It's time to go hungry.
Now, the best way to illustrate the rations Sixth Army have
is by taking a look at the bread ration - which seems to be the main element every source
talks about. The bread ration is about half of the ration that the German soldiers would
have been given per day. Prior to the encirclement, the German soldiers were receiving 16 ounces
of bread a day. This is basically a loaf of bread. Now, this loaf
is actually 14 ounces, so it's actually slightly smaller than what the Germans would have had.
But this is what they would have been given every day. Lots and lots of bread.
Now, there’s people out there that say calories don’t mean anything, and that’s fine.
But those arguments aside, a 16 ounce loaf of bread will provide you with 1,200
calories. According to David Glantz, the recommended
amount of calories for a soldier fighting in severe combat conditions is 2,500 calories.
And in fact, 2,500 calories is what the British NHS recommends for a man to consume daily
in order to maintain his weight. So again, 16 ounces of bread is just under
half of a German soldier’s calorie intake. The rest is made up by other foodstuffs like meat and so on.
Made a slight recovery.
This means that when, on the 23rd of November 1942, Sixth Army ordered that the bread ration
be cut to 8 ounces...
That’s 9 and a half slices of this bread. Per day.
This is 600 calories. If all their other rations halved as well, this would mean they’re receiving
1,200 calories at a time they should be getting 2,500.
Bearing in mind that the guys in the trenches are freezing at this point, and fighting too.
So they’re needing more energy in order to simply stay alive.
And now they’re on a diet of half of what they need, on the first day.
And this is a 71 day siege. And while I’m no diet expert, there are websites out there
saying if you reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories a day, from your recommended, you will lose 1 pound
in weight a week. A reduction of 1,000 calories (which is what this is)
and we’re talking a loss of 2 pounds of weight per week. This
is a 71 day siege, which is 10 weeks. At that then, they would lose 20 pounds, or roughly
1.4 stone, throughout the siege. The average man is 14 stone, so they're going to
lose 1 tenth of their body weight in 10 weeks on this diet.
And that’s only if they stay at this - on the first day. And it didn’t.
The rations were cut again and again. By the time you get to the 26th of December,
the bread ration is cut to 2 ounces a day. That’s 2 and a half slices of bread.
2 ounces of bread is 150 calories. Again, assuming this is half of the food they’re
receiving, they’re getting 300 calories a day - instead of 2,500.
One source says they were receiving 200 grams of deliciously delicious horsemeat, which
is roughly 286 calories. This is 200 grams of steak.
So don't be mistaken in to think this is actually horse meat. But here’s the thing to note. We’re talking
extremely cold conditions, and there’s little to no wood available, or fuel. In some cases,
they were eating this stuff raw. One source says that you can’t eat horse meat raw, so they’re
certainly struggling. But they were getting 30 grams of fat, which
is is 270 calories as well.
But don’t worry! You’re still receiving 3 cigarettes a day. Mmmmm... Tuck in!
Not sure how many calories cigarette is but probably not a lot.
Why are they still shipping in cigarettes, I don't know?
Surely the priority is food, right? But I don't smoke so pfff!
So let’s do the math, 150 calories of bread, 286 calories of horsemeat, and 270 calories
of fat… That’s 706 calories.
However, that same source that says they got all this horsemeat and fat also claims they
were getting 7 ounces of bread, not 2, which seems unlikely, considering the bread ration
was reduced to 2 grams at this point. So these numbers may even be less than that.
If a reduction of 500 calories per day is a pound a week in weight loss. At this point,
they’re probably losing 4 pounds a week. There’s 38 days of the siege left at this
point. That’s roughly five weeks. This means they would have lost 21 pounds,
or 1.4 stone again, in that 5 weeks. But there’s a problem with this. And that
is that we know that Kurt Zeitzler, Chief of the Army General Staff, the man who replaced
the beloved Halder, is so appalled by the suffering of the Sixth Army’s troops, that
he goes on a diet. He eats only what they eat. And according to Beevor (who’s getting
his info from Albert Speer), Zeitzler lost 26 pounds in two weeks.
It was that bad, that Hitler ordered him to give up the diet and return to normal eating.
So clearly, the soldiers in the Sixth Army were not getting enough food. And they’re
losing a lot of body weight in the process. Paulus is reporting that his men are starving
to death, and the first deaths by starvation are recorded on the 21st of December 1942
- less than a month into the siege. And this is before we have a reduction in
rations down to 2 and a half slices of bread. These are terrible conditions, especially
in the extreme cold. Now you hear that the Soviets took somewhere
in the region of 107,000 German prisoners of war during the final stages of the battle.
Glantz calculates that from people flown out of the pocket, Sixth Army probably had 206,000
men left within it. That means that 99,000 men of Sixth Army perished
in the pocket. But here’s the deal - Sixth Army’s combat
strength had been 40,000 men on the 21st of November. This decreased to 34,000 on the
6th of December, and reached 28,200 men by the 18th of December.
Let’s assume for the minute that 40,000 combat troops were in the pocket and that
none of them were flown out. That’s 40,000 of the 206,000 men who were in the pocket.
Let’s also assume that every one of these combat troops fought to the last and didn’t
surrender - that would be 40,000 of the 99,000 men who perished in the pocket.
So what happened to the other 59,000 men then? Yes, I’m certain some of these men would
have died from artillery strikes and whatever else, but it appears that a good portion of the
99,000 men (most of whom were not combat troops) would have simply starved to death.
