What Göring Said After the Luftwaffe Failed to Resupply Stalingrad

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[00:00:07]300,000 German soldiers were surrounded, starving, and waiting to be saved.

[00:00:13]One man told Hitler he could save them.

[00:00:15]He was lying.

[00:00:17]He knew he was lying.

[00:00:19]And when his own chief of staff tried to correct the record, he was told to stay quiet. That single conversation, held in a cold room in the forests of East Prussia on November the 25th, 1942, condemned a quarter million men to death or Soviet captivity.

[00:00:36]Fewer than 5,000 of them would ever see Germany again.

[00:00:40]This is what happened in that room.

[00:00:43]And this is what Hermann Göring said afterward, when the bodies were already freezing on the steppe.

[00:00:50]Wednesday, the 25th of November, 1942.

[00:00:54]The Wolf's Lair, East Prussia.

[00:00:56]Adolf Hitler stands over a map table.

[00:01:00]Around him, Field Marshal [music] Keitel, Operations Chief Jodl, and General Kurt Zeitzler, Army Chief of Staff for barely 2 months.

[00:01:10]The map in front of them shows [music] a catastrophe already in progress.

[00:01:14]6 days earlier, the Red Army had launched Operation Uranus, a pincer attack [music] that tore through the Romanian flanks north and south of Stalingrad, and snapped shut inside the ring.

[00:01:26]300,000 German soldiers, 25,000 horses, 3,500 artillery pieces. [music] The city they had bled for across 3 months had become their cage.

[00:01:37]Zeitzler is pushing for a breakout. The 6th Army's [music] commander, Friedrich Paulus, still has fuel and ammunition for perhaps [music] 10 days of hard movement.

[00:01:48]The window exists. Every hour [music] it stays open costs them options they cannot get back.

[00:01:54]Then, Hermann Göring walks into the room.

[00:01:57]Göring is 49, Reichsmarschall, a rank invented for him alone.

[00:02:04]The second most powerful man in the Third Reich.

[00:02:07]And by this point in the war, a man whose confidence had long since stopped being supported by evidence. [music] He tells Hitler the Luftwaffe can supply the Sixth Army by air.

[00:02:18]Zeitzler cuts in immediately.

[00:02:20]The army needs 300 tons of supplies every day just [music] to survive.

[00:02:25]The transport fleet cannot deliver that.

[00:02:28]Not in a Russian winter, not against the Soviet air defenses tightening around the pocket by the hour. Göring doesn't flinch.

[00:02:36]"I can manage that." He says.

[00:02:38]"The Luftwaffe just can't do it."

[00:02:41]Zeitzler fires back.

[00:02:43]Göring holds his ground. Zeitzler looks at him.

[00:02:47]"It's a lie."

[00:02:48]Hitler speaks. He says he is obliged to believe Göring, the Reichsmarschall. The meeting ends. The airlift will begin. In the 71 days that follow, the Luftwaffe will deliver an average of 117 tons per day.

[00:03:04]The army needs 300. On most days, [music] what arrives is closer to 70. On many days, nothing at all. Of the 300,000 men in the pocket, roughly 91,000 will survive to surrender.

[00:03:18]About 5,000 will ever come home.

[00:03:22]To understand what Göring promised, you have to understand what the Sixth Army actually was.

[00:03:28]By November 1942, the Sixth Army was the largest single German field formation on the [music] Eastern Front.

[00:03:35]Friedrich Paulus, its commanding general, was 51 years old, a careful staff officer who had driven the army across the steppe and into Stalingrad's rubble through the summer.

[00:03:47]By autumn, his men controlled most of the city.

[00:03:50]But the army that took the city was not the army now trapped in it.

[00:03:55]Months of house-to-house fighting had already ground [music] it down.

[00:03:59]When the ring closed, the Sixth Army contained not just infantry and armor, but the full weight of a modern field force. Signal units, [music] supply troops, field hospitals, repair workshops, artillery battalions, anti-aircraft batteries, [music] all of them needed to eat. All of them needed ammunition. The horses needed fodder or they would die.

[00:04:22]>> [music] >> Without the horses, the army could not move its guns.

[00:04:26]The supply officers had done the arithmetic. To operate offensively, 750 tons per day. To hold its lines, 500 [music] tons per day. To remain in being, the bare minimum, just to not die [music] faster than replaceable, 300 tons per day.

[00:04:44]Goering had promised 300.

[00:04:47]His own transport officers told him they could manage [music] 350, and only for a short period under ideal conditions.

[00:04:55]The Luftwaffe's total Ju 52 [music] fleet across all fronts numbered approximately 750 aircraft.

[00:05:02]A third were already committed [music] to supplying Rommel in North Africa.

[00:05:06]The training schools were stripped to fill the gaps.

