Customer Reviews

Last Letters from Stalingrad

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For years in the 1970's & 1980's a local radio celebrity read the "Letters" during the three weeks before Christmas. He added background music of "Little Drummer Boy". We listened every night and "felt the despair and hope of the soldiers who knew they would never return home. The "Letters" have stayed with me through the years. We have searched for a copy of this book and are heartbroken that it is unavailable, even on the secondary market. If you find a copy, you have a treasure.

This book is a selection of letters written by soldiers of the German Sixth Army near the end of its defense of the Stalingrad pocket. The authors of the letters knew that their situation was hopeless, and most did not expect to survive. So the letters are final farewells. The attitudes and viewpoints of the soldier-authors differ widely, but invariably the letters are compelling. Common themes include a widely felt sense of betrayal, hope that the continued struggle in the pocket would have some military benefit elsewhere, and the poignant sense that these letters represent the last words of the soldiers to their loved ones. The letters of these doomed soldiers provide an opportunity to think about not only the Sixth Army's final struggle but war in general as a human experience. Goebbels' propaganda ministry read the letters to determine the attitudes they revealed and then suppressed them. This is a book you will read and re-read.

Although the letters in this book are forgeries, that doesn't mean they aren't true. The man who wrote these letters was a German war correspondent, named Heinz Schroeter, who reported from the Stalingrad pocket. He also wrote the greatest book about that battle, called Stalingrad; To The Last Bullet. Schroeter wrote the letters from the point of view of the German soldiers he had come to know during the siege. He was intimately acquainted with how the soldiers thought and felt in Stalingrad and I believe he accurately portrayed how the "Last Letters from Stalingrad" would have actually sounded, had they been written. For sheer depth of human emotion, nothing comes close to this book. It will personally move you, and isn't that what all great books have in common?

Last Letters from Stalingrad contains a collection of some very compelling letters written by German soldiers in the last few days before their death or final surrender in Stalingrad. But are the letters authentic or phony?
Maybe I've been naive but I've always assumed they were actually written by the soldiers themselves. Certainly the forward to the books I've read represent them this way. Now I see reviews under this heading asserting they were all written by a German war correspondent. But none of these reviews cite a source or any authority for this claim.
These reviews may well be right but until some kind of proof is provided, I think it's more reasonable to believe those who claim to have collected the letters and put them in book form than it is unsupported claims to the contrary.

I have read this book many times and feel it is an important and extraordinary compilation of anecdotal history. I was surprised when I read that it's authenticity was questioned. I did a Google word search for claimed ghost author Heinz Schroeter and the word "Stalingrad" and, in 60+ websites, could find no mention of his connection with the book, false or otherwise. I then Googled the book title with, variously,"fake" and "forgery" and found only three such mentions in over 90 websites: two of these were the Amazon reviews and one was a 2005 book review (of another book) by reviewer Morag Fraser. None of these sources identify or locate of any evidence of fakery; they merely state conclusions. The book "Lakota Noon" (a reconstruction of the Custer battle)is a good illustration of cross-referenced anecdotal accounts which establish the truth of the overall and of individual accounts. A comparison of "Last Letters" with other anecdotal accounts of the same or similar events indicates that "Last Letters" is not fake. These other accounts includes books or compilations by Zeiser, Zaitsev, Bacque, Goerlitz, Chuikov, Haring, Khruschev, Sajer, Sorge and Hart. "Last Letters" is consistent with the many conversations I have had with German and Russian Eastern Front survivors. I vote for authenticity.

These letters were first published in 1954, and carry a powerful emotional impact. HOWEVER, these letters are forgeries. People should be aware that this is a book of fiction - not fact. I gave this book four stars as a work of fiction, and 0 stars as a historical work = 4 stars.

People who are thinking of purchasing this book should know that it is a fabrication. The last loads of letters from Stalingrad were in fact confiscated by the Nazi regime for analysis and never delivered to their intended recipients, but they were subsequently destroyed on Goebbels's order. Only a few extracts copied out by the analysts survived, and they were not incorporated into this book. Of course, the Soviets captured significant numbers of "last letters" in the course of liquidating the Stalingrad pocket (both from downed aircraft and from the captured German soldiers themselves) but none of those letters were available to the public when this book was published.

This is an awful book. It could have been a lot longer, who were these people who wrote the letter and what happened to them anyway. What could have happened is that the Intro should have been longer, names could have signed. It is not the best book written. Dear America: Letters from Vietnam was so much better. In Letter from Vietnam you find out what happened to the soldiers.