Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Last letters from Stalingrad – Letter from an unnamed German soldier in a military hospital in Russia to his wife about the loss of his legs (Published on 01/07/2025)
In a letter from the military hospital at the Gumrak makeshift airfield in Russia, an unnamed German soldier reports on the loss of his legs and the situation (source: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad [“Last Letters from Stalingrad”], letter no. 28, p. 45 f. [translation from German language]):
“… This letter is already difficult for me, how difficult will it be for you! Unfortunately, the news in this letter is not good. And the fact that I have waited ten days has not made it any better. Our situation has now worsened to such an extent that there are fears that we will soon be completely cut off from the outside world. I was recently reassured that this post will definitely still go out. If I knew that there was another opportunity, I would wait, but I don’t know, and for better or worse I have to speak out. The war is over for me.
I’m lying in the military hospital in Gumrak waiting to be taken away by plane. As eagerly as I wait, the date is always postponed again. The fact that I am coming home is a great joy for me and also for my dear wife, who you are. But how I get home will not be a joy for you. I am in despair when I think of lying before you as a cripple. But you must know for once that my legs are shot off.
I want to be completely honest. My right leg is completely shattered and amputated below the knee and my left leg has been removed at the thigh. The senior physician says that with prostheses I could walk around like a healthy person. The senior doctor is a good man and he means well. I wish he was right. Now you know beforehand. Dear Elise, I just want to know what you think. I have the whole day to think about it. And I think about you a lot. I’ve also wished that I was dead, but it’s a grave sin and one is not allowed to say such things.
There are over eighty further men in the tent, but countless comrades are lying outside. You can hear them screaming and moaning through the tent, and nobody can help them. A non-commissioned officer from Bromberg is lying next to me with a severe stomach wound. The senior doctor said he would be home soon, but to the medic he said: ‘He won’t make it any longer than tonight, let him lie there that long’. The senior doctor is a good man. On the other side, next to me on the wall, there was a soldier from Breslau who had lost an arm and his nose, and he told me that he no longer needed handkerchiefs. When I asked him what he would do if he had to cry, he replied that everyone here, including you and me, won’t be getting to crying anymore. Others will soon be crying for us.”
The publisher about the book “Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad“ (a.a.O., p. 67 ff. [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 stone at the German military cemetery Gondelsheim,
February 2025 [Translated inscription: “A German Soldier”])
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