From January 24 on, the fighting in Stalingrad was spasmodic. Trapped in their frozen, dark cellars, German troops listened fearfully for the footfalls of Russian soldiers. Even the Russians took their time now, moving carefully in squads, in platoons, over the mounds of snow-covered wreckage. In countless minor engagements in the side streets of the city, the command “Raus! Raus!” echoed when the shooting stopped, and Germans climbed out of their holes with hands held high. The Russians kicked a few, punched others, but led most prisoners away without further incident.
Germans who witnessed these surrenders took heart. A network of runners carried the message that the enemy did not kill their captives and the news soothed many who were close to hysteria. For the moment they forgot their fear of capture while they fought another deadly struggle, the endless war with lice.
The gray parasites now dominated everyone’s life. Multiplying rapidly in the incredible filth, they swarmed from head to ankles in a voracious quest for food. Ravenous, relentless, they drove their hosts to the verge of insanity. Wherever they feasted, they left giant red welts. Worse, they infected their victims with disease.
In the wall of a balka, just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, more than two thousand German wounded had been jammed into a Russian air raid shelter, known as the Timoshenko Bunker. Tunneled into the side of the ravine like a giant anthill, the bunker’s tiered galleries were nearly two and a half miles long. The “hospital” once had contained electric lights, ventilation, even proper drainage facilities, but those conveniences had long since been destroyed. Now it was a fetid morgue, where only the patients’ body heat brought any warmth to the damp chambers. The air was foul, heavy with sickness and rot.
Doctors who ministered to the rows of wounded noticed an alarming increase of fevers ranging from 102 to 104 degrees. Some men died raving. Chills and a tendency to lung congestion were added symptoms which pointed inexorably to a damning medical diagnosis. Unchecked, it could now complete the extermination of the Sixth Army, which had never been adequately vaccinated against typhus.
In his cellar home to the north of Railroad Station Number One, Sgt. Hubert Wirkner lay among fifty other wounded soldiers and groaned from the fever wracking his frail body. His head ached; his eyes were bloodshot. Blood dripped through the bandages on his legs and arms. He had soiled himself repeatedly and hated the smell that clung to him.
Along the walls of the cellar, a collection of manikins stared unwaveringly at the wounded Germans. Marked in ink with the outlines of female reproductive organs, they had obviously been used in a maternity training program for nurses and interns. How ironic, Wirkner thought, that he and his comrades were in a former Soviet hospital but had no doctors to care for them.
Near the Tsaritsa Gorge, the grim black walls of the NKVD prison enclosed what was left of the German Fourteenth Corps, plus the 3rd and 29th Motorized Divisions. Most of the jail itself was gutted, but on the first floor enlisted men mounted guard at the windows. From there they monitored the huge yard, in which scores of wounded soldiers lay unattended in the snow. Though these men begged for help, no one paid any attention to their pleas.
In the bowels of the prison, a group of German generals lived with a retinue of aides. One of them, Edler von Daniels had not been sober for days. Gloriously drunk, he weaved back and forth among troops lying on the damp floors. “Boys,” he shouted, “who of you is against bringing this to an end?” When nobody objected to surrender, von Daniels showered them with packs of cigarettes.
The general was one of several plotting mutiny. Generals Schlömer, Pfeiffer, Korfes, and Seydlitz had been unable to convince Paulus that further resistance was futile. Increasingly annoyed at his constant refrain: “Orders are orders,” they centered their wrath on Arthur Schmidt, the éminence grise behind the throne. Convinced that Schmidt was the culprit who insisted on insane continuation of the fighting, they were planning to end the chief of staff’s domination and force Paulus to surrender.
Arthur Schmidt was indeed assuming active leadership of Sixth Army. Paulus seemed dazed by the calamity that had overtaken him. “Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes. His posture, so upright otherwise, was now slightly stooped.…” The tic on the right side of his face now extended from jaw to eyebrow.
Schmidt, on the other hand, was a bulwark of strength, bullying defeatist officers with blunt commands, abusing protesters by phone, threatening malcontents with the firing squad. Where Paulus wilted under the enormity of the disaster, Schmidt shone in adversity.
