7

COLD DAYS IN HELL

The relief column began to recede like an ebb tide. By 23 December it was clear to the Germans outside the ring that the breakthrough attempt had come to nothing: Paulus’s besieged men were going to have to fight on alone. Radio contact was maintained, but what was there to say? Werner Wischnowski was a 21-year-old radio operator with a Panzer regiment outside the Kessel. From the relative safety of a communications post, he listened in silence to the radio traffic of the Sixth Army. It was like eavesdropping on drowning men:

By day we saw the Junkers 52s flying provisions into the cauldron. But as one of the little men, you know nothing. We had no maps or anything. Once I went right to the front line in a truck. There was a unit based there with a telephone exchange. I was surprised that the driver could find his way so well without a single signpost. It was evening, and one of the men pointed out to me: The Russians are dug in just over there.‘ 1 couldn’t see them, and no one shot at us. When I was at the apparatus we would sometimes hear things like: They are advancing!‘ or ‘We need ammunition!‘ We didn’t tell the officer, because it was forbidden to monitor conversations.

STILLE NACHT

Inside the Kessel, the mood was sombre and solemn. On Christmas Eve, the crushing news that Manstein was not coming after all seeped through to the ordinary soldiers of the Sixth Army.

The noise of battle from the relief army had been getting closer day by day, said Hans-Erdmann Schonbeck. We were geared up for the last leap westwards, to meet our liberators. But only in our minds, for we knew that we were almost out of fuel and ammo. With the first day of Christmas came the full, awful certainty. The relief troops were unable to make it, the battle sounds were getting fainter and moving to the west. Our thoughts of escape had been in vain.

On this doom-laden Heilige Abend, Holy Eve, Schonbeck, a 20-year-old officer with the 24th Panzer Division, took some comfort in the preparations he had made for the festivities.

On December 24th there were about fifteen men in my bunker. That morning, under fairly heavy fire, I had managed to dig up a little pine tree buried in the snow of the steppe - probably one of the very few Christmas trees in the entire Kessel. That spring, when I’d been billeted with a priest in Brittany, I’d scrounged three church candles that were just the right size to fit into my backpack. I had no idea why at the time, I just liked the look of them. It got dark very early. The candles were burning as I told the Christmas story and spoke the Lord‘s Prayer.

A little later, the crackly loudspeaker transmitted a Christmas message from the Forces‘ radio station in Germany. It was being broadcast everywhere from the North Pole to Africa. At that time an enormous part of the world belonged to us. When Stalingrad was called we began to tremble though we were indoors in the warm that evening. Then when the words ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacbt...‘ were sung, our tears started to flow. We cried for a long time. From that moment, no one said so much as a word - maybe for a whole hour.

Not all the soldiers at Stalingrad were so touched by that Christmas broadcast. The radio announcer had informed the German public that they were listening to a wireless link-up with the army on the Volga, that it was the Sixth Army themselves singing ‘Silent Night’. In fact it was a choir in a Berlin studio. Some of the men, freezing and starving in their bunkers, were incensed by the attempt to cover up or at least to sentimentalize their ordeal. They were also unamused by the irony that none of them had had a silent night, or even so much as a couple of hours’ uninterrupted sleep, for a matter of months.

But the goodly Schonbeck was grateful for the Christmas feast, and he did his best to spread some good cheer of his own.

We each received an extra slice of bread, and also had some French brandy - goodness knows where from - and enough wood. I went from bunker to bunker in our balka and spoke to those on guard duty as well. Everyone’s thoughts were with their loved ones back home. Meanwhile the night sky had become very clear and it turned icy cold. A very few isolated shells landed, and somewhere further off there were a few machinegun volleys. It looked as if the Russians were letting us have our Christmas Eve. Above us the heavens cleared, revealing a starry sky. At home, two thousand kilometres away, they must have been looking at the same stars as we were. That was my bridge, my link with home -the immeasurable breadth of the firmament! To this day, in good times and bad, I have sought calm and stability in the immensity of the universe - and I have always found it.

The Russians were unaware that it was a holiday for the Germans. Christmas was not celebrated in the atheistic Soviet Union, and in any case it fell on 7 January in the old calendar of Russian Orthodoxy. If the Soviet forces had realized where their enemies’ thoughts were, they might have made more effort to disrupt the meagre celebrations. As it was, the everyday round of bombing and sniping was not enough to break the Germans’ festive mood. ‘At around 15.00 hours the Russians started shooting randomly in various directions with heavy artillery ...‘ said Hans Lesko, who was having a relatively quiet Christmas Eve at the Pitomnik airfield.

... We crept into the shelters that the privates had blown out of the ground and shared the last of our cigarettes. Back home they were preparing for Christmas Eve. Before midnight, under cover of the rising mist, the Russian ‘coffee grinder’ made its appearance, as on every evening for days past. The procedure was always the same. After flying over once, the plane turned and dropped small bombs that looked as if they were being tipped out with a shovel, for they scattered over the airfield in all directions. When the bombs were finished, leaflets rained down from the sky. They contained the usual: we should do ourselves a favour and surrender; a pleasant life lay ahead in captivity, plenty to eat and as much brandy as we could knock back. But should we not wish to, we would simply be shot on being taken prisoner.

