The Independent (London)
November 18, 2000
By Adam Lebor
Across the freezing mud of wartime Stalingrad, through the charred rubble of buildings blown to bits, mangled corpses and burnt out tanks, two men, each armed with a high-velocity rifle, stalk each other across the front lines. One is Vasily Zaitsev, the most famous Soviet sniper of the Second World War. The man who would have Zaitsev in his crosshairs is his Nazi counterpart, Major Koenig, brought from Berlin to kill him.
This is a scene from Enemy at the Gates, the most expensive film ever made in Europe, filmed this year at the Babelsburg studios in Berlin. The duel between the two snipers, as they battle it out in the wreckage of the Soviet city, is the centrepiece of the pounds 56m blockbuster. Zaitsev is played by Jude Law, Ed Harris is his adversary, Major Koenig, and Joseph Fiennes plays Danilov, a Soviet commissar. The love interest is provided by Tania Chernova, a female Soviet sniper, played by Rachel Weisz, for whose affections Zaitsev and Danilov compete.
Directed and co-written by Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose previous works include Seven Years in Tibet and The Name of the Rose, Enemy at the Gates is now in post-production, and is scheduled for release next spring. But the film has already sparked controversy by its blending of fact and fiction, and its dramatisation of a battle that has assumed mythic status as one of the turning points of the Second World War. History is hot now in Hollywood, but it seems to be getting mangled in the cinematic re- telling. It is the age-old dilemma of dramatising great events in human history: how far should entertainment triumph over truth? Where Hollywood is concerned, it's usually entertainment that wins.
Stalingrad, the Russian city on the river Volga, is now a byword for heroic endurance, with a resonance that still evokes emotions across the world. Not a name to trivialise. "The power of the name Stalingrad is that this was the most pitiless battle in human history," says Anthony Beevor, author of the best-seller Stalingrad. "It changed the perception of war, it was so brutal and inhuman, not just fought on the ground, but one fought from roofs, from sewers and buildings. The defeat there traumatised the German army. It was the psychological turning-point of the war, and gave the Russians confidence that they could mount an offensive."
The Germans laid siege to Stalingrad in the summer of 1942 but soon became mired in the mud, rubble and, when winter arrived, ice and snow. In conditions of unbelievable harshness and savage fighting, street by street, building by building, sometimes room by room, its Soviet defenders beat them back, until General Friedrich Paulus defied Hitler's orders and surrendered on 31 January 1943. "The air is filled with the infernal howling of diving Stukas, the thunder of flak and artillery, the roar of engines, the rattle of tank-tracks, the shriek of the (rocket) launcher and Stalin organ, the chatter of machine-guns back and forth, and all the time one feels the heat of the city burning at every point," wrote one Panzer officer to his wife. Russians were blunter in their letters: "The Germans won't withstand us," was the simple message of one soldier called Sergey to his wife.
In this hell, a man called Vasily Zaitsev did stalk German soldiers, killing 149. Zaitsev, a shepherd from the Ural mountains, was revered by his comrades for his skill with a rifle. News of each new kill was quickly passed along the front-line troops. So successful was he that he trained younger snipers, and a new military doctrine was founded, known as "sniperism". But German military documents have no record of a Major Koenig fighting a duel with Zaitsev, says Beevor. "There is no trace of this famous incident in any reports on the snipers' activities sent by the political department of Stalingrad front, which certainly would have been sent back. Nobody has found any trace of the so-called Major Koenig, commandant of a sniper school, who was sent to Stalingrad."
Some see another attempt by Hollywood to re-write history, substituting truth for maximum box office returns. Earlier this year the submarine movie U-571 reworked the May 1941 raid by the British Navy against the German U-110 in which it captured the first Enigma enciphering machine. The British sailors were transformed into more box-office friendly Americans, even though at that time the United States had not even entered the war.
"US studios have become obsessed by the ideas of true stories," says Beevor.
"I don't know if this is in response to the needs of the public, or if they feel that the public has come to expect it. With many historical stories they feel compelled to claim that it is true. Almost any adaptation of history is bound to be closer to fiction. More and more people are incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction. Since the main raw material of history in the popular imagination comes from television and film, this does matter."
