140 Men Entered Stalingrad. 57 Came Back. This Is What Happened

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:05]The sky above Stalingrad was red, not the red of dawn, it was nearly midnight.

[00:00:11]It was the red of fires that had been burning [music] for weeks without stopping, and I watched it sitting in the dark of a cellar in Gumrak to the west of the city cleaning the bolt of my carbine for the third time that day. Not because it needed it, because it was the only gesture that made sense at that hour with the intermittent thunder of artillery making the dust tremble from the walls. The next morning, the 518th Infantry Regiment was going into that inferno. I had been serving for 16 months as an Unteroffizier in the second company of the second battalion, 11 men under my command. Our mission, within the 295th Infantry Division of the 51st Army Corps, was to capture Hill 102.

[00:00:59]The burial mound the Soviets called Mamayev Kurgan, the highest point in the city, the place from which you could see everything, the destroyed rooftops, the burning factories, and the wide dark Volga behind it all.

[00:01:14]On the other side stood General Chuikov's 62nd Army with orders to yield not a single meter. Not that they needed the orders.

[00:01:24]In the days that followed, we understood they did not. The summer of 1942 [music] had been one of constant advance. Our division had crossed Ukraine in May, crossed the Don in early August, and pushed across the dry treeless step towards the Volga at a pace that seemed to confirm everything we had been told about the enemy's state of collapse. The step was flat and hot and dusty in a way I had never seen before, a horizon that always retreated at the same [music] distance no matter how many kilometers we covered, and across that vastness, the army moved along dirt roads that threw up clouds of orange dust visible for many kilometers in every direction.

[00:02:07]We were an army easy to see. The enemy knew where we were, but he was retreating, and that seemed to be what mattered. Our division had been formed in August of 1939 around Magdeburg, made up of men from Wehrkreis 11, men from Saxony-Anhalt for the most part, some from factory workers' families, some from farming families in the eastern parts of the region.

[00:02:33]I was from Halberstadt, the son of a grain merchant, and had entered the army in October of '39 as a Schütze by conscription, not by choice. I was 26 years old in September [music] of '42 and held the rank of Unteroffizier by seniority, and because I had survived circumstances that had done away with others.

[00:02:55]I was neither particularly brave nor particularly careful. I was persistent, which is perhaps worth more in war than both those qualities combined.

[00:03:05]My platoon was the first section of the second company. Under my direct command were 11 men [music] when we entered Stalingrad, two of them replacements who had arrived in August to fill losses from the Don.

[00:03:19]My Hauptmann was Hauptmann Dietrich Horstmann, a man from Hanover, who smoked a pipe during lulls in the fighting and had the quality of never appearing surprised by anything, which was either genuine or a very well-maintained performance, and in either case was reassuring to the men who depended on his orders. Major Albrecht Wenninger commanded our battalion, but we rarely saw him during the months in Stalingrad. The war in the city was too fragmented for senior officers to to frequently at forward positions. In the week before the main assault of the 13th of September, our company occupied positions in the suburb of Gumrak, to the west of the city, in a series of residential buildings that had been partially destroyed by the August bombardments, and which we shared with a company of engineers whose presence was never clearly explained.

[00:04:15]Gumrak had been a [music] small town with its Soviet apartment blocks, its modest factories, its urban gardens that residents had planted in the inner courtyards. It was now a collection of pockmarked facades and rubble, inhabited by soldiers who slept in the cellars and ground floors, and moved from building to building when the artillery made the street too dangerous.

[00:04:39]The days before the assault were given over to preparations that I supervised with whatever care the circumstances allowed, checking each man's weapons, distributing and counting grenades and magazines, cleaning the automatic weapons that the step dust [music] had a tendency to infiltrate. The Karabiner 98k was a robust weapon, but the bolt mechanism suffered from accumulated dust if not cleaned regularly, and in that terrain, regularity was hard to maintain.

[00:05:10]The MP 40s were more tolerant of dust, but less precise at distances above 100 m, which in a city in ruins was a lesser limitation than in open country. The August heat had eased slightly, but the dust was constant, and the stench of the carcasses of animals killed along the supply roads soaked into everything.

[00:05:32]Soviet artillery fired regularly on the roads east of Gumrak, [music] and supply trucks moved at night with their headlights off, lurching through the craters left by the previous day's shells. Food arrived cold and in quantities that satisfied no one. The older men, those who had been outside Moscow in the winter of '41, looked out towards the distant city in a silence I preferred not to interpret too carefully. The rumors were constant.

[00:06:01]They said the city would be taken within a week. They said Soviet reserves had run out, that Stalin had forbidden any withdrawal, and that the defenders would fight to the last man, and that men who do not retreat [music] end up dying where they stand, which would be advantageous. I listened to the rumors and gave them little weight. For 2 years, we had been listening to rumors and the war continued.

[00:06:27]But there was in the men an optimism that was real, not manufactured. The belief that this would be the final effort, and afterwards there might be some form of end that none of us could imagine precisely, but that would be different from what was happening.

[00:06:44]I shared some of that optimism.

[00:06:46]It is hard not to share optimism when one is surrounded by men who have it.