So far it was the same as usual. But this time the plane with its clattering sewing-machine engine turned back a third time. And now we were dumbstruck. They were screaming down at us through a loudspeaker. A committee of captive German officers had set themselves up in Moscow. These erstwhile ‘comrades-in-arms’ now invited us to break out and to shit on the oath of allegiance. For a while we were speechless. But then the entire front line sector around Pitomnik sprang into action. Rifles, sub-machineguns, panzer batteries, as well as our tiny anti-aircraft gun all fired their response into the sky. All the fury of the German soldiers lay in every shot. And they yelled upwards: ‘Criminals! Cowards! Arse-kissers! Bastards!‘ An hour later the Stalin organs started playing.

At one o’clock in the morning, when the fireworks had ended, carols were played over the Reich radio. The programme ended with ‘Lili Marlene‘, which brought tears to our eyes. Little Schick went outside on guard duty. I was supposed to relieve him two hours later with a sergeant and a lance corporal. At three in the morning when we crept across to our post, we couldn’t find Schick. The sergeant told us to keep back. He went on alone. We waited under cover. After a long time we heard a shrill whistle. We rushed forwards. There was the sergeant and there was little Schick. He was standing upright in the snow trench. A bullet had got him right in the forehead. In front of him lay three empty magazines from his sub-machinegun and six dead Russians.

Such incidents were frequent enough, even on this day. But throughout the Kessel, German soldiers took advantage of the brief lull in the fighting to write letters, exchange small gifts of cigarettes or a sliver of soap, or to take part in a religious service. Alfons R—, an NCO with the 60th Infantry Division, sat down in the afternoon and wrote to his family. He tried hard to put a brave face on things, but the despair is just below the surface.

Dear parents, dear brothers and sisters, It’s Christmas Eve in the field in the Russian steppes near Stalingrad. By the time you read this letter all the Christmas excitement will be over, both here and with you too, and the harsh reality will have caught up with us again. Here the holiday doesn’t make any difference to our situation and yet, in a very limited way, there is something like Christmas spirit...

It’s just impossible to imagine all the things that happen here. What the men endure cannot be described. And now Christmas - with a simple candle and two thorny twigs from the steppe, a howling east wind, the thud of explosions and bursts of fire cracking over our bunker. Thank God, we still have wood to warm our foxholes. I’m sitting here with my platoon leader, a staff sergeant and our dispatch rider. We’ve placed a few pictures from home around the candle and are thinking of you. Our rough voices have even managed to croak ‘Silent Night’ and another carol, but it didn’t really sound right, for there was something missing -and it was you.

But I don’t want to be ungrateful. I must thank God that I have been allowed to see Christmas, and to be healthy and cheerful. I hope the same goes for you. Though you’re bound to be very worried, let’s hope that we will soon see one another again.

I’ve been to see my men and sat with them a bit, trying to cheer them up. Our soldiers just amaze me, in their way they are quite unique and really unbeatable. I hope the Fatherland is aware of this, and will truly appreciate it.

Corporal Werner R— was in a similarly philosophical mood when he wrote home that same evening.

Somewhere in the front line of the German Fortress Stalingrad, in a small ravine in the steppe, where our vehicles are parked, camouflaged with white lime, and where our bunkers are located, we’ve put up a Christmas tree. We’d been asking ourselves what Christmas 1942 would be like. All I know is that in this defiant mood things were better and more profound than any other Christmas Eve has been or could ever be.

At 17.00 hours I went outside on watch in the driving snow, but without feeling resentful. And as the wind dropped at this hour of the night, the sky cleared, the stars appeared and a huge, serene moon rose. It seemed to me it seemed like a symbol: after the deprivation and horror of our fate, life moves on.

We passed some good time together - you could even say it was relaxing. There was a little 96 per cent schnapps, and real coffee in good supply. So we drank an amazing coffee liqueur.

Naturally, the higher ranks had a better time of it than the enlisted men. Here is an anonymous diary entry, written on Christmas Day. The celebrations of this well- connected officer were about as good as it got.

Yesterday we were expecting the Russians to disturb us, which thank God, didn’t happen. At four in the afternoon I assembled most of my people to celebrate Christmas Eve. The general spoke, saying that this was a Christmas we were unlikely ever to forget: firstly, because every one of us would probably rather be in another place, back home with wife and children; secondly, because of the highly unusual situation we were in at present; thirdly, because of the really outstanding comradely solidarity produced by this situation.

We sang Christmas carols and presents were distributed. Each man received three bars of chocolate, three tubes of sweets, fifty cigarettes, half a loaf of bread, 130 grams of meat and some sandwich spread. One and all were delighted, as no one expected anything like this to happen in the present circumstances. We had conjured up a Christmas tree from a few pine branches, decorated it with silver paper from cigarette boxes, cut one of the last candles into pieces, and used the lids from empty food tins and a nail to make holders. In this way we made do. Then I went round to some people who weren’t able to take part, and shortly after six o’clock I was back in our dugout, overseeing the final preparations for our evening meal.

We wanted to eat together and we set a table with a tablecloth and things to make it look nice. The presents, chocolate and so forth were piled up at each place; a small Christmas tree stood on the table, and everything looked very attractive. All this in a smoky old hole. Thirteen of us gentlemen were there when the general arrived with a gift for everyone: a bottle of alcohol for the senior officers, and something to smoke for the others. Then we had a really good meal, as we’d slaughtered a cow a few days earlier: soup, tongue with noodles, followed by stewed apple and cherries which we had found in the quartermaster’s stores. As for alcohol, we had some rum that we drank with tea. We sat together until eleven in the evening.

