399. Stalin: Hitler’s Downfall At Stalingrad (Part 5)

Antony Beevor wrote the definitive book on the Battle of Stalingrad. He joins William Dalrymple and Anita Anand to discuss how Hitler and Stalin’s armies faced gruelling winter conditions in the siege of the city, and how the battle became a decisive turning point in World War II. What was the experience of soldiers on either side during the brutal urban warfare? How did women survive stuck within the siege? Did Hitler obsess over capturing the city because it bore Stalin’s name? Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:24Speaker 03

  Stalingrad, one of the most brutal battles of all time. By its close, over a million soldiers would lie dead in the rubble of a ruined city. But what was the real reason that Stalingrad was chosen to host this clash of military titans? And how does Putin use this battle to his advantage today? What's he counting on us not to talk about? To guide us through this monumental moment in history, we're joined by none other than the great Sir Anthony Beaver, author of Stalingrad, a book that has redefined the way we view the battle in the West. Anthony, a very warm welcome to Empire.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Now, last time, in the last episode, we left Stalin and he had his back to the Volga. The terror that he had unleashed on his people had gutted his own officer corps. Hitler's invasion had come within sight of the Kremlin towers. And in the summer of 1942, he issues the order that become the iron law of everything else that comes next, not one step backwards. And the place where that order would be tested past the breaking point of most armies is Stalingrad, a long industrial city strung out for more than 20 miles along the west bank of the Volga, renamed from Zaritsin, which you'll remember from one of our previous episodes, was a place

• 3:45Speaker 03

  that Stalin made his name in the civil war, however you want to take that. But by the time this battle is over, more than a million people will be dead, an entire German army will have marched into captivity and almost none of it will ever march out again. So historians argue a great deal about what happened and how it happened, but most of them agree, Stalingrad is the hinge on which the Second World War turns. Almost everything before that is Germany advancing, almost everything after it is Germany falling back.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  And for our younger listeners who perhaps don't know Sir Anthony's name or his book, for my generation of historians, Stalingrad not only changed the way that we looked at Stalingrad, indeed, we looked at the Second World War and how much of it was fought in Russia, rather than the version we'd been fed as children, where the Battle of Britain and D-Day were the key moments of the war. But it also changed the way that history was written. And I should say, just before we go any further, that when I first started writing history books, I went to Sir Anthony and learnt his famous system of card indexes, which I still use to this day.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  He doesn't use it, but we use it.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Have you given them up now?

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Well, I don't anymore, no, really. Very sweet of you to say so.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Anthony, there is one school of thought that suggests that Hitler becomes obsessed with Stalingrad because it bears the name Stalin. I mean, how much do you think that carries any water?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Well, there is an element of truth, yes, indeed, because in a way, it became an Erzurts victory, a replacement for his failure to capture the oilfields in the Caucasus. And that is why Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police, started to refer to Stalingrad as a battle of rams, i.e. two rams crashing together, one Stalin, the other was Hitler. And it was very much the significance of the name of Stalingrad.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  So to remind everyone where we've got to in the story, the Germans reach the Volga on the 23rd of August, 1942, and the Battle of Stalingrad opens not with infantry in the streets, but with the sky full of aircraft. That afternoon, Luftflotte Number Four, one of the primary divisions of the German Luftwaffe, generally assigned as the cream of the East European Air Force, including the highest scoring fighter unit of all time, begins the heaviest bombing raid on the entire Eastern Front. Wave after wave, close to a thousand sorties in a single day. Oil tanks along the river are hit, the burning oil spreads out along the surface of the Volga

• 6:38Speaker 00

  itself, so the river seems to catch fire. And by the time the raids cease, the figure most often given for civilian dead is around 40,000. If it holds, it makes the 23rd of August the deadliest day of aerial bombing anywhere before Hiroshima.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Anthony, one of the reasons that civilian casualty number is so horrendously high is that civilians were forbidden to leave Stalingrad. Can you tell us why they weren't allowed out?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Well, tens of thousands had fled into the city from the west, from all over the area, the Don, Stepp and so forth. And as a result, not only were there sort of too many to evacuate, but also Stalin believed and passed the order to the NKVD, who were manning the sites, the crossing sites and the ferries, to prevent the civilians from crossing over to the east bank. This was partly because he felt that the troops would fight better if there were civilians there and it would make them defend the city. Because at this stage, the Germans had not actually

• 7:47Speaker 04

  reached the city, they were still outside. But in fact, of course, it meant that far more were killed than would have been the case otherwise.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Was there also the thought process, Anthony, that, you know, he wanted the factories running till the last possible minute, you know, that actually he couldn't afford to let people run away?

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Well, the factories were important, because of course, one of them was actually producing tanks, T-34 tanks. I mean, some of them were being rolled out and even simply being manned by factory workers, not even by soldiers. And they were actually, they didn't have any gun sights and they were just looking down the barrel to fire at the enemy.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  We should say, Anthony, that, which I don't think we have said, is that Stalingrad is a major centre of Soviet industry, that one of the reasons, not just the name, that Hitler wants to capture it, is it is so important for the war effort.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Yes, but one has to remember, actually, it was not a prime objective. The whole idea was not to capture Stalingrad, but actually to use it as they advanced down into the Caucasus to seize the oilfields. They were, the original plan was they were just going to bombard it or bomb it, no more than that. And it only actually then became a real target when it was obvious that they were going to fail in their objective of capturing the oilfields. And this is why it became, if you like, the Erzurts replacement for victory in the Caucasus. It was going to be a symbolic victory, really, over Stalin himself, because it bore Stalin's name.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and these are two men who are, you know, egotistical enough for this to matter more than anything. Anthony, one thing that the aerial bombardment does is it sort of makes it almost impossible to capture the city, because if you've left a brail, you know, landscape, a pockmarked landscape, it's not the best place to, you know, drive your tanks into if you're Hitler's forces.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  You're absolutely right. It's a mistake which, in fact, was made on numerous occasions in the Second World War, but this was one of the most outstanding examples. If you smash a city to pieces, the rubble itself not only blocks the street, but actually provides the best defensive positions imaginable. The Russians, the Soviet

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Then use the rubble to bury anti-tank guns, to conceal tanks even within the rubble. And this made it a formidable position to attack for the Germans.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  And what happens next has very few parallels. The tidy German method of armour, artillery and aircraft, all working together with perfect synchronicity, stops working and the fighting shrinks. It moves indoors, it goes from room to room, cellar to cellar, even down into the sewers. And the Germans give it a name that sticks a Rattenkrieg, the War of Rats. Tell us about that.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  It was a vicious, terrible battle. As you say, fighting in the sewers, fighting in the rubble, fighting in from room to room. The whole place, one has to remember, was literally a cloud of dust, of smashed masonry. Each side, they were almost unrecognisable because all of their uniforms were impregnated with the same sort of dun-coloured dust. The fighting took place with really many vicious little battles. It was Trikov, the commander of the 62nd Army, called the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  And they had these little groups of, say, eight men using sharpened spades, knives, flamethrowers. It was totally unlike any form of fighting and the Germans were thrown. They were disorientated, partly because it was taking place on different dimensions. But also because it actually lost all of their advantages, whether it was in momentum of attack, in terms of mechanised attack, their tanks couldn't operate in the same way. And as a result, it was almost like a return to the First World War.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  This is the thing that Putin, you know, often draws on. It's the enormous courage of, you know, a force that has so little. You know, that actually, you know, these are beleaguered men who had very, very little. Hugging the enemy, I think that's an absolutely fascinating tactic. Tell us a little bit about that because that is part of the courage that Putin draws on in the mythology of his new Russia.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Well, General Trikov, the commander in Stalingrad, realised that their real disadvantage was, of course, German air superiority, especially during the day. And so that's why he ordered his troops to dig their trenches within 50 metres of the German positions, knowing that that would make it much more difficult for the Luftwaffe to attack Soviet positions. And because they would be much more likely, just as likely to hit German troops as a Soviet. So that was one aspect of it. But the real point was also to keep attacking at night as well, because that would exhaust the Germans.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  I mean, during the month of September alone, September 1942 alone, the Sixth Army at Stalingrad fired off 25 million shots, rounds of ammunition, purely because in many cases at night, they were terrified, thinking that Russians' troops were creeping up on them. And the Russians were very clever about making provocations, pretending to make attacks. And this set off firing all down the line.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  A nightmare to fight in for both sides.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the hell conditions, the smell, I mean, the place, as people described it, one has to remember, there was black smoke everywhere coming from the burning refineries and oil reserves. The smashed rubble meant that there was this sort of brown dun-coloured dust everywhere. There was no water. I mean, to give an idea of the pitilessness of the battle, German infantrymen would bribe Russian orphans to go and fill their water bottles in the Volga, because they could get no water otherwise, by offering them a crust of bread or something like that.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  And as soon as the Soviet authorities realised that these children, Russian children, were helping the Germans in this particular way purely to stay alive, then they ordered their snipers to shoot the children.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  One of the most affecting parts of your extraordinary book is the deadly river crossings. Because every round of ammunition, every loaf of bread, every reinforcement that kept the 62nd Army alive had to come across the Volga by boat. So, I mean, if that's the case, that is a weak point and that is something that will be exploited by Hitler's forces, right?

