Jame Fell's This Day in History column is about the Battle of Stalingrad this morning, so that reminded me of one of my brother's stories. When he was a teacher, one of the older shop teachers on staff was a German refugee who said he was a survivor of the Battle of Stalingrad. Doug, being a student of history, questioned how this was possible, given that there were very few German survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad--about 5000 out of the quarter million encircled and they were still in Russian camps when this guy got to Canada. He explained that he was one of the lucky ones who was airlifted out. But my brother happened to know, the only units airlifted out were the SS. "And a few lucky others. Not enough to be worth mentioning in any book." My brother may have looked at him askance, because his collague explained, "Look, I can't be SS because every member of that SS unit had that unit's tattoo right here (points), and you can be sure when immigration processed legitimate German refugees at the end of the war, they bloody-well checked for that tattoo." My brother asked, "They all had the same tattoo?" "Yes, the death head and unit number. You had to get it in training. It wasn't something optional that some of the guys got after going to the bar last night, it was required, mandatory, no exceptions." My brother nods, they speak of other things. Then as my brother is getting up to leave the staffroom, the guy leans in and says quietly, "Unless your family happened to run a farm and before the end of training you asked for leave to help with the harvest, and you happened to be away the week everybody else got their tattoos, and when you got back nobody remembered to have the tattoo guy come back just for you. But what were the odds of that happening? And to survive the Battle of Stalingrad? You'd have to be the luckiest bastard in the entire German Army."
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