Not even the Russian winter covers the traces of the monstrous clash of Soviet and Nazi German forces that took place at Stalingrad from July 12, 1942 to February 2, 1943.
As a lingering reminder of the horrors of war, unrecovered human ribs, thigh bones and pelvises jut gauntly from the snow on the steppe outside the southern Russian city, now called Volgograd. Many of the estimated half million Red Army soldiers and 200 000 opposing Wehrmacht and Italian, Romanian and Hungarian troops who fell in the pivotal World War II battle still await a decent burial.
”It looks even worse in spring when the snow melts,” says local historian Svetlana Agaztseva as she leads the way across the wasteland inside the triangle of railway lines at Gumrak, just north of the city and the mighty River Volga.
”Elsewhere the bones have been buried. But here are just too many places littered with remains,” she says regretfully, pointing out the rusting filter of a German gas mask. Beside it lay parts of a skeleton, the skull is missing.
The place is intensely forbidding. Residents of New Hope, the nearest settlement, try to avoid it altogether.
Thirty kilometres northwest of the city, visitors are shown an important symbol of the eventual Russian-German reconciliation, the Rossoshka cemetery. Since the 1990s many of the former enemies have rested here in relative dignity in adjacent mass graves.
”Erwin Beyer 19.06.1922 – 30.09.42” reads one of more than 10 000 inscriptions on the 500-metre perimeter wall. The Russian section starts just over a small road. Barely a tree or bush shelters the burial ground and the site is whipped by icy wind from the steppe.
During Soviet times, building a proper cemetery for the ”Hitlerites” was unthinkable. Deposits of their remains were left unmarked while stark monuments to the Red Army’s Stalingrad victory were erected on a swell of sheer hatred for the Germans. Later, the Communist regime preferred to simultaneously celebrate itself and the overall victory over fascism with more majestic constructions. Today, the city centre is essentially a large memorial park with tanks, eternal flames and guards of honour provided by local schools.
As the loathing for the Nazi invaders gradually receded in the post war decades, Volgograders began to show more interest in the tragic fate of the German 6th Army. Every child knows that Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered in the cellar of the central department store on Peace Street, which is preserved in its original state and can only be viewed with the help of local contacts.
Between cooking pots and domestic utensils an inconspicuous door marked ”staff entrance” leads 20 steps into the rambling basement.
In its dark musty depths, one can almost feel the despair of the German commanders as the battle reached its culmination and they took final refuge below ground.
In the marshal’s private room, barely ten metres square, shards of daylight filter down from a small window aperture. Volgograd businessmen have now donated funds to convert the cellar into a museum where the life and death of the German forces will be presented to the public, although some Communists and veterans have objected to what they consider to be ”a monument to Paulus”.
In one already renovated room hangs a picture of a German soldier with the inscription ”Hold out, and the Fuehrer will get us out”. Next to it, an issue of the Voelkischer Beobachter newspaper dated February 4, 1943, two days after the final surrender, announces: ”The 6th Army’s struggle in Stalingrad is over. They died so that Germany may live.”
More than half a million Russian civilians also died in the hail of bombs and vicious street fighting. Survivors of the battle needed more than a decade just to establish basic amenities in the ruins. Some lived for years inside crashed German aircraft because hardly a house roof remained intact.
Renamed in 1961, eight years after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the city bears the scars even today. Meanwhile, the optimism of the postwar years and the collective reconstruction effort seem to have dissipated in the steppe wind.
”Families these days are busy with the worries of daily life,” said Viktor Pilipenko, the 31-year-old vice principal of a local institute.
Incredibly, Nazi swastika graffiti has appeared in recent years, even though the city suffered from the invaders like no other. One explanation given is that economic hardship and spiritual disorientation has drawn some young people to right-wing extremism.
This winter, barely a visitor comes to the giant 85-metre-high concrete Motherland statue that stands on the bitterly fought over Mamayev Kurgan hill.
The steps vanished weeks ago under a treacherous layer of ice and no one clears them. In the town centre, meanwhile, the number of medal-laden veterans is dwindling fast with every year, say the locals.
But Volgograders will tell you that the legacy of the battle is not just tragic but proud and enduring, and will outlast the anxieties of the modern day, even 60 years on. – Sapa-DPA