Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

First published in Germany as Durchbruch bei Stalingrad in 2016 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch

This translation first published in the UK in 2018 by Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Galiani Berlin bei Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2016

Documentary Appendix copyright © Carsten Gansel, 2016

Translation copyright © Peter Lewis, 2018

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The moral right of Heinrich Gerlach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781786690623

ISBN (E): 9781786690616

Design: Estuary English

Image © TASS / Getty Images

Endpapers: Captured German soldiers at Stalingrad, 1943,

Chronicle/Alamy Stock Image

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Sonderführer – literally ‘special leader’. A rank in the German Army (Wehrmacht) and SS assigned to specialists without any military training who were drafted in for their expertise in certain areas, such as interpreting, civil engineering, archaeology, and finance and administration.

Batyushka – ‘Little Father’, a term of endearment traditionally used by Russians of their leaders, and dating from tsarist times, when it was held up as the complementary quality to the epithet ‘ Grozny’ (‘awe-inspiring/terrible’).

Rembrandt film – Rembrandt was a 1942 feature film directed by Hans Steinhoff depicting the life of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter.

Kübelwagen – literally ‘bucket car’. The German equivalent of the Jeep, manufactured by Volkswagen. Its official designation was the Typ 82 light field car, and the nickname referred to the unglamorous appearance of this open-topped utility vehicle. VW also produced a military variant of its familiar ‘Beetle’ saloon car.

Tuica – a traditional Romanian spirit produced by fermenting and distilling plums.

Stalin organs – Russian BM-13 Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers. Mounted on trucks, this fearsome artillery weapons system was less accurate than conventional shelling, but could saturate an area extremely effectively.

The German word Latrinenparole that Gerlach uses here literally means ‘latrine password’, soldiers’ slang for an unsubstantiated rumour. The exact English equivalent term in the Second World War was ‘Elsan gen’. An ‘Elsan’ (a trademark name formed from the initials of its inventor, Ephraim Louis Jackson and the beginning of the word ‘sanitation’) was a portable toilet; the pejorative phrase derived from the fact that latrines were places where soldiers congregated and hence hotbeds of gossip.

Der Angriff – ‘The Attack’. A daily newspaper founded by the future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin in 1927.

Balkas – the balka , an eroded valley forming a steep-sided gorge or gully, was a characteristic feature of the terrain around the River Volga near Stalingrad.

Ju 52s – the Junkers 52, a large tri-motored monoplane, was originally designed as a passenger plane for Lufthansa but at the outbreak of war became the Luftwaffe’s standard transport workhorse, deployed in all theatres of the conflict. Dating from 1931, it was already an obsolescent type by the 1940s and its rather quaint appearance, with its three engines and its corrugated metal skin, earned it the affectionate nickname Tante Ju (‘Auntie Ju’) among troops.

Hilfswillige – ‘Auxiliary Volunteers’. After the early successes of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of captured Ukrainian and Russian soldiers volunteered to fight against Stalin’s regime by providing assistance to the German forces in non-combat roles, especially engineering and logistics.

Ya nye znayu – ‘I don’t know.’

Dr Robert Ley was, for the entire duration of the Second World War, head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front), a Nazi organization established to take the place of trade unions. The DAF was responsible for administering the Kraft Durch Freude (‘Strength Through Joy’) programme of organized mass leisure activities for the nation’s workforce, including holidays, cruises and ‘cultural’ visits to approved galleries and concerts.

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) was one of the principal theorists of the Nazi movement. A Baltic German, Rosenberg was instrumental in devising Nazism’s racial policies and advocated a new mystical ‘religion of the blood’ to replace Christianity. He was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials and hanged.

Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was a Swedish writer and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909). Her short-story collection Kristuslegender was published in 1904.

‘March Hares’ – a disparaging term (German: Märzhasen ) used by old Nazis who had been in the party since its inception in the early 1920s to refer to new party members who rushed to join after Hitler’s accession to power in early 1933.

Teller mines were German anti-tank mines commonly used in the Second World War. Their name derives from the German word Teller meaning ‘dinner plate’, a reference to their shape.

‘only one arm’ – an allusion to General Hans-Valentin Hube, who had lost his right arm at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Hube commanded the 16th Panzer Division during Operation Barbarossa and Fall Blau (‘Case Blue’), the German army’s summer offensive in southern Russia in the summer of 1942. He was later given command of the XIV Panzer Corps. Hube, an extremely able and widely respected commander among both fellow officers and men, was ordered by Hitler to fly out of the Stalingrad Cauldron in January 1943 but refused; in response, Hitler ordered members of the SS to fly in and force him to leave at gunpoint.

‘Greatest Commander of All Time’ – German: Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten , abbreviation GröFaZ . A term of adulation for Adolf Hitler, coined by the obsequious Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, supreme commander of German forces, after the triumphant Blitzkrieg of 1940 against the Low Countries and France. Later in the war, as defeats mounted for the Nazis, and especially in the aftermath of Stalingrad, the abbreviation began to be used ironically, particularly by opponents within the armed forces.