Any history book coming out in 1998 on the subject of Stalingrad is probably helpful to progressives and communists. For this reason we rushed to review this book in time for the winter 1998 holiday season when people purchase most of their books for the year. Unfortunately, we could not fit it into earlier editions of MIM Notes due to the imperialist attacks on Iraq and other pressing news. This action-packed book is an appropriate holiday gift for the warmonger in the imperialist country family.
At this time in the imperialist countries, the youth are victims of a trend in academia and teaching which says there is no truth and everything is relative. By simply treating the subject of Stalingrad with the documents becoming available today, Beevor has struck a blow against the predominant nonsense in academia today. Together the Axis powers and Russians lost approximately one million troops dead in the battles of Stalingrad.(pp. 394, 398) Unlike post-modernists, MIM has no difficulty saying that the fact that Stalingrad was the largest battle in history makes this book and its subject more important than the subjects and books generally spewed out by post-modernism. Feminists in particular should take note that battles fought predominantly by men must still be accorded their full weight in history by feminists or feminists will forever be sidelined from power by their unwillingness to tackle military history.
There are three main strengths of this book compared with what is already available on the subject. 1) Evidence on the existence of varied anti- and non-Nazi views in the German army. 2) Detailed descriptions of the role of Russian traitors fighting alongside the Germans. 3) An inside view amounting to a psycho-thriller drama on the German army elite and why it did not surrender sooner.
Most of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the battle and this will make it concrete and readable to many.
Stalin blamed again
As is the fashion with Western writers today, Beevor blames Stalin for not believing the information he had about the beginning of the Nazi invasion. Yet, more than any other writer we credit Beevor for undercutting his own argument.
While others simply say Stalin was napping or paralyzed by the Nazi invasion in 1941, Beevor says that there was "repressed hysteria" in the Kremlin. He also says that there had been over 80 warnings of imminent invasion in the past eight months. (p. 3) Hence, Beevor understood it was a matter of not believing the various reports of attacks. Furthermore, Beevor does say Stalin did seriously consider that they were being invaded the afternoon it happened and Molotov took appropriate radio action almost immediately. (pp. 5, 10) Others write as if there were a huge vacuum until Stalin spoke publicly two weeks later.
Beevor was correct that Stalin was suspicious about the information he received. MIM believes that Stalin was right to be suspicious, cautious and thorough in his checking and re-checking of facts. The alternative would be to accidentally start a war along a front of thousands of miles. There had been many times when war almost started prematurely between Germany and the Soviet Union. The number of warnings that Stalin had to ignore mentioned by Beevor is even higher than the number mentioned by Molotov in his memoirs.
Although other than Beevor few Western writers evidence knowing it in their writings seeking to demonize Stalin, Stalin had industries shipped east of the Ural Mountains during the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939-1941, in preparation for the German advance. Nonetheless, Beevor chides the German soldiers and historians who widely complained that the Soviets "lured" them deep into Soviet territory. The Germans believe this caused their defeat, because of overstretched supply lines and widely dispersed troops.(p. 73) Lazy Western scholars believe they know better than the German survivors and blame Stalin for giving up almost all the territory of the European Soviet Union. At first the West thought the Soviet Union would collapse even more quickly than France and then it blamed Stalin for not defeating Hitler from the first stroke.
MIM has shown in the "Stalin Issue" of MT that the racism of Western writers like Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher was to blame for similar reasoning. For the West, it was unbelievable that Stalin would give up the European fraction of the Soviet Union as a field of battle and retreat to its edge bordering Asia. There was nothing real in the military science of their criticisms of Stalin.
A related point is that Beevor criticizes Stalin for not taking up motorized warfare for the Soviet Union in order to take back large pieces of European Russia. He fails to understand that Stalin criticized mobilized warfare in the 1920s and 1930s correctly, because German industry outpaced Soviet industry at that time.
Any strategy relying on something the Germans were better at was bound to lose. Beevor knows this (but he does not make the connection) because he himself notes that once the Soviets relocated east of the Urals, they did have a fourfold industrial advantage over the Germans in the key tank categories, but not until 1942.(p. 223) Beevor lightly dismisses this question of when to oppose motorized warfare as Stalin's "ideology," (p. 221) but Beevor also admits, as many Western writers do, that Stalin was more flexible in his thinking than Hitler: Stalin was willing to take advice.
In fact, Stalin comes out quite passive in Beevor's book, with credit going to Zhukov. It's another strategy of the imperialist mouthpieces to minimize the credit due to Stalin for beating the Nazis. In actual fact, Stalin was right in the 1920s when he said that the Soviet Union could not fight Germany in a motorized war and he was right in 1942 when he organized just such a motorized campaign.
Various German resistances
The oppressor always makes his system out to be invincible and beneficial. During slavery in the United $tates half of the clergy supported slavery as beneficial and godly. Yet, no matter how much of a juggernaut something seems to be there is always a resistance and a birth of new things.