[00:06:50]Gefreiter Reinhold Backers, my most trusted man in the section, was from Quedlinburg, 23 years old, and had a girlfriend named Ingrid, whom he spoke of often enough that I knew her name and her profession.

[00:07:05]She was a nurse.

[00:07:06]Backs had a rare quality among young men. He did not try to seem different from what he was. He did not force courage. He did not feel. Did not feign a calm he did not have. But neither did he amplify his fear for the sake of solidarity or attention. He simply was what he was, [music] which was a competent soldier with a reasonable fear of reasonably frightening things and the capacity to function in spite of it. Obergefreiter Hans-Georg [music] Kleber was from Saxony, older than the others, 31 years old, married with [music] two children in Zwickau, calloused in his hands and calloused in the way he regarded orders, without enthusiasm but without resistance, a practical acceptance I associated with men who had responsibilities outside the army and who therefore [music] approached the war with a seriousness different from that of the younger ones. Schütze Erwin Puff was 18 years old and still got spots on his forehead, which made his helmet [music] uncomfortable. He complained about this regularly and in everything else was an ordinary soldier whom I hoped would survive long enough to become a better one. Schütze Karl August Renger was 20 years old, the son of a Lutheran pastor from Magdeburg, and read his Bible during lulls >> [music] >> without making it a declaration or a matter for debate. Schütze Walter Demmig, 22 years old, was the quickest in my section to understand tactical orders, which I valued more than running speed or shooting accuracy.

[00:08:41]Schütze Franz Kettner, 24 years old, was silent in a way that was not hostile >> [music] >> but made it difficult to know what he thought. The others were younger still, faces I knew by name and by the positions they held in the formation and by little else at that moment. I counted them that last night in Gumrak without wanting to be counting them. It was a habit, checking they were all there.

[00:09:07]11 men sleeping in shifts in a cellar that smelled of damp, dust, and smoke.

[00:09:12]Some had photographs in their pockets, some had letters they had not answered.

[00:09:17]None of them knew what they would find the following day and I, who had more months at the front than any of them, did not know either.

[00:09:26]Stalingrad was different.

[00:09:28]You could feel it was different before you entered it. The night of the 12th to the 13th of September was one of a quietness that was not rest. The artillery on both sides fired intermittently throughout the night without the intense rhythm of the previous days. The sky above the city was red with constant fires, a color that had not changed for weeks, varying only in intensity.

[00:09:54]The men slept in shifts. Those who did not sleep smoked if they had tobacco or lay with their eyes open in the dark. I went round the positions three times between midnight and 4:00 in the morning, checked the state of the weapons, counted the sleeping men and the wakeful [music] ones.

[00:10:11]There was a quality to the silence I did not like, a suspended tension more audible than the intermittent fire.

[00:10:19]It was the silence before a great event, recognizable to those who had heard it before other battles.

[00:10:26]Stalingrad would be greater than the others. At 4:20 in the morning on the 13th, the German artillery opened fire along the entire front. The roar was of an intensity that made verbal communication [music] impossible and caused the earth to vibrate visibly underfoot as though something trembled in the depths.

[00:10:47]The Stukas began arriving 20 minutes later, their engines unmistakable, and their bombs fell on the Soviet positions in the city with a precision that, from where we stood, appeared absolute, but which I knew to be relative. On the Soviet side, the artillery response took a few minutes to organize itself, and then their batteries opened fire towards our jump-off positions, and for an hour the sky above Stalingrad was a continuous exchange of light and fire and sound that made any communication beyond gestures and signals impossible.

[00:11:22]Our company received orders to advance at 8:00 in the morning on the left flank of the division's general axis of attack towards the western slopes of hill 102.

[00:11:33]Before advancing, Hauptmann Horstmann gathered the unteroffiziers for 2 minutes. He said the hill had to be taken by the end of the day. He said resistance would probably be strong. He said we would advance keeping our flanks in contact with the adjacent companies.

[00:11:48]These were clear orders and uninformative about what we would encounter, which was all [music] a Hauptmann could say because it was all he knew. Lieutenant Gerber's platoon led the way, my section in the second echelon 50 m behind. We advanced along a destroyed street whose buildings on both sides had been bombed down to first floor level. Nothing but pockmarked walls and fallen beams lying across what had once been the pavement.

[00:12:17]The ground was covered in rubble, broken bricks, shattered glass, burnt paper, fragments of furniture and roof tiles, all mixed with ash that rose in clouds [music] when walked upon.

[00:12:29]The stench was appalling, not just the smoke of fire, but something organic decomposing beneath the wreckage. I did not ask myself what it was. I knew what it was. Someone to my left shouted something, one word, perhaps two, that the noise swallowed before it reached me. I raised my fist, hold. No one knew what he had seen.

[00:12:52]Enemy fire began at roughly 300 m from our starting position, coming from directions we could not clearly locate.

[00:13:00]Shots came from the front and also from the left flank, from first floor windows and holes in the brickwork that seemed to change position between bursts.

