The End is Nigh

The war of attrition has come to an end.  20 hours of narration from the book called 'Stalingrad' by Anthony Beevor.  It's an amazingly honest, balanced book; a celebration of anti-war.  This is war that defines the horror of war completely.  Beevor suggests that at the Tehran conference, Churchill and Roosevelt felt they were not able to oppose the suggestions made by Stalin (except for the obviously stupid ones), because of the horror they knew Russia had gone through.  They knew that what the armies faced in the west was like child's play to what the armies in the east had faced.  They had been into the heart of hell.  It was also clear that the Vermark and the Red Army had been exposed to very similar atrocities.  The prison camps in Russia with 200,000 German prisoners were kept in very similar conditions to Auschwitz.  Guards could tell which of the prisoners had been at the dead flesh of their comrades.  They had a pink tinge to their cheeks, as opposed to jaundiced yellow.

Stalingrad Madonna- In charcoal by the theologian and physician Kurt Reuber.  It's
drawn on the back of a Soviet map.  Smuggled out of the 'kessel', it is now on display
in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Reuber drew another Madonna whilst a
prisoner in Russia.  He was one of the 84,000 prisoners to die.  Only about 6000 survived,

A useful tip.  If you find yourself unduly irritated by the mass of lice you find swarming over your clothing, remove the offending garments and bury them under a light sprinkling of soil.  Leave one corner sticking out.  The lice, like rats on a sinking ship, will move on mass to this life raft.  As they strung over each other, much a humans do in everyday life, light a match and bring it down onto the heap.  There is a slight risk that you may burn the corner of your garment, but for a week, you will enjoy the luxury of only an occasional odd scratch.

The Germans copied what Nordic people have always known to be practical.  they made roads out of birch logs, which are slow to rot.  These were called corduroy roads.  In Stalingrad, where all trees and wood had been used up, frozen bodies were sometimes found in the road, as impromptu logs.  Horse legs were stuck up at crossroads with signs attached to point the way.
http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/stalingradmadonna-kurt-reuber-und-seine-beruehmte-zeichnung-a-947850.htm