No other name symbolizing defeat
is engrained as much in the German collective consciousness as Stalingrad.
"Who´s that?" I asked my grandmother, pointing at the black-and-white photograph with the black ribbon.
“My brother, he went missing in action in Stalingrad.“
That was probably 45 or more years ago, but I still remember that, it was my introduction to the horrors of Worl War II.
To say it very clearly, I am no revanchist and I am basically glad, us Germans lost, sounds fair to me, otherwise I today might be one of the bad guys too in a Nazi occupied Europe, like in “The Man in the High Castle“.
Yesterday, on February 2, Russia celebrated the 75th anniversary of one of her finest hours, victory over the German Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, defeating the 6th Army, marking one of the most decisive moments in WW II, probably even the turning point.
Like Napoleon´s French army before Moscow, now the Germans, starting out as an unstoppable force, had met their master.
There are movies about it, documentaries too, about the unimaginable suffering, soldiers of both armies went through, where the prospect of death was less horror than life, but salvation from suffering.
Nothing can be done about the past, but we can learn from it, never to repeat it again.
I think history teaches us, that whenever Germans and Russians were friends and allies, like in the Napoleonic wars, both peoples faired well and whenever they were at each others throat, immense suffering occurred for both.
As an anarchist I despise communism as much as fascism, both are just two sides of the same coin of authoritarianism, and, if you would like to play the numbers game, I guess more people were killed by communism and its terrible experiments of forced collectivisation (just think about Mao´s Great Leap Forward, the Holodomor in Ukraine and Pol Pot, to name a few events which cost the lives of millions), but, you have to give it to the Russians, by their immense sacrifice they were able to defeat the Nazis. They also had quite some military geniuses, like Marshal Zhukov, conqueror of Berlin.
It is in vain that you think that victory can be achieved by using "people's meat."
Victory is achieved through the art of combat. War is waged with skill, not with people's lives.
— Order of G. K. Zhukov to I. G. Zakharkin on 7 March 1942
March "Heroes of Stalingrad".
Its joyfulness in stark contrast to the immense suffering that occurred there.
While everybody knows about the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, not many people know or think about that the Soviet Union lost an estimated 20 million people in WW II. Stalin himself held the numbers of Russian losses intentionally low in the beginning, for propaganda reasons, to keep up morale.
The Wehrmacht itself got surprised by and could not handle the sheer numbers of POWs they made in the beginning, it is estimated that 50% of Russian POWs died in the German camps, because the Germans were either not willing or not able to provide all those prisoners with food.
Compare this with about 1.5 % of German POWs who died in the Allied Rhine meadows camps and you see the price Russia was paying, compared to all other war participants, even the Germans who started it all.
All this seemed to be forgotten yesterday, when not a single politician from the German government went to Wolgograd, as Stalingrad is called now, to participate in the memorial celebrations.
Once again Russia is the enemy, with German politicians doing the bidding of their American masters and the NATO ever more sabber-rattling in Eastern Europe, right at the Russian border.
I´m no fan of any politician, so also not of Putin, but if you listen to his speeches, and I assume they have been translated correctly, but he also still speaks good German from his time with the KGB 😎, so sometimes I don´t depend on translation, he quite often makes quite some sense and I simply don´t see the demon, Western propaganda is trying to make him into, in him.
"When we dehumanize others, we lose our own humanity."
Claude AnShin Thomas
The late Helmut Schmidt, Germany´s quintessential elder statesman, once said:
“Peace is more important than human rights.“
And I freaked out!
What is this old fool talking about?, I thought, but then I understood that he was right, because war is the ultimate violator of human rights and all this American talk about freedom, democracy and human rights, in defense of which they bomb the shit out of other people all day long, is bullshit anyway.
So let´s just hope, that despite our stupid politicians, the Russian and the German people can be on friendly terms and never again at war with each other.
Because if the Americans and their NATO allies would ever be crazy enough to attack Russia, they might be in for a big surprise to which the horrors of Stalingrad would pale in comparison.