At 9:00 P.M. on January 15, at Rastenburg, East Prussia, Capt. Winrich Behr faced the Führer of the Third Reich. When he walked into the crowded conference room, Behr was understandably nervous. He was in the presence of many illustrious men. Generals Jodl and Schmundt, Marshal Keitel, General Heusinger, even Martin Bormann stood looking skeptically at him. But when Hitler walked up and smiled warmly, Behr gathered himself to do the job Paulus had entrusted to him.
Hitler was charming, solicitous about the long flight and Behr’s comfort. When he asked the captain to speak freely, Behr launched into a detailed explanation of Sixth Army’s position. The captain was surprisingly blunt as he told of the dissolution of morale, the breakdown of officer leadership under pressure of Russian attacks, of starvation, and of guns blown up for lack of shells. Behr vividly described two hundred thousand men dying from official neglect.
Then Hitler spoke. With Behr listening raptly, the Führer stood over a table and swept his hand back and forth across a map. Though he admitted that mistakes had been made, he hastened to assure Behr that another expedition was going to break the Russian ring and reach Sixth Army within weeks. In the meantime, Hitler continued, the airlift would enable Paulus to hold on. An aide broke in to assure Behr that sufficient flights were planned.
Exasperated at mention of the airlift, Behr interrupted, “But the airlift has not worked.”
Hitler seemed puzzled, saying that Luftwaffe reports showed enough sorties on good flying days to keep Sixth Army at a level above starvation. As Behr shook his head, he noticed Marshal Keitel furiously wagging a finger at him—like an irate schoolmaster scolding a student for talking back to an elder. Refusing to be intimidated, the captain went on, saying that while many times aircraft took off for the pocket, many of them failed to reach their destination because of enemy fire or bad weather. And lately, the captain added, planes that dropped food bombs by parachute aimed most of them into Russian lines.
Emboldened, Behr made one final attempt to save his friends—Friedrich von Paulus, “Schmidtchen,” Eichlepp, the freezing grenadiers in the foxholes at Stalingrad—and he said: “It is of paramount importance that Sixth Army should know the quantities of supplies that will be flown into the fortress. It is too late for long-term planning. Sixth Army is at the end of its resources and demands a clear decision as to whether or not it may count on assistance and support within the next forty-eight hours.”
Shocked at his own impertinence, Behr waited for swift retribution. Adolf Hitler stared at him. Generals and aides were stunned into silence. Keitel’s face was cherry red, almost apoplectic. Suddenly the Führer sighed deeply and shrugged. Smiling warmly at Behr, he told him he would discuss the matter immediately with his advisers.
Convinced that he had done all he could, Behr saluted stiffly and left the room.
Thirteen hundred miles to the east, the Russian ring around Pitomnik tightened as T-34 tanks moved within a quarter mile of the runways. Control-tower operators waved off further transport landings and six Messerschmitt 109 fighters roared off the strip to take refuge at the smaller, ill-equipped Gumrak Airport, a few miles to the east. On landing there, five of the fighters either overshot the runway or crashed into debris. The sixth plane circled hesitantly, then disappeared to the west, far beyond the Kessel. It landed eventually at Schacty and the pilot reported that Pitomnik was no longer under German control.
With Pitomnik overrun, Sixth Army had suffered a mortal wound. The end was almost at hand.
The transmitter at Gumrak relayed news of its final spasms to Army Group Don: “Composure of many troops … is highly commendable. Completely exhausted officers and men who have gone for days almost without food have pulled cannon for 20 kilometers through heavily snowed-in and often roadless steppes. Supply situation catastrophic. In some places troops cannot bring supplies to the front due to lack of fuel.”
Field Marshal Manstein was not surprised. Threatened by Soviet tank raids himself, he had been forced to retreat another fifty miles west to Taganrog, from where he monitored the pulse-beat of his own operations. Along the upper Don, on nearly a two-hundred-mile-wide line from Pavlovsk northwest to Kasternoye, fresh Russian armies had attacked the few Italian divisions that had not been engaged in December, as well as the entire Second Hungarian Army. This latest drive quickly overwhelmed the satellite forces and opened another wide gap in Manstein’s left flank.
