342. Buchbender/Sterz, 102. Goebbels’s plans for an edition of last letters from soldiers at Stalingrad had to be abandoned when it transpired that most of them contained sentiments far from the heroic tone required. (Steinert, 328. See Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad, Frankfurt am Main/Heidelberg, 1950, 5–6 (pointing out that only 2 per cent of the letters were favourably disposed towards the leadership of the war)).
343. Letzte Briefe, 21.
344. Letzte Briefe, 1 4.
345. Letzte Briefe, 25.
346. Letzte Briefe, 1 6–17.
347. Below, 326.
348. Below, 325–7.
349. The above based on Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 104–6; Below, 327; Gruchmann, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1 94; DRZW, vi.1056–7.
350. Boelcke, Wollt ihr, 422.
351. Boelcke, Wollt ihr, 425–6; Steinert, 327. For Goebbels’s pressure for a reorientation of press and OKW propaganda, see TBJG, II/7, 164, 180 (23 January 1943).
352. TBJG, II/7, 1 62, (23 January 1943).
353. TBJG, II/7, 169, 173 (23 January 1943).
354. TBJG, II/7, 162, 168–9 (23 January 1943).
355. TBJG, II/7, 166 (23 January 1943).
356. TBJG, II/7, 1 62, 168 (23 January 1943).
357. TBJG, II/7, 162–3, 171–2 (23 January 1943).
358. TBJG, II/7, 175 (23 January 1943).
359. Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 107; DRZW, vi.1057–8.
360. Domarus, 1974.
361. Kehrig, Stalingrad. Analyse und Dokumentation, 531; Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 108; Gruchmann, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1 94; DRZW, vi.1059–60.
362. Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 108.
363. Domarus, 1975.
364. This had been arranged at Goebbels’s visit to FHQ on 22 January (TBJG, II/7,173 (23 January 1943); the text is in Domarus, 1976–80).
365. Domarus, 1979.
366. Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 108.
367. Domarus, 1981.
368. Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 109. The splitting of the two pockets in Stalingrad, completed on 26 January, had led to a break in communications between them from the following day. Paulus commanded the larger, southern pocket (LB Darmstadt, 72 n.76). According to Lew Besymenski, who acted as interpreter at Paulus’s first interrogation after capture, the newly elevated field-marshal insisted on recognition of his new rank, denied that he had surrendered (claiming he had been ‘surprised’ by his assailants, although he had engaged in lengthy prior negotiations), and refused to sanction the capitulation of his men (despite his own surrender) as ‘unworthy of a soldier’. (‘“Nein, nein, das ist nicht mehr meine Pflicht”. Lew Besymenski über Stalingrad und seine Erlebnisse mit Generalfeldmarschall Paulus’, Der Spiegel, 37/1992, 170 — 71.)
369. Gruchmann, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1 94; Kehrig, ‘Die 6.Armee’, 109.
370. LB Darmstadt, 73 (1 February 1943).
371. LB Darmstadt, 72.
372. LB Darmstadt, 73.
373. LB Darmstadt, 74 and n.84, 79.
374. LB Darmstadt, 77, 79–80. Paulus entered Soviet captivity with the remainder of his troops, and was eventually released in 1953. In 1944 he provided support from Moscow for the ‘National Committee of Free Germany’, the organization initiated by the Soviet leadership and comprising exiled German Communists and prisoners-of-war, which sought — largely in vain — to subvert morale at the front among German troops and to incite resistance to the Nazi regime. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Berlin, 1987, 114–23 (especially 115), 528–9, 564 n.24, 596 n.36, used Hitler’s comments on rats in the Lubljanka prison as part of a speculative hypothesis that his paranoid antisemitism arose out of his acute and lasting horror at Bolshevik atrocities in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution. This assertion was then incorporated in the construction of his heavily criticized interpretation positing Bolshevism, and ‘class genocide’, as the prior agent of a causal nexus leading ultimately to the Nazi ‘race genocide’ against the Jews. (See Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, in ‘Historikerstreit’. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernicbtung, 2nd edn, Munich/Zurich, 1987, 39–47.
375. Domarus, 1985.
376. Kershaw, ‘Hitler Myth’, 192.
377. Nadler, 73, 76.
378. MadR, xii.4720 (28 January 1943), 4750–1 (4 February 1943), 4760–1 (8 February 1943).
379. Goebbels acknowledged that the criticism was now also directed at Hitler (TBJG, II/7, 266 (5 February 1943).
380. Hassell, 347 (14 February 1943).
381. MadR, xii.4720 (28 January 1943).
382. GStA, Munich, MA 106671, report of the Regierungspräsident of Oberbayern, 10 March 1943: ‘Der Stalingrad-Mörder’.
