“Stalingrad” quotes from The World at War

Narrator Russia, the summer of 1942, the Germans are on the move, again. The sixth army, Hitler's largest, victorious in France, almost victorious in the first year of the Russian campaign. Now it has a new task: to fight further east than the Wehrmacht has ever fought before. To cut Russia in two, on the Volga.

Narrator Goring, the Luftwaffe's Commander in Chief. Earlier that year, his planes had supplied a whole army cut off for sixty days with fuel, ammunition and food. Now he thought they could do it again. Provided the weather was good and provided the distances weren't too great, they could fly in five hundred tons a day. Hitler thought that would do. Although he knew, the Army said, it needed at least eight hundred tons. The Russians were waiting. Bombers were used as transport. The weather was vile. The airlift was only able to bring in a tenth of what was needed. Although it did once deliver a plane load of ground pepper, and twelve cases of contraceptives.

Narrator Two German Armies, twenty Four Generals, two thousand officers, ninety thousand soldiers: prisoners. One hundred and fifty thousand dead. The Romanian, Hungarian and Italian armies destroyed. Enough materiel lost to equip a quarter of the whole German army. This was the same Sixth Army, which two years before, could not imagine defeat

Narrator When it was all over, a Russian soldier said: "Germans are funny fellows, coming to conquer Stalingrad in shiny leather boots. They thought it would be a joyride."

Narrator When it was all over, Hitler said: "What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation."

Narrator On February the third, 1943, German radio announced that Stalingrad had fallen. That the Sixth Army had fought courageously, but had succumbed to "vastly superior enemy forces", and to "unfavorable circumstances."