By this time the field marshal’s combat groups were practically worn out. Groups Stahel, Fretter-Pico, Mieth, Hollidt had been badly depleted in the constant leap-frogging operations, which had so far managed to keep the Russians away from Rostov. Now, thinning their lines dangerously, they sideslipped again to the west in order to slow the new Russian juggernaut moving south from the Don.
Meanwhile, Gen. Erhard Milch had arrived at Manstein’s Taganrog quarters to supervise Hitler’s renewed attempt to supply Paulus. From airfields all over Europe, the energetic Luftwaffe officer had collected more than a hundred extra planes and rushed them into the shuttle service to the Kessel. But his last-ditch activities on behalf of Sixth Army depended in good part on a hardworking, well-coordinated staff at Gumrak Airfield.
The only field capable of handling heavy traffic, Gumrak was an ugly scar across the pristine snow. A magnet to retreating troops, it drew long lines of trucks and men to it from the west, then spewed them out on the eastern side toward the Volga and Stalingrad. It had become a charnel house, a depository for the dead and dying, who littered the roads and fields around the runways.
Very few of the Germans in the Kessel retained any hope of rescue. Some perked up with the sound of firing to the south and wondered whether Manstein had actually arrived. Others clung to stories of mythical divisions breaking into the Kessel from Kalach to the west. Realists like Emil Metzger ignored such rumors. With all ammunition gone and his guns blown up to deny them to the enemy, the lieutenant had taken his men into the line of march toward Gumrak and the Volga. As he waded through the drifts, his thoughts wandered back to Kaethe in Frankfurt. He tried hard to remember every detail of her face. It seemed certain that he would die on this godforsaken plain without ever getting the chance to hold her again.
As the wind tore at him, Metzger began to toy with the thought of breaking out of the Kessel—all by himself if necessary.
Like Metzger, Gottlieb Slotta was determined to live. He was already at Gumrak, where he hobbled toward a trainload of wounded, parked at a siding. When a Russian plane dove and released a stick of bombs, bricks and other debris landed on Slotta’s head. Shouting, “I’m not going to die like this!” he began running madly toward Stalingrad, five miles away. On both sides of the road, he saw heaps of men who had given up and died. But Slotta had no intention of relinquishing his fragile hold on life that way.
Cpl. Franz Deifel was not sure life was worth fighting for anymore. Until this moment, he had been one of the few Germans inside the Kessel who pursued a relatively normal routine. He still hauled ammunition up the back slopes of Mamaev Hill and though his load was limited to only a few shells, he went up the hill almost every day.
By late January, Russian planes had begun to stalk individual trucks and men, and they finally found Deifel as he drove back to the ammunition dump outside the city. A bomb landed twenty feet away; shrapnel sprayed the vehicle and tore into his legs. He fell out of the cab and crawled into a house, where he pulled off his pants and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Another bomb exploded and the walls fell out, so he ran to a nearby trench, hid until dark, then stole back to the truck. By some miracle the engine started on the first try and heavy shellfire followed him down the road until he stopped at a dispensary.
Ordered on to a hospital, Deifel found it to be a dimly lit bunker. At the entrance, he froze in horror at a pyramid of bodies which blocked the door. Nauseated, he broke away and limped back to his own quarters.
A general withdrawal had been ordered, and Deifel hitched a ride on a truck headed back to Stalingrad. Just as the convoy started up, Russian shells exploded on the lead vehicles and blew them apart. Horns blared and drivers raged at the delay while Deifel wandered down the road. Dazed and frustrated, he sank down heavily on the corpse of a comrade and muttered: “Kiss my ass.” For the first time in his life, he thought of committing suicide.