• 14:51Speaker 04

  You're absolutely right. I mean, for the Germans, the objective really was to try to cut off the supply chain coming across the river. These were basically the Volga Flotilla, which obviously was a military organisation, but also the local boatmen who had all been press-ganged basically into providing the crossing supplies. The losses were appalling. But one also has to remember that actually it was also just as vital to evacuate the wounded. And I mean, we interviewed some of the young women, old women, but we saw them, of course.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  But I mean, they were the ones who literally had been dragging the wounded off the battlefield, but having to do it on their stomachs, they were under fire, pulling the wounded on, say, a cape, all the way down to the riverbank, where these poor wounded soldiers were basically then dumped on boats and brought back to the other side.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  The bravery of the young women, Russian women in this particular battle were astonishing, whether it was the anti-aircraft gunners who were actually taking on German tanks. I mean, these were 18-year-old girls, 17-year-old girls sometimes, students. They were the ones also who were trying to defend the river crossings with either the anti-aircraft guns or also on the boats themselves. So one mustn't forget that aspect, in fact, of the fighting.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  By the start of November 1942, the Germans hold something like nine tenths of the city and they still cannot finish it. Trikov's 62nd Army is down to a thin ribbon of ground along the river, a few hundred yards deep in places hanging on to the factory ruins and the landing stages. And in that ribbon, a sniper war grows, hunter stalking hunter through the rubble. One Soviet marksman, Vasili Zypsev, is credited with more than 200 kills and becomes a legend the propagandists cannot resist. To the Germans, freezing and exhausted, it looks as though one more shove will end it. But that shove doesn't come. Tell us about what happens next, Anthony.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Well, the sniper duels and all of these great stories were very largely a question of propaganda. Yes, there were certainly some star snipers. And in fact, they even talked about a doctrine of sniperism.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  But what I have to remember is also there were petty rivalries between divisions. The reason why Zaitsev was chosen as the star in the film Enemy at the Gates, played by Jude Law, Zaitsev was a real person. But the whole question of this sniper duel with the German sniper, played by Ed Harris, is total fantasy. But it was a very clever fantasy. It was partly because they were very resentful of the way that the 13th Guards Division, Guards Rifle Division, commanded by Rodimsev, was getting so much propaganda coverage. Both Trikov and the Batup, the commander of the Siberian Division, in which Zaitsev

• 18:14Speaker 04

  was very resentful about this, and this is why Zaitsev was actually sort of chosen as the star sniper. But it was an extraordinary battle. By the way, there weren't any women snipers at this particular time. They came later. They started really from the beginning. There was one in Leningrad and there'd been one in Sebastopol. But the women snipers didn't really start and they became very effective though, but that was the following year.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  I want to ask you about the civilians, but just before that, it's just a thought that occurs to me, you know, with his terror and his purges and his putches, Stalin has removed a lot of very capable people from his armed forces. Is he sort of pulling strings or has he left it to whoever, Trikov and whoever is left, to come up with their own strategies?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  You're quite right. This actually is the turning point, in a way, one of a number of turning points, where Stalin suddenly realises that actually it is time to give the experts, the military experts, their head. And this is where General Zhukov, the commander-in-chief, the chief, the general staff, and Vasilyevsky come up with a plan on the great counter-attack for Stalingrad. But also it is the time when the NKVD, the secret police of Beria, who had been such a terrible influence, not only in the purges of the Red Army, but even during the early

