Stalingrad through German eyes

Iain MacGregor explores the previously unpublished testimony of a German officer on the front line | In September 1942, German lieutenant colonel Friedrich Roske declared himself "the master of the centre of Stalingrad" after his troops had smashed their way into the heart of the city. But with thousands of Soviet guardsmen poised to launch a furious counter-attack, his triumph was to be short-lived. Roske's previously unpublished testimonies reveal, in unsparing detail, the grim fate of the German troops holed up in Stalingrad as the Red Army began to tighten its grip...

- Iain MacGregor

Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Roske during the Second World War. "The men carry on in their duty day and night without protection in this hell," he wrote of the struggle for Stalingrad

Winters in Russia can be brutal. By November 1942, temperatures along the Volga river had plummeted towards -20°C. And the remaining troops of the German Sixth Army, pinned down by Soviet forces in and around Stalingrad (now Volgograd) amid the fractured ruins, factories and other buildings they'd captured earlier that autumn, were experiencing the worst of the conditions.

"The men carry on in their duty day and night without protection in this hell," reported Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich "Fritz" Roske, writing home to his wife in Düsseldorf. "Food is poor, [and there's] no time or possibility of rest. Last night I brought chocolates and cigarettes for everyone with me... which I had saved for when the situation might become more desperate... All night, the Russians attempted to work around our positions and capture [it]."

Roske penned this letter days after 19 November 1942, when Soviet armies commanded by General Georgy Zhukov had launched a massive counter-attack on the weakened Axis flanks, and had soon encircled the Sixth Army in a move that would help change the course of the war on the eastern front. As Roske recognised: "He [Zhukov] definitely had to take it - and we had to hold on to what we had."

AIR POWER A German Heinkel He 111 in the Stalingrad area, 1942. For much of the battle for Stalingrad, the Luftwaffe dominated the skies over the city