Idi i smotri (Come and See, 1985) * * * * *

Come and See (link to DVD on Amazon)
Ethnic cleansing of the Slavs living in the Eastern European lands including Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia and western Russian (to the Urals) was outlined in Hilter's Generalplan Ost as part of his long-term plan for creation of Lebensraum for Greater Germany. This plan involved removal of 70-90% of the existing Slavic population in these areas. Much of this was to be carried out after the war (after Germany's presumed victory) but pacification and elimination of certain areas was to be carried out during the war, in particular in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.

Belarus (was Belarussia) has the sad distinction of being the country where the Generalplan Ost and the genocide of Slavs was most effectively implemented during WWII. 25-33% of the population of Belarus was killed in the war (about 2.2 million killed), the Belarus intelligentsia and Jewish segments of society were entirely eliminated, every city was devastated and large portions of Belarus were laid waste in a scorched earth policy (Belarus official website on the genocide). In some of the worst war crimes committed in WWII, in628 villages across Belarus SS troops rounded up and burned alive every inhabitant as punishment for partisan actions. Another 4667 villages were burnt to the ground with less than 100% of their inhabitants killed. The website on the Khatyn memorial even has archival video taken by SS troops of the plan in action: Plan Ost.


Come and See (1985) is a movie about WWII as experienced in Belarus. It follows a teenage boy who joins the partisans. It shows the horror of the SS annihilation of villages through the eyes of this naive boy. As you might expect, there is a fairly well developed partisan-mythology in Belarus (Robin Hood with a gun). However although Come and See is sympathetic to the partisans, this is not your typical air-brushed film of the heroic partisans saving the day from the evil Germans. Come and See tries to paint a realistic picture of war, without any romance. In that sense, it is has a documentary quality almost, and like all "realistic" war films, it is decidedly anti-war. There is nothing, nothing remotely romantic about being a partisan in this movie because war itself is horror. During the course of the 2 days covered by the movie, we watch as Florya ages physically before our eyes. With each new horror -- the death of someone next to him, watching villagers rounded up and burned, the loss of his family, the gang rape of young girl -- his face becomes distraught, then crazed and finally wooden.



Come and See is one of the most famous modern movies about the Eastern Front. It is very well done and the cinematography and acting is excellent. But I had been warned by Kaja that Come and See is a disturbing movie. It was, however, not as distressing as I was bracing for. I was expecting to be forced to watch people burning alive, children getting their heads split open with rifle butts, or the gang rape of young girls. We see the after effect of these things and we see dead bodies, but the film doesn't actually show these horrors happening. I never needed to hit the "stop" button on the remote in order to avoid any really distressing scenes. That is a real accomplishment because the temptation would be to want to 'rub people's faces' in the horror: "look, look, LOOK!" But it is more powerful, I think, because instead it focuses on how Florya reacts and copes (or not) to seeing these horrors.

Overall this a must-see movie for those interested in the Eastern Front and the effect of WWII on Eastern Europe, along with Stalingrad, Mein Kreig, and Shoah.

References

Generalplan Ost
Hilter's Generalplan Ost
Online documents and transcripts about Generalplan Ost
Except from Janusz Gumkowkski and Kazimierz Leszczynski's POLAND UNDER NAZI OCCUPATION
Belarus : a partisan reality show
The Khatyn massacre website

In Deadly Combat (1964) * * * *

In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier's Memoir of the Eastern Front by Gottlob Herbert Bidermann (link to the book on Amazon)

This is a memoir of a young German soldier who started as a landser—infantry man—manning a heavy machine gun and then became a platoon leader. He began his service in the Crimea in a battle group that defeated the Russians and pushed them out of Sevastapool Castle. They were later moved up to join the army besieging Leningrad. They battled the Russian groups trying to break the siege. Later as the Russians pushed the Germans south, out of Russia, they were surrounded and trapped in what was called the Courland pocket. Against overwhelming odds, they resisted all attempts by the Russians to smash their pocket. They held out till the end of the war, when they were finally ordered to surrender. The author was taken prisoner and was one of the few to survive the gulags.

This memoir is considered one of the best. This memoir gives a good perspective on the skill of the German soldiers and why the Wehrmacht was so effective. Small teams of heavy out-numbered German soldiers were able to maintain their position by being unflinching under fire. In the beginning, the soldiers are affected by seeing death and being killing machines. In one early battle when they are mowing down wave after wave of Russian soldiers, one of the heavy machine gunners becomes overwhelmed by it all and cries out “I can’t keep killing!”. This must have been alarming to his mates who were doing all they could to stay alive. After a year or two though, the soldiers are inured to it and seem simply proud of their skills at repelling these attacks.

My thoughts? It is a good book. If one is interested in German war memoirs, this is one to read. However, I felt kind of traumatized by the end. Killing, killing, killing. Ug. The writer does not glorify this but that is what his life was about at this time.

Ivan's War (2006) * * * * *

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (link to book at Amazon)
He stands larger than life, a gun grasped firmly in one hand, his strong jaw pointing slightly upward as he fixes his determined gaze somewhere off to the left. Ivan. The WW II Soviet soldier. Any visitor to the Soviet Union has seen him cast in bronze at war memorials or seen him in WWII era placards. To readers of WWII memoirs from German soldiers, he is the faceless infantryman who yells Uhrrah! en mass and launches himself with selfless sacrifice in endless waves against withering German fire (1,2). In war, soldiers are always turned into icons -- carefully polished symbols of patriotism and heroism ... (or evil if you are talking about the enemy). But real soldiers are individuals with reals hopes, desires, fears and heartbreak not bronze statues--even Ivan. In this incredibly well-researched book, Catherine Merridale (3) seeks to find the real Ivans and tell their stories.

The bulk of the book is organized chronologically: from the disastrous Winter War in Finland to the victorious invasion of Germany. The book as a whole however is organized to answer three basic questions: Why did men fight, what did they think of their experience at the time and how did the war change them?

To understand these men (ok, there are few women, but mainly men), Merridale first introduces us to their world. These men and their parents were generations that had experienced violence on an unprecedented scale(5). The civil war of 1918-1921, besides creating chaos and killing many, also created desperate shortages. In its wake were epidemics and a terrible famine. That famine turned out to be minor compared to the famine of 1932-1933 when 7 million died. Then there was the restructuring of society after the civil war: collectivization, totalitarianism, and gulags for the land-owners, business-owners and intelligentsia. But the young soldiers also grew up in a state that sought to remake souls--to remake youth into heroic communists. This last point is very important. Those born from 1921 on, were born into a state that saw as one of its great missions the education of youth and the lifting of people out of poverty. To be a "good Communist" was to devote oneself to the betterment of society, to be upstanding, moral, and clean, and to do heroic deeds. At the same time, the experience and views of the men were anything but uniform. Many men came from regions that did not support Russia--the Western Ukraine and the Balkans for example. Others served in punishment battalions as a way to do penance for their family's capitalist crimes--or for more mundane crimes. The idea of a unified country standing together against the Germans is a myth of the Soviet state(6). One of the strengths of Merridale's book is that she tells the stories and experiences of men from many different walks of life. Many were your idealist Muscovite, others were village boys, some were from Russia and others were not. Their experiences as soldiers were also diverse: she tells the stories of men who fought on the front lines on the ground and in the tanks, of men who ended up behind the lines and worked as partisans, of men who survived the punishment battalions, of Jewish men, of ardent Communists, of non-political men, and of a few women.

Why did men fight? When Merridale first posed this question, my reaction was, "Well, duh, they were conscripted and would be shot if they didn't fight." She argues however that terror-tactics produce a very poor solider--the normal response being to hide in one's foxhole or to be incapable of firing. British, German, and American armies create the will to fight by promoting very strong bonds within small groups--after a few battles and losses, the men fight with passion for their close comrades who, through the crucible of fire, have become closer than family to them. Making them feel they are fighting a good cause is good for morale, but does not create the kind of heroic fighting necessary to win wars. What Merridale notes right off the bat is that the Red Army was not organized this way. The traditional military structure had been replaced with an ideological structure. This was an army where men were supposed to fight for the international proletarian and to die for their fellow soldier, whoever he may be, because of comradely friendliness. If one's takes this propaganda at face value, the men seem like mindless robots. Of course dying for the international proletarian is a fine idea if you are agitating in on a street corner; in the heat of battle, nobody is going to rush the enemy for that! Secondly, Soviet battle groups experienced severe losses in battles. Loss of 80-90% of men in a combat group was very common(4). Thus for both political and death rate reasons, strong bonds between small groups of men were discouraged.(8) So the question remains what motivated these men to rush the lines and pull the trigger? The simple answer is that an army run by political officers and not military officers is a pathetic army. The Red Army up to 1942 had huge desertion and panic rates. In the winter war against Finland, 50% of men were captured, missing or killed. As the Germans rolled over Russia, men fled en masse and refused orders to fire. Even the Germans were surprised by the chaos, notes Merridale. Thus much of the first half of the book is about is was like to be in a losing chaotic army--and how does a man react when he can see with his own eyes how terribly mismanaged the war is and how cheaply lives are treated. The feeling clearly changes in the 2nd half of the book and the 2nd half of the war. The army is reorganized under more traditional military not political leadership. Training and tactics improve. Men develop new resolve. Letters from the 2nd half of the war are characterized by determination, resolve and hatred for Fritz.

"I have to say that the war has changed me a lot. War does not make people tender. On the contrary, it makes them reserved, rather coarse, and very cruel."(7)

Part of the drive to understand the man in the Red Army in 1938-1945, it must be said, is to understand what happened in 1945 in Budapest and worse yet in East Prussia. War makes one cruel and innured to death and brutality, but there are many records of officers being alarmed and startled by what happened(9). War atrocities are nothing new. All wars are have instances where women and girls are gang-raped and then shot or where a large group of civilians are killed and mutilated. What was different about Budapest and East Prussia was the magnitude, extent, and commonness of these types of outrageous brutalities. The solidier that did not participate was the exception not the rule. The reports from civilians all over these regions are chillingly similar: a white hot fury descended upon them that went house to house exacting revenge. This seemed to be a spasm of brutality. Merridale spends a whole chapter, with the lovely title of Despoil the Corpse, to understand what caused men spread across different battle groups and across large geographic regions, to do this. This was not an isolated event in one battle group. She attributes it to the terrible strain of war and loss into which was mixed hateful propaganda, implicit and explicit encouragement from above, and inadequate commitment to discipline from officers. After they soliders passed farther into Germany, their behavior was less horrible. Most women were raped, but not gang-raped to death and rape in front of one's family was less common. Children and old people where not generally killed, and certainly not mutilated. Merridale says that in her interviews with veterans they were exasperated with this focus on rapes of German women. They spent years fighting in horrible conditions--that is what defined their experience. Yes, the brutalities were terrible but they had already become so inured to death and cruelty. The rapes and rampage of 1945 was, from the perspective of the war as a whole, a brief and not particularly memorable part of their experience.

