Thoughts on war: Speech by former German soldier Johannes Uhr on the importance of commemorating the victims of Stalingrad, September 1988 (Published on 13/01/2026)
The Battle of Stalingrad
For Germany and the Germans, the Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II. Due to the rapid successes achieved up to that point and the politically conveyed worldview of universal German superiority, which they were only too happy to internalize, the majority of German soldiers and the civilian population considered victory over Russia, which they disparaged as “Asian hordes” and worse, a foregone conclusion.
Things turned out differently.
The German 6th Army was wiped out in Stalingrad. According to estimates, around 300,000 German and Axis soldiers were encircled from November 1942 onwards, 110,000 were taken prisoner, and only 5,000 returned. Despite the hopeless situation and the insufficient supplies for their own troops, the German leadership insisted on continuing the fighting. A total of an estimated 700,000 soldiers died in the Battle of Stalingrad, the majority of them Russians. The statements made by German and Russian soldiers deployed in Stalingrad have been repeatedly reproduced on this blog (see, for example, the field post letters here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Stalingrad took on symbolic significance for both the German and Russian sides that extended beyond the end of the war.
The (waning) German commemoration of the Battle of Stalingrad
On the German side, an association was even founded, the “Bund ehemaliger Stalingradkämpfer e. V. Deutschland” (~ “Association of Former Stalingrad Fighters of Germany”), which in 1964 helped to erect a central German memorial at the main cemetery in Limburg in memory of all the soldiers who fell at Stalingrad and died in subsequent captivity.
At this memorial, Father Johannes Uhr, former captain in an infantry regiment, gave a speech on 18/09/1988, in memory of the victims of Stalingrad, in which he said, among other things (source: Schade-Bartkowiak, Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind, p. 150; translated from German language)):
“…mixed in with our grief is a deep and serious concern for the future of our people.
We do note how the sacrifice of the 6th Army in Stalingrad is increasingly fading from the consciousness of younger people, or rather being suppressed, and how Stalingrad will soon be seen and evaluated only as »the beginning of the end of Hitler’s rule«. The bitter deaths of a quarter of a million people – friends and foes alike – seem hardly worth remembering or reflecting on any longer. But this is what worries us.
If, namey, that historical event is viewed in a distorted or narrow-minded way, it will not help the next generation to live in peace. The former GDR writer Kunze therefore warns impressively against such inadequate historiography when he writes: »Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.«
To protect our descendants from this, we feel compelled to ask them to also see the immeasurable suffering of Stalingrad and to never forget our dead, for it was t h e i r bitter suffering and death that undoubtedly gave the first impetus to change the thinking of our people regarding the value and worthlessness of every war.
Anyone who witnessed the profound shock caused by the bad news from the Volga, both at the front and at home, knows this. While it was still possible during World War I to glorify the horror of battles such as Langemarck, Verdun, Cambrai, or Ypres, this was not the case with Stalingrad! Stalingrad raised serious questions among the people as to whether wars were still a meaningful means of achieving justice and peace between states and peoples…”
Towards a new German value of war?
How aware is today’s German society of the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Stalingrad at that time – Germans and Russians; soldiers and civilians; men, women, and children – and in what form is the memory of this kept alive?
If, according to the above speech, the experiences of Stalingrad, among other things, changed the Germans’ thinking from the value to the worthlessness of war, and regular remembrance supported this change, what impact does the increasing forgetting (or allowing to be forgotten) of the events of that time have?
If German soldiers deployed in Stalingrad back then were already concerned about developments in 1988, there is all the more reason to be concerned today, now that the warning voices of those soldiers have fallen silent forever.
(Head picture: Grave of unknown German and Russian soldiers
at the German military cemetery Ittenbach, August 2025)
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