The Kessel was still a large geographical area, and there were regional as well as hierarchical variations in supply. Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, the soldier who a month before had marched into the cauldron just as it was closing, was already facing the early stages of starvation.

By Christmas Day there was almost no food left. What was being distributed can hardly be described as rations: tiny amounts of tinned bread, tinned sausage, occasionally meat from a horse that had met its end somehow or other, and had been crawled over by countless flies. Once we even caught a donkey - but those times were exceptions - and eating that meat was forbidden. It was more than unhealthy. But what starving person is going to bother about that? Everyone had long since furtively eaten up his ‘iron ration’. When just before Christmas the order reached us that iron rations could now be broken into, everyone laughed.

Some men in Beyer’s unit were even thinking about the ghastly pros and cons of cannibalizing their own bodies.

Even those accustomed to hunger, who knew how much pain the disappearance of the last small cushions of fat on the toes or elsewhere caused, seriously considered taking this action in defiance of orders.

Werner Lange, an NCO, was richly sardonic about the Christmas fare in his letters home. This is what he wrote home on 29 December 1942: ‘On the first day of the holiday we had goose with rice, and on the second day we had goose with peas. Only our geese have four legs and iron shoes on each hoof.’ Karl P—, the infantryman who had fondly hoped to be out of encirclement by Christmas, was one of the few who, despite the hunger, had not yet given up hope.

Day after day, we’re longing for the Kessel to be opened from outside, he wrote on the 27th. Our rations are very poor at the moment. In the morning we get 200 grams of bread, five grams of butter, twenty grams of sausage and a bowl of soup, that’s all. But don’t imagine it’s a lunch like at home, just a load of water. Half of us are even too weak to get up in the morning, let alone do any work. Last week our doctor said if the rations don’t improve, he’ll be putting all the men into the hospital. Each man looks worse than the last.

I haven’t had a single little parcel from you. One letter and that’s all. The Russians have so far left us in peace over Christmas.

Despite the semblance of a ceasefire, the mundane business of killing and being killed carried on. As soon as the holiday was over, Lieutenant Gross of the 60th Motorized Infantry sat down to write this letter -one of many such notes, no doubt - to a dead man’s next of kin.

It is my sad duty to inform you that on December 26th 1942 your dear husband, Wilhelm Siems fell in battle -approximately 25 kilometres north-west of Stalingrad.

On Christmas morning the Russians briefly succeeded in penetrating our line of defence. Your husband was part of a reserve which had the task of forcing the Russians back. As your husband raised his head a little, probably in order to get a better view, he must have been spotted by a Russian sharpshooter. He received a bullet in the head and died instantly. His brother was next to him and will give you an exact account.

I know how hard this news must be for you and I send you my sincerest sympathy for this terrible misfortune. It is also an immeasurable loss for the unit. Wilhelm will not be forgotten by any of us. We have laid him to rest in a military cemetery of the 60th Motorized Infantry Division near the Konnaya Tractor Factory. His effects will be dispatched as soon as possible.

THE MADONNA OF STALINGRAD

The Christmas celebrations were followed with intense interest by Kurt Reuber, both a priest and an army doctor. During the hungry days of Advent he had noted unselfconsciously in a letter to his wife that ‘a piece of bread or wood is worth its weight in gold. My patients get such pleasure from half a piece of bread that I put some by for them if I’ve had enough myself.’ After doing his rounds and giving away his food on a Christian whim, he went back to his bunker to have his own Christmas. It began in song, and ended in blood and pain.

At 14.00 hours in one of the balkas, some of the men started singing. The way these men’s stumbling voices rang out over the steppe - something you cannot talk about. And as to what was going on inside us: quite a few eyes welled up.

A short, serious address from our commander, not without warmth, and not religious. Then celebration in the bunkers. The adjutant and I prepare our room and set out the table of gifts, just like back home. Calling out greetings, distributing presents. Then, in the end, I am surrounded by a circle of patients and medical orderlies to celebrate. The commander presents the sick with the last bottle of sparkling wine. We raise our field cups and drink a toast to whatever we hold dear.

We are standing with our cups full when we have to hurl ourselves to the ground, as four bombs land outside. I grab my medical bag and run to where the bombs hit. One dead and three wounded. My beautifully decorated bunker turns into a dressing station. One of the wounded men has been hit in the head, and there is nothing I can do for him. But I can help the other two.

The dying man had just that minute left the celebration to go on duty. He had said: ‘I just want to sing that carol with you before I go: “O du fröblicheV A minute later, dead. Sad, dreadful work in the Christmas bunker. Our celebration was over.

Reuber‘s work in the Kessel earned him many admirers. But it was a work of a different kind that made him famous throughout the Sixth Army, and that later made the name of this profoundly decent man a legend in the annals of Stalingrad. Reuber the priest and doctor was also a gifted artist. As he observed the war around him he felt compelled to make a drawing, one that would address the horror of the war, but that would also imbue it with some meaning, with the Christian virtue of hope.

I thought a long time about what I should draw. My mud cave was transformed into a studio. This one room, with not enough space to stand back from the picture! I had to climb up on my plank bed or onto the stool to look at the picture. Constantly bumping, falling, with the charcoals disappearing in cracks in the mud. Nothing to prop the big drawing up against. Only a slanting table which I cobbled together myself. I used the back of a Russian map for paper. The result is a Madonna, or mother and child. Oh, if only I could draw what is in my imagination! This is the picture: the head of the mother and of the child nestling against each other, with a large cloth wrapped around them. The one protecting and embracing the other.

