LETTERS FROM WWII: Wilhelm Hoffman

“The war on the Eastern front is different, totally different... It is more aggressive. It has nothing to do with humanity. From the beginning, we saw our men with genitals cut off, the heads cut off, the eyes cut out - such things did not happen in the West.

With my own eyes, I saw female soldiers who dug themselves into the earth. They did not surrender, they shot until the last bullet. Totally fanatical, unbelievable!

We have lost many men. Every time we move, you have to jump over bodies. You can scarcely breathe in the daytime: there is nowhere and no one to remove the bodies, so they are left there to rot. Who would have thought three months ago that instead of the joy of victory we would have to endure such sacrifice and torture; the end of which is nowhere in sight? .

It looks us 6 days to conquer an elevator inside of a grain storage factory. We suffered heavy losses and there are no more than 60 men left in our company. If every building is defended like this, none of our soldiers will ever get back to Germany. The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures.

The men are calling Stalingrad the mass grave of the Wehrmacht. Every soldier sees himself as a condemned man. The only hope is to be wounded and taken back to the rear. There have been a number of cases of self- inflicted wounds and malingering among the men. Every day I write two or three reports about them.

Everybody is racked with hunger. Frozen potatoes are the best meal, but to get them out of the ice-covered ground under fire from Russian bullets is not so easy. 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. We no longer take cover from Russian shells; We don’t have the strength to walk, run, or hide.

A human being can tolerate so much, it's unbelievable how much a human being can tolerate.” - Wilhelm Hoffman, 267th Infantry Regiment, 94th Inf. Div. German 6th Army, Dec. 26, 1942, Stalingrad.