Thoughts on war: Russian soldier Semyon Gudzenko on the last German soldier in Stalingrad, 1943 (Published on 07/01/2026)
Semyon Petrovich Gudzenko (born on 05/03/1922, in Kiev, deceased on 02/12/1953) in Moscow, was a Soviet Russian poet of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. He studied at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature from 1939 to 1941 and worked as a poet during the war against Germany. He died in 1953 from injuries sustained during the war.
In one of his few poems preserved in German, Semyon Gudzenko made a remarkable prediction about the outcome of World War II for Germany. He wrote (source: Bähr, Die Stimme des Menschen – Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der ganzen Welt 1939 – 1945 [“Man’s Voice – Letters and Notes from Around the World, 1939 – 1945”] (1961), p. 332 [translation from German language])):
“Stalingrad, May – November 1943
End of February.
Blue sky gapes in place of curtains in the holes in the walls.
At intersections, arrows point the Germans
The way to captivity.
That is history.
That is memory.
The noise of battle
Has receded from the Volga region.
The question of school construction is deliberated night after night in the district offices.
And the children carefully bring in an intact school desk – as if it were made of glass.
But from the basement,
Blinded by the light,
A German crawled out, breathing heavily.
How he trembled, pressed against the wall!
In a tattered coat,
On unsteady feet –
The last German soldier in Stalingrad.
Once it is Berlin where he crawls out like this!”
Semyon Gudzenko was right.
What he did not foresee was that many of the last German soldiers deployed in the battle for Berlin would often be nothing more than teenagers and old men with no significant military training, who, ordered by the political leaders of the time to join the so-called “Volkssturm,” were to resist to the bitter end in a lost cause. Often politically blinded and fanatical, many of the young people in particular obeyed until the end and paid for their commitment with their lives.
(Head picture: Snow-covered trees in the Düsseldorf city forest,
January 2026)
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