Reuber was a gifted artist - a fine portraitist, in particular - but he would have been the first to admit that the Madonna is not his best work. Given the conditions he had to work in, it could not be. And yet there is something in it that transcends the sketchy draughtsmanship. The cradling gesture of the mother‘s arm, the almost embryonic form of the helpless baby, the cloak that swaddles them both like the all-encompassing love of God - all this shines through the obviously poor quality of the paper, in which the folds of the Russian map are clearly to be seen. Around the edge of the image Reuber wrote the words of St John: Licht, Leben, Liebe - Light, Life, Love. Then he hung the image in his bunker, never suspecting the powerful effect it was about to have on his comrades.

There’s something I want to say about the reaction to the Madonna, wrote Reuber. I followed the old tradition of opening the Christmas door (consisting of rough planks in the case of our bunker) and the comrades trooped in. They stood spellbound, reverent, silent before the picture on the mud wall. A candle on a board was stuck into the clay below it. Everyone stood captivated by the effect of the picture, thoughtfully reading the words. This morning the regimental doctor came and thanked me for this Christmas joy. Late into the night, as the others slept, he and a few comrades lying on their bunks, had felt compelled to keep looking pensively at the picture in the candlelight.

Reuber’s dugout became, in other words, a kind of shrine, and the picture itself was transformed into something more than a mere drawing. It became a sacred object, a focus for the hopes and prayers of the many unhappy men who came in from the cold to gaze at it. It became, in fact, an icon, in the ancient Russian tradition - and it was as if these German invaders had, by some spiritual osmosis, absorbed the deep and simple religion of an older Russia, of Holy Mother Russia.

But the sacramental warmth of the Stalingrad Madonna did not reach everyone in the Kessel. It certainly did not extend to the loneliest man in Stalingrad, General Paulus, who was using the quiet hours of Christmas Eve to grapple with the insoluble logistical problem of distributing supplies to his men. ‘On Holy Eve, the commanding general sent for me with an order to bring him the supply tables,’ said Gunter Toepke, quartermaster for the Sixth Army.

I was in the middle of working out a new distribution plan, as we had food for three weeks at most at the present rate of consumption. When I climbed out of my bunker I could barely see a thing because of the driving snow. I felt my way over to the commander’s bunker, which was a few metres away. He was standing in the open at the door, staring up unblinkingly into the snowstorm.

We stood next to each other in silence for quite a while.

Then he spoke, without turning to me, as if he was saying it to himself. He said: ‘If God in heaven should forsake us too ...‘ I thought I should make some reply, but no word came to my lips. I was too much in thrall to his mood at that moment. He didn’t say it directly, but with that word ‘too’ I understood that he felt we had now been abandoned by the people on the outside.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD

The people on the outside meant first and foremost Hitler himself. In the Führer’s mind, the plight of the Sixth Army was assuming a kind of Wagnerian grandeur. And though he was not yet admitting the possibility of defeat, Hitler was beginning to see that there might be something rather splendid about an army of noble warriors holding out to the last man against the brutish Slav. He sensed the beginnings of a new national myth, a story that would have the power to inspire the German people for generations to come. He was certainly not about to let any sordid details - such as the filth, the hunger and the stench of Stalingrad - get in the way of that shining Nazi tableau.

One man who tried to puncture Hitler’s daydream was General Zeitzler, the Army Chief of Staff. Having lost the tussle with Goring over the airlift, he now made a symbolic decision. In a courageous act of solidarity he put himself on a Stalingrad diet, refusing to eat any more than the ration received by the men of the Sixth Army.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and munitions minister, sneered at Zeitzler’s attempt to make himself the conscience of the Wehrmacht. His brother was at Stalingrad, and his parents had begged him in vain to use his influence with the Führer and get their younger son out, so there was a gnawing sense of guilt behind his scorn. ‘The daily rations in Stalingrad have been cut back again,‘ wrote Speer. It was 5 January, and Zeitzler had been fasting for nearly two weeks.

In the mess hall of the general staff Zeitzler - rather ostentatiously - would only be served those same rations. He visibly lost weight. Hitler informed him that he considers it unbecoming for the Chief of Staff to use up his strength on such gestures, and told Zeitzler to start eating properly again forthwith. At the same time Hitler decreed that for a few weeks no champagne or cognac were to be consumed.

The men at Stalingrad might have had their own ideas about which of these two gestures was unbecoming: Zeitzler‘s hunger strike, or Hitler‘s ban on bubbly. In the trenches and foxholes of the Kessel, hunger was now a more present and deadly enemy than Russian guns. The reduction in rations mentioned by Speer meant that each man was entitled to two slices of bread, a little horsemeat, half a beaker of coffee and one cigarette each day. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, remarked cynically in his diary that this was ‘too little to live on, and too much to die from‘. Some soldiers got a little more than the norm; others, isolated in forward positions or just lost amid the chaos of supply inside the Kessel, received rather less. But nobody got enough, and ordinary soldiers were now being completely frank in their letters home about the misery of it all.

My dear parents, wrote corporal Bruno Kaligo. It‘s New Year‘s Eve. I am thinking of home and my heart is breaking. Here everything is terrible and hopeless. Hunger, hunger, hunger, lice and dirt. Soviet planes are bombing us day and night, and the artillery fire hardly ever ceases. If there is not a miracle very soon I shall die here. Sometimes I pray; sometimes I curse my fate. Everything just seems so pointless and absurd. When and how could we be saved from this? How can a man bear this? Is this suffering a punishment from God?

