The Mostly Peaceful Battle of Stalingrad

Maybe history's deadliest battle wasn't so bad after all.

It was late January, 1943, and Jürgen Heidelbaum was lying around, not really doing much of anything.

In fact, it was his goal to do as little as possible at the moment. The sniper’s bullet had missed him by about two feet, and he cowered behind a piece of rubble for cover. There, he lay in complete stillness with his legs drawn to his chest, waiting for another shot to ring out in the silence.

In other words, he was essentially just lazing about.

He wasn’t alone. All over the town of Stalingrad, men like him were huddled together behind heaps of debris, blown out buildings, and ravaged war machinery. Milling around. Dawdling. Loitering, if you want to be cruel. The Russian winter swirled gently around them, a soft but frigid breeze that whistled quietly through the paneless windows and empty streets, lit golden by the setting sun. Hard to imagine a more tranquil scene.

Admittedly, things had been slightly less peaceful a few hours earlier.

Late that morning, a Russian platoon had attacked, materializing out of the urban sprawl like ravenous wolves, eager to rip apart their German invaders. Jürgen was manning an MG 32 heavy machine gun at the time (which is to say, he was laying prone on the ground behind it, occasionally moving his finger over the trigger to squeeze off a shot — really, not much effort, when you think about it). The fierce but poorly-trained Russian soldiers died easy. Some of them didn’t even have rifles of their own, and had to scavenge from their dead compatriots as Jürgen rained steel fury upon them. It only took seconds for them to die, and after four hours, the Red Army had lost too much blood to maintain its offensive charge. The Russians retreated back into their labyrinth of crumbling stone and broken glass, and all was quiet again, save for the occasional opportunistic pot shot from a sniper’s lair.

Four hours out of twenty four.

A measly sixth.

You don’t need a math genius to tell you it was a mostly peaceful day.

This was par for the course in Stalingrad. The battle had technically been raging for over six months, but that was only if you completely disregarded the actual data. Even though hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and nearly every building destroyed, one couldn’t deny that on average there was hardly any violence happening on any particular square foot of the city at any particular time of day. Jürgen couldn’t appreciate this mathematical reality as he cringed behind the rubble, but if he’d just taken a moment to consider the facts, he’d have realized that, statistically, he was in a pretty good spot.

Across from Jürgen, on the shelled remains of the city street, sat a Panzer tank, cold and lifeless. It had run out of diesel fuel weeks ago and was more like a great metal sculpture than a killing machine. Even now, in his perilous predicament, Jürgen had to admire the artistry in its engineering. If he could just make it across the street behind the tank, he’d be safe. Well…safer, anyway. Technically, he was already quite safe, considering he hadn’t actually been hit by any bullets from the Russian sniper. But Jürgen was the kind of guy who enjoyed the excesses of life, so he resolved to make a dash for the tank anyway.

In a flash of pure adrenaline, he uncurled himself from the fetal position, sprang to his feet, and lunged towards the steel monstrosity. He felt the shockwave of another bullet whizzing past him before the crack of the rifle even registered, but it might as well have happened a thousand miles away. The sniper’s shot missed wide, just like every other bullet that had been lobbed at him during this so-called war, and Jürgen flung himself into the safe cover of the frozen tank, unharmed.

Peace continued its reign.

From there, Jürgen was able to slip past the tank and behind the wall of a ruined factory, back into territory held by his German counterparts. The sniper was unlikely to follow, so he was safe as long as he kept his head down. A little ways up the street, he saw a few of his fellow soldiers huddled together in the remains of a department store, listening to a radio broadcast. He couldn’t make out what was being said but he could tell it was in German, and the male speaker’s tenor was solemn and serious. Jürgen preferred music to the Nazi leadership’s stultifying speeches, but as clearly demonstrated, there wasn’t much else going on, so he figured he might as well join them for a listen.

