Reprinted from the UK Socialist website, Left Horizons
Most of us in the west are not familiar with the effect the Eastern Front had on ending World War Two, in particular, the Battle of Stalingrad. The role and sacrifice of the Russian and Soviet workers in defeating Nazism is hidden from us, it's not popular Hollywood faire. Regardless of what one thinks of Stalin or his historical role, it is workers that fight the wars. One only has to compare the body count to see the sacrifices Russian workers made in this second imperialist war of the 20th century. RM
February 1943: German Surrender at Stalingrad – The Political Effects
Andy Ford (Warrington South Labour Member) continues his occasional series of articles on Soviet history and World War Two [for example here, here and several others]
The final surrender of the German Sixth Army, eighty years ago, on February 3rd 1943, represented a huge and very public defeat of the Nazi war machine. Soviet footage of the surrender of Field Marshal von Paulus was seen around the world as well as the sight of thousands of his men being marched off into captivity by the Red Army. It was one of the key military events of the war, but the political and international effects were just as important.
Germany
Twenty-four generals and 91,000 soldiers were captured at the moment of surrender but prior to that, the Germans and their Italian, Romanian, and Italian allies had lost another 800,000 dead, wounded and captured. Of the total 400,000 prisoners of war (POWs) of all nationalities taken during the whole battle, around three quarters died in the first 3 months, primarily because they were in such bad shape after the battle, encirclement, and starvation in the frozen ruins of the city.
In fact, during the battle, the high command despatched a special medical mission to examine the causes of ‘Stalingrad heart’ which described a syndrome where hundreds of German soldiers simply died in their sleep for no apparent reason. It is now thought that the deaths were due to heart failure caused by prolonged exposure to stress hormones.
Also, once the prisoners were interned in camps across the USSR, they received the same meagre rations – or maybe somewhat worse – as the general Soviet prison population, and thousands succumbed to typhus, diphtheria, and dysentery. In the end only about 10,000 ever returned to their homes. But contrary to the writings of later Cold War historians, the Soviets did not engage in the systematic abuse, starvation and massacre inflicted by the Nazis on their Soviet prisoners of 1941-42. True, the USSR was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, but that was because it enshrined inequality between officers and men. Instead, the Soviets worked to The Hague Convention of 1907.
Apart from the sheer numbers, there was the fact that German Sixth Army was Hitler’s best equipped, with elite troops and experienced armoured formations. It was Germany’s most mechanised and also its most highly decorated army, but like all German formations in the east it had been involved in war crimes and atrocities. The Sixth Army had played an instrumental role in the horrific massacre of Jews at Babi Yar just outside Kiev in 1941. Its destruction was a catastrophe for the Nazis. Apart from the men lost, the war materiel was equal to 6 months of German war production – 56 locomotives, 500 planes, 1,150 tanks, 8,135 machine guns, 61,102 trucks, 7,369 motorcycles, 480 carts, tractors, transports, 320 long range radio transmitters, 3 armoured trains and 235 ammunition dumps.
In Germany itself, despite claims by Hitler that his soldiers had “not fallen in vain” and would “live on eternally in our hearts as undying heroes”, the Nazi propaganda machine moved on as quickly as possible to Goebbels’ declarations of ‘Total War’. But everyone knew what had happened, and whatever mass support the Nazi regime had in 1942 evaporated in short order. Hitler himself did not even appear in public again after his speech on March 21st 1943, the Nazi ‘Heroes Memorial Day’, and even there he only narrowly escaped assassination by a dissident army officer.
Italy – fascism’s collapse
The Italian 8th Army was Italy’s only properly equipped army and when Mussolini deployed it to Russia to help with Operation Barbarossa, the Italian commanders in North Africa were aghast. It had the best troops and consisted of 235,000 men, 25,000 horses, 17,000 trucks, 700 artillery pieces and the use of 64 planes. It’s original commander, Giovanni Messi, was removed by Mussolini for complaining that the army was neither equipped nor supplied for offensive operations in Russia, pointing out that of its 300 tanks, only 50 were battle ready, and the severe lack of radio equipment.
He was to be proved right at Stalingrad, as virtually the whole army, apart from one Alpine division, was destroyed at Stalingrad. Almost every family lost a son in Russia – and for what? The loss of the 8th army was a key part of the events leading to the Italian military removing Mussolini in July 1943, events analysed by one of the leading Marxists in Britain, Ted Grant (1913-2006), in “Fascism Collapsing – the European Revolution Has Begun”
He wrote “The myth of the ‘leader’ was easily dispensed with. With no more ceremony than they would dismiss an office boy, they [the Italian ruling class] have booted Mussolini out. …Mussolini, like all fascist dictators was nothing but an obedient clerk in the service of big business”. Mussolini’s fate haunted Hitler.
Romania – scapegoat for defeat
Romanian troops had fought all the way from Barbarossa’s launch, with an important role in taking the Crimea in 1941. At Stalingrad they were assigned to protect the German’s flanks as division after division of German troops was fed into the hell of Stalingrad. As time went on the Romanians were given more and more of the line to hold. The Romanian Third Army was stationed to the north of Stalingrad with 143,000 troops to hold 148 km of the front, while the Romanian Fourth Army was to the south of the city with just 75,000 troops to hold nearly 300 km of the front line.
