“There is more here than just lands at stake here, this a rassenkampf (race war), where only one can survive! We the German people are the undeniable master race. It is not enough, I tell you to just preserve our Nordic way of life! We must be able to replenish the Aryan, and pursue our policy of racial purity by eradicating the inferiors! Do not believe for one moment we are ordinary people! Ordinary people cannot accomplish our miraculous feats which speak of a great people with a greater destiny! In this short time, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland and France have all fallen and so will the city in East, far from here. The city that is the red menace of Bolshevikism that even bears the name of their corrupt leader, Stalingrad! We shall seize it in the name of the 1,000 year Reich!”
Adolf Hitler (1941)
No where else in Russia does one hear the word ‘history’ spoken with such verve as Stalingrad – I mean Volgograd. For political reasons Stalingrad reflects the name of a controversial brutal dictator Josef Stalin, so they changed it during the 50’s. But everyone here calls it Stalingrad. I know you have all seen the stomach churning meat grinding violence of Saving Private Ryan along with the band of brothers – we know the narrative by heart – the West defeated the Nazis. Right? Nothing can be further from the truth, though historians may differ on who dealt the mortal blow that packed off Adolf Hitler and his uber Aryans to the rubbish heap of history, no one disputes, where it all happened – the beginning of the end – and in this bar South of the city, where old soldiers hang out with their medals strewn out like coins, Stalingrad will forever be the place where the tide was first turned against the invincible army of Hitler in WW II. Read the rest of this entry »
THE INTELLIGENT SINGAPOREAN 