Episode 15 - Dust and gore in the Grain Elevator as Hitler fires Army chief General Halder

This episode is about a grain elevator while Adolf Hitler loses his patience once more and fires General Halder.

I had the fortune to study American Landscape History at Harvard University with one of the most incredible thinkers of modern times – Professor John Stilgoe.

He would present his two hour lectures using hundreds of slides – and one of his fascinating topics was grain elevators. Only countries with food surplus have grain elevators for storage and since then, I’ve kept a sharp eye on the hundreds in my home country of South Africa.

In Stalingrad, the grain elevator was actually the main motif planned for German badges to be issued to the 6th Army upon its fall by its leader, General Paulus.

Ah yes, history had other ideas.

Elevators are built out of reinforced concrete and in the case of Stalingrad, the elevators survived some of the most intense bombings and shelling of any building in history.

Last week I covered the assaults on Mamaev Hill or Kurgan as its known, a site of Tartar graves and rebuilt after the Revolution of 1917 into a park where lovers would gather. IT was also the most bloody few acres of the Stalingrad conflict. It’s 300 foot heights meant whomever controlled this hill, controlled the view of the Mighty Volga River.

So after the Red Army finally seized control in mid-September, it was more difficult for the Germans to range their artillery and hit the ferries and other craft crossing the Volga. Of course, with material and men being shipped across, mainly at night, it was crucial to try to stop the Russians from resupplying the 62nd and 64th Armies which had been pushed back against the Volga in two areas by the German 6th and 4th Panzer Armies.

The fighting on the 14, 15th and 16th September had been brutal, but was just the start of a huge escalation across Stalingrad. In Moscow, US embassy diplomats were reporting that the city was finished and on the evening of the 16th an aide walked into Joseph Stalin’s office and placed a transcription down on his desk.

It was the text of an intercepted radio message from Berlin which said

“Stalingrad has been taken by brilliant German forces. Russia has been cut into two parts, north and south, and will soon collapse in her death throes”.

Stalin got up and stood at his window then ordered the aide to put him through to the STAVKA. He then dictated a message for Kruschev and Yeremenko on the West bank of the Volga outside Stalingrad.

“Is it true Stalingrad has been captured by the Germans?” he asked “Give a straight and truthful answer…”

Little did Stalin know that the scrappy general Rodimtsev who I described last week had arrived in the nick of time with the 295 Division and pushed the Germans back from the Volga and the central station.