30/07/2013
Writer. Law degree from UCM and International Relations from Columbia University, NY
The Führer wanted to annex Russia up to the Urals and enslave the Soviet population. Hitler knew very well how to kill outsiders. Stalin killed even more and better, but of his own, including almost all the officers of the Red Army and Navy in the years before the War. Both of them, coming from the rich authoritarian socialist tradition, national socialist and Bolshevik, respectively, had become strategically paired in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
When the Wehrmacht finally invaded on June 22, 1941, Stalin's purges made Operation Barbarossa become a walk on the three fronts (Leningrad at the north, Moscow in the centre and Ukraine at the south). The survival of the Soviet Union, and of the Russian nation itself, seemed then a miracle. Stalin made plans to evacuate himself to Siberia. Winter took the Germans unaware when they were in front of Leningrad and Moscow, but with the expectation to pull out all the stops in the spring of 1942. This gave precious time to Soviet recovery.
In the south, come April of 1942, the Germans resumed their race, through the Don and the Volga toward the oil fields of the Caspian Sea. Stalingrad, on the western bank of the Volga, seemed vital, not only to advance, but also to cut the power supply of the Red Army itself. The city, however, was at the narrowest point between the Don and the Volga (40 kilometres) and Hitler despised the arduousness and length of his supply lines and the risk of being surrounded--in a very narrow space and with two streams on each side--if the city was not taken quickly. Operations started in July, but it was not until August when, in a matter of days, the German Sixth Corps and the Luftwaffe destroyed the city. But the resistance of the Red Army, with the Volga on their back, bogged the Germans down in combat forcing them to take building by building. The Wehrmacht never managed to cross the Volga, and never could manage afterwards.
Marshal Zhukov, in effect Supreme Commander of all Soviet forces (Stalin actually held the title) and his chief of staff, General Vasilevsky, devised the surrounding strategy of the Red Army, called Operation Uranus, which encircled the troops of General Von Paulus around Stalingrad until the exhaustion of troops and weaponry. Von Paulus surrendered on February 2, 1943, leaving behind him 150,000 dead Germans and 90,000 German prisoners, plus 2 million military and civilian casualties on the Russian side. It was the first German defeat and it was inflicted by the courage and patriotism of an entire people, despite its unspeakable political leadership.
The Soviet people and its army left more than 20 million dead. Victory in World War II, more than to any other nation, belongs to that ephemeral phenomenon--only real between 1941 and 1945--called the Soviet people.