Breakout at Stalingrad

Heinrich Gerlach

2 ideas

1. The Confiscated Stalingrad Manuscript and Its Rewrite

   Heinrich Gerlach, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, wrote a novel of the Sixth Army's encirclement while a Soviet prisoner, and the Soviets confiscated the manuscript before his release. Back in West Germany, he rebuilt it with the help of hypnosis and published it in 1957 as The Forsaken Army. In 2012 the scholar Carsten Gansel found the original in a Russian military archive, and it was published in 2016 (English 2017, as Breakout at Stalingrad), letting readers compare the text written close to the events with the one reconstructed from recovered memory.

2. Obedience Destroyed the Army Before Enemy Fire

   The encircled Sixth Army was lost because officers who could see that holding was hopeless kept obeying the order to stand fast. Their oath and the chain of command overrode their own judgment. By the time conscience might have justified disobedience, the men were too starved and immobile to break out. The catastrophe came less from lacking information than from a culture where deferring upward felt safer than acting on what one knew.

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