This book is a must read for those interested in WWII--the overwhelming majority of which was fought on the Eastern Front. You won't learn about tactics, about troop movements, or about equipment. After reading this book however, you will see the person behind those nameless Red Army faces. This book also helps us grasp the enormity of sacrifice and suffering. 27 million died in the war of which 8 million were Red Army soldiers, but I think the losses are better summed up by another shocking statistic: 90% of men who turned 18 in 1939 (born in 1921) died as solders in the war.(10)


Footnotes:
1,2. Some example memoirs that I've read recently are In Mortal Combat by Bidermann and Blood Red Snow
3. Merridale, from England, is a Soviet historian. Her previous book, Night of Stone, was about how Soviet people dealt with death in the pre- and post-WWII eras. She focused on the deaths and disappearances of people arrested and sent to Gulags (millions and millions). How does a nation of people deal with death when they are forbidden to grieve?
4. Evgyny Bessorov was a platoon leader in the Soviet Army and wrote the memoir, Tank Rider. In basically every major battle, he lost all but a handful of men in is platoon. Then he would get a hodge-podge of replacements for the next battle.
5. 15 million died in the 2 decades before WWII.
6. Merridale and Bessorov mention many cases where the soldiers were not greeted warmly by the civilian population. Bessorov says they almost starved when they were sent as recruits to dig potatoes since the villagers refused to share food. In some instances, peasants rose in rebellion against the Red Army as in Kursk when the army tried to remove them from the front lines.
7. Written in 1945 by a soldier. pg 381
8. The exception seems to be the tank soliders who formed very tight bonds as they had to work as a well-oiled team. They also had very high death rates. According to Merridale, of 403,272 trained, 310,000 died. Interestingly in Tank Rider, Bessorov repeatedly talks of the tanks drivers being scared and holding back.
9. Both Beevor and Merridale give examples of reports from officers and political officers.
10. p 338

Tank Rider * * *

Tank Rider is a war memoir from a man, Evgyny Bessorov, who served in the Russian infantry during WWII. He was the lowest level of officer, a platoon leader. It was his job to get the soldiers up and rushing at the Germans during the endless battles. He rushed into battle for 2 years carrying usually only a shovel, which he used for its intended purpose (digging in) and to 'tap' the butts of soldiers who had been laying on the ground for too long. He said of his job, no one wants to die, that includes soldiers, it was my job to get them up and running at the enemy. Sometimes he had to physically manhandle his soldiers out of their foxholes; only once did he have to threaten execution. He led his men through 4 or 5 major battles. During each he lost about 80% of his platoon. His survival was pure luck combined with caution.

He starts his front-line service at the battle of Kursk.
From there, it is a relentless 2 year push towards the German border and then into Berlin. He is part of the troops the encircle Berlin from the east. Here he is injured and then rejoins his battalion when they are outside Prague. And then 'Woina kaputt'...the war is finished.

As he states in the introduction, this is a book about what he saw and what he did. He doesn't analyze the war or his experience. He doesn't dwell on the horrible things he saw, but he says many times that it was very hard, he was scared and no one wanted to die. He does not mention anything about the Russians treatment of German POWs or about raping and pillaging when the Russians came into Germany. However, he was a frontline soldier and everything I've read has said that the frontline soldiers were too tired to do anything and were on the move forward constantly. The raping and pillaging and shooting of POWs happened behind the lines. Thus I would think that he is not 'leaving out details'. He is upfront about his failings: the times when he was too scared to move or when he made an error that got men killed. He is not philosophic about his job which was to lead men to their deaths. His job was to lead groups of men forward to take objectives at any cost. It was his job, and that was that.

Although, as I mentioned, he doesn't talk about Russian bad behavior, many passages are telling. He asserts that he did not allow his soldiers to loot. Loot however was defined as killing pigs and destroying property. Emptying out the larder and the chicken coop was not looting. He talks a lot about how well they ate in Germany and how well stocked the German pantries were. At one point when they catch a bunch of soldiers, the political officer comes racing forward screaming, 'Don't Shoot Them!!'. He is affronted, noting that the officer acted like he had been shooting prisoners the whole war. However, that the political officer was afraid that the prisoners would be shoot is telling. In other places he talks about 'taking the middle way'. They would come into a village in Western Ukraine, and the people didn't want to feed the soldiers. Bessorov said that he would pull out his gun and threaten that if food wasn't on the table in a hour, he would shoot them. This was the 'middle way'. We did not loot, but the soldiers got fed.