In the early morning of January 24, General von Hartmann, commander of the 71st Division, had put down the book he was reading and said to General Pfeiffer: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust in a thousand years’ time, and the Sixth Army an illegible name, incomprehensible to all.” With his mind settled as to his own, course of action, Hartmann led a small band of men out to a railway embankment. Standing upright in full view of Russians across the snowfields, he shouted: “Commence firing!” and shot a clip of bullets from his carbine.
Col. Günter von Below hurried from Paulus’s cellar with the order to “stop this nonsense.” But Hartmann ignored him and continued to fire at the enemy. Within moments, a Russian bullet tore into his brain.
A short time later, another German general settled his own affairs. Hearing that his son, a lieutenant, had been killed while trying to lead some men out of the city toward far-off German lines, General Stempel took out a pistol and shot himself in the head.*
Only hours after Generals Hartmann and Stempel died, the 297th Division Commander, General Drebber, stood on a street near the grain elevator and saluted a Russian colonel, who politely asked: “Where are your regiments?” Drebber shrugged and replied: “Do I have to tell you where my regiments are?” Accompanied by several aides, he marched off to Soviet lines.
Just before 9:00 A.M. that morning, Friedrich von Paulus was handed a letter sent through the lines by Drebber. As he started to open it, a bomb exploded outside the basement window and showered both him and his adjutant, Col. Wilhelm Adam, with shards of glass and rock. Shaken and bleeding, the two men submitted to medical attention before Paulus sat down again to read the note.
In a moment, the general uttered a surprised cry: “It is not believable! Drebber states that he and his men have been well received by the Red Army soldiers. They were treated correctly. We all were victims of Goebbel’s lying propaganda. Drebber urges me to give up ‘… useless resistance and … capitulate with the entire Army.’” Paulus put the letter down and stared at Adam in wonder.
At that moment Arthur Schmidt entered and when Paulus told him what Drebber had written, Schmidt’s face darkened.
“Never has von Drebber written this letter voluntarily,” he stated. “He was under compulsion.…”
The chief of staff was furious at the defection of a senior officer. But Paulus was merely confused. Had he been wrong about the Russians? Was it possible they would treat every German fairly?
Just north of Mamaev Hill, behind the Red October workers’ settlement, tanks from General Batov’s Sixty-fifth Army smashed through scattered German resistance to meet troops of General Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards. The linkup on January 26 marked the first time that Vassili Chuikov’s divisions inside Stalingrad had established physical contact with another Russian army since September 10, 138 days earlier.
Rodimtsev, who had thrown his cannon-fodder division into Stalingrad on September 14 to hold the Germans between Mamaev and the Tsaritsa Gorge, spied tanker captain Usenko and cried: “Tell your commander that this is a happy day for us.…” More than eight thousand guardsmen under his command had died in the last four months. Embracing, the general and captain wept together.
A few hours later, Sixth Army Headquarters moved abruptly to the hulking Univermag Department Store on Red Square. The buildings around the square were just shells—windowless, pocked with gaping holes. The building housing Pravda was gutted; so were those of the City Soviet and the post office. The theater had fallen in.
Paulus went past these ruins, down a broad ramp in the Univermag courtyard, and into the basement warehouse. While aides set up a radio room for last transmissions to Manstein, the general retired to a curtained cubicle containing a cot and chair, and sagged down to rest. A barred window cast a pale light on his haggard, bearded face.
Later in the day, Arthur Schmidt stormed into Paulus’s room to announce: “Sir, the Fourteenth Armored Corps is considering capitulation. Muller [the Fourteenth Corps chief of staff] said that the troops had reached the end of their strength and that they had no ammunition left. I told him that we are aware of the situation, but that the order to continue combat was still valid and a capitulation was out of the question. Nevertheless, sir, I would suggest that you visit those generals and talk to them.”
At the NKVD prison, “those generals” were holding a meeting. “Paulus will refuse to sign a capitulation, we all know that,” stated General Schlömer, commander of the Fourteenth Corps. “But we cannot let this mass murder continue. I ask for your approval to get hold of Paulus, whereafter I shall bring the negotiations to an end acting as the new commander in chief.”