My dear parents, I should not be writing you this, but I have long since lost all my courage. I have forgotten how to laugh. I am just a shivering bundle of nerves. Everybody lives here as if they are in a trance. If I get put up before a military tribunal and shot for writing this letter, then that will be a release from suffering. I have no hope left. I ask you not to cry if you get a letter saying that I have died. Be kind to each other and thank God for every day he gives you.

Mercifully perhaps, Kaligo’s parents never received that letter. It was captured by the Russians and included in an intelligence report on German morale. This anonymous letter also fell into their hands:

Here we have learned the full meaning of God’s word: give us this day our daily bread. I am getting 100 grams of bread a day - almost one slice. You cannot possibly imagine how that feels here, when the temperature is minus thirty-five. Bread, bread, bread! Horsemeat was the only source of protein. Quartermasters had husbanded the horses used by cavalry and horse-drawn artillery units, and slaughtered them according to a strict plan intended to make them last as long as possible. But they were half-starved already, and there was precious little meat on them. And once the ‘official’ horses had been consumed, soldiers took their meat where they could find it.

This evening we cooked up some horse again, wrote one soldier on New Year’s Eve. You will have to imagine how it tastes, without salt or any other seasoning, and when the animal gave up the ghost a month ago and has been lying under the snow ever since. There are no other dainty little morsels to be had around here.

Some of these ‘dainty morsels’ had partly decomposed before the frosts came and preserved them. Nevertheless they were exhumed and eaten, and sometimes eaten raw. In these desperate circumstances, a recently killed horse was a valuable find.

Meat was being cut from horses lying in the street, said sergeant Helmut Werner of the 16th Panzer Division. The daily ration for twelve men was one loaf of bread and a little watery soup. If you were really lucky you might find a single pea or a bit of noodle floating in it. To begin with no one wanted to eat horsemeat, but hunger is really painful, and so everyone devoured it. We looked like skeletons or walking corpses, some of us on a ration of just a handful of oats and a little water.

In January, six weeks after the encirclement, there was a spate of incidents in which German soldiers died for no apparent reason. Often they would go out on guard duty, and be found dead at their posts. The Army High Command decided to send a medical specialist from Berlin to look into this strange phenomenon.

So the pathologist arrived, said Hans Dibold, an army doctor. The corpses were thawed out in an operation bunker: an earth hole lined and faced with boards. The autopsies were made. The findings were these: hardly a scrap of fatty tissue under the skin and around the internal organs, a water-jellyish content in the intestines, all the organs very pale, the bone marrow not red and yellow but a glassy, quivering jelly, the liver blocked, the heart small and brown, the right ventricle and auricle greatly enlarged. The distension of the right ventricle was deemed to be the immediate cause of death.

Immediately after the pathologist’s visit the doctors of the division were called together to discuss the result of the autopsies. I made a report to this conference. In peacetime

we had found that weakness of the right ventricle was a common cause of sudden death in old people. Here, in Stalingrad, it caused death in the worn-out, prematurely senile bodies of German soldiers.

The doctor from Berlin was not the last visitor to the Kessel. In the middle of January a Luftwaffe officer was sent in to discuss the pathetically inadequate airlift with General Paulus. If he was expecting a businesslike talk about logistics, he was mistaken. What he got was an angry tirade about the realities of Kessel living. Here is a frank excerpt from the Luftwaffe’s report.

A reliable officer and group commander of the Luftwaffe flies into the Kessel to make contact with the Commander-in-Chief of the Sixth Army, in order to discuss the critical supply situation. General Paulus and his Chief of Staff, Major-General Schmidt, are bluntly outspoken in describing the hopelessness of the situation. The commander-in-chief’s words were to the effect that: If there are to be no more landings this spells the death of the army. And it’s too late now anyway. Dropping supplies doesn’t help at all. Many of the canisters aren’t recovered, we don’t have the fuel to collect them. The men are too weak to go searching. It’s now four days since they’ve had anything to eat. The last of the horses have been eaten.

Can you imagine people flinging themselves at an old horse corpse, tearing open the head and swallowing its brain raw? What am I supposed to say when a man comes up to me and begs: ‘Commander-in-chief, sir, a scrap of bread?’

THE LAST OF 1942

Christmas was an ordinary fighting day for the 62nd Army, but the Russian soldiers did have cause for celebration on the 25th. On that day, the six-week-long siege of Lyudnikov’s Island in the Barricades Factory came to an end. Around this time Vladimir Sokolov, who had been on the Island throughout, came across a ragged little girl, about three years old, who was snuggled up to the dead body of her mother. One of Sokolov‘s colleagues, an older man, brought the girl to the command post of the 138th Division. None of the soldiers there had seen a child for months, and when the girl spoke, many of the Red Army men began to weep sympathetic tears. ‘So far as I know,‘ said Sokolov, ‘the girl was adopted by one of our officers.‘

In the meantime, communications were re-established with the depleted, exhausted men of the 138th Rifle Division, and supplies began to move across the river. But as regimental quartermaster Vladimir Borisov found, the process was still fraught with danger.

In the winter it was still extremely difficult to guarantee supplies. The Germans remained in a position to fire on all approaches to the Volga, and to smash the ice on the river. From sundown and all through the night they would hang out ‘lanterns‘ - parachute flares - and shoot at anything that was exposed by the light.