[00:13:11]There were Soviet marksmen with patience and precision who chose their targets carefully, and there were infantry groups trying to check our advance with PPSh fire. Mortar rounds fell intermittently in the street we were following, raising clouds of dust and fragments that wind through the air. The first man in my section to be hit was Schütze Walter Demmig, caught by a round in the right shoulder as we crossed an intersection 200 m into the advance. He fell, but did not lose consciousness. He cried out a single word I could not hear clearly because of the noise, then lay [music] still gripping his shoulder with his left hand.

[00:13:50]Bax and Schütze Kettner dragged [music] him into the shadow of a wall while the rest of us covered the intersection. The shoulder bone was clearly broken. The arm hung in an unnatural way, but the artery had not been hit and the bleeding was controllable with a compression dressing.

[00:14:07]Demmig was pale but conscious. I sent two men to take him back to the casualty collection point and we moved on.

[00:14:14]Advancing through the city was like nothing we had trained for or anticipated. The steppe, the rivers and streams of the East, the Ukrainian villages with their dirt roads, the fields of wheat and sunflowers, we had experienced fighting across all of that.

[00:14:32]A city of destroyed concrete and brick where every rubble pile 3 m high could conceal a sniper and every wall still standing could have a machine gun position behind it was a fundamentally different kind of fighting.

[00:14:47]Distances were measured in tens of meters, not [music] hundreds.

[00:14:51]Our artillery became unusable because we could not get far enough from the enemy to prevent our own guns from hitting us.

[00:14:59]The Stukas could not help for the same reason. It was infantry against infantry at distances where seeing the enemy's face was possible if the light permitted it. The western slopes of Hill [music] 102 lay roughly 800 m from our start position.

[00:15:17]It took us more than 3 hours to cover that distance. Not because the terrain normally required it, but because every 50 m there was a Soviet position to clear. A cellar with two or three riflemen, a stairwell landing serving as a firing point, an improvised tunnel between two buildings that allowed a defender to appear behind you as you advanced. In each case the technique was the same. Suppressive fire to keep the riflemen's heads down, advance under cover, fragmentation grenades into the opening, entry with the MP 40 or the carbine in the firing position.

[00:15:55]In each case it took several minutes multiplied across dozens of positions along the entire street.

[00:16:02]The Soviets retreated in good order when the pressure became too great. Closed their lines further back, >> [music] >> withdrew closer to the hill, and reestablished positions. It was work that consumed everything a man has. By 11:00 in the morning my section had seven men fit for combat. Demig evacuated.

[00:16:23]>> [music] >> Schütze Erwin Pfaff hit in the thigh by a mortar splinter. Probably no femur fracture, but with enough bleeding to incapacitate him. Evacuated with the help of two men who rejoined the platoon 20 minutes later. Obergrenadier Hans-Georg Kleb with a splinter in his left forearm that had broken or cracked a wrist bone. Impossible to determine in the field. Which did not fully incapacitate him, but reduced the use of his left hand [music] to a weak and painful grip.

[00:16:56]He refused evacuation and fought with limitations.

[00:17:00]Schütze Karl August Renger, son of the pastor from Magdeburg, was dead.

[00:17:06]Renger died as we advanced to clear the last building before the hill slopes. A sniper's round caught him when he raised his head a fraction of a second too long above a first floor window sill to check the ground ahead.

[00:17:19]The round entered through the neck at the level of the jugular.

[00:17:24]He died within two or three minutes, the blood coming in quantities that dressings could not check. His eyes open and fixed on the ceiling of a ruined building that had no ceiling, only smoke-blackened beams. Back stood motionless for a moment looking at him, a moment that was not the right moment to stand still, but was the moment he needed.

[00:17:46]I let him have that moment because it was human, and because the war could not take everything from all of them at the same time. Hill 102 was declared captured at 1600 hours on the 13th of September.

[00:18:00]What this meant in practice was that units of the 295th Division occupied the summit [music] and the northern ridge of the mound, but there were Soviet positions on the eastern slopes and parts of the southern slope. And the dividing line between the two sides was a tangle that maps could not represent clearly because it changed [music] house by house and floor by floor and cellar by cellar. It was a real achievement, but it was also the beginning of a kind of fighting in which the summit and its slopes would be contested continuously in the months to come. The night of the 13th to the 14th of September was spent in the positions [music] we had taken, digging with entrenching tools and bare hands a line of foxholes that met no reasonable standard of protection, but was all there was. The soil of Hill 102 was hard, mixed with rubble from old construction works and metal fragments from all the ordnance that had fallen there in the preceding weeks.

[00:19:03]Digging 20 cm took an hour.

[00:19:06]Enemy fire did not stop through the night. There were constant skirmishes along the entire ridge, positions changing hands in small actions recorded on no map but experienced by every man who took part in them.

[00:19:20]I did not sleep. Almost no one did. At dawn on the 14th of September, the Soviets counterattacked with a force we had not anticipated. [music] They had crossed the Volga during the night. The 13th Guards Rifle Division, men drawn from reserves that had not yet been committed, with full equipment and the determination of those who receive an order that admits no alternative.

[00:19:46]They attacked the northern and eastern slopes with heavy mortar support, and the pressure was immediate and violent.