At this remark, the mercurial General Seydlitz-Kurzbach jumped up and shouted: “By God, gentlemen, this is treason!” As his astounded colleagues stared in amazement, he reached for his hat and put his hand on the doorknob to leave.
Suddenly the door opened from the other side and Paulus walked in to face his adversaries. His lips tightly pressed together, and the tic on his cheek noticeably aggravated, he glanced coldly at the mutineers and in that brief instant assumed complete command of the men who had followed him to the Volga and disaster.
“Schlömer, you will go back to your duties. Seydlitz,” he gestured at the Fifty-first Corps commander, “you will resume your responsibilities. And the others will do the same.”
A babble of protest broke out, centering on Arthur Schmidt’s insistence on fighting to the last bullet. Refusing to be drawn into an argument, Paulus turned and walked out of the building. Behind him, the rebellious generals gathered their belongings and left the room. No one mentioned mutiny again.
On January 28, the Russians divided the city into three sectors: the Eleventh Corps was isolated around the tractor plant; the Eighth and Fifty-first corps around an engineering school west of Mamaev Hill; the remainders of the Fourteenth and Fourth corps were in the downtown area around the Univermag.
At the Schnellhefter Block across from the tractor plant, Dr. Ottmar Kohler had run out of morphine. Wallowing in filth and blood, he operated under flickering lights and in incredible cold. Outside the building, lines of soldiers crowded the entrance, looking for a place to sleep. An officer went to the door and begged them to go away because there was no room, but they said they would wait until morning.
At sunrise, the visitors were still there, huddled together against the below-zero temperature. During the night they had all died from exposure.
At the central military garrison post, now a hospital a mile north of the Univermag, three thousand wounded lay under a merciless wind that whipped through the building’s shattered walls. Without enough medicine to care for everyone, doctors placed gravely ill soldiers at the edge of the crowd so they would die first from the cold.
Ringing the huge building on four sides was a stack of bodies six feet high. When soldiers stopped at the garrison to ask for food, they earned it by arranging corpses in neat piles, like railroad ties. After stacking their quota of bodies, cooks splashed soup into their outstretched mess tins and they shuffled away from the cordwood cemetery.
Batteries of Russian mortars zeroed in on the Central garrison and set it afire. While medics screamed for the wounded to get up and run, flames fanned by the gale winds raced through the cavernous hallways. In the courtyard, onlookers saw the building billow into a fire that flashed out of every opening on the upper floors. When fiery bodies hurtled out of the inferno, they sizzled in the snow for minutes.
The hospital walls turned cherry red in color and became almost transparent. Finally they bulged outward and whole sections crumpled into the streets. Through the breaks, horrified witnesses saw patients tearing at burning bandages in frantic dervish dances.
After the ceilings crashed down and the violent whoosh of flames subsided, rescuers pushed in to save as many as they could. They found every stairway clogged by a chain of corpses.
With the last hours at hand, wounded German soldiers in countless cellars asked for pistols, placed them to their temples and fired. The lice that had lived on them for weeks quickly left the cooling bodies and moved like gray blankets to other beds.
At the bottom of a ravine west of Mamaev Hill, General Seydlitz-Kurzbach debated suicide with his companions. Once again, the chameleon-like general had changed his attitude toward Paulus and Hitler. Only a short time before he had told his comrades they were plotting treason; he now spent hours cursing the Nazis and Hitler’s insanity, and openly advocated a revolt of the masses against the Third Reich.
His companions tended to agree with him. White-haired General Pfeiffer goaded Seydlitz-Kurzbach on, shouting that he owed no subservience to “a Bohemian corporal skunk.” General Otto Korfes vacillated between calling for a Gotterdammerung and cursing the leaders of the Nazi regime. Colonel Crome withdrew into a careful reading of the Bible; General Heitz ignored the seditious talk around him. Totally loyal to Paulus, he mounted guns at the entrance to the bunker and said, “I will shoot the first man who deserts.”
While Seydlitz-Kurbach openly discussed taking his own life, his orderly, an elderly man, blew himself up with a hand grenade.
At the Univermag, Arthur Schmidt had intercepted a colonel named Steidle who wanted to plead with Paulus to capitulate. Raging at the man, Schmidt threatened him with the firing squad.
