Seventy-four years ago today the fighting at Stalingrad stopped.
It may well be considered the turning point of the war.
Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the man in charge of the Sixth Army on the Volga, surrendered to the superior Red Army under the leadership of Gerogii Zhukov.
Hitler refused Paulus permission to surrender. Some days earlier he had said: “Surrender is out of the question. The troops will defend themselves to the last!”
Before coming to power and in the early days of his leadership Hitler had promised the German people to "make Germany strong again". He also promised jobs to every unemployed man. He would build roads and see to it that every German worker could buy a car.
He also promised to give Germany back to the Germans and rid itself of all non-German influences.
On February 2, 1943 on the river Volga the Russians sealed Hitler's fate. It was the beginning of the end of his monstrous rule.
Approximately 60 million lives were lost in World War ll at a time when the population of the world was estimated at 2.3 billion. Six million Germans died and many more millions left disabled.
Over 27 million Russian dead.
And then the millions murdered who were considered to be the cause of all the ills in Germany.
Last evening German television station Arte showed a film on Hannah Arendt.
She attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. Reporting the trial she received much criticism for commenting on how Eichmann was just an ordinary man sitting in the dock, no monster.
"Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.
"And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported."
- Hanna Arendt reporting at the Eichmann trial.
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