Stalingrad

In 2010, courtesy of television coverage, we have again been reminded of how terribly nature's forces can break a nation's backbone, reducing structures and communities to rubble. Haiti, Indonesia, Chile, Pakistan have all been hit by sudden, brute chaos and destruction as Earth's controlled processes are unhinged.

In 1942, something similar - and yet very dissimilar - occurred in Russia, in the city named after the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Stalingrad. There structures also came crashing down as concrete broke like moist cardboard. But it wasn't nature that went amoc in the city at the river Volga. It wasn't impersonal forces that shocked and staggered the minds of its citizens. It was something far more hideous, far more terrifying.


The scourge of war


After having signed a peace accord one year previously, the scourge of Europe and the world, herr Adolf Hitler, cynically and mercilessly chose to deploy his formidable war machine on the unsuspecting communist empire of Soviet Russia. Hybris drove him to attempt to expand his reign of terror beyond Germany's eastern frontier, forever cementing his reputation as a world conqueror, and forever ensuring the domination of his perverted state, the third Reich.


Following the initial rapid succession of victories, Germany's luck began running out as blitzkrieg had to give way to guerilla warfare in the streets of Stalingrad itself. Slowly, a humbled, starved and mollified polulace started to resist the onslaught of enemy air and ground forces, and with whatever weapon could be found, men and women, soldier and civilian, found desperation and unbridled ire welcome allies when facing the Aryan heirs.


Antony Beevor in his bestseller, Stalingrad, has unlike anyone before him researched deeply into the subject matter, the battle of Stalingrad, He terms it the most gruelling and frightful battles of the Second World War. What has come out of this meticulous research, are scintillating analyses and shocking narratives that taken together are bound to unsettle anyone mistakenly assuming that modern man is basically good at heart, a victim of ignorance that can easily or with difficulty be cured by education and therapy.


In and outside of the ruins of Stalingrad, men, women and children in their millions starved, and slowly drifted towards mental and bodily breakdown, or suffered instantaneous deaths as frriendly or enemy fire tore their limbs apart and reduced them to bloody lumps of flesh. Being caught up in a war not of their own making, young GIs were slaughtered daily, suffering the consequences of the appalling egomania and misjudgements of not just one, but two, self-serving tyrants.


My aunt's loss

The father of one of my aunt's was conscripted, forced to indulge and obey the iron will of Adolf Hitler. As a German private he fought his way to Stalingrad and the river Volga, and as a despairing father of two he ended his life somewhere on the Russian steppe. The exact location and manner of death has never been verified, and my aunt has never spoken of her father in my presence, but being 10 years old the year the German war effort ground to a halt, she must have despaired, too, as Daddy never came home again, or as the letters from the distant front suddenly stopped arriving.


He may have ended up as a frozen corpse, lice-infested or with fatal injuries to one or several parts of his body because of the prohibitingly severe Russian winter, one of several factors that brought the German armies to their knees. I remember having seen the photo taken on his wedding day. It still hangs in my uncle's and aunt's livingroom. He must have been in his mid-twenties by then, brimming with youthful optimism, never suspecting that his equallly yoiung wife would, in the near future, witness her life being turned upside down as a Russian bullett or merciless winter cold transformed his vibrant, passionate life pulse into faint heartbeats, vainly resisting the grasp of death.


Oceans of blood spilled in vain


He wasn't the only casualty. He certainly wasn't the sole recipient of life's lethal blows. But regardless of personal culpability on the part of assailant or defender in this war theatre, what transpired in or around Stalingrad in the bleak winter of 1942-43, will never cease to shock. Courtesy of the immoral and depraved ambitions of a former Austrian corporal, the world was thrust headlong into a mire of unspeakable suffering. And young men half my age died needlessly and pointlessly.


As did 50 million people all over the globe from 1939-1945.