Every decisive military campaign in history is shrouded in myth, legend, and often in self-serving distortion of fact. As Christer Bergström explains, only rarely has this phenonemon had such an impact as it does on our understanding of the 1942 German summer offensive and the Battle of Stalingrad.
It is certainly the case that the number of myths and legends surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad reflects the scope and scale of the German defeat. In their book The Myth of the Eastern Front, historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J Davies show how memoir writing by German generals in the 1950s shaped the general image of the Eastern Front in the Western eyes:
“They conjured up a black-and-white world, in which Hitler incorporated evil and they, virtue.” [i]
Two men, however, played a leading role in all of this: Franz Halder and Erich von Manstein.
The so-called ’diaries’ by Generaloberst Franz Halder, chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH), were extensively re-written by Halder himself after the war, with a view towards exculpating himself in the Nuremberg trials and also to shift all blame for the war’s failures onto Hitler.
Von Manstein, who commanded Heeresgruppe Don during the final stage of the Battle of Stalingrad, is described by Smelser and Davies as:
“...a commanding military presence raised to the cult level, a man much honoured by postwar historiography, which he, second only to Franz Halder, influenced decisively.” [ii]
Smelser and Davies summarise the tendency in Halder’s 1949 book, Hitler als Feldherr, where the author writes more freely than in his ‘diaries’:
“All the strategic and operational mistakes of the war in the East were laid at Hitler’s door; Hitler’s amateurishness contrasted at every point with the professionalism of the soldiers. Hitler’s wahnsinn (lunacy) contrasted with the simple patriotism of the army. Hitler’s complete immorality contrasted with the traditional moral code of the officer.” [iii]
However, the scene which stymied any objective understanding of Staligrad had already been set by Halder and von Mannstein, and following the footsteps of these two senior commanders, a flood of memoirs by German generals and servicemen strengthens this myth and the image of war on the