So supply was carried out by small groups of people using little sledges - that way there was very little noise. Everybody wore white overalls when they crossed the river. The best time to walk across was just before morning. True, you were dying to go to sleep, but the Germans were pretty dozy at that time of day too and so did not keep such careful watch. I remember one crossing when I was ordered to accompany a high-ranking officer across to our command post.

Since I knew the way, I went in front. I was keeping an eye out for the enemy. We were getting close to the right bank, and I was paying so much attention to the enemy‘s positions that I did not notice a hole in the ice made by a German mortar shell, and I fell straight in.

Some sort of preservation instinct made me stick my arms out to stop myself from going under. My comrades quickly pulled me out. Dripping wet and covered in icicles, I had to wait while my comrades ran on to the dead zone. If I had gone with them, the squelching and rustling might have alerted the Germans and got us all killed. As soon as they were under cover I ran to catch them up. I reached them safely: the Germans must have been sleeping soundly that night. As soon as we reached the command post I quickly got out of the wet clothes, someone gave me some vodka, and the regimental commander, Konovalenko, told me to get into his cot in the dugout to warm myself up.

Borisov was lucky to escape with his life. He would certainly have frozen to death within a few minutes had he been delayed or diverted on his way to the command post. As it was he survived to grapple with the budgetary problems faced by any bureaucratically minded front-line quartermaster: how do you keep tabs on death?

In spite of the dangers and difficulties, it was important at that time to maintain systematic links with the regiment and to keep strict accounts, otherwise it was easy to lose track and as a result find yourself short of supplies that the men needed to take into battle. All the more so as reinforcements usually went straight in: they would arrive in the evening, and by morning many of them were dead. So it was hard to keep any sort of inventory when you did not always see what kit they went in with, and when the official record books always said they were issued with a complete uniform.

Borisov was doubtless poring over his books at New Year, when another short and peaceful hiatus - like the accidental Christmas lull - descended on Stalingrad. For the Russians this was a special day, not just because New Year was the only non-political public holiday in the Soviet calendar (no martial music and Kremlin speeches, just family and feasting) but also because it was now clear that the battle for Stalingrad was nearing its conclusion. They already knew they were going to win.

So New Year 1943 was a memorable night in Stalingrad. Valentin Orlyankin, the newspaper photographer whose black camera had made him a target on the ice, was invited to a party by one of the young officers in the 13th Guards Division. Since the officer was in command of a forward machinegun unit, just to respond to the invitation was a life-threatening undertaking.

My friend, press photographer Grisha Zelma, went with me to mark the holiday with the soldiers under Lieutenant Linnik. It was evening. We made our way stealthily to the lieutenant’s dugout. There was half-hearted shooting from both sides: it was New Year for them as well as us, after all, and no one really wanted to fight.

We tumbled into a cosy, homely dugout, where a samovar with an amusing little teapot on top was already boiling away. It was warm. There were rugs on the walls, and on a table there shone a ‘front-line lamp’ made of a shell case. Everyone had contributed some titbits, put by from their rations. We had brought some mutton soup. Linnik and his soldiers, freed from having to keep watch, were in a festive mood.

Now and then we could hear the muffled sounds of salvoes from one of our machineguns, which was set up behind the dugout, in a gap in the ruined wall of a house. Amid all the chatter, midnight crept up on us unawares. We poured some more mugs of wine.

The host was just about to propose a toast when suddenly, from both sides, there burst out a blaze of machinegun fire. We leapt out of the dugout, leaving the wine on the table. It was dark here, there was nothing for my camera to do, so I set about loading the cartridge belts with ammo. In the embrasure made in the wall of the house, a stream of gunfire poured from our Maxim gun, banging away at the German dugouts and trenches that were situated around seventy metres away from us. The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had started. There were no losses on our side, nor, probably, on the Germans‘. It had been nothing more than a New Year salute among enemies, random fire, a mutual greeting.

Similar congratulations were exchanged in many parts of the front. In some places the Germans were observed to shoot tracer bullets vertically into the air along the line of the forward trenches. The effect was a kind of cascade of light the length of the line, an improvised firework display for men who had long since become inured to the sound of war. Once the trivial nature of the gunfire in his sector became clear, Orlyankin and his hosts returned to the party.

We went back to our mugs of wine. We didn’t celebrate for long - there was still a war on, after all. We talked of our families far away, wished each other health and happiness, and then Zelma and I got up to return to our trench quarters closer to the bank of the Volga.

‘Stop, cameraman!‘ Linnik suddenly said to me, ‘You’ve earned a trophy. Here, take it!‘ and he held out a violin-case. ‘You’re an artist, you can put it to good use. It’s in danger here, so let it sing and tell tales of us, the men of Stalingrad!‘ I was grateful to the lieutenant and moved by the gift. I didn’t stop to ask how such a noble thing had ended up in such an unsuitable place. I took the gift back to my dugout.

I didn’t even know how to play the violin, but I kept it with me as a keepsake of New Year 1943 in Stalingrad. And this mute instrument travelled with me for a long time on the roads of the front, perhaps waiting for its time to come, for someone’s skilled hands to tease from it sounds that would be worthy of what this violin had heard and seen in Stalingrad.

