From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 202-205:
An even worse damper on the public morale than the bombings was the news from the eastern front, where the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad. On February 2, amid the stench of rotting corpses, blood, and human waste, only about ninety thousand exhausted, hungry, freezing German soldiers were still alive to be taken prisoner. Hitler was furious. He had demanded a battle to the last man. As martyrs, he declared, the German soldiers would have earned “national immortality.” The Wehrmacht took up to a million casualties in the battles around Stalingrad. The victorious Red Army lost even more.
…
Propaganda in the Nazi press had swung from triumphalism to the need to bring Opfer [sacrifice], of course, but also to dark warnings over what the barbaric Russians might do to the Germans in their thirst for revenge. Some conscience-stricken Germans already assumed that the British bombing raids were not only a payback for London and Coventry, but a just punishment for what the Germans had done to the Jews. In the words of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, “Hardly anyone understands that what is happening now was caused by what happened before; caused by Coventry, by Dunkirk, by atrocities against the Jews, by the destruction of cities and by concentration camps.” Perhaps more people might have sensed this than Ruth assumed. The absolute need for German victory was no longer presented just as a way to rule the new Europe, but to save the German people from their unforgiving enemies.
The annual commemoration of the war dead on March 21 was initiated in 1922 to remember the soldiers who died in World War I. Once they were in power, the Nazis turned what had been a solemn commemoration into a ritual of hero worship, and renamed it Heldengedenktag, “Day of Commemoration of Heroes.” But in 1943 it was more like a state funeral, with Hitler, looking subdued and much older than his fifty-four years, greeting wounded veterans who raised their bandaged arms in the Hitler salute.
…
Hitler might well have died on this occasion, for an officer named Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff had concealed a bomb in his pocket, timed to go off while Hitler was inspecting captured Russian weapons at the Armory. Unfortunately, Hitler, apparently bored by looking at Russian guns, left much earlier than anticipated, and the bomb had to be defused in a nearby lavatory. Hitler, quite unaware of what had occurred, emerged from the Armory to be met by Paul von Hase, the commanding officer of the Berlin garrison, which snapped to attention. One year later, Hase would be hanged for taking part in the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. (Gersdorff, who also took part in the attempt on the Führer’s life, was one of the very few plotters to survive the war, because his friends refused to name him under torture.)
