Stalingrad and Dachau

“The scale of the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad was unprecedented in German history. Of the 250,000 soldiers of the Sixth Army who battled their way to Stalingrad in the fall of 1942, nearly 150,000 had been killed or wounded by January of 1943. Of the 91,000 who were captured by the Russians, fewer than 6,000 ever returned to Germany. The chances of surviving Dachau, one German has told me, were more than five times as great as the chances of surviving Stalingrad.”

— Timothy W. Ryback, in The New Yorker, Feb. 1, 1993, p. 60.

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From The Journal of Historical Review, May/June 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 3), page 44.