Hunched over, he scrambled across the street, through the ragged hole in the wall where the department store’s front door had once been, and took a seat next to his emaciated compatriots. They shushed him as he greeted them and turned up the volume.

Just a bunch of guys, hanging out, listening to the radio.

Jürgen recognized the voice of Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s high command, waxing poetic to a German public back in Berlin about defeat, about sacrifice, about the 300 Spartan warriors at Thermopylae who’d bravely fought Xerxes’ hordes to their deaths. Jürgen should’ve been happy. The study of mythology was one of his favorite pastimes on holiday, when there was time to laze about and think upon loftier subjects, but he knew Göring wasn’t actually talking about the doomed Spartans of millennia past. He was talking about the doomed German 6th Army today, encircled not by invading Persians but rather Slavic natives whose Motherland lay smoldering and ravaged around them. He was talking about Jürgen.

Jürgen stood up and turned the radio off before walking back into the street. The other men remained seated, staring at the quiet radio, saying nothing. A peaceful silence descended once again as Jürgen trudged down the muddy road.

It hardly seemed fair that he should have to forfeit his own life to the savage untermensch massing their strength just a few blocks over. He’d barely done anything to them! His march to Stalingrad from Berlin had been just that — a brisk walk across the steppes. A hike, really. Perhaps a train ride or two, not unlike the holidays he’d taken to the countryside as a young boy. Sure, there’d been a village or two burned, some peasants executed every once in a while. Jews, Gypsies, and Bolsheviks. But these were minorities, all of them! Fractions of fractions! Their sufferings accounted for mere days out of entire years.

How many mornings had the spring birds sang their songs even as gunfire and shells exploded in the distance? How many summer afternoons passed lazily by, like clouds of smoke and ash riding a gentle, easterly breeze? How many autumn leaves fell unremarked upon, to rot back into the earth by their millions and make fertile the ground of the chosen, as has always been the just and natural order?

Jürgen was too tired and hungry to cry or be angry or do much of anything except continue his trudge down the ruined boulevard — not dissimilar to a fatigued vacationer, groggily wandering the streets of some foreign locale after a long night on an expired visa. But what did he have to be so melancholy about in that moment? His war was over. This evening stroll represented the height of his responsibilities. Sure, there was still some paperwork needed to officiate his once-proud army’s surrender, but for all intents and purposes, he was already living in peacetime.

Once again, the sniper’s bullet came faster than the sound of its departure from the rifle.

Only this time, it found its target. Jürgen didn’t even have time to feel it before it tore through his skull and ejected his brains onto the thoroughfare. No pain, no suffering, no lingering in the foggy mist between life and death. Not even an awareness of how close death had been the whole time. The teenage Jew he’d executed last spring had known his rifle was pointed at her and felt the cold steel of its barrel against the back of her neck. But Jürgen felt nothing of the sort. He died more peacefully than even his sweet old grandmother, whose fevered demise went on for weeks.

The Russian sniper was among the greatest humanitarians in Stalingrad that day.

Having satisfied his mission to humanely dispatch the Nazi invader, the Russian sniper sat up and leaned his back against the wall of the frozen apartment in which he’d taken up position. Even though he’d really just been sitting on his ass all day, watching Jürgen through his rifle’s scope, the sniper decided now was as good a time as any for a smoke break, and lit his last cigarette. As he peered out into the quiet evening, he thought about how little violence had been needed to end Jürgen’s life. Only three bullets, each traveling faster than the speed of sound. The final shot had taken less than a second to reach its destination.

Jürgen’s body lay in the street with a quiet stillness the sniper could only dream of inhabiting. For him, life would go on, perhaps for many more decades. Or perhaps not. He wondered if death would find him as agreeably as it had found Jürgen. He wondered how long it would stalk him, and if he’d see its shadow lingering in his peripheries. He wondered if, when death finally caught him, they’d put that old Catholic command on his tombstone…

“Rest in peace.”