Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Last letters from Stalingrad – Letter from an unnamed German soldier about dying on the Eastern Front (Published on 09/09/2025)
In a letter on the situation, he writes (source: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad [»Last Letters from Stalingrad«], letter no. 10, p. 19 f. [translation from German language]):
“…You are my witness that I always resisted because I was afraid of the East, of war in general. I was never a soldier, only in uniform. What did I gain from it? What did the others gain from it, those who did not resist and were not afraid? Yes, what do we get out of it? We, the extras in this living nonsense? What do we get out of heroic death? I have played death a few dozen times on stage, but only played it, and you sat in your plush armchairs in front of me, and my playing of death seemed real and true to you. It is shocking to realize how little the play had to do with death.
Death always had to be heroic, inspiring, thrilling, for a great cause and out of conviction. And what is it really here? Dying, starving, freezing to death, nothing more than a biological fact, like eating and drinking. They drop like flies, and no one cares or buries them. Without arms and legs and without eyes, with torn bellies, they lie everywhere. A film should be made about this to make the »most beautiful death in the world« impossible. It is a brutal death, which will later be ennobled on granite pedestals with »dying warriors«, bandages around their heads or arms.
Hymns, novels, and sacred songs will be written and sung. And masses will be held in churches. I will no longer participate in this, because I have no desire to rot in a mass grave. I wrote something similar to Professor H. You and he will hear from me again. Do not be surprised if it takes a while, because I have decided to take my fate into my own hands.”
The publisher about the book »Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad« (ibid., p. 19 f. [translation from German language]):
“An adventurous story could be written about the origins of the »Last Letters from Stalingrad«, the story of an over-organized party and war bureaucracy with its censors, snoopers and beadles. For the letters passed through all the stations of this bureaucracy from the day they were transported from the Stalingrad cauldron. They wanted to »get to know the mood in the Stalingrad fortress« from them and therefore ordered the Führer’s headquarters to confiscate the mail. The order was passed on as an order from the Army High Command to the Army Field Post Inspection Office. When the last plane from the cauldron landed in Nowo-Tscherkask, seven sacks of mail were confiscated. This was in January 1943 and the letters were opened and the address and sender removed. They were then sorted according to content and tendency and handed over to the Wehrmacht High Command in carefully tied bundles.
The statistical recording of the »mood« was carried out by the Army Information Department and divided into five groups. The following picture emerged:
Positive about the war: 2,1 %
Doubtful: 4,4 %
Disbelieving, dismissive: 57,1 %
Oppositional: 3,4 %
Without opinion, indifferent: 33,0 %
After being statistically recorded and noted, the letters, together with the other documents about Stalingrad, including Führer instructions, orders, radio messages and reports – a total of around ten hundredweight of material – ended up in the care of a PK man [member of a propaganda company] who had been commissioned to write a documentary work about the Battle of the Volga. The top German war leadership would have liked to justify itself, but the language of the documents was unambiguous. So the book was banned. »Unacceptable for the German people!« decided the propaganda minister. The authentic copies of the letters were then taken to the army archives in Potsdam, where they were brought to safety a few days before the capture of Berlin and saved for the present day.”
(Head picture: Grave stones at the German military cemetery Ittenbach,
August 2025)
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