AndyMc

It's 1942. You're 21 years old in the German Sixth Army, and you're in Stalingrad. When you got here in late summer, everyone said it would be over in weeks. The city was already in ruins from the bombing. All you had to do was take what was left. It didn't work out like that. Now you fight for single buildings. Single floors. Single rooms. The Russians are in the next room, or the floor above you, or the cellar below. You can hear them talking through the walls. A staircase can change hands three times in a day. The soldiers call it Rattenkrieg. Rat war. You fight with grenades, shovels, knives, whatever works. Snipers are everywhere. Stick your head up for a second too long and you're dead. Men learn to never stand in front of a window, never light a cigarette at night, never walk the same path twice. The Russians stay close on purpose. So close that the Luftwaffe can't bomb them without hitting you. At night the Soviet rocket launchers open up. You hear them before they hit, a long howling scream from dozens of rockets fired at once. Then the ground explodes all around you. Then, in November, the news comes that the Russians have broken through on both sides of the city. The whole army is surrounded. Around a quarter million men, trapped. Everyone is told to hold on. Göring has promised the air force will fly in everything you need. It never comes close. Some days a few planes make it. Most days not enough. Then winter comes. It drops to 30 below. You don't have proper winter clothes. Men wrap themselves in blankets, rags, anything they can take off the dead. Frostbite turns fingers and toes black. Men lose feet. The ground is frozen too hard to bury anyone, so the bodies just stay where they fall. The food runs out. Your bread ration gets smaller and smaller until it's a slice a day. The army eats its horses. Then there are no more horses. Men are so weak they can barely lift a rifle. Some just sit down in the snow and don't get up. Everyone is covered in lice. You can't wash. You can't get warm. Wounds don't heal. Dysentery and typhus spread through the bunkers. The airfields become the only way out. Wounded men drag themselves there hoping to get on a plane. When one lands, there's a crush to get aboard. Some men hang on to the outside of the plane as it takes off. Christmas comes. Men sing in the bunkers and write letters home, knowing it might be the last thing their families ever hear from them. For a lot of them, it was. By January the pocket is shrinking every day. The airfields fall. There's no ammunition left, no medicine, no food. The wounded are left in cellars where nobody can help them. At the end of January 1943, the army surrenders. Around 91,000 Germans were marched off into Soviet captivity. Most were sick, starving, and frozen when they started. Many died in the first weeks. Only about 5,000 of them ever made it back to Germany. The last ones didn't come home until 1955.