The Battle of Stalingrad was arguably the most important confrontation of the second world war. After being halted right outside the Soviet Union's capital a year earlier, Hitler's armies were trying to attack another target, one they thought might be easier for them. Stalingrad (Volgograd today), was starting to become an obsession for Hitler, not just because it bore his archenemy's name, but because capturing it would put the russians in serious trouble. They would then have to deal with recapturing a city within their own borders while the rest of the german military attacks someplace else. This episode of World at War goes into detail about this horrendous and very significant battle, which has often been called the biggest disaster in german military history. As usual, the episode features the excellent and gripping interviews with war veterans that we've come to associate so much with this series. Additionally, it has one of the only moments in the whole show that is creepy to me. On Christmas day, 1942, with the german attackers being rapidly surrounded, the russians broadcast this message to them: "Every seven seconds, a german soldier dies in russia. Stalingrad is a mass grave." The message and the sound of the clock ticking continued all day long. Eventually, the situation had become so horrible for the germans that they were reduced to eating raw horse flesh. General Paulus, the commander of the german sixth army, asked Hitler for permission to withdraw from the city before his forces were all destroyed. Hitler told him to keep attacking. The episode does a good job of saying how Stalingrad was not a one sided slaughter for the germans like a lot of people seem to think. The soviets also suffered badly, with almost half a million dead. Germany's allies, Italy, Romania and Hungary also played a part in the battle by attempting to hold various positions on the german flanks. All of this was for naught. The aftermath of this battle made obvious that Stalin would crush any assault on the motherland with absolutely overwhelming force, and sure enough the germans never attacked russia again after this. From early 1943 on, they would spend the rest of the war giving up everything they fought for, as the soviet armies pushed them back all the way to Berlin. They also go into detail about what happened post Stalingrad, such as showing german soldiers surrendering. A young Nikita Khrushchev is seen talking with some fellow officers. As for Paulus, he was captured by the russians and surrendered his forces on the same day Hitler promoted him to Field Marshal. The fuhrer had expected him to shoot himself. In the end, a soviet soldier laughed at how germans thought that it was going to be a walk in the park to conquer russia, just as Napoleon thought over a century before. 90 thousand germans were taken prisoner, and less than 5 percent would ever see germany again. The episode illustrates perfectly how the Wehrmacht wasn't as invincible as people thought. This was after all the same sixth army that was marching triumphantly through the streets of Paris 2 years earlier. Overall, this is another excellent entry in a series full of excellent episodes, and there's really nothing negative to say about it. I almost feel like I have to force myself to say something negative about a World at War episode, because none of them are bad at all.
The World at War (TV Series)
Stalingrad: June 1942-February 1943 (1974)
User Reviews
Review this title3 Reviews
A masterpiece
irishrebel9825 August 2020
Warning: Spoilers
Simply the single greatest documentary about a battle that I have ever seen, period, and I have seen a lot of them. It covers everything about Stalingrad, the strategy, the tactics, the participants, both great and small, and most importantly, what was at stake, and does it all in less than an hour. Perhaps the finest moment is at the end, where Laurence Olivier quotes Hitler about how individuals don't matter, about how they die anyway, where what matters is the nation, while showing the corpse of a dead German soldier lying in the snow by the side of a road. Absolutely masterful.
Mechanized Mass Slaughter That Changed History
darryl-tahirali8 September 2023
Given the near-universal acknowledgement that the Battle of Stalingrad was the single most decisive event of World War Two, it is fitting that the nearly six-month campaign that resulted in a catastrophic defeat for Nazi Germany is accorded its own episode in the masterful 26-part British documentary series "The World at War."
This is doubly so considering that the Cold War, in which the Allies' erstwhile partner the Soviet Union quickly became the mortal enemy of the West, suppressed general awareness, let alone understanding, of its significance, particularly to Russians forced to repel invaders determined to subjugate them and loot their natural resources, including the oil fields in the Caucasus that were one of the central objectives of Hitler's attack on Stalingrad, along a battle front that ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
In addition, "Stalingrad: June 1942-February 1943" is the only "The World at War" installment with no interviewees (a point another user reviewer misstated). This leaves Laurence Oliver to narrate Jerome Kuehl's efficient if elliptical script, which provides the only verbal descriptions of the events while incorporating excerpts from the diary of German soldier Wilhelm Hoffmann and an uncredited, rather poetic, citation from the journal of a German Lieutenant Weiner.