• 19:44Speaker 04

  part of the war, when they had started arresting almost any general who retreated or who even asked questions. This had been the disaster really of 1941. And now by autumn of 1942, Stalin had really started to see that he must not interfere so much and this makes a big difference. And the interesting thing is, we're seeing, this is where Hitler goes in the opposite direction. He is interfering more and more, Stalin is interfering less and less, and they are on totally opposite courses, where Stalin is starting to become a very effective war leader and Hitler is actually starting to become a complete disaster.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Nevertheless, Anthony, your book is full of horrific descriptions of Soviet soldiers being shot by their own sides if they move back even an inch from their lines. And many of the Soviet casualties are actually NKVD and own goals, so to speak.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Indeed, I mean, the obsession which had come down from the commander in chief, from this whole idea of not one step back, order two two seven, had an appalling effect. Inevitably, under such appalling conditions, such pressure, there were many soldiers trying to desert or even cross over to the other side, not that necessarily they were pro-German, but for example, many Ukrainians whose families were cut off in the occupied territories, they didn't know whether their families had survived or not. So quite often, they crossed over, hoping that they would be able to go home and somehow find their own families.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  The execution squads quite often were given vodka to steady their nerves. In fact, this did not exactly improve their marksmanship. And so some of these victims who were executed weren't actually dead. One of them, I mean, I remember when we found in the Russian archives, you know, it described how this guy had been shot, thrown into a show hole, earth chucked on top of him. He'd pulled himself out, he came back, and of course, the execution squad had to be called out again to shoot him once more. Altogether, certainly John Erickson was the first to come up with this particular figure. There were 13,500 executions during

• 22:07Speaker 04

  the course of the whole of the Battle of Stalingrad. Now, that's not just within the city, that's outside as well, the Stalingrad campaign. But it is a staggering figure, because that is more than a whole division. No British Army, no American Army, no French Army would ever have survived at Stalingrad. It was such a bitter, such an appalling battle, that only the Russians, I think, after the way they had been through such horrors already in the past, and famines and everything, would actually have held on there. And I think that's something that we have to recognise.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  We're going to take a break in just a second, but I really want to know about what, you know, we talked about the men in uniform and how hard it was for them. But what about the civilians, you know, the ones who, you know, the women, children, wives, children, parents, who weren't allowed to leave? There's no food coming in. I mean, you've done a lot of interviews for your book. What do they talk about? How did they eat? How did they get water? What was it like for them? Because I guess they're living underground most of the time, aren't they?

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Well, they are. I mean, in the end, they did actually allow some to leave really right at the last moment. But I mean, altogether, we don't know how many were actually trapped in the city. We know that when the battle finally came to an end, the following year in February, there were only 10,000 left alive. And of those, about 1,000 were children. Now, the children survived either by basically working for the Germans, or they were sometimes adopted by Russian units. The very young ones were sort of adopted almost like mascots, and they were fed and cared for. Most of them were literally living a totally feral existence.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  They were having to live off crust, steal food even from what soldiers on one side or the other. Some of them survived from eating roots or berries or whatever they could find in that particular way. To describe the state of these children at the end of the battle, most of them were unable to speak. I mean, they had become literally like animals, like little wild animals. But for the women, and it was usually the women who were the civilians trapped in the cities, they had to survive somehow. In some cases, they resorted to prostitution. There were even cases of sort of, you know, one or two brothels being

• 24:41Speaker 04

  opened up in the ruins, because there was no other way of obtaining food. But the vast majority had then been rounded up by the Germans and then sent back to Nazi Germany as slave labour. So this is why the figure was down to about, as I say, 10,000 civilians by the end of the battle. But I mean, you know, we don't know how many had been trapped there as far back as August 1942.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Well, with that horrifying thought in mind, we're going to take a break. Join us after the break when we talk about this story, but from the German side.

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• 27:22Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Anthony, we've told this story from the Russian side, but what is going on with the Germans? Because I know you went rummaging around in the German archives a lot, and you sort of let the men of the Sixth Army speak for themselves in their own letters home. What kind of thing did you find?