[00:05:10]Instructor pilots were pulled [music] from classrooms and handed mission briefings.

[00:05:14]Aircraft designed for short Mediterranean hops were rerouted to frozen Ukrainian airfields and placed on rotation [music] over the Russian steppe.

[00:05:24]The Junkers Ju 52, the primary aircraft for the operation, [music] was a three-engine corrugated metal transport that had been in service since the car early 1930s.

[00:05:36]Reliable in moderate conditions, it carried approximately two tons of cargo [music] per flight.

[00:05:42]For the Sixth Army to receive 300 tons per day, [music] at least 150 fully loaded aircraft would have to land at Pitomnik airfield inside the pocket every single day.

[00:05:54]Pitomnik sat 260 km from the main Luftwaffe staging base at Tatsinskaya in Ukraine.

[00:06:03]The round trip took roughly 6 hours in acceptable weather.

[00:06:06]In theory, one aircraft could fly two sorties per day. The Russian winter was not interested in theory.

[00:06:13]November 29th, [music] 1942.

[00:06:17]Tatsinskaya airfield, Ukraine.

[00:06:20]Lieutenant General Martin Fiebig, 49 years old from Schweidnitz in Silesia, arrived at Tatsinskaya to take command of the airlift.

[00:06:30]He had already told Paulus's chief of staff that supplying an entire army by air was impossible.

[00:06:37]He had said it [music] clearly, on the record.

[00:06:39]Then the order came down and he went to Tatsinskaya [music] and tried to do it anyway.

[00:06:45]What he found shaped everything that followed.

[00:06:48]The airfield had no winter preparation.

[00:06:51]Cold start [music] procedures for aircraft engines, standard protocol in sub-zero conditions, had not been distributed to arriving crews.

[00:07:00]Aircraft sent from warm climates came without proper lubricants. Hydraulic lines [music] cracked. Instruments fogged and froze.

[00:07:08]Ground crews worked in minus 30°C and below maintaining aircraft in the open because the hangars were inadequate and spare [music] part stocks had not arrived.

[00:07:19]On the days the weather allowed flying at all, the Ju 52s climbed through cloud and ice and turned east [music] toward the Volga.

[00:07:28]The route crossed Soviet-controlled airspace.

[00:07:32]Red Army anti-aircraft batteries had been [music] positioned specifically to cover the approach corridors.

[00:07:38]Soviet fighter regiments, flying lend-lease aircraft from Britain [music] and the United States, increasingly modern, increasingly well flown, patrolled the route.

[00:07:49]The Soviets also jammed German navigational signals, and in several cases transmitted [music] false signals that guided German aircraft directly into Soviet-held airstrips.

[00:07:59]Inside the pocket, the planes came down at Pitomnik.

[00:08:03]The runway was 1,500 m long.

[00:08:07]It had lights for night operations. It had a field hospital beside [music] it.

[00:08:12]The hospital was why young Luftwaffe crews came back from [music] their first mission shaken, or did not come back the same afterward.

[00:08:20]The edges of the runway were lined with German soldiers.

[00:08:23]They lay on stretchers, sat propped against hardened snow, or simply lay flat in the open in temperatures [music] that killed the unwounded within hours of exposure.

[00:08:35]These were the wounded, men assessed as serious enough to merit evacuation, but not critical enough to be inside [music] the tents.

[00:08:43]The tents were already full. The dead, men who had died waiting for aircraft that did not [music] come, or died of cold overnight, could not be buried.

[00:08:53]The ground was too hard.

[00:08:55]They were left where they lay [music] until the living needed the space.

[00:09:00]Flight crews loaded the worst cases, closed the cargo doors on men too far gone to protest, and took off.

[00:09:07]A Ju 52 could carry at most around 20 [music] seriously wounded men.

[00:09:12]As they taxied to the runway, they looked back and saw hundreds of faces watching them leave.

[00:09:18]The daily weight delivered in those first weeks averaged 84 [music] tons.

[00:09:23]The army was supposed to receive 300.

[00:09:26]Göring's promise on November the 25th had not been made in ignorance.

[00:09:30]His own chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, had quickly realized that the airlift figures being used were based on incorrect data and told Göring directly.

[00:09:41]He asked Göring to correct Hitler's understanding before the plan was locked in.

[00:09:45]Göring told him it was too late.

[00:09:48]He called Hitler and repeated his unconditional assurance.

[00:09:51]In Southern Russia, General Wolfram von Richthofen, the commander of all Luftwaffe air forces in the region, a decorated officer with impeccable credentials, had already called the air lift sheer madness and said so to anyone in authority who would listen.

[00:10:08]Major General Wolfgang Pickert, the senior Luftwaffe officer physically inside the Stalingrad pocket, had been shown the plan and replied, "Supply an entire army by the air?