WWII was a war that had a huge effect on his generation. 40% of the boys in his high school class were killed in the war. Interestingly, in start contrast to the USSR propaganda about the country rallying together to support the troops, he gives many stories of the rural people not supporting the soldiers. In training, they practically starve because they are sent to the countryside to learn to dig holes and the villagers refuse to feed them. In the eastern Ukraine, when they push the Germans out, the villagers are very welcoming and always make food for the soldiers, but in the western Ukraine, people are downright hostile.

Overall this is an interesting book for those interested in the eastern front of WWII. This is one of the few memoirs from the Russian side. Until the fall of the USSR, such memoirs were forbidden since they might conflict with the official stories.

Blood Red Snow * * * *

Blood Red Snow is memoir of a German soldier who fought as a heavy machine gunner in Russia, Ukraine and Romania. He also did a short stint in Italy, chasing partisans. This story is very different than A Stranger To Myself. No endless philosophizing or ruminations on the glint of snowflakes against the sun. Instead this is a straight-forward story of what happened to him as an elite front-line soldier.

His first battle is on the outskirts of Stalingrad. He starts as a naive and idealistic young soldier, but that doesn't last long. His first job is a trip into Stalingrad to deliver food at night. This is just before the encirclement, and the battles are done from rubble pile to rubble pile. All he can think about is getting away from the horror. Shortly after the fighting begins and his unit is one of the sacrificial units that are maintaining a fight to the death position. Almost everyone in his unit is killed, and then when all is hopeless the last 10 make a dash to safety through heavy gunfire. They are among those that race across the River Don on foot and are only saved because the ice is too thin for the Russian tanks. It is a brutal fighting retreat. He get injured, gets sent to the rear, and survives.

After a stint in Italy, where not much of interest happens except some looting, he is sent back to Russia. He is now in an elite unit that is steadily retreating from the Russian offensive east into Romania. By this point, he is very weary after so many months of frontline fighting. In the end, he ends up in Poland and is in East Prussia when the Russian arrive. He is once again injured at a lucky time and manages to survive by being in a hospital at the right time.

One interesting section concerns a home-leave he gets in the summer of 1944. He writes that things were very tense at home. Many refugees. People being sent to concentration camps. He does not mention Jews, but rather dissenters and those that refuse to fight. He is not critical of them nor is he sympathetic. Everyone has a duty to do and they refuse to do theirs. In retrospect, we know that Germany mounted an unprovoked attack on Russia in the summer of 1941. But this is not what Germans were told at the time. They were told that Russia was massing troops on the border and this was a defensive attack to protect Germany and Europe from the war-mongering Bolsheviks. I'm sure that this is what everyone believed.

In this memoir, the viewpoint is unconflicted. The Russians are the enemy and they are brutes. He writes about how as his unit retreats and the Russians move forward, the Russians kill villagers in the eastern Ukraine who helped the Germans -- even if they were forced to do so. This is also mentioned in the book, Stalingrad. As they retreat into Romania, he talks about the rampant raping by the Russian soldiers. This is also well documented. He also writes about the treatment of German POWs and that they are killed or worse. Again this well-documented. So to him when he was a soldier, it was clear-cut. He does not mention German war-crimes, but then it sounds like he was not in areas where these were happening in the extreme. He did not fight in the Ukraine in winter 1941 where he would have seen 100,000s of Russian POWs interned with no food nor does he see the round-up of Jews in those areas nor the winter looting and rampant killing of civilians. He does not experience the scotched-earth retreat from Opel. Many other soldiers did experience this and the documentary Mein Kampf has footage taken by these men.

Overall I found this to be an unrealistically rosy picture of German soldiers in Russia. Here there is no mention of the poor treatment of Russian POWs. There is mention of wounded Russians being shot, but this is attributed to sadism. Looting is punishable and soldiers have to be sneaky about it. I don't necessarily doubt that this is a true account of this soldier's experience, and people I've talked to in Czechoslovakia during the war have commented that the German soldiers were well-behaved. Nonetheless, I was struck by the lack of any reference to German treatment of Russian POWs, the massive institutionalized looting, and mass starvation of civilians (like in Leningrad). I cannot believe he was unaware even if he did not personally see this. This especially struck me at the end, where he makes a comment about wanting to be an POW of the Americans since at least they treat POWs according to the Geneva Conventions. I was pretty much flabbergasted by this comment, given what happened to so many Russian POWs. Granted from what I've read, those that were shipped to Germany for slave labor were treated decently, but millions were starved or gassed.

Another part of the book that I read with skepticism was the part where he said he was among the first German troops to come into the village of Nemmersdorf after the Russians briefly took it. Nemmersdorf is the site of the most famous Russian war atrocities in East Prussia. This is the first German town that the Russian troops reached. The Russian troops were accused of killing all civilians, raping the women and girls to death, and then mutilating the bodies. Goebbels had a famous propaganda film made of it. There are questions however about whether it was 'enhanced' for propaganda purposes by SS troops in the area. That the Russians killed the civilians and mass-raped the women and girls meshes with well-documented reports of many, many similar events from East Prussia (discussed in Fall of Berlin). But the Nemmersdorf massacre was also characterized by mutilation and crucifying people on barn doors -- I have never read of anything like that in other reports. In any case, the author claims to have been among those troops that first arrived after the Russians and claims to have seen the mutilated bodies. I found it surprising that of all places, he just so happened to be in Nemmersdorf on Oct 21, 1944.