Kuehl pens a solid, at times evocative, chronology although he doesn't fully explain Stalingrad's strategic significance as a vital industrial hub that commanded control of the Volga River. Furthermore, he supplies only a brief synopsis of the German advances toward Rostov, then southward to the Caucasian oil fields, necessary because Stalingrad (now Volgograd) lies northeast of both and was thus not directly in the path of the massive German forces. Finally, Kuehl's narrative favors subtleties that readers can detect but listeners often do not.
Compensating for these shortcomings is the cache of German and Russian archival footage, a fair deal of it in color and all of it artfully edited by Beryl Wilkins, that provides its own stark, powerful eloquence. Having lost a million men in the 1941 Soviet campaign, German dictator Adolf Hitler decided to split Russia in two with a southern offensive targeting Rostov and Stalingrad. Color footage opens "Stalingrad" and depicts German forces preparing for the offensive, then surging forth against seemingly little Russian opposition, pushing Soviet forces across the Don River, west of Stalingrad, by the end of July, although a Soviet stand at Kalach proved to be a portent.
With Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian forces shoring up the German flanks, the Sixth Army under the command of General Friedrich Paulus advanced on Stalingrad in August 1942. (Narrating Kuehl's script, Olivier repeatedly and incorrectly states Paulus's name as "von Paulus.") The Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad nearly into rubble, but in those ruins Red Army troops lay in wait for the German invaders; as Hoffmann's diary recounts, a giant grain elevator defended by fifty Russian soldiers held out for days, emblematic of the devastating urban warfare that marked this epic battle with its horrendous loss of life.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did not order the evacuation of Stalingrad; thus, rare Soviet footage shows civilians pitching in to shore up the city's defenses, overseen by Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, as Muscovites had done against the German advance the previous year (depicted in the fifth episode "Barbarossa"). By November, Nazi German forces controlled ninety percent of Stalingrad, by now an obsession with Hitler, who in September 1942 had dismissed General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the army high command, in favor of General Kurt Zeitzler as Halder had failed to supply "National Socialist ardor rather than professional ability." Then the Russian winter struck. And so did the massed Red Army forces that counterattacked under Operation Uranus.
This was the turning point within the turning point of the European theater. Crossing both the Don and Volga Rivers, Soviet armies executed a pincers operation that encircled a quarter of a million men of the German Sixth Army so quickly that Soviet camera crews were unable to capture it on film; a re-enactment was later staged for propaganda purposes (one that recalls battle scenes legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein had filmed for his 1938 movie "Alexander Nevsky"). Having wrested control of the skies from the Luftwaffe, the Soviet air force stymied German attempts to resupply the Sixth Army by air.
After a rescue mission mounted by General Erich von Manstein to establish an escape corridor for the Sixth Army failed, Paulus, whose forces were trapped in a hopeless situation, requested permission to surrender, per the terms offered by the Soviets, on January 22, 1943. Hitler refused the request, his "National Socialist ardor" manifesting into a psychosis that would persist until his death. Eight days later, Hitler displayed this delusional thinking by issuing a passel of promotions to the starving, desperate Sixth Army personnel, making Paulus a field marshal. No German field marshal had ever been captured, with the implication, which Kuehl's too-subtle script doesn't convey effectively, that Paulus should commit suicide rather than surrender.
Tasked with carrying the narrative weight of "Stalingrad," Olivier acquits himself respectably as Carl Davis emphasizes the emotion of the moment with incidental music that is tasteful and sympathetic without resorting to cliché or melodrama. But the real star of "Stalingrad" is the archival film footage that can be bracing, poignant, and at times revelatory, a sober reminder of mechanized mass slaughter that changed the course of history.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?