[00:10:20]Absolutely impossible. It simply cannot be done, especially in this weather."

[00:10:26]Pickert was standing in that weather when he said it.

[00:10:29]The objections had come from every direction, from the transport commander, from the field army, from the officer inside the pocket, from the air fleet commander, from the Luftwaffe's own chief of staff.

[00:10:43]Every man with direct operational knowledge said the [music] same thing at the same time on the record.

[00:10:50]Göring said none of it to Hitler.

[00:10:52]He said the [music] opposite.

[00:10:54]And while the air lift struggled and failed and killed its crews, Göring spent much of that Russian winter in Italy, traveling with his staff, wearing his fur coat, acquiring art.

[00:11:05]He told Hitler as late as mid-December that the supply situation in Stalingrad [music] was not so bad.

[00:11:13]General Zeitzler, who had called the air lift a lie in the November meeting, reduced his own personal rations to match the level of the men inside the pocket.

[00:11:23]He lost 26 [music] lb in 2 weeks before Hitler ordered him to stop.

[00:11:29]December 23rd, >> [music] >> 1942.

[00:11:33]Tatsinskaya Airfield.

[00:11:36]Soviet tanks had been moving for days.

[00:11:39]General V.M. Badanov's 24th Tank Corps was pushing southwest, targeting the airfields.

[00:11:46]Fiebig had been requesting permission to evacuate his aircraft for days.

[00:11:51]The intelligence was not ambiguous.

[00:11:54]Göring had forbidden any withdrawal until the airfield came under direct fire.

[00:11:59]The tanks arrived at 5:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve while flight operations were still ongoing.

[00:12:06]There had been no [music] warning to ground crews. No standing procedure had been created to scramble the [music] aircraft because no standing procedure had been authorized. Of the 180 Ju 52 transports [music] at Tatsinskaya that morning, 124 managed to get airborne.

[00:12:24]Many without [music] full crews, without complete fuel loads, without gear properly stowed.

[00:12:30]At least 50 aircraft were overrun on the runway. Soviet tank tracks crushed them where they stood.

[00:12:36]Another 50 aircraft were found at the rail station still crated, not yet assembled. They burned with everything else.

[00:12:43]The Red Army also captured the fuel depot. 300 tons of aviation oil and gasoline, five complete ammunition stores.

[00:12:52]The surviving aircraft relocated to Salsk, [music] over 200 miles from the pocket.

[00:12:57]The round trip to Pitomnik was now at or beyond the Ju 52's operational range.

[00:13:03]The margin that had always been thin was gone.

[00:13:06]Inside the pocket, the ration issue changed immediately.

[00:13:10]Each soldier received one loaf of bread shared between five men.

[00:13:15]Horse meat became the primary protein source and the number of horses still alive was falling.

[00:13:21]The army had entered the pocket with 25,000 horses. They were eating them in the order they were least needed for moving guns.

[00:13:29]In early January, the daily calorie allocation per man fell below 1,000.

[00:13:35]An adult in a warm, sedentary environment needs at least 1,800.

[00:13:41]These men were fighting, digging, carrying, and surviving minus 30°.

[00:13:47]The army's medical officers began recording deaths from starvation.

[00:13:52]The airlift's daily average from the fall of Tatsinskaya to the end of the operation below 100 tons, on many days zero.

[00:14:02]January the 30th, 1943.

[00:14:05]Berlin, the Air Ministry.

[00:14:09]It was the 10th anniversary of [music] the Nazi seizure of power.

[00:14:13]Hitler was scheduled to speak.

[00:14:15]Göring was scheduled to speak.

[00:14:18]The Sixth Army >> [music] >> inside its pocket outside Stalingrad was by this point a dying institution.

[00:14:23][music] Paulus had told Hitler it would be finished within days.

[00:14:29]The army was out of fuel, nearly out of ammunition, and past the point where organized defense was possible across most of the perimeter.

[00:14:37]Göring broadcast his address from the Air Ministry in Berlin.

[00:14:41]He compared the Sixth Army to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

[00:14:45]The broadcast reached radios inside the pocket.

[00:14:49]In a theater that had been converted into a hospital and packed with wounded men, Göring's voice was immediately recognized. Someone shouted to turn up the volume. Others shouted to switch it off and cursed him.

[00:15:02]One officer inside the pocket described it as their own funeral address being delivered by the man who had put them there. [music] Gottfried von Bismarck, a senior officer in the pocket, called the effect on the men macabre.

[00:15:16]Some officers, in the dark humor that only the genuinely doomed can manage, noted that the comparison to Masada might have been more accurate than Thermopylae.

[00:15:27]The broadcast ended with Bruckner's [music] Fifth Symphony.