In the end, I'm not sure what to make of this memoir -- except that it gives me a new insight into more of the evil of war.

Chronology
October-November 1942 On the Don River outside Stalingrad. Makes a hasty retreat and get injured. Thus survives.
October-November 1943 On the Dneiper in Eastern Ukraine some 500km south of Kursk. Russians are in the process of their steady push of the Germans out of Russia. His unit is one of the delaying units set up to give the retreating soldiers more time.
December 1943 Major assault by the Russians on the line of the Dneiper River.
January 1944 Retreat from the Dneiper River near Dneproperovsk.
March 1944 Miserable retreat to just north of the Black Sea. From where they are transferred to Romania.
April 1944 Part of a big successful fight where the Germans defeat the Russians near Lasi (Jassy) on the border between Romania and Moldava. Russian will have it back by July.
June 1944 Heavy fighting near Jassy as Russians are intent on retaking Jassy.
July 1944 Transferred to Poland; hard fighting; losing; injured and off the hospital.
October 1944 Fighting in Poland. Says he is in the troops that first come into Nemmersdorf (the site of a famous Red Army massacre of civilians), but that seems hard to believe.
January-March 1945 In Denmark as a trainer for new recruits.
March 1945 Volunteers for the front with his ragtag group of new recruits. Sent to Stettin on the Oder as the Russians are pushing their way to Berlin. Is soon injured, and sent back to a hospital.
End of April 1945 Is in a hospital that is taken by the Americans, but the Americans turn the German POWs over to Russia. He reinfects his wound to get back to the sick ward, and survives this. Spends time in American camp then released.

A Stranger to Myself * * *

A Stranger to Myself is a book made from the diaries of a young writer/poet/philosopher who died in Russia on his 5th tour on the Eastern Front. This is a memoir about what it was to experience the Eastern Front as a little human not an uber-German. If you've seen any books on the Eastern Front, you've seen the pictures of the winter of '41. The German soldiers in summer uniforms are laying in endless frozen heaps. The walking have their hands and feet wrapped due to frostbite. It is a disaster. Reese entered the war during that winter and lived through the experience in those pictures. He also was on the front near Kursk during the disasterous winter of '43 when Germans were again pushed back. 100'000s German soldiers were killed or froze to death during that winter. He returns to the front in winter '44 as the Germans are getting pushed out of Russia after the failure of Operation Citidel. So this is a memoir of the winter defeats. He misses completely the heady summer of '41 when the Germans pushed to Moscow and the summer of '42 when they pushed to Stalingrad.

A Stranger to Myself is unlike any war diary that you would have read before. This is Wagner meets WWII. It is an at times lyrical and, in the first half, overwrought exploration of his experience of the war. We are transplanted to the Russian steppe. The writer paints a vivid and poetic pictures of the the landscape and how it changes from winter to summer. As I read it, I could almost smell the crisp morning air and see the red sunrises, and then later the endless brown and mud that covers everything. In the beginning of the book, Reese struggles with yet embraces the role of the soldier. He repeatedly talks of the mask of the soldier and playing a role. He tries to understand his existence. Life is suffering. It is what must be. Suffering defines existence. In the beginning he sees himself as part of a larger thing. The master race scouring the countryside. Yet he does not see himself as superior; he is simply part of this larger thing that is happening. He feels no emnity to the people or his enemies. Yet he participates. His life is not defined by Free Will. He gives in to the larger forces and plays his role. He embraces herioc nihilism. After 2 years of war, he view will change however....

Reese is unsparing in his examination of himself. And if all soldiers were like him, the Wehrmacht surely wouldn't have gotten very far. He kvetches, he gets lost, he has heart palpations, somehow he repeatedly manages to stay behind and hold the fort while his comrades go off to fight, etc, etc. During the brutal winter of '43, he descends into pure desperation and finally stands up in his trench until he is shot. Salvation, a home-pass. In the winter of '44, however, he is a seasoned frontline veteran and participates in endless battles -- although he and the others are fighting just to save themselves nothing more. He is unsparing in his admission of his participation in abuses of civilians; he does not agonize over it nor does he feel good about it. In the winter of '41, he describes how the soldiers were constantly hungry and suffering. They looted from the civilians viciously and if the people complained, they were shot. Later in the book, during the retreat from Orel, he writes of the endless destruction behind the frontlines. The Germans instituted a scorched earth policy on their retreat. He is sad of the war is consuming noncombatants and recognizes that he is both perpetrator and pawn of the war-monster.

After 2 years of war, Reese has changed. He explores his mental scars that simply do not heal. His writing has changed. Before it was overwrought and explored endlessly this idea of heroic nihilsm. Now his writing is terse as he tries to comes to grip with who he is, what his life is, and the images in his head. He decides his life can only go forward after going through the fire. He volunteers for the frontlines. In the end, after going through the crucible, he is ready to live. The beauty of nature consumes him. But he accepts that death is his fate and is not sad. He did about 3-4 months after he finished the book during a furlough at home. He was killed in June 1944 during the retreat from Russia.