• 27:39Speaker 04

  What one found actually was the most fascinating material, especially in the German archives, but in the Russian too, is of course, those who are not exactly part of the army. So in the German archives, it was the reports from doctors and from priests. And when we negotiated with the Ministry of Defence to get into the Russian archives the first time around, the Colonel there, when I explained, he said, we have a simple rule in our archive. You tell us the subject, we choose the files. So I said, well, yes, I know, but that's not quite how it works in other archives. I said, to give an idea, in the German archives in Feiburg, you know, the most interesting were the doctors and

• 28:24Speaker 04

  the priests. And a roar of laughter there. No priests in the Red Army, he said. I said, no, I know, but the commissar reports. And this was vital, because Stalin was so certain that the generals were lying to him, that he was not getting an accurate idea. He thought that the situation in Stalingrad was even more disastrous than it was. That as a result, every night, a report, usually about 20 pages long, or between, say, 14 and 25 pages or whatever, was flown back to Moscow every single night, so that Stalin would know exactly what was happening. And this was gold, from a historian's point of view, because there

• 29:06Speaker 04

  was no exaggeration, there was no propaganda at all. It was dead honest, it was both the real heroics and also the real humiliations, the real drunkenness of commanders crossing over to the enemy, what were called extraordinary events.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  And were they happy that you got hold of these, Anthony? I mean, did they slip through the net, or were they willing to give them to you consciously?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  No, they were not giving them to us consciously. We were having to cheat. And the only way of cheating was to begin with, they gave us all the files, but they marked the pages we were allowed to read, everything else was forbidden. To begin with, we were supervised, and then they got bored. And we weren't supervised, so we were able to read the forbidden stuff. And the intriguing thing was that this was, in a way, typically Russian. It was a mixture of paranoia, first of all, and then naivety afterwards.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  So we're now, Anthony, in November 1942. The Germans are certain that the 62nd Army is all but beaten, and that certainly is the trap. While the whole world watches the street fighting, while Paulus, the commander of the German 6th Army, feeds division after division into the rubble, the Soviets are quietly doing something else entirely.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Out on the open steppe, north and south of the city, Zhukov and Vasilevsky are amassing over one million men for a plan so ambitious that when the Germans glimpse pieces of it, they simply refuse to believe it. The plan is not to relieve Stalingrad, the plan is to swallow the army by besieging it whole. Its code name is Uranus.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Operation Uranus was astonishingly ambitious, particularly since the Red Army up until this particular time had not managed any effective assault, and certainly not a deep penetration and an encirclement of German units. So from this point of view, Stalin had, back in late September, early October, was desperate about how were they actually going to save Stalingrad. And to begin with, he just wanted one counterattack after another. But Zhukov and Vasilevsky realised that this really demanded a much more radical solution.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  And this is when they came up with the plan for Operation Uranus. They organised with extraordinary cleverness

• 31:43Speaker 04

  a way of concealing this build-up, this huge build-up of forces, both to the north of Stalingrad and to the south, where they were going to attack through the Romanian armies on either side of the 62nd, of the 6th Army, of Paulus's 6th Army, which was the largest army in the whole of the Vermark. It was so large because it had had a part of half the 4th Panzer Army attached to it. They were going to cut through all the way and meet at Kalach, well behind German lines, and basically cut off in a huge encirclement the whole of Paulus's 6th Army.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  How did the Germans not see this, Anthony? Because you can't move millions of men around in the steppe without the Luftwaffe spotting it, you'd have thought.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Well, they did it by concealment, and this was called Maskerovka. Maskerovka is basically the concealment of your attack plans to a large degree. They were, for example, would dig defences at the very places where they were going to attack. The Germans refused to believe that the Russians were capable. They knew the Russians were probably going to attack and would, in fact, they guessed they're probably trying to attack through the rather weak Romanian armies on either side.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  But, you know, that was not enough. It never occurred to them that they could actually go for a full encirclement.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  And that's exactly what they get, a quarter of a million men, the 6th Army, sealed inside this ring of Soviet steel. The Germans have a word for it, don't they? The Kessel, the cauldron. And the man who spent, you know, the whole of the 1930s shooting his own generals is actually winning at last. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing. Mission Uranus, Operation Uranus, is the moment that Stalin learns that, you know, however briefly, get out of the way of your soldiers, let them do what they do.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Indeed, this was the moment. And Stalin looked at the plans. He was, in a way, sort of involved, but not from the point of view of the actual planning, but of making sure that they had absolute full support. And everybody at every level was given total priority to make this work. From this point of view, then, we knew that, for example, Beria would never have quite the same control over the army. And one of the commanders, in fact, a very interesting, Rokossovsky, Marshal Rokossovsky, as he became, had actually been one of the prisoners tortured and beaten up by Beria,

