October 1942 Memoir: Across the Endless Steppes to Stalingrad

“Day after day, the wide expanses of Russia pass by.  There are harvested fields as far as the eye can see, and in between some huge barns and farmsteads,” notes young Günter Koschorrek late in October 1942, as his unit moves inexorably across Ukraine toward their fate in the frozen rubble of Stalingrad.

      As he described in his memoir Blood Red Snow for October 24, 1942, “we are being taken over the Dnyepropetrovsk and Rostow and there in a north-easterly direction to Stalingrad.”  In fact, “a day later we reach Rostow on the Don estuary by the Sea of Azov.”

       We have his book today because he was one of the few soldiers to find solace in writing down his experiences in notes along the way, though diary keeping was forbidden by superiors, lest his scribblings would provide intelligence to the enemy.  Koschorrek hid his scraps of paper in the linings of his coat.

       Ironically, Koschorrek ultimately survived the ordeal on the Russian Front at Stalingrad because of his many injuries.  Time and again, he was able to be evacuated just as the final doors were closing.  Most of his battlefield friends now lie anonymously on Russian soil, their Christian crosses long since bulldozed over by Soviet authorities.

Koschorrek was able to reconstruct his day-to-day intense combat as a heavy machine gunner because of his notes, though for years he’d given them up for lost along with so much else in his life after the war.  Even his wife ran off with an American GI.  Years passed, until he unexpectedly received a phone call from a woman living in Las Vegas.  It was his daughter.  She had his notes.