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exploits obviously inspired the movie’s Lt. Dunbar character, who also sabotaged a
German train (albeit in a highly unlikely manner), is hidden at Stalag 17 to protect
him from the Gestapo, and then escapes with Sefton’s help. Frank Grey’s incredible
saga is recounted by fellow Kriegie Ned Handy in his memoir, The Flame Keepers.
Sta lin grad (1993)
Synopsis
Sta lin grad is a German war film directed by Joseph Vilsmaier. Starring Thomas
Kretschmann as Lt. Hans von Witzland, the movie follows a platoon of World War II
Wehrmacht soldiers from Italy in the summer of 1942 as they are transferred to
the German Sixth Army, which finds itself surrounded and besieged by the Red
Army during the fateful Battle of Sta lin grad during the winter of 1942–1943.
Background
The Battle of Sta lin grad (23 August 1942–2 February 1943) was one of the largest
(nearly 2.2 million personnel involved) and bloodiest battles ever fought. After 13
weeks of street- to- street combat in the fall of 1942, the Germans had taken most
of the city— reduced to rubble from aerial bombardment and shelling— but they
had neglected to shore up their weak flanks to the north and south. On 19 November
1942 the Rus sians launched Operation Uranus, a surprise massive counterattack
on those flanks that quickly surrounded and ultimately destroyed the German
Sixth Army in a giant pincer movement. Total Axis casualties (Germans, Roma-
nians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 250,000 dead,
450,000 wounded, and 91,000 captured— a devastating defeat that essentially
sealed the doom of Hitler’s Third Reich. Over the ensuing de cades a number of
documentary and fiction films, German and Rus sian, have been made about this
decisive WWII battle, but the best of them remains Joseph Vilsmaier’s Sta lin grad.
The film originates with Christoph Fromm, a young German screenwriter who
wrote a screenplay (c.1990) based on extensive research, including numerous inter-
views, that places fictive characters in the 336th Pioneer Battalion, 336th Infantry
Division, a real unit that fought at Sta lin grad. Producers Günter Rohrbach and
Hanno Huth acquired Fromm’s script and hired director Joseph Vilsmaier to turn
it into a movie for Bavaria Film. Vilsmaier and co- writers Jürgen Büscher and
Johannes Heide retained Fromm’s characters and basic narrative structure, but
extensively reworked the material, making it less a documentary and more of “a
movie with feelings,” as Vilsmaier later put it—so much so that Fromm took his
name off the proj ect and later published his version as a novel (Stalingrad— Die Ein-
samkeit vor dem Sterben [Stalingrad— The Loneliness Before Dying]).
Production
In order to show the declining health and weight loss of its main protagonists, Sta-
lin grad was shot in sequence between October 1991 and April 1992. The opening
moments were filmed on location in Cervo, Liguria, Italy, while the Sta lin grad