• 34:23Speaker 04

  who is now, and was even threatened by Beria, saying, listen, I can pull you back at any moment into my torture chambers. This was now no longer really the case, and Rokossovsky proved himself. He happened to be of rather aristocratic descent and also Polish, which in Stalin's view, of course, was about as bad as you could get. Because Stalin hated the Poles above all, partly because of his humiliation, as you have already covered it, in the civil war and the defeat on the Vistula.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Now, inside the cauldron, Paulus can do the sensible thing. He can turn his army round and punch his way out to the west while it still has fuel and the strength to do so. And he asks Hitler for permission, but Hitler refuses. The 6th Army will stand where it is, and it will be supplied from the air.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  That promise comes from Hermann Göring, but it's a complete fantasy. They don't mean it. They make the promise, but they're not going to do it. To keep a quarter of a million men alive and fighting through a Russian winter, the airlift would need to bring in several hundred tonnes of supplies every single day. And of course, just look at those numbers, it never could and never did come close. The weather, the Soviet fighters, the flak, simply too many transport planes cut the deliveries to a fraction of what they needed. And so you've got these men in the cauldron who are slowly but surely starving. And what did that, I mean, Anthony, for the troops themselves, is it that, you know, they see their rations being cut and cut and cut again?

• 36:03Speaker 03

  And what do they, you know, say or think about Hitler and, you know, the end of the war?

• 36:08Speaker 04

  The whole idea of standing firm on the Volga was entirely Hitler's. The trouble was that Paulus had always been rather in Hitler's thrall, mainly because of one of the earlier battles whereby Hitler had been proved right, and Paulus, who had thought that he was wrong, had realised that he should really be very careful. And I'm afraid Paulus did not have the courage really to speak out at this particular time. Manstein, who was the commander-in-chief further south, was determined that they should try to break out. But he knew perfectly well that he was not able to be able to persuade Paulus to disobey orders.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  So as a result, the condition of the soldiers started to deteriorate very, very quickly, and especially with the weather. So there was a combination of three things, and this was, for me, was fascinating because by sheer chance, I found that the pathologist of the 6th Army, who'd been flown into Stalingrad in December to find out why soldiers were dying so rapidly, was living only a few hundred yards away from the archives I was working in. This was Professor Gergensen, so I went to interview him. And he had discovered with his research that it was a combination of stress, of cold, as well as the shortage of food,

• 37:35Speaker 04

  which actually was upsetting their metabolism and was creating an accelerated starvation. So, as I say, it was the stress and the cold which was important parts of it. When he started cutting up the bodies for his autopsies, this became absolutely clear of what the real tragedy or the real disaster which was taking place at this particular time.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  I remember, Anthony, stories at school of, you know, the beleaguered Germans being so desperate, so desperate, so they're drinking antifreeze and they're hacking off bits of their own horses. And did you find this to be true or is this part of the massive propaganda at the time?