In public Schmidt showed a tenacious will to resist to the final bullet but in secret, he was having conversations with two officers, one a Colonel Beaulieu, who had spent some years in Russia in the twenties and the other, Capt. Boris von Neidhardt, a Balt and former czarist officer. Both men spoke fluent Russian and were knowledgeable about life in the Soviet Union. Schmidt spent hours with each man, asking probing questions about their experiences.
Col. Wilhelm Adam, Paulus’s adjutant, intercepted Beaulieu after one of these talks and asked what was going on behind Schmidt’s closed door. Beaulieu was candid, “Schmidt asked me to tell him about the Red Army. He was particularly interested to learn what one had to expect of their soldiers and officers. I didn’t know that your chief of staff could be so friendly.”
The suspicious Adam checked with Neidhardt and found that Schmidt had quizzed him on the same topics.
On the evening of January 29, Adam received further proof that Schmidt had no intention of fighting to the last breath. Schmidt’s orderly suddenly pulled Adam into the chief of staff’s room, and pointing to a suitcase in the corner, whispered, “To all his subordinates he says ‘you must hold out, there will be no capitulation,’ but he himself gets ready for captivity.”
Seething with hatred, Adam went back to his cot and brooded.
From his basement window just off Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger looked past his machine gun at a water fountain on the intersection. For days it had been the focal point of firefights, and Pflüger had killed a number of Russians trying to reach it. There was also a line of dead Germans around it, cut down as they crawled across the ice with empty canteens.
With his war now reduced to fighting for a sip of water, Pflüger was ready to surrender. But first he wanted to hear a speech being given by Adolf Hitler on January 30, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Third Reich. At noon, he stood with others beside the radio and waited for the Führer’s voice to flood into the cellar. It did not. The announcer said that Hermann Goering would speak instead, and the Reichsmarshal was his bombastic self:
… What herculean labors our Führer has performed … out of this pulp, this human pulp … to forge a nation as hard as steel. The enemy is tough, but the German soldier has grown tougher.… We have taken away the Russians’ coal and iron, and without that they can no longer make armaments on a large scale.… Rising above all these gigantic battles like a mighty monument is Stalingrad.… One day this will be recognized as the greatest battle in our history, a battle of heroes.… We have a mighty epic of an incomparable struggle, the struggle of the Nibelungs. They, too, stood to the last.…
In Pflüger’s cellar, men groaned and someone cursed the “fat man” in Berlin.
Goering continued “… My soldiers, thousands of years have passed, and thousands of years ago in a tiny pass in Greece stood a tremendously brave and bold man with three hundred soldiers, Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans.… Then the last man fell … and now only the inscription stands: ‘Wanderer, if you should come to Sparta, go tell the Spartans you found us lying here as the law bade us.’… Someday men will read: ‘If you come to Germany, go tell the Germans you saw us lying in Stalingrad, as the law bade us.…’”
It was suddenly clear to Pflüger and thousands of Germans standing by shortwave radios that Hitler already considered them dead.
After Goering’s speech ended, the German national anthem was played, and Pflüger joined hands with his comrades to sing: “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.” He sobbed unashamedly at the beautiful words. When the anthem was followed by “Horst Wessel,” the Nazi party song, someone in the room lashed out with his gun butt and broke the radio to pieces.
To the last, however, Paulus publicly worshipped at the feet of the Führer:
January 30th:
On the tenth anniversary of your assumption of power, the Sixth Army hails its “Führer.” The swastika flag is still flying above Stalingrad. May our battle be an example to the present and coming generations, that they must never capitulate even in a hopeless situation, for then Germany will come out victorious.
Hail my Führer
Paulus, Generaloberst
At a railroad embankment near the engineering school, Gen. Carl Rodenburg sighted his rifle and carefully squeezed off a shot. Then he turned and asked his aide to find another target. The monocled general had come to the “range” as he called it, to have a last crack at the enemy. He fired for over an hour while the aide, newly promoted to captain, chose his targets. As the general turned once more to speak to the young officer, a Russian bullet tore into the man’s head, killing him instantly. The sorrowful Rodenburg left the body in the snow and went back to his bunker to await the end. It was some consolation to him that at least the captain’s family in Germany would get a bigger pension because of his new rank.
