Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Last letters from Stalingrad – Letter from an unnamed German soldier on the principle of “Resist the beginnings” (Published on 21/02/2025)
An unnamed German soldier comments in a letter on the “good advice” previously given to him (source: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad [“Last Letters from Stalingrad”], letter no. 6, p. 10 f. [translation from German language]):
“…Why don’t you stay away from me with your well-intentioned advice? Don’t you know what kind of situation you’re putting me in? What kind of words are those! You wouldn’t have done it if you knew how to do it! It should have been done that way! What does that mean? You know that I agree with you and that we’ve talked about it more than was good, but you can’t write that. Do you think the others are idiots?
When I write now, I know that nothing can happen to me, and I wisely left out the sender, and you will receive this letter by the usual means. Even if you knew who wrote on this paper, I would never be safer in any place than in Stalingrad. It is so easy to say: lay down your arms. Do you think the Russians will go easy on us? You are a clever man, why don’t you also demand that your friends refuse to produce ammunition and war equipment?
It’s easy to give good advice, but it doesn’t work the way you think it does. Liberation of peoples, nonsense. The peoples will remain the same, their rule will change, and the outsiders will always argue to liberate the people from the respective rule. 32 it would have been time to act, you know that very well. And that this moment was missed, too. Ten years ago it was still possible with a ballot paper, today it costs lives.”
The publisher about the book “Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad“ (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: German military cemetery Daleiden, February 2025
[Translated inscription: “Before this stone remember all of us in the world /
Live and do not forget us.”])
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