• 38:18Speaker 04

  I don't think they were drinking antifreeze.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  That tended to be a Russian soldier's thing when they were short of alcohol more than German. Oh, God, yes, certainly about eating the horses. Though what was even more appalling, of course, was that there were Russian prisoners held within the castle, and they were not given any food at all. And they were reduced to eating each other to cannibalism, which was an appalling, basically a war crime. But I'm afraid that was the decision taken by the German Chief of Staff, Paulus's Chief of Staff, General Schmidt, that they should not be fed while German soldiers were also starving.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  So then we've got this extraordinary moment when he promotes Paulus to field marshal, but it's actually meant as a death sentence. Because the whole of German history, no field marshal has ever let himself be taken alive. The message could not be plainer. Shoot yourself. But Paulus, holed up in the basement of a bombed-out department store called Universmag, declines the invitation. "I have no intention of shooting myself for this bohemian corporal," he says. Give us a little bit of the background to that.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Well, Paulus knew perfectly well what Hitler meant at this particular time, and Hitler was absolutely furious when he discovered that Paulus had not shot himself. He regarded that as utterly cowardly, as woman-like, and he said, yes, actually, even women were more courageous about being able to shoot themselves. I think partly because he did know of a couple of women's suicides in that way. And he was furious that Paulus should have actually decided to live, and basically to carry out the surrender.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  And you know, the interesting thing I always think about this is that Paulus is, you know, he's actually a man that the military could respect. He was brave, you know, he did what he could do, but in the end, you know, he's forced to surrender the southern half of the pocket that he's in. The north half holds out for two more days, and then he gives up on the 2nd of February. Around 91,000 men will walk out of those ruins straight into Soviet captivity. Twenty-two of them will be Hitler's generals, and they are in a terrible state. Anthony, I mean, just describe what they look like and, you know, what happens to them.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Well, most of them were frostbitten. Their feet, above all, were frostbitten. So they weren't walking out, they were shuffling, if they could even manage that, into captivity. They were, as you say, they were covered in lice, many of them had typhus, many of them were going to die of typhus. And in fact, as they shuffled out, and this is one of the scenes which really struck me, a Russian colonel shouts in their faces, pointed the ruins around, saying, "This is what Berlin is going to look like." And that very much summed up the point that Stalingrad was the turning point and that

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Berlin was going to be the final destination of the advance, all the way from the Volga all the way to the Sprey.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  And that's realized even at the time, is it? People, I mean, point to this as the turning point as it's happening, they realize the significance of the surrender.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Oh, yes. And I think that we realize that, and we see all around the world, there is this influence, this effect, that Stalingrad really is the turning point. But in fact, the geopolitical turning point had actually taken place much earlier, even though it didn't look like it at the time. And I think that most historians accept that it was December 1941, when Hitler declares war in the United States, and of course, when he fails to capture Moscow in December 1941. But of course, one disaster after another follows in 1942, whether it's in Pearl Harbor,

• 42:28Speaker 04

  the loss of Singapore, everything in North Africa. I mean, there was one disaster after another, and yet, it's only until we actually see the final defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad that everybody around the world suddenly realizes that this definitely means the end of Nazism in the near future.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and what is so interesting about this is that, you know, Stalin, a man who didn't like talking in public, you know, suddenly, you know, this is his moment to shine, he's being feted across the world as the architect of this victory, you know, made a marshal of the Soviet Union. And he's kind of feted and celebrated in poetry and song, you know, there's even Pablo Neruda does this "Canto de amor a Stalingrad," Song of Love for Stalingrad. I'm going to sort of read you a little bit of this, because it becomes just such a motivating factor to everybody who's fighting the Nazis, that this is, from now on, we're going to crush them.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  So this is from Neruda's poem, "Save me a fragment of violent foam, save me a rifle, save me a plow, and let them place it at my grave with a red ear of grain from your soil. That it be known, if there were any doubt, that I died loving you, and you loved me, and if I did not fight in your waste, I leave in your honor this dark grenade, this song of love for Stalingrad."

• 43:58Speaker 00

  He's good, isn't he, Neruda? He really is, he's very good.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, psychologically, this is a massive deal, but it also, you know, the thing that, you know, happens next is that you have a whole bunch of victorious soldiers who are now cantering towards Berlin, thinking we're going to take Berlin, and they are in murderous moods. I mean, apart from feeling like they're victorious, they have suffered also, it's not just, you know, they have starved, they have had typhus, they have had lice, they're battle-hardened, but they're also very angry.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Well, you're absolutely right. "Homennachia Stalingrado" of Neruda was repeated in many ways, in many other forms, all around the world. It brought thousands into resistance movements right across Europe, because people saw that at last they were going to be defeated, the Nazis. So from that point of view, yes, the effect was indeed enormous. And yes, there was also this longing for revenge, which was going to take place. But they weren't necessarily, it wasn't going to be an easy canter towards Berlin, because of course, the German army was going to fight more and more desperately in retreat.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  And the viciousness would not in any way diminish, in fact, it would get worse, as we find with the Holocaust, because the idea that defeat might be upon them made Hitler even more determined to kill more Jews before the end. So, shall we say, it brings horror as well as triumph.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Anthony, what was it about the Soviet uniforms and so on that allowed them not to be as frostbitten as the Germans, or were they actually as frostbitten? Or is it just that they had better kit for the winter?

