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Kessel: Göring's Airlift Lie and the Slow Death of the Sixth Army
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The encirclement was complete — but Hitler refused a breakout, Göring promised an airlift he couldn't deliver, and 250,000 men began to starve. Episode 12 traces the collapse inside the Stalingrad pocket, from Manstein's failed relief to Paulus's impossible choice.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Stalingrad, you could look at this battle and see a city holding on. Stubborn, bleeding, costly, but holding.
Hermann Göring told Hitler the Luftwaffe could supply the Sixth Army by air. That promise is worth dwelling on, because it defines everything that follows.
The conditions inside the encirclement that winter were extreme in ways that are difficult to convey without the detail. The temperature dropped to minus thirty and lower.
From the south, Erich von Manstein tried to reach them. Operation Winter Storm launched in December nineteen forty-two, a relief column pushing northward toward the encircled army.
Through all of this, the fighting in Stalingrad itself hadn't stopped. Vasily Chuikov's sixty-second Army still held its strip of the western bank.
Inside the German command structure, the weight of the situation was fracturing relationships that had held through four years of war. Several senior officers in the kessel argued openly for a breakout, regardless of Hitler's orders.
On the second of February nineteen forty-three, the last German forces in Stalingrad surrendered. Friedrich Paulus, newly promoted Field Marshal, gave himself up in the basement of the Univermag department store on Red Square in Stalingrad.
Stalingrad is called the turning point of the war in the east, and the phrase is accurate, but it can make the shift sound cleaner than it was. The Germans didn't collapse after February nineteen forty-three.
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