Inside the NKVD prison, several hundred German officers and men waited for the confrontation with Russian soldiers. Some drank heavily, and in an upstairs room, one officer enjoyed pancakes cooked for him by a pleasant Russian woman, who had magically appeared in anticipation of victory.
Other soldiers prepared by dressing in clothing taken from corpses: extra underwear, two shirts, double socks, sweaters—anything they could find to ward off the cold weather they knew awaited them on the march to internment.
Shots rang out in one of the cells and several soldiers rushed to the open door to find a sergeant standing over three officers sprawled in death. Behind the sergeant, a blond lieutenant sat at a table and stared intently at a girl’s picture, framed by the light of two candles. The lieutenant seemed completely oblivious to the scene around him.
Hearing the commotion at the door, the sergeant whirled on the spectators and shouted; “Goddamn you, go away or you’ll get the next one!”
As they retreated from the doorway, the sounds of two more shots rocketed off the walls and when they looked in again, the blond lieutenant had fallen face down on the floor. His head was a mass of blood.
The sergeant was there, too, with a self-inflicted bullet wound in the mouth. He had carried out the suicide pact exactly as ordered.
At the southeastern side of Red Square, Col. Gunter Ludwig held the cellar of an office building beside the Gorki Theater. His post was also the last defense line the Germans manned in front of the Univermag. On the evening of the thirtieth, a military policeman arrived and told the colonel that General Schmidt wanted to see him. Ludwig was suddenly fearful, for during the day he had been talking to Russian officers about surrender. Knowing Schmidt’s threats of a firing squad for those who quit the battle, he walked to the department store feeling like a condemned man.
Schmidt greeted him sternly and asked about his position on the lower part of the square. After Ludwig told him his men were still deployed there, Schmidt offered him a seat and said, “Listen, I just heard that you negotiated with the Russians today.”
Ludwig admitted he had, and justified his actions by describing the woeful condition of his troops. As he spoke, Ludwig watched Schmidt carefully, trying to gauge his reaction. The general paced the room, then whirled, “You mean you just went to the Russians and negotiated capitulation, and no one even thinks of coming to us, to army headquarters?”
The stunned colonel had trouble getting the point: Schmidt, the martinet, also wanted to surrender! Then he recovered enough to say: “If that is all you want, sir, I believe I can promise you that a parliamentarian will report here in front of the basement tomorrow morning at about 0900 hours.”
Schmidt was suddenly gentle, “All right, Ludwig, you see to that—good night now.”
Minutes later, the 71st Division commander, General Roske, went to Paulus and said, “The division is no longer capable of rendering resistance. Russian tanks are approaching the department store building. The end has come.”
Paulus smiled at his aide, “Thank you for everything, Roske. Convey my gratitude also to your officers and men. Schmidt has already asked Ludwig to take up negotiations with the Red Army.”
Paulus went back to his cot where Colonel Adam sat across from him. A small candle flickered between them; neither spoke for a while. Finally Adam said, “Sir, you must go to sleep now. Otherwise you will not be able to stand up to tomorrow’s trials. It will cost us the rest of our nervous strength.”
Shortly after midnight, Paulus stretched out to nap, and Adam went to Roske and asked if there were any new developments. Roske gave him a cigarette, lit one for himself, and said: “A Red tank is standing quite close in a side street, its guns aimed at us. I immediately reported to Schmidt on the matter. He said the tank must be prevented from firing at all costs.… The interpreter should go to the tank commander with a white flag and offer negotiations.…”
Adam went back to his own cot from where he stared across the room at his sleeping commander. His relationship with Paulus had become almost worshipful and Adam could no longer see the flaws in Paulus’s character: his failure to comprehend the destructive alliance that existed between Hitler’s ambitions and the Wehrmacht’s apolitical generals, or Paulus’s unwillingness to shoulder the burden of independent command. What a handsome man, Adam thought as he pondered the events that had overwhelmed such a brilliant military career. Decent and honorable, Paulus had subordinated himself completely to Hitler’s demands and in so doing, had lost control of his destiny.