It was these formations that Zhukov targeted in the pincer movement that encircled the Germans in Stalingrad. Poorly equipped, split along feudal class lines with low morale, just a third of a German division’s anti-tank guns and very few trucks and armoured vehicles, the Romanian armies were no match for the Soviet T34s and fell back in disarray.
In the recriminations after the defeat Hitler and his generals made a scapegoat of the Romanians for failing to stop the Red Army – an impossible task in the circumstances. The responsibility for the defeat rested squarely with the Germans. Firstly, with Hitler for giving two strategic goals – to take Stalingrad and also to seize the Caucasus oil fields – to one military formation and then with his generals for assuming the Red Army was incapable of a counter offensive, for failing to notice the Soviet build up on their flanks, and for leaving their Romanian stooges holding a hugely extended line with insufficient manpower.
From Stalingrad onwards the Romanian ruling class were just waiting for their chance to escape their misalliance with Hitler, an option that presented itself in August 1944 when they switched sides to fight with the Red Army for the remainder of the war.
In Russia
Victory at Stalingrad solidified support for Stalin and his bureaucratic regime. For the masses the regime represented their best way of driving out the hateful Nazi occupation. For his part, Stalin softened the worst excesses of his police state. Also, he learned a lesson – to leave military decisions to his generals (as long as he could take the glory). Partisan activity increased in the German rear with huge areas becoming ungovernable. Across the world the prestige of Soviet arms increased support for the Communist Parties and they became the backbone of resistance movements across Europe, from France to Yugoslavia. It was the beginning of the process analysed by Ted Grant in “Stalinism in the Post-War World” whereby, despite its crimes and mistakes, Stalinism emerged from the war enormously strengthened and “the Russian bureaucracy achieved domination beyond the wildest dreams of Russia under the Tsars”.
A Separate Peace?
On the international plane, Stalingrad ushered in a peculiar period where it appeared that Stalin may have been considering a separate peace with Hitler. The USSR had just lost more men at Stalingrad than the US and Britain were to lose combined – in the entire war. Then Stalin lost another 86,000 soldiers at the Third Battle of Kharkov of February-March 1943. The British military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, claimed in his memoirs that contacts were established in Stockholm between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and although no definitive documents have ever emerged there is intriguing circumstantial evidence.
The main testimony of serious consideration by Stalin of a separate peace comes from Peter Kleist, an aide to von Ribbentrop (the German Foreign Minister) who asserted, in his post war memoirs, that repeated contacts were made in 1943 between the two governments through intermediaries in Sweden. Events in Moscow seem to support this.
A strange article was published in the party journal Bolshevik in January 1943 by a known Stalin mouthpiece, Colonel Razin, who asserted cryptically that in war it was wrong to neglect politics in favour of purely military matters and that “primacy lies with politics”. Then in late January 1943 the Moscow radio began talking about an imaginary underground peace movement in Germany.
On February 23rd, Stalin’s speech to the Red Army did not even mention the Allies and from March 15th, offensive operations by the Red Army all but ceased with a sort of calm prevailing on the front lines. The Red Army even allowed the Germans to evacuate their salient at Rzhev, where around a million Soviet soldiers had died in combat, without interference.
Stalin also maintained a conspicuous silence on the demand for unconditional Nazi surrender agreed between the US and UK at Casablanca in January 1943 and it is a matter of record that Stalin, in late 1942, had said “It is not our aim to destroy all military force in Germany…it is not only impossible…but inexpedient”.
A document in the US Army archives records an intercepted message to the French Stalinists warning them to be prepared for an armistice, and at the same time Swedish sources informed the American Secret Service that exploratory talks did in fact take place just outside Stockholm. This was confirmed in Swedish newspaper reports that surfaced in June. The same sources reported that the Russians wanted restoration of their frontier of 1941, but that the Germans wanted control over Ukraine and that no agreement was found possible.
Then, on May 1st 1943, Stalin’s speech in Red Square changed the mood again, extolling Allied victories in North Africa (previously denigrated as a sideshow), acknowledging the help given to the Soviets under lend-lease, and speaking warmly of the alliance with Britain and the US. On May 23rd, in a gesture to the western powers, he dissolved the Communist International.
Of course all this – the Stockholm contacts, the cryptic articles and speeches – could just have been Stalin trying to frighten the western powers into opening a second front. He had been promised one for 1942, and all that happened was the Allied takeover of French North Africa. Meanwhile thousands of Soviet soldiers were dying on the battlefields and the Nazis continued their barbaric siege of Leningrad.
But on balance, it seems that the idea was considered for a matter of weeks or months, only to founder on the mutually incompatible needs of the Soviets and Germans. The Germans could not concede the frontier of 1941 as that would leave the Red Army just 500 miles from Berlin – but the Russians could not accept losing the resources of Ukraine.
The Allies
The British and Americans, disconcerted by the danger of a separate peace, moved to give much firmer promises of a free hand for the Stalinists in Eastern Europe after the war. The victory at Stalingrad served notice that the Nazis could not, and would not, defeat the USSR and so they hastened to make plans for a landing in Europe, what was to become the invasion of Sicily and Italy later in the year.
The Germans had been stopped at Moscow in December 1941; that was the real military turning point on the Eastern Front. But Stalingrad was the political turning point of the whole war. The Battle of Kursk in July 1943 only confirmed the fact that the Nazis were going to be defeated and lose the war.
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