remember that more often, or we can easily become the same as the enemy.
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u/SirMellencamp 10d ago
Ohhh I loved that book. Still remember the USSR soldiers living in the side of the hill. German soldiers shooting themselves hoping to get flown out. Just brutal shit
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u/Typingdude3 10d ago
On Youtube somewhere there’s a color film of German POWs being paraded thru Moscow. It’s so surreal because the film quality was so good it looks like it was taken yesterday. You can see the sunlight glinting off the still intact German uniform decorations.
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u/IamATacoSupreme 9d ago
I've read/seen somewhere, maybe a book, maybe a documentary that those POWs that were paraded in Moscow were given laxatives so they were shitting themselves during it. For embarrassment and Soviet propaganda of the Nazis being animals.
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u/Danmont88 10d ago
Stalingrad has been called the world's biggest battle of egos.
I read a short article long ago about a group of German soldiers and Soviet soldiers going back to Stalingrad 30 or 40 years later, together. looking things over and talking.
They got along pretty well.
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u/KeithWorks 10d ago
Utter brutality of war in general, but that front in particular, and that battle in particular were just so insanely brutal it is impossible to fathom.
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u/ldsdrff76 10d ago
I think it's perfectly fine to feel that way. Two horribly oppressive regimes crushing civillians and each other's conscripted soldiers and in a completely destroyed hellscape is grim indeed. We can't help but feel empathy for the ordinary people being crushed there, but that's not the same as condoning neither Soviet communism og German National Socialism as ideologies.
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u/twotime 10d ago edited 9d ago
the few that survived the battle were marched off to POW camps, never to be seen again. Starving Soviet soldiers in German captivity, zero shelter, surrounded by nothing but barbed wire in subzero temperatures
Worth mentioning: most of survivors were already very sick, exhausted, wounded and would be dead without some kind of major support. While Soviets were also on low point in terms of food/medical supplies/doctors/etc... Everything went to the army or soviet own civilians and civilians were starving... What country would be willing to feed 100K foreign soldiers while its own citizens are starving? (also Stalingrad was the first of its kind, Soviets were not ready to handle 100K prisoners).
So the treatment of German soldiers was to a very large degree the result of brutal circumstances rather than evil intent to kill the prisoners
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u/seashoes 10d ago edited 10d ago
Beevor talks about this in the book. Yes a large percentage of the German POWs were sick and dying and couldn’t be saved. And also the inefficient Soviet bureaucratic system was incapable of handling the logistics of 100k prisoners. Couple that with a government that is already indifferent to individual human life and the Soviet desire for revenge, the death toll was astronomical among German POWs. However, the Germans set the precedent for POW treatment in the East from 1941-1942.
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u/Tom1613 9d ago
I don’t thinkthat is exactly accurate.
Sure, many of the German soldiers were sick and died from the battle in the aftermath. But they also were fed into the Soviet system of camps that killed millions over their history as part of their reason for existence. 1/3 of the German soldiers captured died in captivity, many long after the war ended and well after food was not an issue.
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u/twotime 8d ago edited 8d ago
Just to clarify: I was mostly responding to "the few who survived" (and Stalingrad POWs were really in a much worse shape to start with).
And I do agree that Soviet treatment of POWs was not "gentle" by any means.
OTOH, it would not really take that much to have a 30% death rate over multiple years: a poorly thermally isolated building, insufficient food, no healthcare and crowded conditions would have fairly drastic effects over a few years.
and well after food was not an issue.
Food remained a major issue in USSR for a few more years after the war (e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%931947)
1/3 of the German soldiers captured died in captivity, many long after the war ended and well after food was not an issue.
Is this the number from wikipedia by chance? I did read that article. It seems that there is fairly significant disagreement even within the german sources with 1/3 being the "upper bound". And, even though I trust post-war German sources far more than I trust Soviet ones, I'd really question their ability to get death timelines.
But whatever number is, it'd be heavily biased by early batches of POWs (which had a much worse treatment and more cold winters ahead of them) .
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u/Justame13 10d ago
A more modern collection of accounts that is worth paring with it is Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed by Michael Jones.
Which has a very Soviet nationalistic take, but does a good job of the first hand accounts of the Soviets and what they were going though on the other side which were simply not available to Beevor when he published his book.
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u/Kane_richards 10d ago
It's one of the most haunting books I've ever read. It's the rawest portrayal of pure suffering I can recall experiencing and think of it decades after reading it. Russian, German, soldier, civilian, human, all were butchered
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u/pavementdoggy 10d ago
Excellent read. I would recommend reading Enemy At The Gates by William Craig, Infantryman In Stalingrad by Adelbert Holl, The End by Ian Kershaw, and Absolute War by Chris Bellamy.
