Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Last letters from Stalingrad – Letter from an unnamed German soldier from 1942 about his grief at having killed a burning Russian tank soldier (Published on 22/11/2024)
In a letter from 1942, an unnamed German soldier expresses his grief at having killed a trapped, burning Russian soldier after a tank battle (source: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad [“Last Letters from Stalingrad”], letter no. 35, p. 58 ff. [translation from German language]):
“I have cried so much in the last few nights that it seems unbearable to me. I also saw a comrade crying, but for a different reason. He was crying for his lost tanks, which were his pride and joy. And as incomprehensible as my own weakness is, it is even more understandable to me that a man can mourn for dead war material. I am a soldier and I want to believe that the tanks are not dead material for him. The fact that two men are crying at all is remarkable. I was always prone to tears, a shattering experience, a noble deed made me cry. This was also the case at the movies or when I read a book or saw an animal suffering. I separated myself from the world around me and took part in what I saw and felt. In contrast, I didn’t experience lost material values as a loss. So I couldn’t weep for tanks that were used as artillery in the open steppe without fuel and were so easily shot up. But the fact that an irreproachable person and brave soldier, tough and unyielding, cried like a child, that’s why my tears flowed at night.
On Tuesday, I shot two T 34s [tanks] with my vehicle. Curiosity had driven them behind our lines. It was magnificent and impressive. Afterwards I drove past the smoking wreckage. A body was hanging out of the hatch, its head down, its feet stuck and burning up to the knee. The body was alive, the mouth groaning. It must have been excruciating pain. And there was no way to free him. Even if there had been, he would have died in agony hours later. I shot him, tears streaming down my cheeks. Now I’ve been crying for three nights over the dead Russian tank driver whose murderer I am. The crosses in front of Gumrak shake me and many things that my comrades overlook with their mouths shut. I fear that I will never be able to sleep peacefully again when I come home to you, my dears. My life is a terrible contradiction. A psychological unicum.
I’ve now taken over a heavy Pak [anti-tank gun] and organized eight men, including four Russians. The nine of us drag the gun from one place to another. Every time the exchange takes place, a burning tank falls by the wayside. There are already eight of them, and the dozen are to be filled. But I only have three shots left, and shooting tanks is not like playing billiards. But at night I cry like a child. What else is it going to be?”
The publisher about the book “Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad“ and the alleged origin of the letters (a.a.O., p. 67 ff. [translation from German language]):
“An adventurous story could be written about the origins of the ‘Last Letters from Stalingrad’, the story of an over-organized party and war bureaucracy with its censors, snoopers and beadles. For the letters passed through all the stations of this bureaucracy from the day they were transported from the Stalingrad cauldron. They wanted to ‘get to know the mood in the Stalingrad fortress’ from them and therefore ordered the Führer’s headquarters to confiscate the mail. The order was passed on as an order from the Army High Command to the Army Field Post Inspection Office. When the last plane from the cauldron landed in Nowo-Tscherkask, seven sacks of mail were confiscated. This was in January 1943 and the letters were opened and the address and sender removed. They were then sorted according to content and tendency and handed over to the Wehrmacht High Command in carefully tied bundles.
The statistical recording of the ‘mood’ was carried out by the Army Information Department and divided into five groups. The following picture emerged:
Positive about the war: 2,1 %
Doubtful: 4,4 %
Disbelieving, dismissive: 57,1 %
Oppositional: 3,4 %
Without opinion, indifferent: 33,0 %
After being statistically recorded and noted, the letters, together with the other documents about Stalingrad, including Führer instructions, orders, radio messages and reports – a total of around ten hundredweight of material – ended up in the care of a PK man [member of a propaganda company] who had been commissioned to write a documentary work about the Battle of the Volga. The top German war leadership would have liked to justify itself, but the language of the documents was unambiguous. So the book was banned. ‘Unacceptable for the German people!’ decided the propaganda minister. The authentic copies of the letters were then taken to the army archives in Potsdam, where they were brought to safety a few days before the capture of Berlin and saved for the present day.”
(Head picture: Gravestone of an unknown Russian soldier,
military cemetery Brandau/Odenwald, August 2022)
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