Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

by William Craig

the Russian High Command wrestled with its own serious problems: the success of the vast encirclement. Neither Stalin nor Vasilevsky or Zhukov had dared anticipate the dimensions of their triumph. Prepared to deal with up to one hundred thousand of the enemy, they suddenly realized that nearly three hundred thousand armed soldiers had to be contained and liquidated. In Red Army staff schools, such an operation had never been broached. Only Zhukov had practical experience in dealing with a surrounded enemy; at Khalkin Gol in Manchuria in 1939, he had successfully eliminated a portion of the Japanese Kwantung Army in a period of eleven days. But that force had totaled only one fourth of Paulus’s Sixth Army,

On this day, December 23, the sergeant was just one of 686 Germans killed or wounded while waiting for Hitler to approve Thunderclap.

In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow. When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”

While Hitler stared in surprise, Zitzewitz summed up. “My Führer, permit me to state that the troops at Stalingrad can no longer be ordered to fight to their last round because they are no longer physically capable of fighting, and because they no longer have a last round.” Hitler looked right through Zitzewitz. Dismissing the shocked major, the Führer mumbled: “Man recovers very quickly.”

At Susdal, men died at the rate of two hundred a day from starvation.

At this point, General Korfes became a talkative spokesman for the German officer corps. “It is the tragic point of world history that the two greatest men of our times, Hitler and Stalin … have been unable to find common grounds so as to beat the mutual enemy, the capitalist world.”

In five months of fighting and bombings, 99 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble. More than forty-one thousand homes, three hundred factories, 113 hospitals and schools had been destroyed. A quick census revealed that out of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of the previous summer, only 1,515 civilians remained. Most of them had either died in the first days or left the city for temporary homes in Siberia and Asia. No one knew how many had been killed, but the estimates were staggering.