Behind the utterly depressed corporal, Gumrak Airport had become bedlam. On January 18, two days after Pitomnik had fallen, it was crammed with thousands of wounded from all around the Kessel. Doctors worked eighteen-hour tours of duty treating patients lying on cots, on floors, and outside in the snow. Delirious and pain-wracked soldiers bellowed in torment as medics jabbed needles into arms crawling with gray lice, then stripped the patients for surgery.
Trucks bulging with torn and mutilated men pulled up at the hospitals but when drivers were waved off because of lack of space, they left their cargoes unattended. The temperature fell to twenty degrees below zero and the wounded cried feebly for help. When no one responded, they froze to death within a few yards of the operating table.
At his bunker a mile away, Gen. Friedrich von Paulus filled the airwaves with messages to Manstein: “Airfield at Gumrak usable since the 15th of January, landing ground available for night landings.… Request quickest possible intervention. Gravest danger.”
The Luftwaffe rejected Paulus’s claim about Gumrak. Declaring the field almost totally unfit for use, it insisted that adequate safety measures were needed to insure proper deliveries.
Paulus was furious: “Objections raised by Luftwaffe regarded here as mere excuses.… Landing ground has been substantially extended. Fully competent ground organization with all necessary installations.… Commander in chief has directly requested the Führer to intervene.…”
The reality of the situation, however, was that neither Paulus nor Schmidt understood that there was an almost total operational breakdown at the airport. The so-called “fully competent ground organization,” which had performed admirably at Pitomnik, was no longer a cohesive group. Though Col. Lothar Rosenfeld now tried to clear Gumrak for an intensive shuttle service, he was working with men exhausted beyond recall.
When a Luftwaffe officer landed in Gumrak on the morning of January 19, he recognized these symptoms immediately. Major Thiel, who had come to the Kessel to reconcile differences between Sixth Army and the Luftwaffe, was appalled at the condition of the runways. The wrecks of thirteen planes littered the landing cross, forcing incoming pilots to touch down within a tight eighty-yard radius. Bomb craters pocked the concrete. Newly fallen snow had not yet been cleared.
Thiel descended into the cramped, brightly lit command bunker where he was quickly surrounded by Generals Schmidt, Paulus, Heitz, and other aides, all of whom began to insult him about the Luftwaffe.
“If your aircraft cannot land, my army is doomed,” roared Paulus, who was particularly bitter as he unleashed his fury on the startled Thiel. “Every machine that does so can save the lives of one thousand men. An air drop is no use at all. Many of the canisters are never found because the men are too weak to look for them and we have no fuel to collect them. I cannot even withdraw my lines a few miles because the men would fall out from exhaustion. It is four days since they have had anything to eat.… The last horses have been eaten up.”
While Thiel stood mute, someone else shouted, “Can you imagine what it is like to see soldiers fall on an old carcass, beat open the head and swallow the brains raw?”
Paulus picked up the conversation again, “What should I, as commander in chief of an army, say when a simple soldier comes up to me and begs, ‘Herr General Oberst, can you spare me one piece of bread?’”
“Why on earth did the Luftwaffe ever promise to keep us supplied? Who is the man responsible for declaring that it was possible? Had someone told me it was not possible, I should not have held it against the Luftwaffe. I could have broken out. When I was strong enough to do so. Now it is too late.…”
In his frustration and sorrow, Paulus ignored the fact that in November, his Luftwaffe friends Richthofen and Fiebig had warned him that the air force could not supply him. But now it was January, and the commanding general of Sixth Army needed to blame someone, so Major Thiel bore the brunt of his rage.
“The Führer gave me his firm assurance that he and the whole German people felt responsible for this army and now the annals of German arms are besmirched by this fearful tragedy, just because the Luftwaffe has let us down.…” Disdainfully waving aside Thiel’s attempts to explain the Luftwaffe’s terrible difficulties, Paulus continued, “We already speak from a different world than yours, for you are talking to dead men. From now on our only existence will be in the history books.…”
That night Major Thiel went back to his plane and found proof for the Luftwaffe’s charge that Gumrak was not “efficiently managed.” No one had unloaded the supplies from the Heinkel bomber, even though it had been on the ground for nine hours. Thiel left the Kessel to report his conviction that Sixth Army was beyond help.