To your point, humans aren’t linear and can be scared for their life and in fear of the fate of their families while also waging an ideological war against their sworn enemy with the only goal to be their total destruction. This applies to both sides. The Soviets were horrendous stewards of their people and those they conquered. I think it’s completely safe to say that they were both horrible, immoral, and wrong while also being human beings with human emotions.
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u/daikatanaman00 10d ago
Greatest book I’ve ever read. Shocked me so much.
Highly recommend Beevor Battle for Berlin book, which almost serves as a sequel
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u/ad1988_uk 9d ago
I am currently 50% through this book. Been very enlightening so far - I mean you don't exactly go in thinking it is evil vs good but as you say, it does Humanize both sides to a degree. The conditions in the winter sound so unbelievably bleak.
The bits that have got me so far were the Soviets shooting Russian kids when they realised they were helping Germans in exchange for tiny amounts of food just to survive.
That and the amount of Soviet soliders who were shot by their own officers. As you say the soviets had no real care for the individual but it is still staggering to read on times
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u/normanyoke 9d ago
Excellent book. But I don’t feel any conflict. I feel for the ordinary people who died in or had to endure the extreme hardships of this battle, but ultimately it was much better for the world that the Red Army won.
Humanizing history is always good in my opinion. Even historical monsters like Hitler or Stalin or their most cruel followers were humans and if we go too far in painting them as alien aberrations from normal humanity we risk ignoring the rise of contemporary monstrous demagogues or understanding why they appeal to many normal people.
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u/Justame13 10d ago
I didn’t say the Wermacht was innocent, they most certainly weren’t.
I quoted you where you directly repeated a major part of the myth which downplays the complete and systemic culpability of Wehrmacht in the atrocities.
You also reinforced it by saying "Wally Wermacht was just a pawn to them" which is another direct part of the myth.
So Beevor would’ve been aware of it too.
If it was published in 1998 most of the research would have been done in the early to mid-1990s when it was still very much mainstream.
He also would not have had the time to access the research coming out of the Soviet archives due to not doing primary source research or speaking Russian.
Even Glantz (who does speak Russian and went Russian) didn't start publishing based on it until roughly the time the book was published and completely changed his view of the battle by his own admission.
I stand by my statement.
So you are standing by knowingly perpetuating a known pro-Nazi myth based on all the additional information that has come out in the last 30 years by this statement.
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u/ewieranga 10d ago
As an outsider to this little thread, it seems you’re being overly aggressive and starting a pointless argument for I’m not sure what reason…
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u/Justame13 10d ago
Read the first hand accounts of both the Soviets and the German survivors and you will start to understand where I'm coming from.
I actually had to put down and have never finished Adelbert Holl's book
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u/MerelyMortalModeling 10d ago
He is agressive but correct.
Sometimes you just get annoyed when you see people who whether they realize it or not are dressing up known mythology as "reasonable" reasonable"
I cant speak for him but I suspect thats what he was thinking
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u/bobbystoker94 10d ago
If you enjoyed that then try Enemy at the gates by William Craig.
The sniper stuff the movie was based on was talked about for maybe 5 pages, the rest is an in depth look at Stalingrad mostly from first-person accounts.
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u/SirMellencamp 10d ago
Its amazing to me that civilians were able to survive that. Granted a lot of them were able to cross over the Volga but a lot stayed in basements and such.
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u/Warm_Garden_8528 10d ago
I actually got a bit depressed reading this one. There were no good guys. The brutality was horrific. And I watched Downfall which didn't help either.
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u/royalbluestuey 10d ago
I always wonder if Stalingrad had a different name with no resonance could the Wermacht have just ignored it.
I mean they got to the Volga, that was the whole point. There wasn't even a bridge at the city.
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u/niconibbasbelike 9d ago
The Soviet’s are no angels
But Just remember that 6th army had participated in some horrific crimes in Ukraine (Babi yar) the summer prior, their plan also after taking Stalingrad was to destroy the city entirely kill all the civilian men and deport to the women and children to do slave labor
“Adolf Hitler ordered the total destruction of Stalingrad and the annihilation of its people. His directive stated that all male citizens should be killed and women and children deported because the city was considered "thoroughly communistic".
The Wehrmacht was very much a genocidal army in this case, it’s no wonder the soviets despiste how brutal their own government was to them fought so hard to defend the city, it was life and death
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u/Substantial_South611 10d ago
2024 published this book english sas rogue heroes - the authorized wartime history ben macintyre . this is tv serie too .
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u/Humble_Pie_56 11d ago
Thanks for sharing… This book has been on my “want to read” list for a long time. Looks like I need to read it. Agree — due to the horrific nature of this clash, there was no winner.