Already at Christmas in 1941, German troops were criticizing the invasion of the Soviet Union. Some wrote anti-war slogans right on the headquarters building of the Sixth Army, Hitler's prized army. "'We want to return to Germany'" and "'We didn't want this war!'" were some.(p. 47) This was despite the fact that the Axis forces had advanced through all of Europe without any difficulty and had only had to withdraw from territory once, for the first time in November, 1941.
It was always known that German communists helped the Soviet Union and had small circles here and there and it has also been known that the German officers and intelligence included those who wanted to be rid of Hitler. Based on what is known today, Beevor focuses on what the German military officers really thought of what they were doing. We will not comment further on German officers, but the Soviet victory in Stalingrad did give rise to a German student movement, the "White Rose." Students and professors suffered beheadings for their agitation against the war in this movement.(p. 403)
The student movement of the "White Rose" is still what we need today --an anti-militarist movement in the imperialist countries. The arguments within the Nazi military were mostly about how to better defeat and oppress the Soviets.
Purges necessary
On the first page of the book in the preface, Beevor points out that the Soviet Union executed 13,500 of its own people in the Stalingrad battle. These were people who ran to desert to the enemy or spread defeatism in the ranks. To his credit, Beevor also admits that over 50,000 Soviet people fought alongside the Nazis in Stalingrad in front-line divisions.(p. xiv) Most Western writers are unwilling to connect these two facts and confront the moral argument about them head on. MIM says that obviously 50,000 that should have been executed before the war got away.
Most Western writers on the subject have taken to bashing Stalin with facts like the first without mentioning facts like the second. In this way, Beevor's book is above average, because the blow-by-blow detail does not omit the crucial fact of anti-Soviet treason. Indeed, Beevor takes care to tell us about life of the Soviet people called "Hiwis" who fought with the Germans and how they were often well-treated by the German Nazis; even though, overall, Hitler was too racist to let Russians help win the war. German intelligence asked to use Russian reactionaries or lose the war as early as 1941, but Hitler refused. To get around Hitler and because Hitler could tolerate the Cossack people racially, Russians and Ukrainians were renamed "Cossacks," so that they could fight alongside the German army.(p. 185)
In wartime, no one wants a vacillator covering his or her back. This vacillation in a minority of the Soviet peoples cannot be ignored. It was made all the worse by the collapse of Liberal Western states too pusillanimous to put up a good fight against Hitler. France was a major imperialist power in Germany's league as a military power, supposedly stronger than the Soviet Union, but it turned out to be a cake-walk for Hitler, a four-week non-existent battle. A single platoon in Stalingrad known as "Pavlov's" killed more Germans than all the French killed Germans in the defense of Paris.(p. 198)That is not to mention the smaller imperialist powers like Belgium that Hitler waltzed over.
The imperialists also failed to give the Republicans in Spain material aid to fight the Nazis and the Republicans lost. Hence, as Beevor correctly pointed out, Hitler took all of continental Europe and suffered no defeats until deep inside the Soviet Union. Beevor points this out, but is unable to draw the firm ethical conclusion that the bankruptcy of the West made Hitler seem invincible, contributed to panic in the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded and thereby caused the executions by the "Stalinists." It is inexcusable and obscene to this day for Western scholars to write about Stalingrad without acknowledging the West's own blame for the Soviet purges. Had Hitler been stood up to in Czechoslovakia, Spain or France, the 13,500 executed in Stalingrad would not have been.
What happened was that almost a million Italians, Finns and Romanians joined the three million Germans in the invasion and despite being joined by even more Ukrainian, Russian, Tartar, Cossack and other traitors, the Soviet Union still won. Beevor is so kind as to point out that only Japanese intelligence did not underestimate the Soviet Union.(pp. 13,24) The West did not want or know how to fight the Nazis, but Westerners complained about Stalin then and continue to complain even more today.
Long after the fascists had been surrounded at Stalingrad with no hope of victory, even the Russian traitors continued to fight to the death. Almost half of the 297th Infantry Division was 780 Russians. The best anti-tank fighters opposing the Red Army were Tartars, a people of the Soviet Union.(p. 353) When Stalin and Beria said that there was a fifth column in Russia just like the rest of Europe and said purges and special measures against panic-mongering were necessary, they were right. Even many Russians never heard about these people, because Stalin and Beria did not want to spread panicky ideas, but they existed. Now that we know the facts in 1998 about the Soviet peoples who joined up with Hitler it is even more obscene that the Western scribblers attack Stalin's purges and executions. Had the Liberal West succeeded in stopping Hitler, it would have had a right to complain. Since it didn't, it should shut up in the name of decency.
Harsh prison camps necessary
Many people ask us communists how we can complain about U.$. imperialism when Stalin did not allow complaints in his day, no "free speech." While it is true that not all of us speaking against imperialism are in prison for it, the percentage of Black people in prison is the same as the percentage of Soviet people in prison under Stalin in war. While Stalin had to lock up Nazi-supporters after the war, the U.$. imperialists have no excuse.
The context of imprisonment is important, not just the war either. Today, production is more modern in the imperialist countries. If the United $tates imprisons people and does not take good care of them, there is no excuse. There is no war except the undeclared war against oppressed nationalities and there is plenty of food and fuel.