West and north of Gumrak, German detachments paused in their flight to hold back Soviet T-34 tanks that were close enough to shell the airfield’s runways. At the Gumrak railroad station, thousands of weary troops asked for information about their units. Almost everyone received the same answer: “Go into Stalingrad. You’ll find them there.”
Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt wandered through this uproar in a mood of suppressed anger. He had just found an abandoned corps headquarters and inside the bunkers he picked through empty champagne and cognac bottles, plus canned meat delicacies which he had never dreamed were available during the encirclement. Wohlfahrt seethed at the thought that his leaders had been eating well while he starved.
A short time later, he passed a half-burned shed. In disbelief, he counted huge stocks of new uniforms, overcoats, felt boots, and meat rations stacked from floor to ceiling. Wohlfahrt was now almost sick with rage. Besides his own need for warm clothing, he had seen hundreds of men clutching shawls or thin blankets to protect their shivering bodies from the cruel winds. Yet German quartermasters still guarded the supply depots with criminal disregard for the suffering around them. No German soldier was allowed to touch a single item.
Private First Class Josef Metzler had already taken matters into his own hands. For weeks he had begged for warm footwear, and for weeks he had been told none was available. When his toes began to burn fiercely from frostbite, he stole a pair of felt boots from a hospital and ran off. A scrupulous man, who never before had stolen anything, Metzler felt no remorse. He was now desperate, and desperation encouraged rationalization for his misdeeds.
Intent on survival, Metzler stopped at another field station to seek some food and treatment for his feet. Meeting a soldier carrying two mess tins, he asked him for one. When the man refused, Metzler waited patiently until his antagonist’s attention was diverted, then stole a tin and walked away. Unrepentant, the righteous Metzler stayed on at the hospital to care for his feet.
One mile west of Gumrak, beneath timbered roofs and tons of snow, the staff of Sixth Army worked in semi-isolation from the procession of death moving past them into Stalingrad. Radio operators in the underground bunkers maintained close communications with Manstein at Taganrog over the single thousand-watt transmitter. Their commentary recorded the now commonplace mention of heroic deeds, and the transfer of key men:
Oberst Dingler flew out yesterday, report arrival.
Have left: Sickenius, Major Seidel, … Obertleutnant Langkeit.…
Proposal of knight’s cross Oberstleutnant Spangenburg. Spangenburg held on own initiative from 10 to 15 January the flank of the Seventy-sixth Inf[antry] Division against the great enemy attack at Baburkin.…
Proposal of knight’s cross, iron, to Oberleutnant Sascha.… Sascha repelled enemy attacks repeatedly on January 16 with only four usable tanks … in spite of heavy enemy fire Sascha left his vehicle to make the infantry get back into position without regard to his personal safety.… without his positive action an enemy entry into Gumrak would have been unavoidable. Signed Deboi [general]
And the radio operators recorded other indications of behavior: “Oberleutnant Billert missing in action.… Later: Oberleutnant Billert left without permission by air. Request court martialling procedures.”
Beside the few officers who abdicated their responsibilities, some of the wounded flying out of the Kessel did so under false pretenses. They had shot themselves in order to reach safety and surgeons who operated on them failed to detect evidence of their self-inflicted injuries. The reasons were twofold. First, the malingerers had fired through a loaf of bread to eliminate close-range powder burns. Secondly, none of them followed patterns normally associated with such cases. Instead of aiming into a leg or arm, areas less dangerous as well as less painful, these men blasted holes in their stomachs and chests to guarantee a successful escape. Since no doctor dared accuse a man of inflicting so grievous a wound on himself, the offenders flew unpunished from Gumrak to hospital beds and a hero’s welcome at home.