Chronology
August 1941 Reese is stationed in Poland and participates in fights to push the Russians east
Sept 28, 1941 Reese arrives in Kiev the day after the greatest encirclement of the war; 650,000 Russians
October 1941 He is near Kursk. Winter arrives they begin to freeze and starve;
Dec 1941 - Jan 1942 Starving and freezing and trench warfare near Kursk; Reese is injured and returns home. This was the eastern end of the big Russian counter-offensive.
July 1942 Reese joins the summer offensive in the push towards Stalingrad. They start marching near Kharkov. But he collapses in the march and is sent back to Germany.
October-Dec 1942 Reese is sent to Rshev NW of Moscow. In Dec/Jan a big Russian counter offensive at Rshev pushes the Germans back 200km.
Feb 1943 In the midst of this counter offensive, Reese stands up in his trench to get shot. He does.
July 1943 Reese is sent to about 200mi SW of Moscow near Smolensk on the Vopez River. Fighting.
End of July 1943 Moved to Mileyevo NE of Bryansk (100km W of Orel). Fighting.
August or so 1943 Collapse of the Citidel offensive. Enormous retreat by the German Army back to the Dneiper River in the west. All villages destroyed on retreat. Reese describes this.
To Dec 1943 North of Gomel (200km W of Byransk). Reese is part of the fighting to hold the line of the Dneiper River against a huge Russian counter-offensive.
Spring 1943 Home leave
June 1943 Reese is killed in the Vitebsk region 400km W of Moscow during the start of the Russian counter-offensive that drove the Germans out of Russian

The Fall of Berlin * * *

The Fall of Berlin is the follow-up book by the author of Stalingrad: the Final Siege. TFOB starts as the Russians cross the German border in East Prussia. For those who are spotty on their post-WWI geography (meaning 99.999% of us), Prussia was is in the Baltics (meaning up by Lithuania) and extended across modern day northern Germany (formerly East Germany), Western Poland, parts of Lithuania, and far southwestern Russia (parts it annexed after WWII from Germany). Much of the first third of the book is about the invasion of Prussia and the attempts by civilians to escape. This was especially interesting to me because I know someone who's mother and grandmother were among those civilians. About 1/4 million civilians were trapped in Konigsberg at one point, completely surrounded by the Russian Army. My friend's mother was trapped there and was among those that crossed the ice of Frisches Haff (a bay) on foot to reach a small spit of land that the Germans still held. From there they walked into Germany through a thin corridor of German-held land to East Germany. Later after the Germans surrendered, they escaped from East Germany to the West.

The Germans civilians in Prussia were understandably terrified of the Russians. They had been inundated by propaganda about how the ruthlessness the Russians and the horrors they would do against Germans. But soldiers who had been on the Eastern Front knew that the Russians would be driven by revenge -- rather than ruthlessness per se. One Berliner recalled being on a subway when an old soldier announced how Berlin would be flattened if the Russians won, "If they win, they will do to us what we did to them." As it was, the Germans of East Prussia were still unprepared for the fury of revenge. The first target as the troops came were women. The book contains many first-hand accounts that any woman spotted was gang-raped by 10 to 40 soldiers at a time. Deliberate shooting of civilians seems to have been rare, however lines of fleeing refugees were repeatedly straffed by aircraft and run over by tanks. I think to understand in part what the Russians did when they came into East Prussia, you have to understand what the German Army did to Russia. The German Army carried out a policy of living off the land (meaning taking food, shelter, firewood, etc from civilians), laying siege to cities, and Slavic cleanings. Slavs were considered an "inferior race" and there was widespread killing of civilians. t is estimated that 11 million Soviet Union civilians were killed during WWII! In addition, the out-matched Russian Army suffered horrific casualties (like 50% or so). Russian POWs were sent to concentration camps and suffered the same fate as Jews; as the Russians came into Poland, they discovered these concentration camps with Russian POWs. I'm not trying to justify their actions, but rather show the context in which they occurred.

The second half of the book covers the race to Berlin and the downfall of Berlin. Surprisingly this part of the book was not terribly interesting (for me). Lots of space is devoted to troop movements (yawn). You don't get a sense from the book about what the civilians in Berlin went through. This is surprising since there were many diaries published from that period. For some reason, this part just seemed a bit mechanical. Basically, the sense you get from the book is that Berlin fell without much of a fight in the city proper and then people started getting on with their lives. That's hard for me to believe. The city was reduced to rubble and the depression among the people must have been extreme. My next book is "A Woman in Berlin" which is a diary from the 9 days of the battle. I expect that this book will give a different picture.

Stalingrad: the fateful siege * * * * *

The battle for Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in the brutal battles on the Eastern front. After surviving a brutal winter and unsuccessful attempt to capture Moscow, the German Army turned its attention to the east and the Caucaus oilfields. They raced forward rapidly in a headlong rush of one success after another. Then they reached the city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In difficult fighting they managed to capture 95% of the city, but the Russians held on the the north side of the Volga River and a small strip of land on the south side. For months, the Russians and Germans fought a pitiless street battle in the ruins -- while each day winter got closer. In late November 1942, the Russians executed a large counter attack and successfully surrounded the entire 6th Army, by then numbering only about 250,000 men. The Germans were unprepared for winter, and over the next 2 months, they slowly but surely starved to death. When they finally surrendered in early February 1943, they numbered only 90,000. These were taken prisoner and only about 6,000 managed to survive captivity and make it home.