MIM does not support letting prisoners die today in the imperialist countries -- through infectious disease, guard murders and instigation of gang-fighting. If we could overthrow imperialism, deathly prisons would not be necessary anywhere in the world, because there is enough food and fuel for the whole world if it were distributed without regard to profit. In World War II though, the situation was different. Panic-mongering had concrete effects. Many troops lost their lives when their units became disorganized and panicked. People spreading such ideas had to be executed. The worst of all panic-mongers was Trotsky who predicted to the world that Stalin would be defeated by the Nazis. We at MIM wish Trotsky had been assassinated before 1940, back in 1938 when Germany moved on Czechoslovakia or even earlier when Japanese imperialism seized Manchuria. More innocent lives would have been saved without this master panic-mongerer and splitter.
Once fascist prisoners had been seized in battle, with what motorized vehicles could they be shipped to the rear? Fuel and vehicles were in short supply and needed at the front. With what food would they be fed? Soviet soldiers and other innocents were starving, especially in Leningrad and Stalingrad. Giving food to fascist prisoners only took food away from innocent people. Finally, these captured fascists and their collaborators could not just be released, because they would return to fight with the fascists and kill more innocent Soviet people. They had to be guarded, but the more people to guard, the more guards there had to be. However, guards with guns were needed at the front.
For all these reasons, early treatment of Axis prisoners of war was justifiably horrible. Hitler had rejected an offer from Stalin that both sides go by the Hague convention for treatment of prisoners.(p. 60) Executed on the spot, starved to death, left to bleed to death and worked to death -- these were the usual results for Axis prisoners. A portion did survive, especially almost all the top officers who the Soviets wanted to keep for historical reasons. However, when the rednecks tell us communists that we should not complain about the prisons here, they are way off the mark. There is no shortage of food, fuel or unemployed people to guard prisoners. There is no just war going on either. There is no excuse for treating people within U.$. borders in any way like Stalin treated prisoners. Molotov said as much just before he died recently. Things are different now in terms of production and war.
Dialectics and military tactics
We credit Beevor for talking about the small Soviet military advantages that added up over the course of the war. Of course there was patriotism and fighting on one's own soil, especially at night and at times when the German air force did not fly. In the first winter, the Germans came without any winter clothes and the second winter also favored the defenders.
Furthermore, Soviet industry was already superior in one sense. According to Beevor, the T34 tank was superior to any tank the Germans had. Many German anti-tank guns and tanks could not pierce the armor of the T34, especially at anything but point-blank range.
Beevor's most dialectical observation in the whole book is that the German air force pounded Stalingrad into impassable streets strewn with everything, but it was exactly that fact that made it impossible to take over.(p. 149) Up to that point, the Germans had made the maximum use of their motorized vehicles, especially tanks. Now with house-to-house fighting, artillery and the air force were much less useful and the rubble made it difficult for motorized vehicles to just stomp on everything in town. In every crevice, underneath every piece of junk a Russian would be waiting for the Germans and fighting became more like that of trenches in World War I.
Thus, Germany's overwhelming air superiority in the early stages of the battle of Stalingrad turned into a liability. Just as everything seemed bleak for the Soviet Union, the playing field was "leveled" so to speak, which was in effect an advantage for the defenders. The dialectics of reality were on the side of progress.
Western bias
On the book jacket, Gitta Sereny credits Beevor's "own humanity" as a reason to buy the book. To MIM, we prefer Western "humanism" to relativism, but in truth many will read this book unable to derive any of its meaning because of the general failure of teaching in the imperialist countries.
Beevor himself correctly concludes that it was not just the SS involved in executions of Jews and communists. It was the army itself. He holds the officers responsible for carrying out orders to exterminate various nationalities. Moreover, he even acknowledges that since over 3 million Soviet peoples died in German camps under brutal conditions, it was not going to be possible to restrain the revenge of the Soviet Army against German soldiers at all times. For these conclusions, Beevor is already superior to what is sweeping academia today.
Nonetheless, Beevor clearly wishes Stalin ran a more Liberal war. He claims Stalin and Beria were too harsh in their assessments of what patriotism was necessary.(e.g., p. 385) On the other hand, Beevor also presents the evidence that there were massive panics and treason committed on the Russian side.
Those with a firm sense of weighing the benefits and losses of leniency during the war will be able to engage the book, but the many youth with no political notions or sense of how to weigh the issues will come to relativist conclusions from reading this book. The reason is that the authors present evidence but do not offer firm moral conclusions on the difficult questions, beyond the obvious that the war was a terrible thing in a terrible time. To succeed 50 years after the battle, a book like this should at the very least organize the pros and cons of the difficult ethical decisions made so that the questions are not dodged completely.
MIM finds nothing humynist about dodging the tough ideological or ethical questions of World War II. People living in that time had to make decisions, either right or wrong, involving life and death. Dodging those questions makes it more likely that they will have to be faced again as history ends up repeating itself.