Knowing that each transport touching down at Gumrak might be the last, the walking wounded thronging the runways eyed each other suspiciously and jockeyed for elbowroom in anticipation of where the aircraft would roll to a stop. The ensuing rush to hatch doors brought death to many who were trampled by half-crazed men.
Now, with time at a premium, Paulus was stepping up the evacuation of specialists, ordering them out to form new divisions for the Wehrmacht. Armed with passes, this elite filtered through the wounded, who glared at them in open hostility.
Gen. Hans Hube left; so did Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz, carrying some of Paulus’s medals. Gen. Erwin Jaenecke, commander of the Fourth Corps, departed with sixteen shrapnel holes in his body. Capt. Eberhard Wagemann flew out clutching General Schmidt’s last will and testament. From each division came officers and hand-picked enlisted men to form the cadre of a new Sixth Army that would fight again someday, somewhere.
On the morning of January 21, Gerhard Meunch answered the field telephone in the basement of a house near the bread factory, and was told to go immediately to 51st Corps Headquarters.
Puzzled by the summons, the captain reported to Colonel Clausius, General Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s chief of staff and heard the incredible words, “Captain Meunch, you will fly out this day.”
“This cannot be true. I cannot leave my soldiers in the lurch,” he protested, but Clausius stopped him, saying that because he was a specialist in infantry tactics he was needed elsewhere. Then the colonel brusquely said good-bye.
Meunch rushed to the airfield where an officer standing beside a car shook his head vehemently and told him that no more aircraft were going out that day. “Get in,” he shouted, “or else you will stay here. I am going to the city.”
Exhausted from the tension and hunger of previous days, Meunch sagged into the car and rode on to the tiny auxiliary airstrip at Stalingradski, on the outskirts of Stalingrad itself, where he spent the night in the company of hundreds of soldiers, pacing through the snow.
At 7:00 A.M. on January 22, a lone Heinkel 111 flew over several times, dropped food bombs into the fields, but would not land. The hours passed and the wounded had eyes only for the western horizon, where suddenly three specks appeared—Ju-52s. The “old reliables” grew bigger, circled, and came in for landings.
Moments later, Meunch saw a sight he would never forget: The wounded rose from the snow to rush the doors of the taxiing aircraft. Clawing at each other, they kicked the weak to the bottom of the pile and hoisted themselves into the empty cabins.
Meunch walked slowly up to a pilot and showed his special pass. The pilot shook his head:
“You don’t intend to get in there?” he said, pointing to the “animals” at the side of the plane. “You won’t make it. Get in with me through the cockpit.”
While Meunch clambered into the plane, Russian shrapnel sprayed the crowd. The pilot quickly gunned the motors and tried to lift off. He could not. Looking out the window Meunch saw nearly fifty men lying on the wings, holding on to anything they could with blue-cold hands as the Ju-52 picked up speed and raced down the strip. One by one, the riders fell off and tumbled back in the slipstream from the propellers. Shorn of its added burden, the plane rose swiftly into the bright sky and turned away from the Volga. Meunch tried hard to calm himself. For the first time in more than two months, he could not hear the sound of guns.
Radio message: 22 Jan. 43, 1602 hours
To Army Group Don
… For submittal to the Führer and to commander in chief, Army Group Don.… The Russians are advancing on a six-kilometer frontage both sides of Voporonovo toward the east, [toward Stalingrad] in part with flying colors. There is no possibility to close the gap … All provisions are used up. Over twelve thousand unattended [wounded] men in the pocket. What orders am I to issue to the troops, who have no ammunition left? …
Immediate decision is required, since symptoms of disintegration are noted in some places. However, the troops still have faith in their commanders.
Paulus
East Prussia had the answer ready within hours.
Capitulation impossible.
The troops will defend their positions to the last.… The Sixth Army has thus made a historic contribution in the most gigantic war effort in German history.