[00:19:53]Hauptmann Horstmann ordered us to hold our positions and not retreat. We held, but every meter of ground we retained that day cost proportionally more than anything it had cost to take the day before. The second day was brutal [music] in a different way from the first because the first had held something new in it, the adrenaline of an advance that had not yet met its limits. And the second began with full knowledge of what this was, the knowledge that the fire would not stop, that the enemy would not flee, that every position taken would be contested the next day.

[00:20:29]Gefreiter Martin Hazelhorst, a 30-year-old man from Dessau serving in the third section of our company, was killed during the morning counterattack by grenade fragments that penetrated his chest.

[00:20:42]He took perhaps 40 minutes to die and remained conscious for most of that time. The company medic did not arrive in time. Schütze Heinz Bremermann, from my section, was temporarily deafened in his right ear by the concussion of a mortar round that landed 2 m from him without hitting him with splinters but threw him against a wall.

[00:21:04]He functioned at half his auditory capacity and with a look that was different from the one he had worn before that morning. In the weeks that followed, the positions on Mamayev Kurgan settled into a form that was the opposite of stability.

[00:21:19]A series of strong points separated by distances [music] of 20 to 50 m, spaces where neither side permanently controlled anything, where moving during the day was very likely fatal, and at night was a matter of luck and silence.

[00:21:36]The Soviets tried to infiltrate through the gaps every night.

[00:21:40]We did the same. The ground that had cost hundreds of men to take on the afternoon of the 13th of September changed hands in small pieces every day.

[00:21:50]And every 2 days the situation on the map was different from the day before.

[00:21:55]But from a more distant perspective, it would have appeared the same because the overall line advanced and retreated only meters.

[00:22:04]Logistics were a persistent hardship that never resolved itself. Ammunition arrived in quantities insufficient for the intensity of the combat, and there were days when we tallied [music] what we had available and decided what we could or could not do on that basis, which is a humiliating tactical constraint.

[00:22:25]Food was intermittent. One day there would be hot rations arriving in metal containers carried by the supply runners at night.

[00:22:34]The next day there was only what was in the individual packs.

[00:22:38]On the third day there was nothing or almost nothing. I learned to eat quickly when food was available and to ignore hunger when it was not, which is an adaptation the body makes without fully volunteering for it.

[00:22:53]There was water, but getting it required going to a distribution point 200 m from the forward positions, within range of several Soviet marksmen who evidently knew of the distribution points existence and waited.

[00:23:07]Two men were killed at that point in September. After that, we sent the water carriers in pairs at a run, never by the same route twice. The water that arrived tasted of rust and rubber from canteens that had been refilled too many times without being cleaned.

[00:23:25]At that moment, it was the finest thing I drank. The company's Oberfeldwebel, a man called Rüdiger Fechner from Braunschweig, who had managed the company's logistical affairs since Poland in '39 with an efficiency that was never acknowledged in any report I saw, but was indispensable, appeared at night with his men, distributed what there was, noted the day's requests, wrote down requirements on a sheet of paper which he kept carefully in a leather pouch, and departed back to the rear with the punctuality of a man who keeps a schedule. Sometimes it took a day for something to arrive, sometimes two.

[00:24:06]In that interval, we ate what we found in the ruins, which was rarely much.

[00:24:11]Tins forgotten in the cellars of buildings that had been homes, roots, and once a sack of wheat flour found in a partially destroyed warehouse whose existence was reported to Oberfeldwebel Fechner and consumed over two days by the entire company. The flour was eaten raw, mixed with snow when there was snow, or dry by the spoonful, and it stuck in the throat in a way that made you reach for water there was never enough of.

[00:24:39]The city smelled in a way I have no adequate words [music] to describe to anyone who was not there. There was the permanent smell of fire, >> [music] >> wood, and rubber, and plastic burning in every direction, a background of smoke that never disappeared because there was never a moment when something somewhere in the city was not burning. There was the smell of pulverized brick and cement and broken stone, a dry mineral smell that deposited itself in the nose and at the back of the throat.

[00:25:08]There was the smell of gunpowder, constant, which accumulated [music] in the respiratory system until sometimes I coughed at night for no other reason. And there was the other smell, the smell of the dead who had not been collected, scattered among the ruins on both sides in numbers that made collection impossible under continuous fire, warmed by the September sun and left where they lay, decomposing in a heat that still reached 23 or 24° in direct sunlight.

[00:25:40]After a week of combat in the city, that smell was the constant background of all existence. I learned not to notice it in the same way I learned not to notice the sound of shots when they posed no immediate danger.

[00:25:54]It is a capacity the mind acquires without asking permission.

[00:25:59]I do not know whether it is good or bad.

[00:26:02]It is what it is.

[00:26:04]The third week of September brought rain, which eased the heat but made the ground slippery and the foxholes boggy with standing water that could not be drained because digging deeper means being more exposed during the digging.

[00:26:17]Wet clothing did not dry between one day and the next. Boots became waterlogged and stayed that way.