In total, some ¾ of a million Axis troops (Germans and their Hungarian and Romanian allies) were involved and basically all were killed or wounded, except some 6,000 who were taken POWs and managed to survive Siberian work camps. All and all this represented about 1/4 of the men fighting for the Germans on the Eastern front. On the Russian side, some 1 ¾ million troops were involved and about half were killed or wounded.

This book combined reams of archival material such as letters home, memoirs, and official reports to provide not only a sense of the overall battles, but a feeling for what it was like for the individual soldiers. As the film Stalingrad graphically shows, it was grim for the German soldiers. Although I have to say that after reading the book, the film was not nearly as horrific as the truth. One memorable section in the book describes how the doctors had to scrape the lice off injured men with spatulas before surgery. The movie also is from the perspective of only the Germans. The book gives equal treatment to the Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers experienced some 50% casualties, and some references have said that the average survival of newbies on the front was 1 day. The story of the Russian soldiers is that of incredible courage under impossible odds. Of course, lack of courage or allowing oneself to be captured (translation = not fighting to the death) was punished by execution, but that does not by itself explain the willingness to die shown by so many of the men*. I'm not sure what explains the wanton disregard of soldiers lives by their leaders, however. The tendency of the Russians to do frontal attacks against well-guarded positions was shocking.

The one area the book did not discuss, however, was the perspective of the people trapped in the city and those in the surrounding areas. People were not allowed to evacuate, which meant that the 50,000 or so people living there died. Those able to help with the fight were organized into militia or put to use otherwise. In the end, about 2000 civilians survived in the city through the battle which included some 900 children -- of which all but 6 were orphans. Outside the city, the Germans were living off the land, by taking food from the villages and they dismantled all buildings for their own uses. One must presume that the elderly and children in the outskirts did not fare very well either. The book also discusses the anti-Slavic views of the Nazis. They viewed Slavs as ethnically inferior and subjected them to some of the same extermination policies as the Jews. This was seen most vividly in Poland where there were mass killings of civilians, but also in Russia. The treatment of Russian POWs was similar to that of Jews (meaning sent to similar camps and marched into similar ovens) and was dramatically different than that of American or British POWs. The Russian soldiers were very affected by seeing the treatment of Russian POWs and used this as a justification for their later treatment of German POWs. As the same time, in utter Stalinistic perversity, being taken prisoner was a Russian crime since troops were ordered to fight to the death. Obviously you didn't do that if you were taken prisoner. When Russian POWs were returned to Russia after the war, 2/3s were executed or sent to Siberia(!!)

Overall, this book was very interesting. I had not expected to read this book actually, but I was given it as a gift and couldn't put it down. It's like watching a train wreck; it's mesmerizing. I'm interested in understanding the post-war period in Germany. The fall of Stalingrad is immensely important for this because 1) the casualties were so high so this really affected public sentiment back in Germany and 2) what the Germans did in Stalingrad and in Russia fueled the plundering, murdering, and rape that occurred when the Russians made it into Germany. This relentless drive of the Russians to exact revenge lead to a fundamental difference between East and West Germany. One side was laid waste to and the other side not. The next book this author wrote is the Fall of Berlin, which details this.

* It is thought-provoking that such admirable bravery and self-sacrifice can exist in the same people that a few months later were committing horrific crimes against German civilians in East Prussia. Of course, the German Army did worse to Russian civilians. Although on the German side, attacks against civilians seemed to come from the officers and military tactics that used starvation and ethnic liquidation as a weapon. On the Russian side, civilian attacks (rape, murder, pillaging, squashing with tanks) came from the ordinary soldier while the officers were supposed to prevent this. Clearly most didn't try hard to stop it though.

Stalingrad (1992) * * * *

This is my review of the movie Stalingrad; my review of Anthony Beevor's book is here Stalingrad: the fateful siege. If you are interested in the film, I highly recommend the book too. It is one of the best historical books on the Eastern Front.

(Link to the Stalingrad DVD at Amazon)
Stalingrad (now Volgograd) lies on the Volga River in southern Russia. It was a major transit point for oil and supplies for the Russian army in World War II, and here the Russian and German armies fought the deadliest battle in WWII, if not in human history. The final defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad marked the turning of the war on the Eastern front. Both sides sought to win regardless of the cost, with wanton disregard for civilian and military life. Stalin went so far as to forbid civilians from fleeing the city in order to deepen the resolve of the city’s defenders. Both sides forbid retreat by the soldiers, on the threat of immediate execution. The final tally of dead from this battle is incomprehensible. On the German side, some ¾ of a million troops were involved and basically all were killed or wounded, except some 6,000 who were taken POWs and managed to survive Siberian work camps. On the Russian side, some 1 ¾ million troops were involved and about half were killed or wounded. To put things in perspective, the number of soldiers killed in the 199 days of the battle of Stalingrad well exceed all American military deaths in WWI, WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. Estimates place the total number killed or wounded, military plus civilian, at 1 ½ to 2 million people.