Certainly the film's setting in one of the war's bloodiest and best-known battlefields, is the stuff of human drama. Stalingrad was the very crucible of the war. A soldier's graffitto encapsulated the fear felt by the Germans on the eastern front: "Russians in front, Russians behind, and in the middle, shooting." In fact the epithet could just as well have been reversed for the troops of the Red Army. Except the shooting behind Soviet troops came from the guns of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) machine-gunners, ready to mow down any Red Army soldiers who were reluctant to attack. Some 13,500 Soviet troops were executed by their own side at Stalingrad, enough to form an extra division. Such offences, catalogued in Russian Ministry of Defence archives, were classified as "extraordinary events", included drunkenness, cowardice, incompetence, self-inflicted wounds, the catch-all "anti-Soviet agitation" and crossing over to the enemy. This was more common than the propaganda myths would have us believe: more than 50,000 Soviet citizens fought in the German Sixth Army's front- line divisions.
Nor did being captured by the Nazis offer a haven from the killing. For the Germans, the war in the east was a Rassenkampf, a race war, against a people they regarded as sub-human. The Geneva Convention was not observed for Soviet PoWs. Of 5.7 million Soviets captured by the Nazis, 3.3 million, almost 60 per cent, died: they were starved or worked to death, or died of disease. In a ghastly irony, many of those Soviet PoWs who survived the camps were arrested once they returned home after the war and were sent by Stalin to the gulag, since surrender or capture, in his twisted mind-set, meant treachery.
Initial press coverage of Enemy at the Gates said the film was intended as a rendition of actual events. "Enemy tells the true story of a duel during the Second World War between a young Russian shepherd and a German officer set against the epic battle of Stalingrad," reported the trade newspaper Variety in September 1999. "The true story of Valisi Zaitsev, a Russian sniper credited with over 140 kills at the Battle of Stalingrad," records the website www. upcomingmovies.com. Now, wary perhaps of the deep historical waters in which the producers find themselves, the British distributors Pathe Pictures say the film was never intended to be factual. "Jean- Jacques Annaud has made a film against the backdrop of Stalingrad, and there is no official press statement where it is claimed that the story is true. It was never set up as a true story," says Geraldine Moloney, head of publicity for Pathe.
Either way, the film arouses mixed emotions in Germany and Russia. It was shot at the Babelsburg studios, just outside Berlin, where Marlene Dietrich starred in The Blue Angel, and where director Fritz Lang shot Metropolis. The nearby village of Krampnitz, in the former East Germany, with its real-life scenes of decaying Soviet-era barracks and crumbling concrete, provided the perfect backdrop. A new statue of Stalin was built, while the banks of the river Oder, 50 miles away, were transformed into the Volga running through Stalingrad. Its steep river banks were recreated in a brown-coal mine in nearby Cottbus. It proved a neat symbiosis of the demands of capitalist Hollywood and former Communist East Germany. "We have everything we need here. The old Russian barracks, the old factories that were built according to the Russian model, all close to Berlin and with a modern infrastructure," Annaud told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
Apart from the locals, many of whom gained parts as extras in the film, few Germans wish to remember the Third Reich's worst military defeat. One veteran of the battle, 81-year-old Helmuth Ronnefahrt, told Die Welt newspaper that he would not see the film: "Nobody who was not there can understand that, nobody can re-enact it. The money could have been used better." About 150,000 Germans perished, as well as hundreds of thousands of the Germans' Hungarian, Romanian and Italian allies. Many of these Axis troops stood little chance, sacrificed by their leaders in an "anti- Bolshevik crusade" for which they were ill-equipped and worse led. So ineffective, for example, was the Romanian firepower against the stolid and well-armoured Soviet T-34 tank, that the shells were mockingly dubbed "door-knockers". Of 90,000 German PoWs, just 6,000 returned home.
In Russia there is a mix of enthusiasm and trepidation that the film is being made, says Lev Karakhan, deputy editor of leading film magazine Iskusstvo Kino (The Art of Film). "There will be tremendous interest in this film in Russia. There is no doubt that this topic is very close to people's hearts, and people will also be very critical. There is a colossal amount of literature and film on this topic already, and Annaud's work will have to measure up." In Russia, any artistic portrayal of an event that is still so much part of the country's psyche will cause controversy, he says. "There are so many different forces and points of view in Russia that there will always be someone who will decry the film, whether it's communists on the left or nationalists on the extreme right."
Yet none of this, and no controversy about the historical veracity of Enemy at the Gates, can detract from the indescribable heroism of the Red Army as it beat back the Nazis. As one German soldier wrote: "Here a saying from the Gospel often passes through my thoughts: 'No stone will be left standing one upon another.' Here it is the truth." In the charnel house, the cauldron of war that was Stalingrad, its defenders were tested beyond human endurance. They were not found wanting.
'Surviving Hitler: Choices, Corruption and Compromise in the Third Reich' by Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes is published by Simon & Schuster