[00:26:25]There was no possibility of lighting a fire during the day because of the snipers, and at night the risk of revealing the position made it equally impractical. The men developed foot fungus favored by the constant moisture, inflammation in the joints of knees and elbows, untreated cuts that became infected with a speed the battalion medical officer attributed to the general sanitary conditions, [music] and treated when he could, which was not often because he had more than he should have had to deal with. Schütze Bräumer man, who had never fully recovered his hearing, developed an inner ear infection that caused dizziness and headaches, which compounded the auditory disorientation.

[00:27:07]The medical officer examined him on the 20th of September and said he needed urgent hospital treatment. He was evacuated on the 22nd, two days later, because the evacuation [music] transport was being used for more serious wounds and partial deafness did not qualify for high priority. Meanwhile, our position on the northern ridge of the hill had been reinforced. Units from the third battalion of the same regiment came up [music] to cover the left flank where we had a gap that worried us.

[00:27:36]A group of engineers spent two days installing barbed wire on the most obvious approaches and laying mines in the natural crossing points of the terrain. Hauptmann Horstmann called the Unteroffiziers to a 10-minute meeting in a cellar 150 m from the forward positions. A cellar where there were two chairs [music] and an ammunition crate serving as a table and a field lantern that conserved its battery by working only when absolutely [music] necessary. He told us the division had received orders to hold Mamayev Kurgan at [music] all costs.

[00:28:11]He said this in his usual voice without drama and without comment as though reading a service notice. There were four Unteroffiziers at that meeting.

[00:28:21][music] Not one of us said anything. There was nothing useful to say. The role of 140 men with which our company had entered Stalingrad on the 13th of September had, at the end of two full weeks, been reduced to 98 men fit for combat. Of those 98, [music] 21 had wounds that in normal circumstances would have warranted immediate evacuation and hospital treatment. In those circumstances, they fought because the alternative was leaving positions unmanned. I myself had a splinter gash on the right side of my head above the right ear, the result of a grenade fragment that had passed close enough to open a 6 cm cut, but far enough not to penetrate the skull. The medical officer stitched it in a 3-minute procedure using local anesthesia inadequate for an area in that state and told me to keep the wound clean. Keeping a wound clean under those conditions was an instruction the medical officer gave because it was the correct instruction and not because there was any way of following it adequately.

[00:29:29]I tried.

[00:29:31]There were days when the dressing was saturated with sweat and brick dust before the end of the morning. The weeks of continuous combat on the hill created a routine that was the negation of everything the word routine normally implies. A routine was supposed to be predictable and relatively safe. Ours was predictable only in its basic elements. During the day, constant fire from both sides, attempts to consolidate or expand positions by tens of meters, casualties arriving at the collection point with a regularity that the battalion medical officer dealt with through a mechanical efficiency I admired without being able to imagine its personal cost. At night, infiltrations, patrols, the work of digging and reinforcing positions that would have been impossible under fire during the day, and the cold that increased week by week.

[00:30:25]The psychological state of the men varied in ways that were not easy to monitor from the inside. Some developed a kind of functional indifference to danger that was valuable in combat, but strange to observe at rest.

[00:30:40]Men who did not react to the sound of explosions 100 m away, who ate while machine gun fire was close by, who slept with the same expression they would have worn in a bed at home. Others went in the opposite direction, a heightened vigilance that became pathological, that made rest impossible even when conditions [music] permitted it, that made a man flinch at every sound and scan the horizon with his eyes for threats where there were none.

[00:31:09]Both extreme states were dangerous. One for underestimating risk, the other for exhausting whoever suffered it.

[00:31:17]Most of the men stayed somewhere in the middle, in an unstable equilibrium that shifted with whatever each day [music] brought. What disturbed me most was not the fear. Fear I knew, it had a name and a shape. It was its progressive absence.

[00:31:33]There was a night, I think in the third week, when Schütze Pfaff was hit by a splinter in the forearm during a reconnaissance patrol. He cried out. I registered the cry, assessed the severity, ordered treatment. I did everything I was supposed to do. And while they treated him, I found myself thinking about the following day's ammunition distribution. [music] It was not deliberate coldness. It was that the mind had learned to process the suffering of others as tactical information, input, [music] assessment, response, next problem.

[00:32:07]There was something lost in that efficiency.

[00:32:10]I knew something was lost.

[00:32:12]But there was no room to recover it in the middle of all that. And I do not know whether I ever recovered it entirely afterwards.

[00:32:21]There were practical matters that never resolved themselves satisfactorily. The latrine problem, for example, never had an adequate solution in the forward positions on the hill. The tactical logic made it impossible to build facilities at any reasonable distance from the combat positions, which meant the men saw to their physiological needs in holes dug in dead [music] ground behind the positions, mostly at night, and the accumulated stench added to the general reek that was already unbearable. It was a small and ignoble, but constant reality, mentioned in no official report, and not directly discussed by the men, but an integral part of the conditions of existence in that place.

[00:33:07]There was one afternoon when Bax and Kettner argued over who had accumulated more bad luck, Kettner, who had never taken a scratch, which according to Bax was only possible if the devil himself [music] was looking after him, or Bax himself, who had caught two good ones and was still here. Kettner replied that Bax's bad luck had been wasted on Soviet incompetence. They both laughed in a way that did not fit that place.

