Hardcore History Show 27 – Ghosts of the Ostfront I

At long last there’s a new episode out of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast: Show 27 – Ghosts of the Ostfront I.

Here’s a really striking section from near the beginning of the show:

But the most haunting part of Donovan Webster’s book is when he takes several planes and a bunch of cars to get to this spot in the middle of nowhere, on the steppes of southern Russia, to see something that very few people know is there, especially outside of Russia, and he says he had a guide with him and they pulled the car up to this spot, and it was in the middle of a very flat plain, and he could see way off into the distance, all the way to the horizon, miles away, and he says that he and the guide got out of the car, their boots crunching on the snow-filled field, and the guide told him to look down, and Webster says when his eyes adjusted to the blinding white of the snow and the plains, he could make out strange shapes in the snow, and the guide picked up one of these shapes and showed it to Webster, and it was a bone — a human bone — and he and Webster begin walking around this field, picking up clavicles, and thigh bones, and jaw bones, and pieces of skulls, and they are everywhere. He says there are also jackboots that you come across, and all sorts of leather gear, all the refuse and debris of human existence that you might imagine still sitting around this field. And he says you can look off into the horizon and these bones are sticking up out of the snow as far as you can see, for miles. The guide tells him that this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of how far this bone field, he calls it, stretches. This bone field is a monument, an inadvertent commemoration of an important event, with many, many, many lessons to teach modern people today, and it’s out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest major city is a place called Volgagrad, which may not ring a bell in your memory. But Volgagrad used to have another name. It used to be called Stalingrad.

ETA: I interviewed Dan Carlin for Episode 15 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.