This is doubly so considering that the Cold War, in which the Allies' erstwhile partner the Soviet Union quickly became the mortal enemy of the West, suppressed general awareness, let alone understanding, of its significance, particularly to Russians forced to repel invaders determined to subjugate them and loot their natural resources, including the oil fields in the Caucasus that were one of the central objectives of Hitler's attack on Stalingrad, along a battle front that ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
In addition, "Stalingrad: June 1942-February 1943" is the only "The World at War" installment with no interviewees (a point another user reviewer misstated). This leaves Laurence Oliver to narrate Jerome Kuehl's efficient if elliptical script, which provides the only verbal descriptions of the events while incorporating excerpts from the diary of German soldier Wilhelm Hoffmann and an uncredited, rather poetic, citation from the journal of a German Lieutenant Weiner.
Kuehl pens a solid, at times evocative, chronology although he doesn't fully explain Stalingrad's strategic significance as a vital industrial hub that commanded control of the Volga River. Furthermore, he supplies only a brief synopsis of the German advances toward Rostov, then southward to the Caucasian oil fields, necessary because Stalingrad (now Volgograd) lies northeast of both and was thus not directly in the path of the massive German forces. Finally, Kuehl's narrative favors subtleties that readers can detect but listeners often do not.
Compensating for these shortcomings is the cache of German and Russian archival footage, a fair deal of it in color and all of it artfully edited by Beryl Wilkins, that provides its own stark, powerful eloquence. Having lost a million men in the 1941 Soviet campaign, German dictator Adolf Hitler decided to split Russia in two with a southern offensive targeting Rostov and Stalingrad. Color footage opens "Stalingrad" and depicts German forces preparing for the offensive, then surging forth against seemingly little Russian opposition, pushing Soviet forces across the Don River, west of Stalingrad, by the end of July, although a Soviet stand at Kalach proved to be a portent.
With Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian forces shoring up the German flanks, the Sixth Army under the command of General Friedrich Paulus advanced on Stalingrad in August 1942. (Narrating Kuehl's script, Olivier repeatedly and incorrectly states Paulus's name as "von Paulus.") The Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad nearly into rubble, but in those ruins Red Army troops lay in wait for the German invaders; as Hoffmann's diary recounts, a giant grain elevator defended by fifty Russian soldiers held out for days, emblematic of the devastating urban warfare that marked this epic battle with its horrendous loss of life.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did not order the evacuation of Stalingrad; thus, rare Soviet footage shows civilians pitching in to shore up the city's defenses, overseen by Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, as Muscovites had done against the German advance the previous year (depicted in the fifth episode "Barbarossa"). By November, Nazi German forces controlled ninety percent of Stalingrad, by now an obsession with Hitler, who in September 1942 had dismissed General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the army high command, in favor of General Kurt Zeitzler as Halder had failed to supply "National Socialist ardor rather than professional ability." Then the Russian winter struck. And so did the massed Red Army forces that counterattacked under Operation Uranus.
This was the turning point within the turning point of the European theater. Crossing both the Don and Volga Rivers, Soviet armies executed a pincers operation that encircled a quarter of a million men of the German Sixth Army so quickly that Soviet camera crews were unable to capture it on film; a re-enactment was later staged for propaganda purposes (one that recalls battle scenes legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein had filmed for his 1938 movie "Alexander Nevsky"). Having wrested control of the skies from the Luftwaffe, the Soviet air force stymied German attempts to resupply the Sixth Army by air.
After a rescue mission mounted by General Erich von Manstein to establish an escape corridor for the Sixth Army failed, Paulus, whose forces were trapped in a hopeless situation, requested permission to surrender, per the terms offered by the Soviets, on January 22, 1943. Hitler refused the request, his "National Socialist ardor" manifesting into a psychosis that would persist until his death. Eight days later, Hitler displayed this delusional thinking by issuing a passel of promotions to the starving, desperate Sixth Army personnel, making Paulus a field marshal. No German field marshal had ever been captured, with the implication, which Kuehl's too-subtle script doesn't convey effectively, that Paulus should commit suicide rather than surrender.
Tasked with carrying the narrative weight of "Stalingrad," Olivier acquits himself respectably as Carl Davis emphasizes the emotion of the moment with incidental music that is tasteful and sympathetic without resorting to cliché or melodrama. But the real star of "Stalingrad" is the archival film footage that can be bracing, poignant, and at times revelatory, a sober reminder of mechanized mass slaughter that changed the course of history.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?
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