[00:33:33]It was the kind of laughter that holds no real humor inside. It is simply the valve that pressure finds so as not to burst through somewhere [music] else, but it served its purpose. The second week of October was the most intense of the period we spent on Mamayev Kurgan.

[00:33:50]The Soviets had received reinforcements across the Volga, fresh units crossing the river at night in boats that our artillery tried to hit and succeeded in hitting often enough to make the crossing mortally dangerous, but not often enough to stop it.

[00:34:06]Men kept coming, and every time we thought the defender had reached the limit of his human capacity for resistance, there were new men in the Soviet positions. On the 14th of October, the Soviets launched a night counterattack that penetrated the German lines to the north of the hill through a gap created by the death of the sergeant commanding that subsection and the confusion that followed.

[00:34:32]The penetration created a situation that Hauptmann Horstmann, when he gathered us in the cellar at 3:00 in the morning, >> [music] >> described as extremely serious.

[00:34:42]Our left flank had lost contact with the adjacent units. There was shooting to the north, where there should have been no shooting from our own artillery. For a period I estimated at 2 hours, all notion of where the front line lay was completely lost.

[00:34:57]And there were groups of Soviet and German soldiers intermingled in the ruins, with neither side having any clear picture of where the other was. It was the kind of confusion that kills through disorientation beyond enmity.

[00:35:11]Men firing at sounds and shadows without knowing whether they were the enemy or their own comrades.

[00:35:19]It was that night that I lost Gefreiter Backers.

[00:35:22]We were trying to re-establish contact with Lieutenant Gerbers' [music] platoon, which had not answered on the radio since midnight. Advancing down an alleyway between two destroyed buildings, when the shot came from a second-floor window. I heard him fall more than I saw it in the near total darkness. The round entered below the rear edge of his helmet in the posterior cervical region.

[00:35:47]Two men reached him 30 seconds later.

[00:35:50]He was unconscious and stopped breathing before they reached the battalion field hospital 400 m away.

[00:35:56]>> [music] >> He was 23 years old. His girlfriend Ingrid was a nurse in Quedlinburg.

[00:36:03]I did not register this as something extraordinary in that moment. I reported to the Hauptmann, reorganized the section with the men who remained, continued trying to re-establish contact with the adjacent platoon.

[00:36:16]Only later, about an hour afterwards, sitting on a pile of rubble reloading magazines with hands that were shaking slightly from the cold, I told myself, not wanting to attribute it to anything else, did Bax's absence become concrete in a way that was not merely tactical or operational. The way he walked, the specific sound he made moving across rubble, the way he checked his equipment before advancing, these were patterns that had been part of the surroundings for the preceding weeks, so constantly that his absence was louder than his presence had been.

[00:36:52]I did not dwell on it because there was no time, but I noticed it. Contact with Lieutenant Gerber's platoon was established at dawn on the 15th of October. Lieutenant Gerber's was dead, hit by mortar splinters during the night. His platoon had seven men fit for combat, dug in in a cellar with two wounded men who could not be evacuated until the positions around them were clarified.

[00:37:16]Oberleutnant Friedrich König assumed command of our company when it became clear that Hauptmann Horstmann had been seriously wounded in the early hours, an artillery splinter in the abdominal area that had penetrated beneath the field jacket. [music] He was evacuated on a stretcher when conditions permitted, mid-morning on the 15th. We never received any information about his subsequent condition.

[00:37:40]The Soviets attempted three assaults throughout the 15th. The second was the one that came closest to breaking through our positions. It was a force I estimated at 70 to 80 men that advanced up the eastern slope with the support of two T-34 tanks. The tanks were immobilized when they triggered the [music] anti-tank mines the engineers had placed 300 m from our positions.

[00:38:07]And the Soviet infantry, without their armored support, became a problem that our concentrated fire resolved over a period that seemed to me to be 10 to 15 minutes, but may have been longer.

[00:38:20]At the end of that period, >> [music] >> the assault had been broken off.

[00:38:25]The Soviets withdrew with their wounded and with as many of their dead as they could manage. On the slope remained the dead they could not retrieve, the same that happened with ours on so many other slopes.

[00:38:37]Among our own that stayed was Schütze Fennig, hit by machine gun fire while we covered the flank during the initial phase of the assault, and a recruit whose name I recorded in the report, but whose face I can only vaguely picture.

[00:38:52]The exhaustion after a month of continuous combat was of a nature different from any fatigue I had previously experienced. It was not simply lack of sleep, though there was that, too. It was a fatigue that entered into the thought processes and made them slower, more prone to error, more dependent on established routines than on active judgment.

[00:39:16]Decisions that had previously taken a second now needed two or three, which in combat can be the difference between consequences and the absence of them. I saw the same look on the men, hollow faces, sunken eyes that reacted to immediate fire with the speed of trained reflexes, but which during lulls took on a blank expression, not sleep, not vigilance, but something in between that I cannot name precisely. There were men who broke, not dramatically, not all at once, not in a way that made them visible or distinguishable from the others at any given moment. They broke by accumulation, layer by layer, until there came a day when they could not advance when the order arrived or froze under a firefight that was in no way different from hundreds of other firefights they had already endured.

