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Good Morning,

Seventy-five years ago today the German Sixth Army finally surrendered at Stalingrad, after bitter fighting lasting many months. Together with Field Marshall Montgomery’s success at el-Alamein, the Red Army’s victory on the Volga marked the turning point of World War II.

The struggle for Stalingrad was extraordinarily fierce. The battle was fought district for district, house for house. The Russians supplied their beleaguered troops, often short of every commodity but courage, across the waters of the Volga, exposed to shelling and perilous ice-flows in the winter. They held on in the devastated city with terrible tenacity, losing almost half a million dead.

Eventually they counter-attacked in a carefully camouflaged pincer movement. They cut off von Paulus’s Sixth Army and, aided by the Russian winter, forced him, against Hitler’s personal orders, to surrender.

Of the 91,000 German troops captured at Stalingrad, only 6,000 survived. It was a bitter response to how the Nazis had treated their Russian prisoners of war, letting them die of cold, starvation and disease.

The novelist Vasily Grossman was a reporter with the Red Army. He wrote after Stalingrad:
A killed Romanian and a killed Russian were lying next to each other on the battlefield. Our soldier had a letter: ‘Hello Daddy. I miss you very much. I am writing this and tears are pouring. That was your daughter Nina…

No doubt many of the ordinary German soldiers who perished had children too. They’d been lovers, fathers, before Hitler summoned them to kill and die.

God, do not let evil ideologies lead us into hatred. Set respect for all humanity deeply in our hearts.