Viktor Nekrasov - Stalingrad, February 1943
The author and Stalingrad veteran penned this short reflection on the end of the fighting on the Volga in 1983. Then exiled in France - he never returned to the USSR before his death in 1987 - Nekrasov plays with myths and expectations of Soviet and German troops’ behaviour at Stalingrad.
Employing his customarily slippery narrative style, the author at once reiterates and underlines the validity of Soviet myths of exemplary conduct in the wake of Stalingrad while simultaneously revealing the looting, pillaging, violence, and suffering that defined the post-battle period in the city.
Viktor Nekrasov, 1980s
Stalingrad, February 1943
I’m writing these words on 2 February 1983, precisely forty years after the Battle of Stalingrad drew to a close. It was on that long awaited day that the German 6th Army laid down its arms and Field Marshal Paulus signed and sealed the unconditional surrender.
The war in Stalingrad was over. The cannons, howitzers, guns and Katyushas fell silent. The machine guns ceased their fire. But the submachine gun rounds continued to tear into the air. Searchlights, rockets, and tracer rounds joyously combed the sky late into the night. Everyone was drinking away, drinking to our victory, drinking to their defeat, drinking to kaput!
It hadn’t been long before – as recently as 29 January – that the then General Paulus had been signing this radiogram:
“To the Fuhrer. The 6th Army congratulates its Fuhrer on the anniversary of your rise to power. The Swastika flag still waves over Stalingrad. May our fight be an example to today’s generation and the generation to come of how a refusal to capitulate in this hopeless situation will lead to Germany’s victory.”
It was all talk. Five days previously, Paulus had reported to Hitler that, “Further defence is senseless. The catastrophe is inevitable. I ask your urgent permission to surrender that we might save those who remain alive. Signed, Paulus.”
Paulus’ request was turned down. On 31 January, the HQ and commanders of the 6th Army were taken prisoner in the central department store building on the Square of Fallen Fighters. On 2 February, the final army group, the 11th Infantry Corps, ceased combat near the Barricades Factory.
The surrender was complete.
Streams of Germans with hands held high and white flags aloft flowed out of dugouts, bunkers, cellars, crevices, and ruins. They had become prisoners of war. They numbered three hundred and thirty thousand.
Strong and well equipped, they had seized 1,500 kilometres of Soviet land, crossed the Dnepr and the Don, conquered all of Ukraine, reached and climbed Mount Elbrus to the south, and made it to the Volga. Now out they came, downcast, frozen and unaware of what awaited them…
What was to come? Revenge? Humiliation? Denigration? Cruelty?
None of that happened in Stalingrad. Dozens, hundreds of prisoners passed through my charge, through my dugout, through the neighbouring dugouts, and through our commanders’ dugouts. There was no denigration and there was no cruelty from either the COs or the troops. But mock we did:
“Well then, well then, made it to the Volga, did we? Liked it, did we? Had to tear through, eh? What’ve you got in your kitbag, then? Go on, give us a look! Photos? Give ‘em here. Who’s that, your little Gretchen? Cor, what a looker, what I wouldn’t do..!”
What came after was the usual soldier’s filth, but nobody took their photo albums away. That was the orders we’d been given. We left them with their owners, an act considered the very height of mercy. That would be followed by the ordinary: “Want a bite to eat, Fritz? There, take it! Have a smoke…you don’t even know how to roll? You’re used to your German cigarettes; here’s how you do it, have a look.”
Even reflecting hard on those days forty years past, I cannot remember a single example of cruelty or even impropriety. Later, in Eastern Prussia, it was a different matter. Violence, plunder, and murder. The murder of innocents and civilians. The fluff from ripped up feather mattresses whirled over their bodies for weeks on end. It was then that Stalin had allowed packages to be sent home from the front. He was obviously saying, “Loot it all! I’m giving you permission!” A week later, to be fair, came another order: “Looters and aggressors are to be shot.” But it was too late; people were coming up from the rear and they had to allow themselves a few entertainments, regardless of orders.
There was none of that in Stalingrad. If it did happen – after all, everything happens a little everywhere – I didn’t see any of it. And that makes it all the more awful to hear and read about what’s happening in Afghanistan today. At Stalingrad we were fighting invaders, but in Afghanistan, the Soviet soldier has become the invader. I don’t want to believe it, but he is stealing and committing violence without a damn. That’s a terrible thing.
Thus ended the war. Silence descended. An unnatural, unfamiliar, unbreakable silence broken only by the odd round of drunken submachine gun fire. Silence—and a kind of idleness. Inertia forced the issuing of some commands—clean this, wash that, take it apart, guard it—and inertia forced the unhurried fulfilment of these orders. Yet mostly we just blabbered away and rifled through German dugouts. We dragged out everything we could get our hands on. I sought out in particular newspapers, magazines, illustrated brochures, and stamp albums (that’s right, the Germans even seemed to have time for that at the front). Then, snug and warm in my bunker, I’d leaf through my Volkischer Beobachters and Allgemeiner Zeitungs and get acquainted with German propaganda.
They really didn’t do a bad job of it at all. It wasn’t even really propaganda as such; it was more of a strong link between the rear and the front, which is an extremely important thing. Until the very last the Germans kept dropping national and local newspapers and letters from relatives for their surrounded soldiers. For Christmas they got little folded cardboard Christmas trees, written for some or other corporal from his beloved Frau Muller, still in his native Weissenford.
I’d keep working my way through these newspapers and magazines, then one of the artillerymen or the scouts would turn up—and what did we do? We drank. We had plenty: our own stuff, and stuff we’d seized.
And that was how we spent the first half of February. No hard work: demining a few nasty minefields, tidying up some barbed wire, burying the dead (of which there was a considerable quantity in no man’s land), then spending our evenings…well, what do you think we did in the evenings? Have a bet.
In the middle of February, we fetched up our things and moved them to Leninsk on the left bank. Then we were loaded onto trains bound not for the east, not for the leave we all thought we’d get, but for the west. Forward—westward!