On the German side, inside Fortress Stalingrad, the young corporal Werner R— had survived another week. As the new year rolled in he was in less optimistic mood than at Christmas, when he had been so soothed by the sight of the peaceable moon. The last hours of this year are slowly ticking away into eternity,‘ he wrote to a distant friend:

As the year comes to an end it‘s customary to look back, and the more difficult the situation in which one finds oneself, the more urgent is the review. The typical Landser reaction is just to say ‘to hell with it all’. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to influence the situation I’m in. But I hope that one day I’ll have a life of my own again. Meanwhile, I’m playing hide-and-seek with destiny. Yes, I have the feeling that life is just a gamble, no matter how worthwhile it is to live it.

I probably shouldn’t be writing to you now, for we’re really not in a good way. I’m referring to danger from the enemy. Yet I don’t have to tell you, do I, that in these last hours of the bygone year in my heart I’m with you? Totally!

I’ll be on guard duty from 12 till 1 in the first hour of this New Year. I’ll keep my thoughts about this hour for a fresh sheet of paper.

Werner continued his letter the next day, but in the cold light of morning he was more preoccupied with the workaday business of the fight than with the meaning of his own existence.

Yesterday the Reds launched an assault which was meant to get them back into Stalingrad before the old year was out. By way of reply, our old hymn ‘Now thank we all our God’ rang out at midnight to greet the Russians across the Volga, where the Bolshevik loudspeaker was tastelessly blaring out ‘Dawn, dawn, and still no bread ...’ This is no way to trap any of the Landsers whose haggard faces now resemble the faces of those soldiers from the last war, the faces that stare out from many photos. The German soldiers’ response to the pathetic leaflets inviting them to give up their pointless resistance is a midnight fire display, sending the Reds the message that their propaganda will make no impression.

The Russians will be trying to use the winter again to subject us to a ‘Napoleonic fate‘, which they didn’t succeed in doing last year. I hope and believe, and I’m making it a New Year wish now, that the battle for our position here may be absolutely crucial in bringing the war to an end. The Russian posters are virtually inviting German officers to surrender, saying there’s no more holding out against the ‘Red Ring’ (Wagner!) of the Red Army. That just makes us wonder: well, why don’t you come and burst our balloon?

LAST CHANCE TO SURRENDER

The Russians had every intention of bursting the Germans’ balloon, of puncturing the Kessel and reducing it to nothing. Plans were already in train for a new offensive that had as its goal the total annihilation of the Sixth Army. This, the final phase of the battle of Stalingrad, was given the transparent designation Operation Ring.

But first the Russians intended to give the Germans an opportunity to surrender, hence the propaganda leaflets that had looked to Corporal Werner R— like a pathetic bluff. The mass leafleting from the air was now to be followed with a formal approach to the German commanders. Semyon Ozerinsky was a battalion commander involved in the tricky task of organizing the delivery of a letter.

The Chief of Reconnaissance, Ilya Vinogradov, went to see the Chief of Staff of the front, General Malinin, with a proposal that envoys be sent to the encircled group of Germans with an ultimatum to surrender. Malinin listened attentively to Vinogradov, as did General Sergei Galadzhev, the head of the Political Department of the Stalingrad Front, who was there with him at the time. They discussed the matter among themselves, and took the preliminary decision to approve the idea in principle and immediately notify General Voronov, who along with his staff was based in the same village. Galadzhev assumed responsibility for drafting the ultimatum.

The document that Galadzhev prepared was a judicious mix of threats and promises - what the Russians call knut i pryanik (‘whip and gingerbread’). In this instance the whip was the prospect of a crushing offensive against the starving army; the gingerbread was an assurance that prisoners would be decently treated.

But the document began with a pitiless assessment of the Germans’ present situation:

To the Commander of the Sixth Army encircled at Stalingrad, General Paulus, or his deputy.

The Sixth German Army, the units of the 4th Tank Army and their reinforcements have been completely surrounded since November 23rd, 1942. The forces of the Red Army have drawn a secure ring around this German army. All hopes of rescue by means of a German offensive from the south and south-west have proved unfounded. The forces which were rushed to your aid have been destroyed by the Red Army, and the remnants of these forces are withdrawing towards Rostov. The German transport planes which are supplying you with a bare minimum of food, ammunition and fuel are being forced to move between airfields, and to fly from great distances to reach your positions. Moreover, the Russian air force is inflicting great losses on German transport planes and their crews. Air transport is unlikely to continue for much longer.

Your encircled troops are in a grave situation. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and cold. The harsh Russian winter is only just beginning: hard frosts, cold winds and snowstorms are still to come, but your soldiers do not have winter uniforms and are living in unsanitary conditions.

You, as commander, and all the officers of the surrounded troops know very well that there is no longer any realistic possibility of breaking through the encirclement. Your position is hopeless and further resistance is pointless.

After this came the Russians’ two-point demand, followed by the carefully worded ‘gingerbread’:

Given the inescapable position that your forces now find themselves in, and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we propose that you accept the following terms of surrender:

1. All surrounded German troops, with you and your staff, are to give up further resistance.

2. You are to hand over to us, in an orderly fashion and intact, all men, arms, weaponry and army property.

We guarantee the lives and the safety of all officers, non-commissioned officers and men who cease resistance. We also guarantee that at the end of the war they will be returned to Germany, or to any other country of their choice.

All surrendering forces will be allowed to keep their uniform, insignia and decorations, along with their personal belongings and valuables. High-ranking officers will be allowed to retain their service daggers.

