The Croat Regiment fought in many of the fiercest battles in the city. Ivan Coric, a Captain who commanded the 2nd Battalion, described how he was ordered to mount an attack in the middle of a Soviet Katyusha rocket and artillery barrage and air attack:

During the night of 26/27 September, Russian aircraft flew extremely low, and bombed the area where my battalion was supposed to be encamped… After only a few hundred meters, we were hit by immense artillery fire, and my men began to die, one after another… Soviet airplanes easily noticed us and bombed us with Phosphorus bombs that burn upon explosion. Many of my men were in flames. It was a horrible sight… My Battalion, now attached to the 227th Regiment, advanced with great difficulty, taking house by house… I later heard that my men continued to fight heroically until the last man of the 2nd battalion had fallen.

A platoon commander of the 2nd company wrote:

When we entered Stalingrad, it was ruined and in flames. We took cover in trenches and bunkers, as the enemy was hitting us with artillery, Katusha rockets, and with aircraft…My platoon’s mission was to, in conjunction with a German unit, clear the Freight Station, and then the railroad dike, and reach the Volga river… I didn’t lose any men, but our transport unit was hit badly, and lost 10 men, 40 horses, and an equipment truck with ammunition.

By the end of December, three straight days and nights were spent fighting for control of the Red October factory. German troops would take a room in the factory only to lose it in a Russian counter-attack. The Germans would then mount a counter-attack to retake the room of the factory. The Russians would then mount a counter attack to retake the ground lost. It was a war of attrition and futility. After the 6th Army was encircled and effectively cut off and trapped in the city, the German forces were fighting merely not to be overrun. But time was not on their side. When the Red Army seized the last German airfield, the 6th Army was doomed. Many of the Croats fought fanatically to the death in the final days of Stalingrad. On January 16, Soviet troops attacked the Croatian positions from three sides and overran their positions. The Croatian troops fought until their ammunition was used up and they were killed in the assault.

Sanne awarded Pavicic the Iron Cross 1st class on October 16 in Stalingrad for “excellent leadership of the Croatian Legionnaire unit.” Pavicic had earlier been the commander of the Croatian Military Academy in the NDH and had been in the Army or Domobranstvo of the NDH. Pavicic was listed as “missing and presumed dead” on January 21, 1943 when the plane on which he was evacuated was shot down. Marko Mesic took command of the regiment in its final death throes. Mesic received the Iron Cross 1st class for a stubborn and fanatical defense in the last days of the battle of Stalingrad. Only Mesic and a few others survived, trapped in a pocket of the city. The Russians overran and trapped and destroyed the regiment in the final days of fighting. Mesic was captured by the Soviets and became a POW. In 1947 the USSR extradited him to Yugoslavia where he was executed by the Yugoslav government. Over 1,000 Croat and Bosnian Muslim troops were evacuated from Stalingrad before it fell.

On November 19-20, the Soviet counter-offensive known as Operation Uranus began. Uranus had been planned and organized by Alexander Vasilevsky, the chief of the Soviet general staff headquarters or STAVKA, and by Georgi Zhukov, who was the deputy Supreme Commander of the Soviet forces, in fact, the military commander of the Soviet armed forces. Zhukov would be made the first Soviet Marshall of the war in January, 1943, after the success of the Stalingrad encirclement. On August 26, Zhukov had been given responsibility for the defense of Stalingrad. Three days later, he went to Stalingrad to assess the military situation. Vasily I. Chuikov, the Soviet commander of Red Army forces inside the city, the 62nd Army, conducted a fierce Ratten Krieg or ‘rat’s war”, using fast moving, small unit attacks that ground the Nazi forces down. Chuikov was also responsible for the success of the encirclement. On November 21, the flanks of 6th Army were attacked by Soviet forces led by Nikolai Vatutin from the north and Andrei Yeremenko from the south. The Romanian 3rd Army in the north and the Romanian 4th Army in the south were quickly destroyed by a massive Soviet armored attack.