• 45:54Speaker 04

  They did have much better kit for the winter. Their padded jackets, the cotton padded jacket, were far better.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  There are wonderful pictures in your book of these guys with the white sort of winter outfits on the ice.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Well, those were the, yeah, those were the sniper, those were the sort of, basically, the sniper uniforms, which were important indeed. But no, it was the padded jackets, but also the fact that they didn't have socks, they didn't wear socks, they wore foot bandages. And those were far better, because their boots also didn't have iron studs in them. And those had accelerated the frostbite of the Germans far more.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Anthony, I know when we've chatted before, you have told me that this is the exact moment that you think the Soviet Union became a superpower, that, you know, until this point, it was sort of A, another country, but from here on in, this is where superpower is conferred. And that's something that probably explains why Putin keeps referring to Stalingrad in the war against Ukraine. I mean, tell us a little more about that.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Well, it was very much at the Tehran conference in November 1943, so whatever it is, you know, eight, nine, 10 months after the end of Stalingrad, that Stalin, with Roosevelt and with Churchill, meeting in Tehran, is the leader, he is the boss in a way, because it is the sacrifice of the Red Army, the victory at Stalingrad, which basically puts him in the controlling position, definitely in the driving seat at Tehran. Churchill is very, very aware of this.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  He's tried to improve relations with Stalin, but of course, Stalin is absolutely embittered at the fact that there's been no cross-channel invasion, no attempt. He has been blackmailing Churchill, and Roosevelt has been very dishonest in the way that he's always more or less passed the blame on to Churchill. And Churchill is the one who has to deal with Stalin on this particular question. But interestingly, what Soviet intelligence is asking all of their German prisoners this time is, what was the effect of the bombing on Germany?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Because in fact, the bombing campaign, the strategic bombing campaign, which of course has been hugely controversial because of, A, the morality, or B, the effectiveness with the RAF Bomber Command and also the Americans later bombing Germany.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  That Stalin was well aware that actually this was our second front. This was what gave the Russians air superiority on Eastern Front and made the whole difference to the war at this particular stage. But Stalin was never going to acknowledge it, even though he was well aware from his own people that this is what is actually going to really change things on Eastern Front.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Anthony, we just draw the whole thing to a close now. And one thing we should be aware of is the vast scale of the casualties. What numbers do you give for the casualties on both sides?

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Well, it seems, you know, the casualties on the German side altogether, it depends really whether you just talk about Stalingrad itself or the whole of the Stalingrad campaign.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  The whole campaign.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the whole of the campaign, we're going to be talking well over, definitely well over a million, just on the German side. Now, eight hundred thousand of those probably in terms of eventual deaths, because, of course, many of them just died afterwards in captivity. I mean, of those who were captured, only five percent survived. That is the survival rate amongst the ordinary soldiers. Interestingly, amongst the generals, ninety-five percent survived because they were treated so much better. And I mean, this is the paradox. Here you have a communist country looking after the generals and feeding them properly

• 50:23Speaker 04

  and forcing the ordinary soldiers into slave labour in the forests, and they were known as Stalin's horses. Basically, they were worked to death, cutting timber, digging, and used for the most dangerous tasks available.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  So we leave, you know, Stalingrad with Stalin coming out of the ruins, going on to Berlin, going on to, you know, sort of build an empire. And that is the thing that Putin refers to when he rehabilitates Stalin in many ways. And we're going to be speaking to Fiona Hill, one of the West's foremost experts on Russia and Vladimir Putin. She served as the US National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia, later as Senior Director for Europe and Russia and the National Security Council during Donald Trump's presidency. Internationally acclaimed for her calm, authoritative testimony during Trump's first impeachment inquiry in two thousand and nineteen, where she warned, and I urge you, if you haven't

• 51:25Speaker 03

  seen it before you listen to our conversation, go look it up on YouTube. She warned against Russian disinformation and defended the integrity of US intelligence. If you can't wait, you know what you do? Just head to empirepoduk.com, there's empirepoduk.com and become a member. Anthony, thank you once again. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndt.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  And me, William Dernpo.

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