While the commander in chief of the Sixth Army rested, the Führer employed one last device to salvage something from the disaster. He ordered a shower of promotions on Sixth Army’s senior officers, most notably one that made Paulus a field marshal. Knowing that no German field marshal had ever surrended, Hitler hoped that Paulus would take the hint and commit suicide.
Paulus did not. Before dawn, his interpreter, Boris von Neidhardt, went out through the darkened square to the Russian tank, where a young Soviet lieutenant, Fyodor Yelchenko, stood in the turret. When Neidhardt waved to him, Yelchenko jumped down and Neidhardt said, “Our big chief wants to talk to your big chief.”
Yelchenko shook his head and answered: “Look here, our big chief has other things to do. He isn’t available. You’ll just have to deal with me.” Suddenly apprehensive because of nearby shelling and the presence of the enemy, Yelchenko called for reinforcements and fourteen Russian soldiers appeared with their guns ready.
Neidhardt was disgusted. “No, no, our chief asks that only one or two of you come in.”
“Nuts to that,” Yelchenko said. “I am not going by myself.” The lieutenant with the turned-up nose and boyish smile had no intention of going alone into the enemy camp. After agreeing on three Russian representatives, the group went into the cellar of the Univermag where hundreds of Germans had gathered. Yelchenko had a difficult time deciding who was in command. Though Roske spoke to him and then Arthur Schmidt, he did not see Paulus.
After Roske explained that he and Schmidt were empowered to speak for the commander and negotiate a surrender, Schmidt asked as a special favor that the Russians treat Paulus as a private person and escort him away in an automobile to protect him from vengeful Red Army soldiers. Laughing gaily, Yelchenko agreed. “Okay,” he said, and then they took him down the corridor to a green-curtained cubicle. Yelchenko stepped in and confronted Friedrich von Paulus, unshaved, but immaculate in his full-dress uniform.
Yelchenko wasted no time on formalities. “Well, that finishes it,” he offered in greeting. The forlorn field marshal looked into his eyes and nodded miserably.
A short time later, after conversations with more Soviet officers, Paulus and Schmidt walked out of the fetid depths of the Univermag and stepped into a Russian staff car. It took them south over the Tsaritsa Gorge, past the grain elevator, through the ruins of Dar Gova, and on to the suburb of Beketovka where, in a wooden farmhouse, they were ushered into the presence of Gen. Mikhail Shumilov, commander of the Soviet Sixty-fourth Army. Surrounded by cameramen, Shumilov greeted his guests correctly and asked for identification. When Paulus produced his paybook, the Russian pretended to read German and grunted his acceptance.
The Russians offered the Germans food from a tremendous buffet but Paulus balked, insisting that he first receive a guarantee that his men be given proper rations and medical care. Reassured on that point by Shumilov, Paulus and Schmidt finally picked lightly at the feast spread before them.
The primary antagonists of the battle for Stalingrad never got to meet. Deprived by jealous commanders of the chance to capture Paulus himself, Vassili Chuikov had to content himself with lesser fry.* Dressed in a fur jacket, Chuikov sat behind a big desk in his Volga bunker, and glared at the first German to come through the door.
“Are you Seydlitz?” he asked. The officer was Lt. Philip Humbert, Seydlitz’s aide. To cover his error, the flustered Russian interpreter introduced Humbert as a lieutenant colonel, and then brought the rest of the Germans into Chuikov’s presence.
Chuikov was suddenly expansive. “Be glad, general,” he said to Seydlitz, “that you are with us. Stalin will have his parade in Berlin on the first of May. We shall then make peace, and we shall work together with you.”
His questions then came fast. “Why do you look so bad? Why did they not fly you out?” General Krylov broke in to say that he had been flown out of Sevastopol when that city was doomed.
At this point, General Korfes became a talkative spokesman for the German officer corps. “It is the tragic point of world history that the two greatest men of our times, Hitler and Stalin … have been unable to find common grounds so as to beat the mutual enemy, the capitalist world.”
Even Chuikov seemed startled by this declaration. Seydlitz grabbed Korfes’s arm and cried: “Why don’t you stop talking?”