Adolf Hitler
“A historic contribution,” Hitler had declared, so Paulus stopped trying to convince his superiors that further resistance was simply mass murder. Blocking out the reality of the men dying around him, he chose instead to be overwhelmed by the natural course of events, and he left Gumrak for a cellar in Stalingrad.
In an anteroom just off Adolf Hitler’s conference room, Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz waited nervously for an audience. Snatched from the Kessel by direct orders from East Prussia, he had flown to the Wolf’s Lair to echo Capt. Winrich Behr’s graphic description of conditions at Stalingrad.
When the door opened, Zitzewitz strode in and came to attention. Hitler walked forward and covered Zitzewitz’s right hand with both of his. Shaking his head, he said: “You’ve come from a deplorable situation.” And he waved his guest to a high stool beside a table.
Zitzewitz tried to adjust his eyes to the dim half-light in the room. A huge map of the Russian front framed one wall. A fireplace dominated another. He noticed Generals Zeitzler and Schmundt sitting back in the shadows.
Hitler opened the discussion. Pointing frequently to maps on the table, he spoke of German tanks striking across the Don and breaking into the Kessel with supplies. A battalion of them, he thought, could crush Russian resistance and reach Sixth Army.
Zitzewitz listened in growing disbelief. When his chance came to speak, he rattled off statistics and comments he had jotted down on a piece of paper: casualty rates, ammunition stocks, food supplies, death, disease, frostbite, morale. The figures were catastrophic, irreversible, and damning. While Hitler stared in surprise, Zitzewitz summed up. “My Führer, permit me to state that the troops at Stalingrad can no longer be ordered to fight to their last round because they are no longer physically capable of fighting, and because they no longer have a last round.”
Hitler looked right through Zitzewitz. Dismissing the shocked major, the Führer mumbled: “Man recovers very quickly.”
The railroad station at Gumrak burned brightly against the snow. Russian artillery fire had blown the structure apart and ignited the corpses that had been stacked against its walls up to the level of the second-storey windows. The frozen bodies became a gruesome bonfire that Sgt. Hubert Wirkner witnessed as he was carried to the edge of the runway and a last opportunity to get away from the Kessel.
Completely disabled by his arm and leg wounds which were complicated with frostbite, Wirkner lay unattended on a stretcher for hours while twenty-four transports screeched in, unloaded and took off with hundreds of soldiers. In disgust he watched some of the lesser wounded “play possum” in the snow until the doors of the planes opened, then leap into the aircraft before harassed officials could see them. Too weak and proud to consider doing such a thing himself, Wirkner felt only pity for those who stole seats from their comrades.
One more plane glided in through the foggy mist and settled on the runway. From his prone position, Wirkner stared in disappointment as hundreds of ambulatory patients crowded around it and blocked access to the more seriously wounded.
At one of the doors, Col. Herbert Selle helped check ongoing passengers. An engineering specialist, the colonel had received orders earlier that day to leave and train another unit for another battle. Surprised by the unexpected reprieve, he stifled his momentary guilt feelings and reported to General Paulus for a few last words.
Paulus’s appearance shocked Selle. The general was unshaven, bedraggled. His blue eyes, formerly so sparkling, “had become lifeless.”
The general had a brief but bitter message for Selle. “Tell them,” he said mournfully, “wherever you think it is advisable, that the Sixth Army has been betrayed by the Supreme Command.”
Selle had left the pathetic figure of his commander in chief and gone to Gumrak where he waited through the foggy night until the last Ju-52 landed. While the pilot kept the motors running, Selle counted “cases” into the plane. His orderly, who had accompanied him to the field in hopes of a free ride, hovered nearby. The colonel nodded his head and winked him into the rear section. Beside the runway, Hubert Wirkner craned his neck and watched the Ju-52 depart.
Resigned to being left to die, Wirkner began to crawl on hands and knees in the general direction of the gutted railroad station. He passed an officer who stared incredulously at him and then begged Wirkner to go back to the hospital. The sergeant ignored him and pushed on into a snowfield. The wind tore at him, ice formed on his face, and he breathed torturously as his mouth filled with lumps of snow.