[00:15:32]Two days later, on February 1st, [music] Paulus, Hitler had promoted him to Field Marshal that same morning in the expectation that a German Field Marshal would die rather [music] than surrender, sent his final signal.

[00:15:46]On February 2nd, >> [music] >> the last organized resistance in the northern pocket ceased.

[00:15:53]Approximately [music] 91,000 German soldiers walked into Soviet captivity.

[00:15:58]Fewer than 5,000 would return to Germany, some not until 1955. [music] The losses of the airlift were tallied in the weeks that followed.

[00:16:08]4,487 sorties [music] had reached the pocket or dropped supplies over it during 71 days.

[00:16:16]Total supplies delivered, just over 8,300 metric tons. Average per day, 117 tons. Minimum required to sustain the army, 300.

[00:16:29]What the army had originally asked for, 750.

[00:16:33]Aircraft destroyed or written off, 488 total.

[00:16:38]274 missing or confirmed destroyed. 214 damaged beyond repair.

[00:16:45]The aircraft lost were not only Ju 52s.

[00:16:48]In the desperation to meet tonnage targets that were never met, the Luftwaffe had thrown everything into the operation. Ju 86 trainers, wholly unsuited to the role. Heinkel 111 bombers with hastily modified cargo fittings. Focke-Wulf 200 Condors pulled from maritime patrol. Ju 90 long-range aircraft pressed into rotation.

[00:17:11]Bomber crews trained for attack missions flew long, slow, straight approaches [music] into Soviet anti-aircraft corridors, predictable and low, and loaded with food instead of bombs.

[00:17:24]The training schools stripped to feed the operation did not recover quickly.

[00:17:28]The instructor pilots who flew and died over the steppe would have trained the next generation of German air crew.

[00:17:34]They did not come [music] back to teach anyone.

[00:17:37]The Soviet Air Force, meanwhile, had learned from every week of the operation. The coordination between fighter units and anti-aircraft batteries, the layered defense, [music] the flexible positioning, tactics refined against the Stalingrad airlift [music] became the template for Soviet air operations for the rest of the war.

[00:17:56]In the weeks after [music] the surrender, Hitler met with Manstein and accepted some responsibility for the [music] disaster.

[00:18:02]Then, he blamed Göring.

[00:18:05]Göring was not removed. [music] He was not tried.

[00:18:08]He remained Reichsmarschall. What changed was subtler.

[00:18:12]Hitler stopped believing him.

[00:18:15]The conversations that had once been long and frequent became short, then rare, then stopped.

[00:18:21]Göring was excluded from the senior conferences where he had previously [music] sat at the center of power.

[00:18:27]The relationship built across 20 years and sustained by a series of promises, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, and now Stalingrad, had finally accumulated more failures than Hitler could absorb.

[00:18:40]Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe's Chief of Staff, [music] the man who had found the error in the airlift figures, told Göring and been forbidden from correcting it, died by suicide in August 1943, 8 months after the surrender.

[00:18:56]He left a note.

[00:18:58]He asked that Göring not attend his [music] funeral.

[00:19:01]Göring stood trial at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946.

[00:19:07]He testified at length.

[00:19:09]He was convicted on all four counts.

[00:19:12]He died in his cell on October the 15th, 1946, 2 hours before his scheduled hanging by cyanide.

[00:19:20]Martin Fiebig, the man at [music] Tatsinskaya who had asked permission to evacuate his aircraft for days before the tanks came, who had kept the diary [music] that listed every reason the airlift was doomed, who had been right about all of it from [music] the first day, survived the war, was captured by Yugoslav forces [music] in May 1945, and was executed by firing squad on October the 24th, 1947, for the bombing of Belgrade [music] in 1941.

[00:19:50]The ground where Pitomnik airfield once stood is now farmland, 15 km west of the city of Volgograd.

[00:19:58]There is no runway. There is no marker for the hospital tents, the rows of frozen men waiting beside the strip, the stacked [music] dead that could not be buried because the ground was too hard.

[00:20:09]The soil has been turned over by agricultural machinery for more than 80 years.

[00:20:14]In spring, it grows wheat.

[00:20:17]The German military cemetery at Rossoshka, outside Volgograd, holds approximately 50,000 German soldiers.

[00:20:25]Most are in mass graves.

[00:20:27]The individual names, where they could be recovered, appear on flat stone markers.

[00:20:33]Many could not be recovered.

[00:20:35]Those markers list only a number, the count of unidentified dead beneath each stone.

[00:20:42]The cemetery was built on the site of one of the Sixth Army's own forward airstrips.

[00:20:47]The ground under the graves was once a place where men stood in the cold and looked up at the sky and calculated whether what they heard was a Ju 52 anti-aircraft fire, and whether this time the plane would bring enough.

[00:21:00]It never did.