Demyansk Pocket - a forerunner of the catastrophe at Stalingrad
Part of Eastern Front Fortnight (4) on WW2TV
With Sergey Vershinin
More Red Army and Soviet content on WW2TV
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Demyansk Pocket - a forerunner of the catastrophe at Stalingrad. The Red Army’s unsuccessful attempts in 1942-1943 to overrun the German troops, offering stubborn resistance while encircled near a small town in Northwestern Russia, have been subject for decades to over-glorification by some German war historians and deliberately silenced by the Soviet and almost all Post-Soviet historiography.

What was so special about this battle? Why did the success at Demyansk turn to one of the reasons for the Wehrmacht’s subsequent catastrophe at Stalingrad? In today's show, we will talk about the Demyansk Pocket based on archival sources and personal evidence from both sides of the frontline.

Sergey Vershinin studied Linguistics & Interpreting (German and English languages) in Russia and Germany and later Law in Russia. As an amateur historian he has spent almost 20 years collecting and researching first-hand evidence (mostly unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters of both Russians and Germans) as well as wartime documents on the Demyansk battle aiming to reconstruct a picture of events free of propaganda, stereotypes and myths. The reason for his interest was his grandfather‘s war faith, who fell near Demyansk in summer 1942 as a Red Army sergeant. The result of his research is an as yet unpublished manuscript in Russian titled Humans at War, compiled of eyewitness accounts, rarely mentioned Wehrmacht’s and newly declassified Red Army’s files where the war drama at Demyansk is focused on through the human lens.

In 2022 the manuscript was rejected for publication in Russia under the pretence of containing not enough evidence of Soviet heroism and too negative picture of the Red Army. The author now lives in Toronto, Canada.

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