On January 31, 1943, as his troops, under-supplied and out-gunned, froze to death in -45 degree C. temperatures, German Field-Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered to Soviet forces after what has been termed the “most desperate battle in history”, the Russians’ six-month struggle against von Paulus’ 280,000-strong Sixth Army.

 

Fought at Stalingrad, in southern Russia, near the Caspian Sea and the gateway to the Caucasus’ rich oil fields, along a 25-mile long Volga River front, the contending armies fought a desperate, six-months’ long battle. Both dictators, Hitler and Stalin, locked in personal as well as political-military struggle, had proclaimed “death until victory”.

 

Stalingrad cost a total of some two million mostly-Russian lives, military and civilian, from its beginning in July-August 1942 to the final surrender of the complete Sixth Army on February 2, 1943 (one Soviet division of 10,000 men was reduced, in a few weeks of fighting, to 320 survivors; and NKVD security troops, on Stalin’s orders, shot 13,500 fleeing soldiers and civilians).

 

Led by General, later Marshal, Georgi Zhukov (author, later, of the biography “The Man Who Beat Hitler”), Soviet troops first surrounded von Paulus, and then imposed a decisive defeat on him and Hitler’s Germany. German soldiers called it the Rattenkrieg, “rat’s war”, continuous hand-to-hand combat, and Vassili Grossman, the famous Soviet journalist and author of the great novel Life and Fate, who was there,  described “an iron whirlwind howling over the bunkers and slicing through anything living that raised its head above the earth”.

 

Twenty-four German generals, in addition to von Paulus, were captured, along with the 91,000 survivors of the once-proud Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army invaders (of whom only 9,626 ever made it back to Germany).

 

Stalingrad (today called Volgograd) was the key turning point of World War II, as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin understood. It was here, and not in the later 1944 Allied landings in Normandy, that Hitler’s war to make the German ”Aryan” master-race the rulers of the world, was effectively lost.

 

The Allied campaigns from North Africa to Italy to France, were of course of great importance in the European theater, not least in tying down Wehrmacht divisions and war materiel, including tanks and aircraft. But it was the Russians, suffering ca. 20 million casualties, military and civilian, from 1941-45, who bore the brunt of World War II.  From Stalingrad, Marshal Zhukov would lead the great Soviet Western counter-offensive which would, finally, end in Berlin, and Hitler’s suicide in his bunker there, in April, 1945.

 

It is an unimaginable sacrifice that must never be forgotten. Had von Paulus and Nazi Germany prevailed at Stalingrad, the entire course of the war might well have been changed, with immense consequences for Western, and indeed, world, civilization.

 

(Prof. Frederick Krantz is Editor of the Daily Isranet Briefing, and Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)