By November 23, 6th Army was encircled when Soviet forces linked at Sovietski west of Stalingrad, placing a noose around the neck of the trapped Nazi forces in the city. Erich von Manstein (original name, von Lewinski), attempted to break through the Soviet ring around the city and relieve the German forces by launching a German attack from the south, the relief action known as Operation Winter Storm. Manstein made progress and advanced steadily until the Russians called in reserves that stopped the advance 35 miles from Stalingrad. The fate of 6th Army was now sealed. They were a doomed army. Paulus debated on whether a breakout should be attempted but Hitler ordered that Paulus should hold his ground and not retreat from Stalingrad.

On December 25, a massive Soviet artillery and Katyusha rocket barrage was launched in the northeastern section of the city that killed 1,300 German troops. Lt. General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s forces then broke through the German lines. Rokossovsky sent an ultimatum of surrender on January 8 to the trapped German, Romanian, and Croatian and Bosnian Muslim troops in Stalingrad. Paulus wanted “freedom of action” but Hitler prohibited a retreat from the city.

The only way the 6th Army could survive was if the German air force or Luftwaffe could deliver supplies and food by air. Hitler sent Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s deputy to the Stalingrad sector to personally organize the air deliveries of food and supplies to the city. Facing starvation, the troops of 6th Army killed their 4,000 pack horses for meat.

Pavicic, commander of regiment at Stalingrad

By the end of November, 5 officers, 9 NCOS, and 100 soldiers were all that was left of the 369th Croat Reinforced Regiment. They were reduced to eating 120 grams of horse meat and bread per day.

On January 16 the Potomnik air strip was taken by Russian troops. The Germans could now only air drop food and supplies to the city. Gumrak, the last German air strip, fell on January 22 cutting 6th Army off completely. They were now doomed to a slow death by starvation.

On January 23, 1943, 18 wounded Croatian troops were evacuated out. Mesic remained on to fight desperate and hapless battles against Russian troops. Mesic and a handful of troops were all that remained when they finally surrendered. Some of the Croatian POWs later switched sides and fought as part of the Red Army as the “1st Royal Yugoslav Brigade in the Soviet Union”.

On January 30, Paulus, at his headquarters in the basement of the Univermag department store, could still boast that “the swastika flag is still flying over Stalingrad.” On January 24, Paulus had ordered that no food be given to the 30,000 wounded and sick German and Axis troops in order to conserve food. The end was approaching for the 6th Army as they began to run out of food and ammunition.

On February 2, 1943, all German and Axis forces surrendered in Stalingrad while the last remnants were captured by the Russians. The Soviets took in 91,000 German POWs, 24 generals, and 2,500 officers. The Russians destroyed one Italian Army. From the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Russians destroyed two Romanian Army groups, one Hungarian army group, and a Croatian reinforced infantry regiment. Over 147,000 German and Axis troops are estimated to have been killed inside of Stalingrad, while 100,000 were killed outside the city. This group was initially part of a 330, 000 man force in the Stalingrad sector. This was the final result of the 1942 German summer offensive known as Operation Blue.

The Nazi Legacy in Croatia and Bosnia: “My Father Fought at Stalingrad”

Western historiography on World War II has censored and covered-up the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim role during World War II. There is hardly any mention of Jasenovac, the largest concentration and death camp in the Balkans. All the information has been deleted and carefully censored out. Likewise, the role of Croatians and Bosnian Muslims on the Eastern Front and at Stalingrad has been covered-up and expurgated.