Korfes could not be stilled. “After all, I feel entitled to say this because it is the truth.”
Seydlitz-Kurzbach and General Pfeiffer lapsed into a fretful silence, marred by each man’s occasional weeping. Chuikov tried to make his prisoners more comfortable by ordering food and tea, which they gratefully accepted. After more polite conversation, the Germans were escorted to the Volga shore and a battered Ford which took them across the ice to captivity. Behind them, their German troops faced a mixed reception from the Russian captors.
On the summit of Mamaev Hill, Lt. Pyotr Deriabin led a company of soldiers into German trenches. Intent on looting, the Soviet troops shot at random into men who raised their hands in surrender, then stripped the bodies of watches and other valuables.
At the edge of Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger packed a few pieces of bread and sausage while the Russians tiptoed down the cellar stairs. In the corner of the room, three Hiwis dressed in German uniforms crouched nervously. As the Russians began to seize rings and watches, the terrified Hiwis bolted from the basement into the street. The Russians chased them for a block and shot them dead.
At the NKVD prison, the surrender was orderly. From the catacomb of cells, the Germans poured into the courtyard, ringed with piles of corpses. In the middle of the assembly area, a German cook, incongruously attired in a spotless white apron, stood by a stove. As Russian guards circulated among the prisoners and shared cigarettes with them, the cook continued to ladle out mugs of hot coffee both for his men and their new masters.
Further north, Cpl. Heinz Neist heard the Russians pounding down into his cellar. One of them confronted him and pointed at the wedding ring on his hand. When Neist used sign language to explain that it was difficult to pull off, the Russian whipped out a knife and made a motion to slice the finger away.
At that moment, the corporal heard a voice shouting, “All nice young Germans, goddamn Hitler,” and Neist beckoned the speaker over to help him with the irate looter. But the officer just shook his head and said: “Give the ring, give everything you have, save your life.” Struggling frantically with the wedding band, Neist finally loosened it and handed the treasure to the happy Russian who then left him alone.
That same day, January 31, hundreds of wounded German troops were killed where they lay.
In his cellar north of Red Square, the desperately ill Hubert Wirkner heard a noise and turned to see a Russian soldier pouring gasoline in through the window. Summoning all his strength, he lunged from his bed and crawled on his deadened arms and legs toward the stairs.
Behind him the Russian lit a match and tossed it onto the fuel. The cellar exploded in a violent orange cloud and turned fifty men into human torches. As some of the flaming bodies clutched frantically at the window bars the Russians pounded their hands with rifle butts.
At the bottom of the stairs, Wirkner dumped a pail of water over himself and groped upward toward fresh air. Clouds of smoke choked him and the awful screams of the burning patients followed him as he fell out the door into the snow. On all fours, he crouched like a dog while a Soviet officer came up to him, cocked his pistol and shoved it in Wirkner’s ear. While he waited to die, another voice broke in, “Comrade Stalin wouldn’t like that.” Wirkner’s executioner pulled the pistol away and stalked off. Safe for the moment, Wirkner dragged himself across the street to find another sanctuary.
On February 1, at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler had not taken the news of surrender calmly.
Sitting before the huge map of Russia in the main conference room, he spoke with Zeitzler, Keitel, and others about the debacle: “They have surrendered there formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog and shot themselves with their last bullet.…”
Zeitzler agreed: “I can’t understand it either. I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he [Paulus] is lying there badly wounded.”
“No, it is true,” Hitler said. “They’ll be brought to Moscow, to the GPU right away, and they’ll blurt out orders for the northern pocket to surrender, too. That Schmidt will sign anything. A man who doesn’t have the courage, in such a time, to take the road that every man has to take sometime, doesn’t have the strength to withstand that sort of thing … He will suffer torture in his soul. In Germany there has been too much emphasis on training the intellect and not enough on strength of character.…”
The conversation droned on.
Zeitzler said, “One can’t understand this type of man.”
Hitler was disgusted: “Don’t say that. I saw a letter.… It was addressed to Below [Nikolaus von Below, Winrich Behr’s close friend]. I can show it to you. An officer in Stalingrad wrote, ‘I have come to the following conclusions about these people—Paulus, question mark; Seydlitz, should be shot; Schmidt, should be shot.’”
