Consider this scenario: you are a regular wehrmacht soldier, so you don’t have an SS tattoo on your arm. You are the company mess sergeant, so you have been able to steal some extra rations. And hide them. Plus, you speak passable Italian-and you are able to take the identity of a dead Italian soldier-whose uniform fits you.
You were able to get a good pair of (Russian) insulated boots, and you have a compass and a good map.
You decide that you don’t want to die a “hero’s death”, so you pick a moonless night, ditch your German uniform. And slip through the Russian lines. As you head west, you stay under cover-you walk mainly at night, and you are able to hitch a ride on some trains heading west.
What are your chances of getting back to Europe alive?
That scenario is so incredibly unlikely that I don’t even know how to tell you how unlikely it is.
2 guys did manage to stagger back to their own lines in the general manner outlined in the OP (tho the cite I was trying to find eluded me-Wikipedia was no help). The two characters who tried it in the Russian film about the battle didn’t make it very far however.
I get the impression that the Gerams didn’t have much control over the areas they occupied. Russia is so vast, there simply were not enough soldiers to control the rear areas-most of the troops were at the front.
So, a deserting italian soldier might be able to get away.
Would the germans manninga rear checkpoint shoot such a guy?
I don’t see where your Italian cover would help. If captured by the Russians, they’d treat you no better than a captured German. If you made it to German-controlled territory, sooner or later a Feldgendarmerie (military police) patrol would ask you for your marching orders. If your cover held it’d just mean being executed as an Italian deserter rather than a German one. If your cover failed you might enjoy the dubious advantage of being questioned then executed as a Russian spy.
Come to think of it, a better bet might be to be a clerk and forge your orders by a conveniently dead officer.
If the Germans don’t kill you for a deserter, the Russian Partisans shall.
Or the first Pole to see you, if you get that far.
You’d actually have a better chance trying for the Black Sea, or the Caspian, & trying for Turkey or Iran, IMHO.
Wouldn’t you be sent back to the Italian Army? Or would the Germans just shoot first?
Sounds like you are better off staying in Stalingrad!
What would be the point in pretending to Italian? Germany and Italy were both at war with the Soviet Union in 1943.
Your overall chances are essentially non-existent. The NKVD would have been watching outbound trains for any Soviet deserters trying to escape combat. Same thing for anyone trying to drive away or even walk. Wearing an enemy uniform would have just made your capture happen quicker.
But let’s say you’re a master of camouflage and manage to remain unseen by any Soviets. The closest German lines to Stalingrad was on the Chir River about forty miles away. Manstein launched an attempt to link up with Stalingrad in December. But the closest they got to the city was twenty-nine miles. Of course both of these assume you’d have been able to walk through four separate front lines.
Assuming you manage all this, then what? When you report in to the nearest German army unit, the first thing they’re going to want to know is why you aren’t with your unit which is still fighting back inside Stalingrad. You’d have been shot for desertion. Same thing would happen if you somehow made it all the way back to Germany.
Your chances would be better surrendering, becoming a P.O.W. of the Soviets, and trying to live through the Gulag. I mean, your chances would be utterly horrible–about a 5% chance of living through the ordeal, according to Wikipedia–but even those odds would probably give you a better chance of survival than pretending to be an Italian and trying to sneak through both Soviet and Nazi lines to…wherever.