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(narrator) Russia. The summer of 1942.
The Germans are on the move... again.
The Sixth Army, Hitler's largest, victorious in France,
almost victorious in the first year of the Russian campaign.
Now it has a new task -
to fight further east than the Wehrmacht has ever fought before,
to cut Russia in two, on the Volga.
The German army's plan to destroy Russia by a blitzkrieg in 1941 had failed.
And, in the attempt, they'd lost a million men.
ln 1942, they were not strong enough - even with the help of their allies -
to attack along the whole front.
Hitler turned south, to the Caucasus.
Three-quarters of Russia's oil was there.
He divided his forces into two groups -
the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army would move first.
His plan was to encircle and destroy Soviet armies in the Don bend,
drive east towards Stalingrad,
and cut off the Caucasus from the rest of the country.
Then in the main campaign,
the other army group would capture Rostov
and strike south to the oil fields.
The offensive started late.
lt was high summer before the Sixth Army,
under Friedrich von Paulus, began to move.
The armour in front, as usual,
the motorised supply columns close behind.
The foot soldiers slogged along in the rear.
At first, the Russians seemed to melt away.
No matter how far the Germans advanced,
the Red Army always eluded them.
The Germans didn't take many prisoners.
They captured territory and towns.
The army wanted to keep pressing ahead to encircle the Russians, but couldn't.
Time and again, its spearheads had to pause and wait for supplies to catch up.
One soldier, Wilhelm Hoffman, was keeping a diary.
He thought the war might soon be over.
"Perhaps we'll be home by Christmas", he wrote.
(artillery fire)
The Russians had lost a quarter of a million troops in the spring.
Now they could not afford pitched battles,
so they kept retreating.
To the Russian commanders, it was a skilful planned withdrawal.
To the Russian troops, it was a demoralising rout.
To Hitler, it was a crushing victory.
He thought the Russian armies had been wiped out.
So, with the offensive barely two weeks old,
he started to shiff his armies south.
At the end of July his troops entered Rostov,
the key to the Caucasus.
Hitler now gave absolute priority to the thrust towards the oil fields.
He unleashed his fresh, southern armies.
He diverted the Fourth Panzer Army south.
He stripped the Sixth Army of its fuel and most of its armour,
and sent them south, too.
But he still expected the Sixth Army to carry on as before.
By mid-August, the Sixth Army had been on the march for six weeks.
Late in the affernoon of the 23rd,
a panzer column reached the Volga just north of Stagingrad.
lt cut off river traffic and brought the opposite bank under fire.
The infantry dug in along the railway and waited for reinforcements.
Though the Sixth Army's original mission was now accomplished,
Hitler now expected them to take the city.
Stalingrad was built on bluffs overlooking the Volga,
and stretched 15 miles along its western bank.
The old town - log huts and wooden buildings - in the south,
a modern centre, steel and concrete.
To the north, three large factories, with workers' housing nearby.
The whole city lay on hilly ground, scored by deep ravines.
A Soviet showpiece, Stalin had named it for himself.
Stalin had determined to defend the city.
He decided not to evacuate most of the civilians.
The troops would fight better, he said, for a live city than for a dead one.
Air defences were improvised.
Half the anti-aircraff guns in the town had women crews.
A workers' militia was recruited.
Stalin had coined the slogan, "Not one step back."
Troops and security police patrolled the streets.
lt wasn't all coercion.
There was fear of the Germans, and patriotism, and communist zeal.
"Comrades and citizens of Stalingrad,
each of us must apply ourselves
to the task of defending our beloved town,
our homes, and our families."
"Let us barricade every street, transform every district,
every block, every house, into an impregnable fortress."
The Sixth Army had not reached the Volga in enough strength
to take Stalingrad on its own.
(gunfire)
lts reserVes were still far behind.
(siren)
The Luffwaffe was called in to help the ground forces.
For three days, from August 23,
every aircraff available on the Russian Front attacked the city.
Almost the only defence came from the gun boats on the Volga
and from the batteries on the opposite shore.
(man shouts)
The city did not fall to air attack,
and the shattered buildings were transformed into fortresses.
The beginning of September.
Russian artillery could harass the Germans
from the east bank of the Volga.
