Antony Beevor's Stalingrad, published by Penguin in 1998, was a worldwide bestseller, telling one of the most harrowing stories of the Second World War and reminding everybody of the power of narrative history in the hands of an expert story-teller. In Christmas at Stalingrad, Beevor takes us back to December 1942, when the German 6th Army was surrounded by the Russians and facing annihilation. Only thoughts of Christmas kept the soldiers' hopes alive.
On Christmas Eve, Reuber's pianist battalion commander gave his last bottle of sparkling wine to the soldiers in the sickbay, but just after all the mugs were filled, four bombs exploded outside. Everyone flung themselves to the floor, spilling all the Sekt. The medical officer grabbed his first-aid bag and ran from the bunker to see to the casualties - one killed and three wounded. The dead man had been singing the Christmas carol 'O du fröhliche'. The incident, not surprisingly, put an end to their celebrations. In any case, both the 16th Panzer and the 60th Motorized Infantry Division soon found themselves under full attack in the early hours of Christmas morning.
The traditional, and favourite, song that night was 'Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht', which soldiers sang 'with husky voices' in bunkers by the light of hoarded candle stubs. There were many stifled sobs as men thought of their families at home. General Strecker was clearly moved when he made a tour of front-line positions. 'It is a "Stille Nacht" amid the turmoil of war.A Christmas that shows the true brotherhood of soldiers.' Visits by senior officers were also appreciated for their accompanying benefits. An NCO in a panzer division recorded 'the divisional commander gave us a swig from his bottle and a bar of chocolate'.
In positions which were not attacked, men crowded into a bunker which had a wireless to hear 'the Christmas broadcast of Grossdeutsche Rundfunk'. To their astonishment, they heard a voice announce: 'This is Stalingrad!', answered by a choir singing 'Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht', supposedly on the Volga front. Some men accepted the deception as necessary in the circumstances, others were deeply angered. They felt it was tricking their families and the German people as a whole. Goebbels had already proclaimed that this should be a 'German Christmas', a definition intended to convey notions of duty and austerity, and perhaps already a way of preparing the nation for news of the tragedy of Stalingrad.
At seven o'clock on Christmas morning, the Sixth Army diary recorded: 'No supply flights arrived in the last forty-eight hours [a slight exaggeration]. Supplies and fuel coming to an end.' Later that day, Paulus sent a warning signal to Army Group Don to be passed back to General Zeitzler. 'If we do not receive increased rates of supplies in the next few days, we must expect a greatly increased death rate through exhaustion.'
Although they realized that the snowstorms of the previous day must have hindered flying, they had not been informed that Badanov's tanks had stormed on to Tatsinskaya airfield the previous morning. Manstein's headquarters did not even pass on the news that the Soviet counter-attack with four armies against Hoth's panzer divisions on the Myshkova river had been launched. When 108 tons of supplies finally arrived on 26th December, Sixth Army headquarters discovered that they had been sent ten tons of sweets for Christmas, but no fuel.
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