[00:40:08]The battalion medical officer called them combat shock cases and sent them to the rear when there was a place for them. The Hauptmann, before he was wounded, dealt with them with a pragmatism that was neither cruelty nor compassion.

[00:40:21]It was simply the accounting of available human resources to the rear when conditions allowed, one more day at the front when they did not.

[00:40:32]Most endured that one more day. Some could not. The 18 days I spent on Mamayev Kurgan under Oberleutnant König's command after Horsmann's wounding were of a brutal sameness that made the individual days difficult to distinguish in retrospect.

[00:40:50]The same terrain, the same positions, the same cycles of assault and counter-assault, the same artillery from both sides falling without pause, the same insufficient food and the water that cost men to fetch. There were close-quarters engagements at distances where the carbineer sights were irrelevant and the fight became a matter of reflexes and the pressure of circumstances and who could react first to the other's presence.

[00:41:18]There were nights when the Soviets infiltrated with such silence that the confrontation was almost hand-to-hand [music] before either side fired. There were mornings when the first men to raise their heads above the positions found enemy soldiers 50 m away who had not been there at nightfall.

[00:41:37]Night combat had a completely different logic from day combat.

[00:41:41]During the day, visibility turned every movement into a calculated exposure, every advance into a matter of moving from cover to cover, every change of position into an opportunity for the snipers. At night, the darkness leveled out part of the advantage held by the [music] defender who knows the ground but multiplied the confusion on both sides.

[00:42:05]I learned to navigate the positions in the dark by touch and memory.

[00:42:10]The angle of the wall 200 m away, the three steps down into the cellar of the destroyed building, the wire that marked [music] the limit of our furthest forward position. I learned to identify enemy equipment by sound because the Soviet PPSh had a different rate of fire from our MP 40, and in a dark night, that was the difference between recognizing the danger and being wrong about where it came from.

[00:42:37]I learned that the smell of corpses was more [music] intense in the vicinity of Soviet positions than of ours, which was a proximity indicator I used with some regularity. There was one night, around the 20th of October, when a Soviet group of perhaps eight men penetrated our positions without being detected and came to within 15 m of the company command post before being intercepted by Kettner, who was standing guard at that hour. Kettner fired and killed two of them. The remainder retreated.

[00:43:11]Kettner stood looking at the two bodies for a time he later told me had been brief, but which seemed longer to me. He said only that the two were young, perhaps 18 years old, and that one of them had a portrait of a woman in his pocket that fell out when he went down.

[00:43:27]He did not tell me more than that, and I did not ask. Some details need no elaboration. The cold began to settle in at the end of October, not the extreme cold that would come later, but cold enough that the nights in the open positions became a matter of temperature as well as tactics. The clothing we had was adequate for autumn, but not for a Russian winter. The requests for winter equipment had been submitted through the proper channels, we were told, and would be addressed when logistical requirements permitted.

[00:44:00]The answer was the usual answer, which was a way of giving no answer. The men wrapped themselves in blankets and in coats captured from the enemy when there were any and in their own coats when there was no alternative and spent the nights shivering with a cold that was not yet the worst of it and trying not to shiver so as not to make noise. The cold affected the functioning of weapons in ways that basic training had never mentioned.

[00:44:27]>> [music] >> The standard maintenance oil became too viscous below certain degrees below zero which slowed the bolt [music] mechanism and created feeding failures at the most inconvenient moments.

[00:44:38]We learned to use less lubricant and to keep weapons closer to our bodies when not in use making use of residual body heat to prevent the metal from cooling too much. It was one more practical problem [music] added to the already long list of practical problems. Each one bearable in isolation, all of them together forming a constant weight that never entirely went away.

[00:45:02]There was one day, I think around the 23rd of October when there was no ammunition for the MG 34 machine [music] gun covering the northern flank of our position.

[00:45:12]The resupply cases had been promised by Oberfeldwebel Fechner for the previous night and had not arrived. We waited.

[00:45:19]During the hours the machine gun was without ammunition, we depended entirely on individual carbines and MP 40s to cover that flank.

[00:45:30]The Soviets did not attack during that period for reasons we did not know but the awareness that that sector was unmanned was a constant pressure. The ammunition arrived in the late afternoon carried by four men who ran 500 m under machine gun fire from the distribution point. One of them was wounded during the run. The ammunition arrived. The day we left Mamayev Kurgan was the 28th of October 1942.

[00:45:59]Our company was withdrawn from the line and replaced by units [music] from the 95th Infantry Division.

[00:46:06]We reached our rear area position, a set of prepared positions 1,200 m from the hill's crest by 3:00 in the afternoon.

[00:46:14]Oberleutnant König made the formal count of men when we arrived. Of the second company that had entered Stalingrad on the 13th of September, 57 men remained fit for combat on the 28th of October.

[00:46:29]46 had been evacuated with wounds over the course of the 6 weeks, of whom six died in field hospitals or during evacuation, as we learned in the following days.

[00:46:41]22 had been killed in action directly at our company's positions. Three had disappeared [music] during the night of the 14th to the 15th of October and had not been found as dead or wounded or prisoners, as far as it was possible to ascertain in the subsequent days.