But the Russian reserVes were useless
unless they could cross the river and get into the city.
There were no bridges
and by day river ferries were under constant Luffwaffe attack.
As long as the Russians held any of the western bank,
they could send troops into the city.
Once across, they could use tunnels dug into the high bluffs
and force the Germans to battle for every foot.
The German armies held the initiative,
but they were at the very end of a precarious supply line.
All their troops were committed to the offensive.
They had no reserVes leff if anything went wrong.
The Germans launched their first attacks early in September.
September 1 1 , Wilhelm Hoffman:
"Our battalion is fighting in the suburbs of Stalingrad."
"Firing is going on all the time."
"Wherever you look is fire and flames."
"Russian cannons and machine guns are firing out of the burning city."
"Fanatics!"
(machine-gun fire)
(explosions)
(gunfire continues)
(gunfire)
Hoffman, September 16:
"Our battalion plus tanks is attacking the grain elevator."
"The battalion is suffering heavy losses."
"The elevator is occupied not by men
but by devils that no bullets or flames can destroy."
September 18:
"Fighting is going on inside the elevator."
"lf all the buildings of Stalingrad are defended like this,
then none of our soldiers will get back to Germany."
September 20:
"The battle for the elevator is still going on."
September 22:
"Russian resistance in the elevator has been broken."
"Our troops are advancing towards the Volga."
"We found only about 40 Russians dead in the elevator."
The German army high command, 1 ,000 miles away,
was beginning to have second thoughts.
General Halder, chief of staff,
had not seriously opposed Hitler's directives earlier in the year.
Now, with the original strategic objectives accomplished,
he urged caution - but in vain.
A member of Halder's staff obserVed
that the Führer used to move his hands in big sweeps over the map:
"Push here, push there."
lt was all vague and took no account of practical difficulties.
Halder refused to take responsibility for continuing the advance
with winter approaching.
Hitler said: "We now need National Socialist ardour,
rather than professional ability, to settle matters in the east."
"Obviously l cannot expect this of you."
He sacked Halder and replaced him by General Zeitzler,
who was thought to be a genius at logistics -
a man who would know how to move armies where Hitler wanted them to go.
(explosions)
ln Stalingrad, the Sixth Army's commander
was having second thoughts too.
Von Paulus's troops
were not used to fighting hand to hand in bombed-out cities.
Here, their tanks moved at a snail's pace,
yet Hitler insisted, demanded, that they take the city.
A Russian soldier, Anton Goŝnik:
"We moved back, occupying one building affer another,
turning them into strongholds."
"A soldier would crawl out of an occupied position
only when the ground was on fire beneath him and his clothes were smouldering."
September 26, Hoffman complained about the way the Soviets fought:
"We don't see them at all."
"They've established themselves in houses, in cellars,
and they're firing from all sides, including from our rear."
"Barbarians! They use gangster methods!"
(machine-gun fire)
Zeitzler, Hitler's new chief of staff,
took a long look at the situation and told him:
"The most dangerous positions on the whole Eastern Front
are the north front at Stalingrad
and the eastern flank of the Fourth Panzer Army."
"lf steps are not taken in good time to rectify the situation,
there will be a disaster."
Hitler replied, "You're too pessimistic, Zeitzler."
"We've been through worse periods than this and we've surVived."
"We'll get over our present difficulties, too."
The German position was dangerous.
20,000 men a week were being lost in Stalingrad.
They could only be replaced by stripping the army's flanks of German troops.
Romanians were moving in here.
This area was now held by the ltalians.
Next to them were Hungarians.
The most precarious position of all was here,
where the Russians held both banks of the river Don.
They faced the Romanian Third Army,
which had no heavy anti-tank guns and no tanks either.
Hitler wasn't worried. He thought -
and the high command's intelligence confirmed this -
that the Russians had no strategic reserVes leff.
ln October, the Germans attacked again, towards the Volga.
Unless they captured the entire river bank,
the Russians would bring in troops and supplies at night.
(gunfire)
Wilhelm Hoffman, October 4:
"A lot of Russian Tommy-gunners have appeared."
"Where are they bringing them from?"
Another German wondered:
"Were we going to have to fight through another dreadful Russian winter?"
Hoffman, on October 14:
"lt's been fantastic since morning."
