WaybackWire

MOSCOW, Tuesday.—The Germans trapped before Stalingrad rejected Russian surrender terms, and on 10 January the Red Army opened the offensive that broke their defences.

The ultimatum of 8 January offered the surrounded troops, commanders included, their lives, swords for senior officers, and medicine and food if they laid down their arms. The answer was due by 10 a.m. Moscow time on 9 January, by motor car under a white flag.

The text, published on 16 January, described troops suffering hunger, disease and cold, without winter uniforms. “Your position is hopeless. Further resistance is useless,” it said.

General Rokossovsky commanded the troops who broke through. A special communique of 16 January said they had taken 30 important strongpoints, villages and railway stations and advanced 12 to 22 miles. “The liquidation of the German Fascist troops encircled in the Stalingrad area is drawing to a close,” it said.

On 18 January the Russians took Pitomnik airfield, the trapped army’s only link with the outside world, where transport planes had made up to 500 flights a day. By 26 January, Moscow said, the Germans were split into two small groups, cut off from each other.

OUTSIDE STALINGRAD, Tuesday.—Maj. Gen. Moritz von Drebber, commander of a German infantry division, gave himself up at Stalingrad to a Russian colonel only 35 years old, a Pravda correspondent’s account says.

One of his officers came forward first as envoy, to say the general was ready to lay down his arms. “I am the first German general to surrender to you here at Stalingrad,” von Drebber told the colonel.

“You are the first, but I hope not the last,” the colonel replied. As they talked, word came that a Rumanian general had surrendered with his whole division.

Von Drebber told the Russian officers: “We believed further resistance was senseless and criminal, but the Fuehrer did not take our opinion into consideration.”

A crack German regiment that had numbered 1,200 men three days earlier surrendered, its survivors a few hundred with two machine guns and 100 rifles and no ammunition, Red Star said last week. Individual officers were still organising resistance in fortified buildings.

BERLIN, Tuesday.—General Dietmar has told German radio listeners it is his duty to inform the German people of the extent of the defeat suffered in Russia. Of the troops at Stalingrad, he said, according to the Indian Express of Madras: “Without a chance of retreat, they can only hold out or perish.”

On 16 January the German High Command told the German people for the first time that their troops at Stalingrad were fighting encircled, speaking of weeks of heroic defensive battles against an enemy attacking from all sides. On 22 January it admitted that the enemy had broken in from the west, forcing German positions back several kilometres.

On 25 January a German official pronouncement said: “In heroic and self sacrificial fighting against overwhelming superiority, the Sixth Army at Stalingrad attached immortal glory to its colors.”

The Borsen Zeitung has written that Germany has suffered her first setback. The Brussels radio said one must be resigned to the fact that the defenders cannot be helped any more.

BERLIN, Saturday 30 January.—Reich Marshal Goering likened the German stand at Stalingrad to that of Leonidas at Thermopylae, as R.A.F. Mosquitos bombed Berlin twice by day on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power.

The first raid struck at 11 a.m., as Goering was about to speak, and delayed his speech about an hour. Goering said the army had had to stay at Stalingrad to let the German line be reorganised, and that this would be the last hard winter. “This will some time be considered the most heroic struggle of history,” he said.

Hitler did not speak in person. Dr Goebbels read his proclamation. “The struggle imposed upon us by the same enemies as in 1914 will decide the existence or annihilation of our people,” Hitler said in it, Domei reports from Berlin in the Japanese-run Syonan Shimbun in occupied Singapore.

MOSCOW, Tuesday.—Russian troops were today within 42 miles of Rostov, 65 miles of Kursk and 34 miles of Kupyansk, United Press reports from Moscow.

Premier Stalin, in an order of the day broadcast by the Moscow radio on 25 January, said the Red Army had advanced about 400 kilometres (243 miles) in two months of its winter offensive and routed 102 enemy divisions. He thanked the troops who routed the Hitlerite army at the approaches to Stalingrad. “Our troops have won an important victory,” he said.

Among the towns he named as freed were Millerovo, Voronezh, Salsk and Pyatigorsk. “Forward to the routing of the German invaders and their expulsion over the boundaries of our motherland!” the order says.