The Times (London)
January 27, 2001
By Giles Whittell

He was the deadliest sniper in the Soviet Army and is now the central character in one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year.

But when Vasili Zaitsev, played by Jude Law, takes to the screen at the Berlin Film Festival next month, he will do so amid mounting controversy over who walked into his crosshairs.

The battle of Stalingrad cost the lives of a quarter of a million soldiers under German command and four times as many Russians. It left Stalin's gateway to the Caucasus so devastated that historians have compared its wreckage to Hiroshima after the atom bomb. It also created heroes such as 2nd Lieutenant Zaitsev, who is said to have killed 149 Germans with his rifle.

He will receive a posthumous jolt of fame when the Berlin Festival opens with a screening of Enemy at the Gates, a £52 million blockbuster centred on a legendary duel he is said to have fought in the rubble of Stalingrad with the finest marksman in the German Army. Were he still alive, however, Zaitsev might wish he had been spared the tribute. The film is already controversial in Russia, where official accounts of Stalingrad still inspire almost religious reverence, and the truth of its central storyline is now in doubt.

According to a book written in 1973 on which the film is based, Zaitsev, a shepherd from the Urals trained to shoot wolves by his grandfather, became so feared by the Wehrmacht's 6th Army as it endured the winter of 1942 in Stalingrad's suburbs, that it sent for the only German considered capable of killing him, an aristocratic Berliner named as Major Konig, who is played by Ed Harris.

The book, a history of the battle by William Craig, states that as the two snipers closed in on each other their armies withdrew to allow a gladiatorial fight to the finish. Mr Craig's chief sources are thought to be the memoirs of General Vasili Chuikov, who commanded the Red Army's defence of the city, and the official Soviet version of Zaitzev's exploits, crafted after the war as priceless propaganda and nurtured to this day.

Both have been undermined by Antony Beevor, author of the bestselling book Stalingrad and the leading authority on Soviet archives from the time. "The story of the duel is almost certainly a complete fiction of Soviet propaganda," Mr Beevor said, pointing out that it appears nowhere in the archives of General Chuikov's 62nd army and that no trace of "Major Konig" has been found in German records.

The argument matters because "Enemy at the Gates" is likely to be the first depiction to bring the pivotal battle to mass audiences in America, where the Western allies' efforts in Europe and the Pacific are still celebrated almost to the exclusion of the war on the Eastern Front.

The film also breaks a 50-year-old taboo for Russian audiences on depicting the horrific role of the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, which drove the Red Army into battle from behind and mowed down deserters with machineguns.

"Enemy at the Gates could well be a wonderful film — just don't claim it's true," Mr Beevor said, referring to the central duel. The film's publicists have been backing away from such claims, wary of rows of the kind that damaged releases such as U 571, the recent film showing American submariners seizing Enigma machines that were in fact captured by British sailors.

As marketing began last year, press releases referred to "a famous real-life duel" and meticulous realism has been the hallmark of Hollywood's return to the war genre. "We have taken a historical event and tried to understand what happened in the hearts of people who lived through it," said Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of the film. "We know about some of these characters from the archives and newsreel footage. The rest is open to interpretation."

Soviet officials left little to interpretation and made men such as Zaitsev travel the Soviet Union regaling schoolchildren and workers' groups with their tales. Their fame was so intoxicating that it may have fooled even Mr Beevor. He wrote that another Stalingrad hero, Jacob Pavlov, was still alive as a monk near Moscow. The rumour took hold in the early 1990s and has been kept alive by admirers of Pavlov's heroism in defending a building against the Germans for 58 days. In fact he appears to have died in 1981. "I buried him myself but the strain of all the rumours ten years later gave me a stroke," said his widow, Nina.

Meanwhile, the legend of Major Konig will not die. A telescopic rifle sight made by Carl Zeiss in Austria and attributed to "Major Konig, head of the Berlin Central Snipers School and Olympic shooting champion of 1936" is still on display at the Armed Forces' museum in Moscow.