[00:46:59]15 others were present, but with wounds that significantly limited their combat capacity. My section had arrived in Stalingrad with 11 men. Remaining was Obergefreiter Kleber, who had reduced mobility in his left arm, but a functional right, and who refused evacuation with a stubbornness I did not try to contest.

[00:47:21]Remaining was Schütze Kettner, who had passed 46 days of combat without a single significant scratch, and whom I considered either exceptionally skilled at using the ground [music] or simply one of the rare cases in which luck is real and constant and inexplicable. Remaining was Schütze Bremermann, who had returned from the field hospital on the 25th of October with his hearing partially recovered and the air of a man who had come back out of obligation rather than will, but who had come back all the same.

[00:47:55]The other eight men with whom I had entered the city were dead, evacuated with serious wounds, or missing. Oberleutnant Konig [music] gathered the remaining unteroffiziers over the following two days to discuss the state of the company and immediate projections.

[00:48:12]He told us the company would receive reinforcements, estimated at 80 to [music] 90 men, in the first week of November. He also said we remained operational as a reserve unit until the reinforcements arrived, and that we could be called [music] back to positions on the hill in the event of an operational necessity for the division.

[00:48:33]He used the phrase operational necessity without specifying what conditions would constitute it, which meant that anything could be the condition.

[00:48:43]I spent the first days in the rear dealing with section matters, checking and cleaning weapons, obtaining new boots for Kleb and Kettner, who urgently needed them, writing the administrative correspondence on the dead and missing that regulations required. Writing the notice for Gefreiter Reinhold Backers was the last thing I did before lying down on the night of the 29th of October.

[00:49:06]Full name, rank, service number, date of birth, unit, date, and circumstances of death.

[00:49:15]My handwriting was less steady than usual, which I attributed to accumulated exhaustion, and asked no further questions.

[00:49:23]The reinforcements arrived on the 6th of November, 83 men. Some of them transferred from other divisional units that had suffered less severe losses.

[00:49:33]Some of them recruits who had completed basic training in Germany in September and October, and who arrived with new equipment and unmarked uniforms, and with that expression I recognized from my own reflection in the weeks before I had first entered the city.

[00:49:50]A mixture of anticipation and fear and genuine ignorance about what they were about to find. I said nothing that might have been useful. There is nothing to say that prepares anyone for what that is.

[00:50:04]Readiness either exists or it does not.

[00:50:08]And it is not made of words.

[00:50:11]The first section of the second company was 11 men again.

[00:50:15]Eight of them had never fired on a human being. In the two days the new men spent in the rear before the movement orders, I tried to assess each of them as best as two days permitted. The way he held his weapon, the speed at which he understood an instruction, the composure with which he reacted to the sounds coming from the front, which were constant [music] and close enough to be unsettling for anyone not accustomed to them. Two of them struck me as competent, men who had done field training beyond the basic and who moved with an awareness of ground that was not taught in the ordinary training camps.

[00:50:52]Three concerned me more. One of them had a reaction to the sound of explosions that was an excessive flinch even for someone experiencing real fire for the first time.

[00:51:04]Another avoided looking at the wounded who passed through the rear position with a regularity that should have been getting him accustomed. A third talked excessively, a sign I had learned to associate with fear that had found no other outlet. These were tendencies that time and exposure could resolve or intensify. There was no way of knowing before we knew. Oberleutnant König summoned the Unteroffiziers on the 7th of November and informed us we would receive movement orders within a few days. Where to? He said he did not yet know. He said the division was being reorganized along the entire city front.

[00:51:44]There were rumors we would move north to the industrial complex area, the tractor factory, the Barricady. There were rumors of a new German offensive in December [music] to complete the conquest of the pockets of Soviet resistance remaining in the northern city.

[00:52:01]There were rumors of a large-scale Soviet counterattack.

[00:52:06]They were all rumors, and I had stopped trying to distinguish those with some basis from those without because the effort of discernment consumed energy I did not have available, and because the distinction rarely changed what we would be doing the following day.

[00:52:22]We spent the days preparing equipment and trying to pass on to the new men the skills that increased the probability of surviving that particular kind of combat.

[00:52:33]I showed Schütze Ewald Krüger from Stendal, 18 years old, how to check the fuses of fragmentation grenades before using them in confined spaces, how to determine whether an apparently abandoned position had genuinely been abandoned or was waiting, how to move through rubble without raising visible dust or making excessive noise. It was technical instruction, specific, with no philosophy or interpretation [music] of what the war was or what it meant to be there.

[00:53:06]The philosophy of that place will present itself to Ewald Krüger without anyone needing to explain it.

[00:53:14]The movement orders arrived on the 11th of November, north, as the rumors had said, the area of the Krasny Oktyabr Steel Factory and its surroundings.

[00:53:24]Oberleutnant König briefed us on the movement on the morning of the 12th. We would move the following night by truck to the division's concentration point, from which we would proceed on foot to the new positions.

[00:53:37]Schütze Krüger asked me how long we would be there.

[00:53:41]I told him I did not know. That one never knew.