The Battle of Stalingrad was the most bloody and barbaric battle of the whole of the Second
World War, with the casualty and death toll in the millions.
The city held great importance for both the Soviets and also the Nazis, and they would
fight to the death for it.
After having initial successes on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad is seen as a major turning
point against the German Army and the Nazi war effort.
It resulted in the complete destruction of the German 6th Army, and it was heralded across
in Germany as a huge loss once the population had been told.
The street fighting was intense, and the built up city became a battleground with each house
and street holding strategic importance, and the conditions in the city were dire.
The Luftwaffe were bombing heavily, and the stress of battle on the soldiers was incredibly
high.
But there was a phenomena within the German High Command, and it was linked to the death
rate of the 6th Army’s soldiers based in Stalingrad.
For a battle situation, there was an alarmingly high rate of German and Axis soldiers who
were dying from natural causes in the battlefield.
This has been labelled Stalingrad Heart.
But why was this?
Join us as we look at ‘Stalingrad Heart, The Silent Killer of WW2’s Bloodiest Battle.’
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The Axis casualties of the Battle of Stalingrad were over 750,000 in their number which is
incredibly shocking considering it was just one battle.
It resulted in the capitulation and the surrender of the 6th Army who suffered complete wipeout
and destruction at the hands of the Red Army.
The fighting inside the city was indescribable, and it was incredibly barbaric and brutal.
The Soviet generals were executing their own men if they dared to retreat one step, and
this made them dig in and become an even more determined foe for the Germans.
As the Soviet’s counterattacked and encircled the Germans, conditions for them deteriorated
greatly.
The surrounding forces were forced to live on hardly any food, and were killing horses
to eat.
The situation was so bad that the horse meat was frozen and was unable to be cut by a knife,
and there was a huge amount of despair on a daily basis, along with the cold to contend
with.
Many German soldiers took their own lives, and a number inflicted wounds on themselves
to try and get a trip back to Germany away from the front lines.
Men would willingly put there heads out about the parapet to pray for a Russian Sniper to
end their suffering, and within days each German soldier was losing kilograms of weight.
But there was another problem within the German high command, and it came from a mysterious
illness or disease which was plaguing the German soldiers.
It had been present even before the Germans became encircled and surrounded, and it has
been known as Stalingrad heart.
Many soldiers who were young, in their late teens and early twenties were found keeled
over dead, and they were not suffering from wounds inflicted by the enemy, or by the effects
of starvation.
These were young fit men who were dead from no real cause or sign of battle.
The reason these men died was due to the prolonged stress that the battle and the war was having
on them.
This was also affecting Red Army soldiers, the Germans in fact had found many Red Army
POWs simply keeled over dead for no reason, but through autopsys of these POWs, it was
revealed that these men were suffering from enlargement or inflammation of the heart.
Following 1941, the German army at the time had been short of men and they kept Soviet
POWs alive to supplement their workforce and man power.
They were used to move supplies and build roads and maintain infrastrure.
But many of these POW’s, fit and young men died from natural causes.
These men who were dying from no obvious cause at Stalingrad were dying from the prolonged
stress that was and battle was causing to their bodies.
Living every day as if it was their last, the soldiers caused immense stress and trauma,
and with this the stress caused physical damage and changes to the heart and the body.
This then made the men more likely to suffer from heart attacks, and surrounded by artillery
fire and constant barrages, this easily happened.
The men of the 6th Army became obsessed with death, and were surrounded by it constantly,
and with this a number of doctors were dispatched to conduct autopsys on the mysterious corpses.
They found that after thawing, the bone marrow was filled with a waxy liquid, and that the
hearts of these young men were inflamed and enlarged and that the silent killer of Stalingrad
was infact death from heart failure.
As mentioned, many of these deaths occured before the enriclement of the 6th Army, and
increased in the final weeks before surrender because of the weather conditions and the
cold.
The starvation also made heart failure more likely to occur.
But there is also another belief as to why healthy soldiers just died at Stalingrad.
Despite all the stress, the German Army were giving their soldiers stimulants and amphetamines,
and a drug called Pervitin which is linked to irregular heartbreats and high blood pressure.
With this, it increases the risk for the taker of a heart attack and a stroke, and it was
only within the last few decades that the risks of this drug were discovered.
So the medication given to soldiers could also have been inflicting damage to the soldiers
also, placing more strain on their hearts.
It’s also been considered that Stalingrad Heart could be linked to a Vitamin deficiency
caused by the lack of food and poor nutrition that was given to the German soldiers.
Stalingrad Heart was a real condition that the soldiers of not just the German Army,
but the Red Army also suffered from.
It’s likely that the intense stress of the Second World War was having an incredibly
detrimental effect on the bodies of those people fighting in it, and the reason so many
people were dying from natural causes with no sign of battle is because the heart could
not take the fear that people were living in.
The German High Command had learned about the stresses of battle and war on Soviet POWs
and clearly understood towards the end of the battle that the stresses of the Battle
of Stalingrad was causing hundreds of seemingly fit and able soldiers to just keel over and
die.
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