"Our aeroplanes and artillery
have been bombing the Russian positions for hours."
A panzer Leutnant, Weiner, wrote:
"Stalingrad is no longer a town."
"By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke."
"lt is a vast furnace, lit by the reflection of the flames."
"And when night arrives - one of those very hot, noisy, bloody nights -
the dogs plunge into the Volga
and swim desperately to gain the other bank."
"The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them."
"Animals flee from this hell."
"The hardest stones cannot bear it for long."
"Only men endure."
Hoffman's diary, October 22:
"Who would have thought three months ago that instead of the joy of victory
we would have to endure such sacrifices and torture,
the end of which is nowhere in sight?"
"The soldiers are calling Stalingrad 'the mass grave' of the Wehrmacht."
From far behind Stalingrad,
long columns of Russian tanks and men came that autumn.
But only a trickle went to Stalingrad - just enough to keep it from coggapsing.
The rest went to assembly areas north and south of the city.
(men sing in Russian)
Newsreels told Russians what their leaders wanted them to know -
that small arms factories were working round the clock from Moscow to Georgia.
Sweethearts were writing letters about production quotas,
or wrapping parcels for the front,
and delivering them by special messenger.
Youth groups could adopt their own tanks
and even pose with their crews.
Groups of workers could buy their own Stormovik
and send it off to shoot down Hitlerite invaders.
But the underlying message was clear - the terrible days of shortage were over.
Now, at last, the Red Army was getting all it needed.
When it seemed likely
that Stalingrad would hold out, its generals were filmed.
General Yeremenko, commander of the Stalingrad front,
found time to distribute medals.
Stalin's speeches were much read to the troops.
There was even a Stalingrad oath:
"lts burnt-out houses, its ruins, its very stones, are sacred."
The war went on.
The Russians ferried their troops across the Volga and the Don
and crammed them into the bridgeheads they had held since the summer.
The Russians dug in and waited.
The Germans now held nine-tenths of the city.
On November 8, Hitler made an affer-dinner speech in Munich.
(Hitler) lch wollte zur Wolga kommen.
(narrator) "l wanted to get to the Volga at a point
where stands a certain town... bears the name of Stalin himself."
"l wanted to take the place and we've done it."
"We've got it really, except for a few enemy positions still holding out."
"People say, 'Why don't they finish the job more quickly?"'
"Well, l prefer to do the job with quite small assault groups."
"Time is of no consequence at all."
But time was creeping up on the Germans.
Even before Hitler's speech,
the Russian winter had begun.
(wind howls)
The Germans knew what was coming.
Soon it would be 30, 40, 50 degrees below freezing.
Equipment and men would freeze.
But the Russians would keep going.
The Russians tried to keep their build-up a secret,
but they could neither move all their men by night,
nor hide completely three-quarters of a million new troops.
On November 10, Von Paulus asked Hitler to let him withdraw from Stalingrad.
Hitler told him to keep attacking.
The Russian build-up went on.
On November 19, the Russians struck.
They attacked the Romanians from the north
and, two days later, from the south.
Within hours, the Russian tanks were through.
The Russian plans were ambitious.
Their two pincers would cut through the Romanians and link at Kalach.
That would trap the German Sixth Army.
They would reduce the Stalingrad pocket,
and could then strike south-east towards Rostov.
That would trap all the Germans in the Caucasus.
Just four days affer the offensive began,
the two Russian armies did link up.
lt had all gone so quickly there was no time to film it,
so it was re-enacted for the cameras.
(men cheer)
The Russians thought they had trapped 75,000 Germans.
ln fact, 250,000 men were cut off.
All the Sixth Army, some of the Fourth Panzer Army,
Romanians, Croatians, and even Russian volunteers.
The commander on the spot, Von Paulus, asked to be allowed to break out.
Hitler told him to stay put. He would send troops to break in.
And he sent him a cheery message:
"l know the brave Sixth Army and its commander-in-chief,
and l also know that it will do its duty."
But the army still had to eat.
Göring, the Luffwaffe's commander-in-chief.
Earlier that year, his planes
had supplied a whole army cut off for 60 days
with fuel, ammunition and food.
Now he thought they could do it again.
