In late 1942 the German army reached the Russian city of Stalingrad on the Volga. A Russian counterattack in November led to an encirclement of the German forces by the Red Army. This is how some starving and freezing Wehrmacht troops marked Christmas.
Lieutenant Sachonbeck, a 20-year-old officer with the 24th Panzer Division, took some comfort in the preparations he had made for the festivities. “On December 24th there were about fifteen men in my bunker. That morning, under fairly heavy fire, I had managed to dig up a little pine tree buried in the snow of the steppe – probably one of the very few Christmas trees in the entire Kessel. That spring, when I’d been billeted with a priest in Brittany, I’d scrounged three church candles that were just the right size to fit into my backpack. I had no idea why at the time, I just liked the look of them. It got dark very early. The candles were burning as I told the Christmas story and spoke the Lord’s Prayer. A little later, the crackly loudspeaker transmitted a Christmas message from the Forces’ radio station in Germany. It was being broadcast everywhere from the North Pole to Africa. At that time an enormous part of the world belonged to us. When Stalingrad was called we began to tremble though we were indoors in the warm that evening. Then when the words ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacbt…’ were sung, our tears started to flow. We cried for a long time. From that moment, no one said so much as a word – maybe for a whole hour.”
Another German soldier, Wilhelm Hoffman of the 267th Regiment of the 94th Infantry Division, made a last entry in his diary, writing: “The horses have already been eaten. I would eat a cat; they say its meat is also tasty. The soldiers look like corpses or lunatics, looking for something to put in their mouths. They no longer take cover from Russian shells; they haven’t the strength to walk, run away and hide. A curse on this war.”