Podobnik in the Croat Legion

Why has there been a cover-up? One reason is that the war against Russia was motivated by a Roman Catholic “crusade” against Communism. The Vatican was implicated. From the Vatican perspective, Operation Barbarossa would allow the Roman Catholic Church to proselytize and covert the Orthodox populations to Roman Catholicism creating a single Catholic religion led by the Pope at the Vatican. The Uniate Churches were eastern churches that were “united” with the Vatican although they had different rites and customs. Why did Croatia fight on the Eastern front? The role of the Vatican’s “crusade against Bolshevism” is significant in understanding why Croatia participated in Operation Barbarossa. Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, stated that “the one, real and principal enemy of Europe was Communism” and he advocated a “communal military crusade against Bolshevism”. In Slovakia, a Roman Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso, took up this Roman Catholic “crusade against Communism” by sending a Slovak Army Corps as part of German Army Group South in the invasion of the USSR. Like Tiso, Croatian Poglavnik Ante Pavelic was a fanatical and hardcore Roman Catholic true believer. Ante Pavelic and Pope Pius XII and Alojzije Stepinac had the same goals. In 1940, Archbishop Stepinac told Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia, that the Serbs should convert to Roman Catholicism: “The most ideal thing would be for the Serbs to return to the faith of their fathers, that is, to bow the head before Christ’s representative, the Holy Father.” In Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell explained the Pope’s support of the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim genocide of the Serbian Orthodox population as furthering his "ambition for evangelization eastward”, i.e., in the Soviet Union:

The potential for enticing mass conversions of the “schismatic” Orthodox, through their close proximity to the Catholic eastern rite, explains Pacelli’s indulgent policy toward Pavelic and his murderous regime. Had he combated Pavelic’s forced conversions, deportations, and massacres with denunciations and excommunications, the existence of the Croatian bridgehead to the East might have been put in peril.

Thus, the Pope needed the Croats to advance his evangelization program in Russia and in Eastern Europe. In other words, the Croats were doing on a small scale in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina what the Pope hoped to see realized in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Pavelic and Stepinac were committed to Roman Catholicism and its spread. Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Reinhard Heydrich opposed Roman Catholic influence in the Eastern territories. Hitler himself did not share Pavelic’s or Tiso’s religious convictions: “Christianity is the hardest blow that ever hit humanity. Bolshevism is the bastard son of Christianity; both are the monstrous issue of the Jews.” Franz von Papen, who was a Roman Catholic, however, sent Hitler a memorandum outlining his goals for Roman Catholic evangelization and conversions in the USSR. French Cardinal Eugene Tisserant headed at department in the Vatican that focused on evangelization in the East, known as the Congregation for the Eastern Churches.

When Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, the Vatican was the first to recognize the newly independent country. This reckless and premature Vatican recognition, before any negotiations and discussions could be conducted to ensure the rights of the Serbian Orthodox population, plunged the region into civil war. The Vatican had staunchly supported Croatian secession and independence of a Roman Catholic Croatia ever since the end of World War II. The Vatican had worked the hardest to make Croatia an independent Roman Catholic state? Was anyone surprised that the Vatican was the first to recognize Croatia in 1991? Not surprisingly, Germany was the second state to recognize Croatia in 1991.

Pavelic meets Catholic Archbishop Stepinac

The Nazi legacy persisted and endured in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. Although censored and suppressed in the Western press and media, the Croat-Bosnian Muslim connection to Nazism and fascism occasionally intruded. In the November 15, 2000 Telegraph article “Croat hardliners push nationalism with fascist edge”, Julius Strauss noted the Croat connection to Nazism. He reported from Ljubuski, a city in western Hercegovina, part of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Strauss quoted a Croat party official who told him:

I hope you’re not a Jew or an American. My father fought at Stalingrad. He wore the German insignia with pride. At the end it was only us Croats who stayed faithful to the SS.

Strauss noted that Croatians were “Hitler’s proxies in the Balkans” and are the “spiritual descendants of the Ustashe.” Why has this history been suppressed, censored, and covered up in the so-called West? Is this history not known to Western historians and the media? The Croats and Bosnian Muslims were the most fanatical Nazis. This fact is well-known by historians. Abe M. Rosenthal, the former editor of the New York Times, wrote that Croatia was Hitler’s staunchest ally during the Holocaust and World War II: “In World War II Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia.”

The Croatian and Bosnian Muslim connection to Nazism continues. This Nazi legacy can be witnessed today. An article in the Washington Times for June 15, 1997 noted this enduring Nazi legacy and connection:

A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant ‘Heil Hitler’….Europe in the 1940s? No, Croatia in the 1990s.