Providing the weather was good and the distances not too great,
they could fly in 500 tons a day.
Hitler thought that would do,
though he knew the army said it needed at least 800 tons.
The Russians were waiting.
Bombers were used as transports.
The weather was vile.
The airliff brought in only a tenth of what was needed,
though it did once deliver a planeload of ground pepper
and 12 cases of contraceptives.
The Russians did not attack
the 250,000 troops in the pocket directly -
they were not yet strong enough.
lnstead, their armies drove westwards, and the further they drove,
the wider grew the gap between the Germans besieged in Stalingrad
and their would-be rescuers.
(gunfire)
German troops inside the pocket were cold and hungry, but confident.
They settled down, ready to move when their rescuers got close enough.
But they never came.
The Germans fighting their way to relieve Stalingrad
turned back to meet a new threat to the entire southern front.
The Germans in the pocket were on their own.
The Russians had the upper hand.
Even the quality of their medical care showed it.
German wounded, except the few airliffed home,
died in their dugouts.
The Russians at Stalingrad
had the best recovery record of any Russian armies.
The Russians now had mastery of the air.
Their bombers were virtually unopposed.
Hitler was obsessed by Stalingrad.
The Russians too.
They could have leff the men there to freeze and starVe.
lnstead, they massed seven armies round the pocket.
ln Stalingrad itself, fighting went on in the same bloody way.
(explosion)
On Christmas Eve in Germany
the radio broadcast this live message from the troops in Stalingrad:
Achtung. lch rufe noch einmal Stalingrad.
Hier ist Stalingrad. Hier ist die Front an der Wolga.
(narrator) But it was a fake.
Broadcasts from Stalingrad had stopped a week before.
On Christmas Day, Radio Moscow broadcast to the Germans in Stalingrad:
"Every seven seconds, a German soldier dies in Russia."
"Stalingrad is a mass grave."
(clock ticking)
The ticking and the message went on all day.
(ticking)
The Germans were now eating raw horse flesh.
On January 8, the Russians offered surrender terms -
warmth, medical care, food.
Officers could even keep their ceremonial daggers.
Hitler refused.
"Every day the Sixth Army holds out", he said,
"helps our situation everywhere else on the front."
January 10. The final Russian assault.
They thought it would take about four days.
But two weeks later, they were still fighting.
On the 24th, Von Paulus signalled Hitler:
"Troops without munitions or food."
"Effective command no longer possible."
"Collapse inevitable."
"Army requests permission to surrender
in order to save lives of remaining troops."
Hitler still forbade surrender.
"The Sixth Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad until the last man."
But German soldiers and German officers
were already giving themselves up.
On January 31 , Hitler made Von Paulus a field marshal,
knowing no German field marshal had ever been taken alive.
The same day he was promoted, Von Paulus surrendered.
His captors had never seen such a senior German officer before.
General Shumilov, who took the surrender,
didn't quite know what to do,
so he asked Paulus for proof of his identity.
Then for proof that he was commander of the Sixth Army.
Then whether he really was a field marshal.
They talked a while. Von Paulus cheered up.
He even proposed a toast to the Red Army.
Hitler had expected him... to shoot himself.
lt was not an ordinary defeat. lt was a catastrophe.
Two German armies -
24 generals, 2,000 officers, 90,000 soldiers -
prisoners.
And 150,000 dead.
The Romanian, ltalian, and Hungarian armies destroyed.
Enough material lost to equip a quarter of the whole German army.
This was the same Sixth Army which, two years before,
could not imagine defeat.
Prisoners were marched off to camps.
50,000 died within weeks of cold, malnutrition and typhus.
Of all but 100,000, only 6,000 ever returned home.
The people of Stalingrad
came back to look for what was leff of their homes.
When it was all over, a Russian soldier said:
"Germans are funny fellows,
coming to conquer Stalingrad in shiny leather boots."
"They thought it would be a joyride."
(wind howls)
When it was all over, Hitler said:
"What is life? Life is the nation."
"The individual must die anyway."
"Beyond the life of the individual is the nation."
On February 3, 1943,
the German radio announced that Stalingrad had fallen.
The Sixth Army had fought courageously,
but had succumbed to vastly superior enemy forces,
and to unfavourable circumstances.
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