“I have also heard bad reports about Seydlitz,” Zeitzler offered.
“One could say that it would have been better to leave Hube in there and bring out the others,” Hitler added. “But since the value of men is not immaterial, and since we need men in the entire war, I am definitely of the opinion that it was right to bring Hube out. In peacetime, in Germany, about eighteen or twenty thousand people a year chose to commit suicide, even without being in such a position. Here is a man [Paulus], who sees fifty or sixty thousand of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end. How can he surrender himself to the Bolshevists? … That is something one can’t understand at all.”
“But I had my doubts before,” Hitler continued. “That was at the moment when I received the report that he was asking me what he should do [about the Russian ultimatum to surrender]. How could he ever ask about such a thing?…”
“There is no excuse,” declared Zeitzler. “When his nerves threaten to break down, then he must kill himself.”
Hitler nodded, “When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself.…” Hitler stared at Zeitzler, who replied: “I still think they may have done that and that the Russians are only claiming to have captured them all.”
“No …” said the Führer vehemently. “In this war, no more field marshals will be made.… I won’t go on counting my chickens before they are hatched.…”
Zeitzler shrugged: “We were so completely sure how it would end, that granting him a final satisfaction.…”
“We had to assume that it would end heroically.”
Zeitzler agreed, “How could one imagine anything else?…”
Hitler sounded depressed: “This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling.…”
In the northern part of Stalingrad, Eleventh Corps commander, General Strecker, held out for another forty-eight hours in a futile gesture of defiance.
On the morning of February 2, all the Russian artillery concentrated on this area, and for two hours, shells rained down on the pitiful survivors of the Sixth Army. Then the barrage was over and thousands of Russian troops rushed the cellars while German machine-gunners fired their last belts of ammunition. Enraged at the fanatic resistance, the Russians pulled prisoners out of foxholes and beat them savagely. With clubs and fists they pummeled the die-hards, cursing the “Nazi swine” who continued the bloodshed long after Paulus had quit the field and stopped the killing.
Suddenly white flags popped out of windows up and down the side streets across from the factories. The stronghold began to collapse.
While Hans Oettl paused to urinate outside his building, a Russian sergeant poked a gun in his back and demanded in broken German that he call everyone out of the cellar to surrender. Oettl refused and stared into the silver-toothed grin of his captor, who made a motion with his weapon as if to kill him. When Oettl still refused, the sergeant shouted “Raus!” into the stairwell and Oettl’s companions streamed into the brilliant sunlight with their hands over their heads.
Across the main road from Oettl’s basement, the Russians poured into the tractor factory assembly rooms where hundreds of wounded lay on shelves against the walls. Other Germans dangled grotesquely from belts hooked onto stanchions. Unwilling to endure captivity, they had taken their own lives during the hours before dawn. Just before the Eleventh Corps command post was overrun, General Strecker issued a last message to the Fatherland: “Eleventh Corps and its divisions have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”
At 12:35 P.M. that afternoon, Army Group Don at Taganrog logged the final words from Sixth Army at Stalingrad when a weather team filed its daily report: “Cloud base fifteen thousand feet, visibility seven miles, clear sky, occasional scattered nimbus clouds, temperature minus thirty-one degrees centigrade, over Stalingrad fog and red haze. Meteorological station now closing down. Greetings to the homeland.”
Reacting to Soviet proclamations about their stupendous triumph, the Nazi government reluctantly told the German people of the loss of the entire Sixth Army. For an unprecedented three days, all radio broadcasts were suspended. Funeral music droned into thousands of homes across the Third Reich. Restaurants, theaters, cinemas, all places of entertainment were shut down, and the trauma of defeat gripped the population.
In Berlin, Goebbels began to draft a speech calling for a realization that Germany must prepare for “total war.”
* Though badly wounded in the escape attempt, his son survived.
* The honor of capturing Paulus caused bitter rivalry among Red Army officers. In postwar reminiscences, several lesser generals and colonels claimed that they had received Paulus’s surrender in the Univermag cellar. In almost all these accounts, Lt. Fyodor Yelchenko’s role was dismissed.