He dragged his dead legs for nearly a mile, reached the main road to Stalingrad, and collapsed alongside the stream of traffic. When he tried to climb into the back of a truck, his legs collapsed and he fell down. With a final burst of strength, Wirkner rose once more to clutch a howitzer with his frozen hands. Grunting from the pain, he pulled himself over the gun barrel and dangled precariously, his head hanging down on one side, his feet on the other.
The howitzer crept toward the city. With his face inches from the ground, his eyes bulging and his head pounding from blood draining into it, Wirkner drifted in and out of consciousness. The sounds of speeding cars washed over him and he heard the mournful prayers of soldiers lying on the ice. Screams, machine-gun fire, and curses came at him from all sides. He fainted again and when he woke up, he was surrounded by Germans sitting beside the road. When he called weakly for help, they failed to respond. Wirkner heard the wind and gunfire but nothing from his companions. They were all dead.
The lights of a truck flashed over him and he tensed for a terrible blow, but the driver had seen him move and stopped to pick him up. Wirkner rode the rest of the way into Stalingrad, where, again on all fours, he dragged himself into a dark cellar and “switched off his mind.”
At Gumrak, Russian tanks were rolling over the runways and firing point-blank into hospital bunkers. Hundreds of German wounded died where they lay, abandoned by countrymen now stampeding into Stalingrad. Along the main road into the city, a long line of trucks and cars roared through the fog, while in the fields beside the highway, a thin line of troops sat in hip-deep snow as a rear guard protecting the disorderly retreat. Panicked at the thought of being left alone to face Soviet armor, some of them swiveled their guns around and fired into the vehicles. When a driver was hit and his truck stopped, the gunners ran to the road, pulled their victim from the front seat and drove off themselves.
On the morning of January 24, the “Road of Death” as the truckers called it, was a five-mile stretch of snow coated with frozen blood left by the passage of Sixth Army to its final positions. By now more than a hundred thousand Germans had plunged into the black basements of Stalingrad.
Cpl. Heinz Neist rode into the city on a sleigh dragged by friends. Totally exhausted, Neist shivered under a thin blanket while Russian artillery knocked down what buildings were left standing. To Neist it seemed that “everything had been annihilated.” The world was dead. He was in a state of despair.
Quartermaster Karl Binder had burrowed into the Schnellhefter Block, a series of workers’ houses just west of the tractor factory. Still the efficient organizer, Binder was trying to establish a food-sharing program in his sector, but his problems defied solution. Although the Ju-52s and He-111s still were dropping supplies by parachute, most of them drifted inside Russian lines and were lost. The few that landed among the Germans were supposed to be brought immediately to central points for equal distribution, but the soldiers frequently hid them away for their own use. German military police held summary courts-martial for those found stealing and executed the offenders.
A few hundreds yards away from Binder’s refuge, in the tangled wreckage of the tractor works, tailor Wilhelm Alter was busy working on a “thing of beauty.” With a piece of brown cloth and fur from a coat collar, he was making a Cossack hat for an officer who was looking ahead to the rigors of captivity. Besides having the chance to pass the time doing something creative, Alter was especially pleased about the payment due for his labor. The officer had promised him an extra piece of bread.
In the same sector, veterinarian Herbert Rentsch had assumed command of a machine-gun company. He had also made a heartrending decision about his horse, Lore. Forced out of a balka toward the city, Rentsch went to the black mare, led her into a tunnelled-out bunker and tied her to a post. As Lore stood patiently beside her master, Rentsch patted her neck and gently stroked her emaciated flanks. When she turned her head to nuzzle his hand for food, he choked back a sob and ran away. His one hope was that the Russians would find her quickly and treat her with tenderness.