This includes the Russian auxiliary troops, drafted by the Germans. This includes rear
service troops. Not front line combat troops. They were all starving to death.
And the men who did surrender were going to be on the borderline of death as well.
It’s clear they didn’t all suddenly receive bountiful quantities of food as soon as they
surrendered to the Soviets. I think it’s obvious why so many German
soldiers from Sixth Army didn’t survive the war.
Of the 107,000 men who surrendered, only 5,000 ever saw Germany again.
But this death ratio is actually quite high for German troops surrendering to the Soviets.
Of the 1,415,000 German prisoners of war taken by the Soviets, 459,000 died in captivity.
That’s 32.4%. 102,000 of these - almost a quarter - were
Sixth Army. 102,000 men died from the 107,000 men that were taken prisoner. That’s a death
percentage for Sixth Army prisoners of 95%. Why? What’s the difference?
Why would an average German soldier on the Eastern Front die in Soviet captivity 32.4%
of the time, but the Sixth Army soldier die 95% of the time?
It’s quite obvious that their poor diet prior to their capture is what did it. This
was the main difference between the average German soldier and the Sixth Army soldier.
And that’s not to say the German troops weren’t treated badly - yeah, they were. But there’s
a difference between the Sixth Army and the rest of the German prisoners, otherwise, we
would see the same 95% death ratio for all German troops. Which we don’t.
Poor diet in the weeks prior to their surrender, explains this.
But here’s something you don’t often hear, and that is - it's quite an interesting one.
On the 31st of December, Chuikov reports his men are existing on 100 grams per day, which
is roughly 500 calories. Sixth Army are starving. But so are 62nd Army.
And let’s not forget, they’re under siege as well. And they’ve been under siege for
a long time - 6 months. To quote David Glantz -
“If the German troops were suffering from severe deprivation, things were often nearly
as bad on the Soviet side, particularly in the ruins of Stalingrad’s factory district,
where death was a constant companion.” - Glantz, Volume 3, Book 2, P406
As I mentioned in last-Monday’s video, the 3,000 or 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war
(and civilians) that were trapped in a camp within the Sixth Army pocket, starved to death.
The story of Dulag-205 is horrifying. This was a transit camp close to the village
of Alexeevka, 3 miles from Gumrak airfield inside the pocket.
“That the food for the prisoners was the scraps from the kitchens of German soldiers
and sometimes the corpses of dead horses, which were thrown into the camp. Water was
not delivered to the camp, and the prisoners were forced to use dirty snow collected inside
the camp. Additionally, no fuel was brought to the camp, which forced the prisoners to
use fuel from the clothes of the dead in order to make fires for preparing the “food”
comprising leftovers and dead horses. And when there was insufficient clothing to be
taken from the dead they used their own uniforms. However, even this “food” made up of scraps
and horses was of a miserable quantity. As a consequence of the starvation in the camp,
prisoners were reduced to cannibalism. Despite this, rations were not given to the prisoners.”
And you have to remember that the camp was only really designed to accommodate 500 prisoners.
The prisoners couldn’t sleep lying down, because there was that many of them, and there were no bunks anyway.
There's no fuel, there's no heating.
But there were beatings. The guards removed the prisoner’s clothing and kept it for
themselves, and they also set their dogs on them.
These are the names of the officers in camp who
were captured when the camp was liberated on the 31st of January 1943, and were later
tried and executed in 1944. These were not SS guards - these were Wehrmacht
officers. The highest rank was Oberleutnant. And this is in addition to the sufferings
of the Stalingrad civilian population. Thanks to numerous refugees, in August 1942,
the city’s population was roughly 400,000. The civilians were evacuated and bombed by
the Luftwaffe - with 75,000 of these dying as a result of this.
At least 200,000 civilians were still in the city when the Germans entered it.
186,000 were then exported to the Ukraine and Germany, and most of these would die in captivity.
By the 2nd of February, Stalingrad’s civilian population had fallen to 7,655 persons.
“Thus, simple but grisly arithmetic indicates that the actual death toll of civilians in
Stalingrad city was at least 80,000. And even if only half the forced laborers perished,
that would bring the total to more than 170,000 people.”
Men. Women. Children. Dead. There were no SS troops at Stalingrad.
The German soldiers who starved at Stalingrad - were just as guilty as the Nazi high command.
There is no innocence in this war. This is a brutal conflict on all sides. The Soviets
are just as bad - the British and Americans also committed crimes.
But this idea that the Wehrmacht was innocent, and that it was just the SS’s fault, or
just the Nazi high command’s fault. This idea is rubbish.
The men who marched to the east deprived the local population of food. They took the food
off them, and this lead to starvation. Sixth Army did this as well. And yes, you can
sympathise with the men involved, but there comes a point where you have to remember that
these men were not nice people. And that this was not a nice war.
Sixth Army were not innocent. And when you hear about how they went hungry - you've got to remember
that. They are not innocent. Thank you to my Patreons. You
make these videos possible, because you’re awesome. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure
to share, and tell everyone about this channel. I'll be very grateful for that.
As a final note, It’s a good job the Oil crisis for Germans was as bad as it was.
If they’d drove into the Soviet Union on trucks instead of on horses, Sixth Army wouldn’t
have had that deliciously delicious horsemeat on which to sustain themselves.
Sometimes this meat was rotten, which is why they ended up at the horsepital.
On that note, thanks for watching guys, bye for now.