and in Stalingrad during this time they only advanced from one side of the street to the other.
How do Germans today perceive the Battle of Stalingrad?
Just think about the figures of the Battle of Stalingrad: irretrievable and sanitary losses on both sides amounted to more than 2.6 million people! The Red Army, only in this battle, lost more soldiers killed (about 480 thousand!) Than the USA for the whole World War II (418 thousand).
The Battle of Stalingrad showed the whole world that the fate of the Soviet Union was by no means predetermined and marked a turning point in the course of the entire Second World War ...
- It was a terrible tragedy. Germany plunged into mourning. Everyone thought - the German army is invincible, but our best parts have disappeared in the snow on the Volga. My grandmother only had a brother then, my parents wanted to call him Adolf, in honor of the Fuhrer ... For the first time, something jumped into their hearts, and the baby was named Johann. Already after the forty-fifth year, my grandmother saw Soviet newsreels and experienced a shock. Tens of thousands of German soldiers, exhausted, frostbitten, wrapped in women's shawls and shawls, having lost their human face, barely rearrange their legs at the sight of Soviet submachine gunners. I was born after the war, but I imagine Stalingrad as an icy catastrophe film.
44-year-old engineer Thomas Edinger is a hot opponent of Nazism and I am sure: on May 9, 1945, Germany was not conquered, but was freed from the cannibalistic regime of Hitler. However, the Battle of Stalingrad is seen differently: a black abyss that absorbed a million "boy soldiers".
According to the polls, 85% of the inhabitants of the FRG do not know that the battle began on July 17, 1942: the Volga is associated with the terrible frosts of the Germans. The same is reflected in culture. In the movie "Stalingrad" (published in the screens of Germany in 1993) shows the company of romantics soldiers - soldiers of the Wehrmacht: they all perish, the pair of the latter freezes in the steppe. The song Stalingrad of the German band Accept, playing in the style of heavy metal, tells about two fighters, Soviet and Nazi, who became "brothers in death" and (of course!) Frozen in a dead city. The sixth army of Paulus, which turned Stalingrad into ruins, in the representation of the Germans - a herd of lambs, doomed to slaughter by the insane Hitler.
"Perhaps it's the horror with which the ancestors of the current citizens of Germany took Stalingrad," says Martin Borman, Jr., a 82-year-old son of Nazi No. 2, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann. "I perfectly remember the crushed Germany, crushed faces, half-masted flags with a swastika. I could not believe that the Russians had buried our best soldiers in the snow. Over time, knowledge came - and about the atrocities of the SS, and about the concentration camps, and the clarity that May 9 is not a defeat. But Stalingrad is still a gloomy picture in the minds of the Germans. The soldier Paulus is not considered occupiers, but victims of war.
With Bormann the younger was also the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess, the son of another famous Nazi - Rudolf Hess. "Stalingrad is something terrible, an octopus from the depths of the ocean, even antifascists feel pity for the Germans who died there. The sixth army is perceived as martyrs, crushed by the millstones of war, and not by loyal servants of Hitler. "
This is surprising: after all, modern Germans sincerely condemn the Wehrmacht and SS killings of peaceful inhabitants of the USSR, Hitler for them is a real monster. However, in the case of Stalingrad nobody imagines healthy men in their summer uniform with a swastika, with rolled up sleeves that marched to the Volga, following the order of the Fuhrer - to break through to the Caucasian oil. And of course, the inhabitants of Germany do not know anything about the forty thousand Stalingrad: the elderly, women and children killed by the Paulus Sixth Army. They were shot, raped, taken hostage by the very "victims" and "lambs". Hearing these figures, the Germans were terribly surprised in their conversations with me: "How? Did they kill civilians ?! It can not be that there were almost no SS troops in Stalingrad! "Yes, it's hard to believe that the frostbitten" bums "in lice on film, dressed in rags, were recently executioners. That's why the Germans do not believe either.
We know the truth at what price the victory was won on the Volga: the losses (killed and wounded) of the Red Army amounted to more than 1 million people. We were opposed not by romantic boys, but by the strongest army in the world, crushed to dust in Europe. The surrender of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad 72 years ago is a victory over evil, and not humiliation of the Germans. Will this be understood by the inhabitants of present-day Germany? I would like, although it is not important. The most important thing is that we understand this.