In central Stalingrad, Sgt. Albert Pflüger, despite his broken arm, set up a machine gun to interdict some side streets, then sat back to think about the future. Fully aware that the Russians had already won the battle, he conjured up the possibility that Hitler and Stalin had reached an agreement on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Pflüger also “dreamed” that the Americans were going to intervene with Stalin to prevent the mass killings of captives.
These delusions helped immensely as he prepared himself for the ordeal he knew was coming.
“Hold out for the next few days? For what?” asked an increasing number of German officers and men as they scurried for shelter in the broken-down houses of Stalingrad. They had finally begun to question the purpose of fighting for a thousand cellars at the edge of Asia.
With the fall of Pitomnik and Gumrak, all but a tiny hard core of Nazis faced the ghastly truth. Stalingrad would be their tomb. Abandoned to a miserable fate, they vented their rage in their letters, and one of the last planes leaving the Kessel carried seven sacks of mail scribbled on toilet paper, maps, anything that passed for stationery.
At Taganrog, German military censors analyzed the letters, sorted them into appropriate categories and forwarded a report on to Berlin and the Propaganda Ministry, where Dr. Joseph Goebbels read the findings.
1. In favor of the way the war was being conducted |
2.1 percent |
2. Dubious |
4.4 percent |
3. Skeptical, deprecatory |
57.1 percent |
4. Actively against |
3.4 percent |
5. No opinion, indifferent |
33.0 percent |
Nearly two out of every three writers now complained bitterly against Hitler and the High Command. But their protest was tardy and irrelevant. Fearful of the effect of these letters on the German population, Goebbels ordered the letters destroyed.*
Meanwhile, Erich von Manstein read a wireless from Stalingrad that convinced him the Sixth Army was finished.
Attacks in undiminished violence … Frightful conditions in the city area proper where about 20,000 unattended wounded are seeking shelter among the ruins. With them are about the same number of starved and frostbitten men, and stragglers, mostly without weapons.… Heavy artillery pounding the whole city.… Tractor works may possibly hold out a little longer.…
Positive that Paulus had done all he could ever do, Manstein called Hitler and recommended that Sixth Army be allowed to surrender. Hitler would not consider the idea. Manstein argued that “the Army’s sufferings would bear no relation to any advantage derived from continuing to tie down the enemy’s forces …”, but the Führer repeated his claim that each hour that Paulus continued to fight helped the entire front. Then he charged that capitulation was futile. The men at Stalingrad would have no chance to survive since “the Russians never keep any agreements.…”
That thought was uppermost in the minds of more than one hundred thousand Germans penned up like cattle at Stalingrad to await their executioner. Unable to control their destinies, they succumbed to the malignancy of fear, which centered around one question: “Will the Russians kill us outright or send us into slavery at some terrible Siberian prison camp?”
Few expected decent treatment. Too many had seen the butchered remains of German prisoners left on the battlefield by retreating Soviet troops. They also knew what their own countrymen had done to Russian soldiers and civilians during the occupation of the Soviet Union.
The retribution the Germans feared was real. It was taking its toll among soldiers of the puppet armies already in captivity. At the monastery town of Susdal, northeast of Moscow, Felice Bracci and Cristoforo Capone shivered in windowless barracks and waited for their captors to increase the food ration to a bare subsistence level. They waited in vain. At Susdal, men died at the rate of two hundred a day from starvation.
At Oranki Prison, Rumanian troops staggered into camps from a hundred-mile forced march and pressed their hands on lighted stoves to take away the pain of frostbite. When they pulled back their fingers, the flesh remained on the stoves and the stench made them retch. Amidst screams of torment, many fell dead. The change of temperature from the steppe to warm rooms had brought on massive heart attacks. More than a hundred bodies were hauled out of the barracks feet first. The thump, thump, thump of their heads striking the stairs kept other soldiers awake for hours.
In a camp at Tambov, north of the Don, Italian soldiers crowded around a gate as Russian troops dumped cabbages from a truck onto the snow. Then thirty thousand prisoners rioted and fought each other for the food. Guards shot those they caught in the act of murder.
* A few were saved and published after the war.