The film follows a company of German soldiers, storm troopers, who have just finished fighting in Africa and are sent to the battle for Stalingrad. The film focuses on a group of about 6 of these men from this company (well, the core focus group starts larger but their numbers keep getting smaller). We see them as they arrive in the midst of the battle. They step off the train into hell, walking past a long line of severely wounded men and Russian POWs being beaten to death. Less than an hour after their arrival, they are in intense close urban combat. I cannot say how realistic these scenes are, but they are certainty some of the most gripping that I have watched. But they are not heroic pictures of combat. It’s ugly, scary and men soil their pants. As the movie goes on we follow this core group through battles, an overly harsh punishment involving loss of rank and work on mine removal, the deepening chaos of the German army as they are surrounded, desperate battles against the Russian tanks, and finally the collapse of the German army in Stalingrad.

I’m not really into war-movies. There is generally far too much testosterone involved for my liking. But I do spend a bit of time in Central Europe and I am intrigued by differences in the social and political perspectives of Americans versus Europeans, and especially differences in views about war. Two incredibly bloody wars (WWI and WWII) were fought on European soil. The war was especially destructive to the populations in Central and Eastern Europe. The percent of the total population killed in WWII was approximately 10% across Central & Eastern Europe, with Poland and the Soviet Union on the high end with ca 15% of the population killed, Germany in the middle at 10% of the population killed and Czechoslovakia on the low end with 2.5% killed. In contrast outside of Central & Eastern Europe (UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Spain, etc), approximately 1% of the population was killed with France on the high end at 1.3%. So I wanted to watch the film to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of war on this region.

I had approached this film with some trepidation since other reviews had said that it is extremely graphic. I had expected close ups of limbs being blow off and intestines hanging out. However, relative to Saving Private Ryan and Downfall (which I also saw recently), I did not find it particularly gruesome. Let me clarify that, this is a film that attempts to show a deadly battle in a realistic light. There is a lot of blood. Men get limbs blown off. There are dead bodies everywhere. But I did not find the gore gratuitous. For example, there are no close-ups of men with their faces half blown off or intestines hanging out. Although I winced in many places, there was no scene like the beach landing in Saving Private Ryan that I that I felt ill watching.

One of the things that struck me in Stalingrad was the portrayal of the German officers as cruel to the German soldiers. Traitors (those that try to escape by injuring themselves) are summarily executed. A high level officer hoards a warehouse of food while the soldiers starve. We see a scene where dead soldiers are being burned in a big bon fire. The camera lingers for a moment as a dead soldier is thrown onto the burning stack. A group of soldiers threaten a doctor to get care for their friend and are court-marshaled and sent to work on land mine removal. Much like in Downfall, there is a sense that the common solider is there simply to be slaughtered. Individual life is not valued, and soldiers have meaning only in aggregate as little flags that are moved around a map as a division. However, in Downfall this sense of the soldier as mere cannon-fodder comes mainly from Hitler and the generals find this view appalling, whereas in Stalingrad there are high-level generals on the ground with this attitude. In fact, one of the generals in Stalingrad is so nasty, cruel and cowardly, he seems to have been cast from Indian Jones and the Lost Ark. In Downfall, this is not the case, the generals are uniformly professional, courageous and dedicated to the troops. Nonetheless, one detects, like in Downfall, a seething anger about WWII and about the enormous casualties of young German men. Towards the end, one soldier berates an officer who objects that "I'm not a Nazi", that he is worse than a Nazi because he went along with them even knowing how it was going to end.

Stalingrad is considered one of the great anti-war films about WWII. It is anti-war in that it does not glamorize war and exposes the ludicrousness of the Reich propaganda about “Fuhrer, Volk, Vaterland, and the hero’s death”. The would-be German hero dies with soiled pants, screaming from his shredded legs – just like the Russian hero dying while crying for his mother. It is a bitter picture of war. Although Stalingrad is well-regarded for its general realism, it seems to take some liberties by using protagonists that are curiously not racists. The common German view of Slavs in this period was decidedly racist (see for the documentary Mein Krieg), and if one believes the footage from Mein Krieg and the Soviet movies on the Eastern front, Germans were regularly killing civilians – who they regarded as sub-humans and whores. So the scene where the soldiers are stunned that they are ordered to kill civilians who are collaborating with the Russian army seems unbelievable. And that the German officer would defend the Russian boy, who was obviously helping the Russian soldiers in an earlier fight, is also implausible.

Nonetheless, I personally found Stalingrad to be a deeply moving movie, and overall, I recommend it to anyone who liked movies like Das Boot, Downfall or Saving Private Ryan. This is no "pound the chest" war movie. There is no glory in this war-film. After watching it I sat on the bed of my sleeping young son for a long time, and almost cried imagining the millions of mothers that had to send their sons to war, never to return.

To see reviews of other movies and books on the Eastern Front, click here: Eastern Front. Other WWII reviews can be found by clicking the tags in the right navbar.
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Rented from Netflix.
My epinions review of Stalingrad.