Stalingrad

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In October 1942, an officer wrote 'Stalingrad is no longer a town . . . Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure'. It was an extraordinary mixture of both courage and coercion. There were terrifying reports of the way soldiers were executed. Sometimes they weren’t even shot properly because the firing party was partly drunk or whatever it may have been. They would then dig themselves out of the shell hole into which their body had been thrown, reappear, and then be shot again. So there were some really terrible sides to it. Judd, Alan (28 April 2002). "Every sort of assault: review of Berlin: the Downfall, 1945 by Antony Beevor". The Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 30 March 2007 . Retrieved 4 March 2009. This is really what I was trying to do when I researched the Russian military archives. I wanted to find out the detail of what life was like for the soldiers and it was simply terrifying. They executed 13,000 of their own men during the course of the battle, which is something that we simply could not imagine.”

When you take, say, Susan Brownmiller’s great book, Against Their Will – which is an urtext, if you like, on rape in warfare – it’s defined. Very much rape is defined as, not an act of sex, but an act of power or an act of violence, or whatever it might be.He was watching us. And then, in the middle of the morning, this other colonel arrived. He was clearly GRU because he spoke perfect English and had obviously learned that abroad. He asked if I was looking for ( he switches to a Russian accent) ‘negative material’. I had to try to give a deliberately boring treatise on the duty of objectivity of a historian, which had no effect whatsoever, as you might imagine. In 1917 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child. There are still places where you can get good stuff. Tim Snyder is a good example. He got it from the Ukrainian archives. You’ve got to be quite clever in the way that gets you round the obstacles.

But then we managed to find the NKVD file on censorship, which quoted some of the more outrageous things from these letters. Those who were caught out, including these incredibly naive Ukrainian boys, for example, one of whom had said, ‘I’ve heard from my family’ – even though the family members were on the other side of the German lines – ‘and they say the Germans aren’t so nasty; they’re really getting on very well with them.’ Unsurprisingly, this guy was immediately seized by the NKVD.There were still some old loyal Communists who were appalled at the whole situation. There was one dragon lady. She had no less than three portraits of Lenin in her office. Five Dials RFE/RL: Another aspect of Stalingrad that I found particularly interesting was the involvement of women combatants on the Soviet side, with many of them seemingly right on the front line. Is that something that is pretty unique to that battle?

In the preface to Stalingrad you mention how important timing has been for you as a historian. A window was opened when you were there in Moscow in 1995 to research the book. Antony Beevor Stalingrad has won prestigious awards including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize.Beevor was awarded an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Kent in 2004, [26] from the University of Bath in 2010, [27] the University of East Anglia in 2014 [28] and the University of York in 2015. [29] He was elected an honorary Fellow of King's College London in July 2016. [30] In July 2016, Beevor was awarded the Medlicott Medal for services to history by the UK-based Historical Association. [41] Published works [ edit ] Fiction [ edit ] The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. ISBN 978-0-14-303765-1 Beevor: No, it wasn’t unique to that battle. In fact, funnily enough, many more women served later in subsequent battles. Overall, his works have been translated into 35 languages with more than 8.5 million copies sold. [17]

Beevor: Altogether around a million Russians -- or those of Soviet nationality -- served on the German side in one form or another. Now the majority of these, one must remember, were called "Hiwis" -- Hilfswilliger [German for “one willing to help”] -- or auxiliary volunteers. They weren’t actually volunteers in many cases. They had been more or less recruited by force from prison camps because they were starving and they were offered some food. They were used basically as draft animals in many cases, or to dig trenches. Beevor was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2017 New Year Honours for "services in support of Armed Forces Professional Development". [23] Farndale, Nigel (19 October 2014). "Antony Beevor: 'I deserved to fail history. I was bolshie...' ". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 19 October 2014 . Retrieved 10 November 2014. James, Trevor (2016). "The Historian". Historian (London). The Historical Association: 2. ISSN 0265-1076. Beevor, a former chair and member of the Council of the Society of Authors, [31] resigned with Sir Philip Pullman in 2022 [32] in protest over the actions of the CEO and the leadership of the management committee.Antony Beevor (24 April 2014). "Antony Beevor - Penguin Books USA". Penguin.com. Archived from the original on 13 August 2014 . Retrieved 23 June 2014. We had to be very careful indeed, but it was the opportunity. I’d always thought that this was where the commissar’s files, the political department’s files were, and I always guessed that that was going to be where the good stuff would be. And it was. You can imagine my feeling of euphoria that evening thinking, ‘Are we really going to be able to carry on doing this?’ I had Angelique Hook, a Dutch researcher and helper, for Arnhem. We started working through the Dutch archives, NIOD in Amsterdam, which is a major Second World War archive. The material there is fantastic. I can read a little bit of Dutch, because of its similarity to German, but I would never dare do a translation or anything like that. It was enough for me to be able to skim a few diaries, while she was skimming others. But, also, it was a good way for her to get used to some of the sort of material to look for and all the rest of it. Rather like with Lyuba, as I say, right from the first moment she knew exactly what to go for. But with Angelique she was more nervous and far too conscientious, recording absolutely everything. I said, ‘You’re never going to have time. Look how many thousands of diaries they’ve got in this archive alone.’ I underestimated that, I have to say. I had already been condemned by the Russian ambassador, and this is before he’d even read a word. The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler and Stalin's determination and its citizens endured unimaginable hardship as a result. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline.