Word: german
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...late fall of 1942, the entire German Sixth Army, which in the summer months of the same year had pushed its way across the Don and into the industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga, was cut off from its Army Group and left to shift for itself 300,000 men deep inside the Russian front, supplied inefficiently by air and gradually being killed among the snow-covered steppes and hills and the shattered remains of the city...
...siege of Stalingrad is not only interesting tactically, but many historians and most of the captured German generals maintain that it was the actual turning point of the war. Theodor Plievier, a German left-wing writer who made his reputation in the 1920's with violent attacks on militarism and imperialism, wrote "Stalingrad" during the war, presumably in Russia and with Soviet blessing. The book was published in Berlin shortly after the end of the war, and has since sold over a million copies in Germany alone. Although it is slightly slanted to glorify the Russian Army and was extremely...
...begins with the nightmare existence of a soldier in one of the notorious punishment companies, a man who has lived through so many years of deaths and explosions land burying details that he scarcely knows whether he is alive himself. As the pressure of Russian attacks forces the German line closer and closer together and the regiments beat their aimless retreat across miles of snow-swept steppes into Stalingrad proper, Plievier introduces many miscellaneous characters who appear briefly, disappear are forgotten by the reader, and reappear again somewhere else...
...Stalingrad" is a novel of mood. Instead of a plot, there is only the overpowering atmosphere of snow and gray skies and beaten men--and death. Plievier indulges in lengthy political discourses in the words of his characters and in the third person. His German officers begin, for the first time, to doubt the infallibility of what they have built and operated, and to find in the ruin of the sixth Army and its betrayal by Hitler the first indications that they have devoted their lives to a false cause. It dawns on some of them that...
This story doesn't end on the last page of the novel. Field Marshal Von Paulus, the commander of the Sixth Army, joined the so-called Free Germany Committee shortly after his capture. This group was made up of German ex-officers in Russian captivity, who became opposed to Nazism and were carefully trained to form a pro-Russian puppet administration in Germany. Today Von Paulus is said to be commanding an army of pro-Communist German veterans--a ghost army somewhere in eastern Europe, ready to pounce when the time comes. Theodor Plievier himself came to Germany...