All officers, non-commissioned officers and men who surrender will immediately be issued with normal rations. All those suffering from wounds, illness or frostbite will receive medical attention.

We expect your written reply on January 9th, 1943, at 15.00 hours, Moscow time. It should be brought by a representative whom you have personally appointed, and who should proceed in a car flying a white flag along the road from the Konny railway halt to the Kotluban station. Your representative will be met by Russian officers in Region B, 0.5 kilometres south-east of railway halt No. 564.

Then, finally and brutally, the threat of the whip:

If you choose to reject our proposal for your capitulation, be warned that the forces of the Red Army and the Red Air Force will be compelled to take steps to destroy the surrounded German troops, and that you will bear the responsibility for their annihilation.

Signed, Colonel-General of Artillery, Voronov; Supreme Commander of the Don Front, Lieutenant-General Rokossovsky.

The wording of the document met with the approval of the Soviet commanders. It certainly looked like an offer that Paulus could not refuse. But there remained the tricky problem of how to deliver it to him. Any envoy was likely to be shot on sight, long before he had a chance to ask for a parley. And in any case, nobody on the Russian side knew the etiquette of such things: how, in the midst of total war, do you declare a truce?

Colonel Vinogradov declared his willingness to be the postman, but it was thought that, as head of reconnaissance, he knew too much to risk his being killed or (even worse from an operational point of view) captured by the Germans. Instead he was ordered to find some lower-ranking officers to do the job.

Out of the large number of volunteers, Major Alexander Smyslov was chosen to head the group of envoys, said Semyon Ozerinsky. This seasoned soldier combined all the qualities required for such a responsible and dangerous mission. He was well-liked by all the staff at the front. He was a somewhat shy, reserved, laconic and composed man, good-looking, well proportioned and smartly dressed. In his brown eyes there sparkled an exceptional intellect, and his determined Russian face reflected the confidence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. An indefatigable scout, he knew all about all the commanders of the enemy grouping, right down to the commanders of the smallest sub-units, and had a good command of German.

On the night of January 7th, our wireless stations broadcast an address to the command of the surrounded troops several times, informing them of the time and place of the envoys’ crossing and demanding that they do not launch any military operations, that they cease firing, and that they send some of their officers out to meet our envoys.

Smyslov, who belonged to army intelligence, was to be accompanied on the mission by an NKVD man, a young captain named Nikolai Dyatlenko.

At dawn on the 8th our envoys went out past our front line into the ‘neutral zone’, along a path through a minefield that had been cleared by the sappers, said Ozerinsky. At first everything was quiet, and the envoys continued moving forwards with a white flag without encountering any officers from the German side. But then the enemy’s front line gradually started shooting - first single shots, then sub-machinegun salvoes - and our lads had to dodge the bullets and lie down. Two bullets went through Smyslov’s hat. True to form, the fascists were behaving like scum.

Despite repeated calls to cease fire from the loudhailers on the propaganda trucks, the enemy carried on firing. As soon as our lads stood up, the Germans would start shooting again. The envoys lay there for several hours, pinned to the ground on top of a sharp frost. Vinogradov, who had observed the whole event through a stereoscopic telescope from a trench at a combat outpost, sent two soldiers out with orders to get the envoys to the safety of a ravine seventy or eighty metres to the left of where they were lying. This they managed to do, but now instead of single shots the enemy started firing shells at our front line.

Colonel Vinogradov decided to get the envoys out of the line of fire and terminate the operation. Exhausted, frozen, dispirited by their brush with death, and frustrated by the failure of their mission, the envoys and the support team returned to the command post of the front headquarters.

We knew about the Germans’ habits and were not surprised by their hospitality, but no one thought that in their hopeless situation they would reject the favourable surrender terms and opt instead for suicide. The failure did not shake our determination to repeat the attempt at persuading the fascists to give in. The wireless station of the front headquarters sent another message to von Paulus calling on him to surrender, and indicating a new route.

In the space of a few hours the front’s Political Department produced ten thousand leaflets, which were then dropped onto the German positions from aircraft. The leaflets gave the surrender terms but also highlighted the treachery of the German command in recklessly condemning tens of thousands of soldiers to a certain death. The leaflets called on the German soldiers to cease resistance and give themselves up. Dozens of propaganda trucks broadcast the same message across the whole front line.

After this psychological softening up, the Russians tried again to deliver their letter. Smyslov and Dyatlenko were informed at breakfast that they had been awarded the Order of the Red Star for their work the previous day. They were also told that they had now done enough, that other volunteers could be found for the second attempt. But Smyslov and Dyatlenko were loath to let anyone else take on the job.

Despite their exhaustion and the nerve-racking experience of the first attack, they begged to be entrusted once again with this trip, continued Ozerinsky. This time around, it was decided to cross the front line at a point near the village of Marinovka, in the zone of the 21st Army. A bugler was added to Smyslov and Dyatlenko’s group. He was First Lieutenant Sidorov, a bandmaster from the 96th Rifle Division, which was defending the sector in which our representatives were to cross over on that frosty morning of January 9th.

Smyslov, carrying a letter sealed with many seals, Dyatlenko, bearing an unfurled white flag, and Sidorov, continuously blowing trumpet-calls on his bugle, climbed out of the trench and began their second procession to the fascists’ camp. Vinogradov, along with a large retinue of assistants (including myself), nervously tracked the three of them through binoculars from their trenches as they made their way towards the enemy.

So far, everything was going according to plan. This time, not a single shot was fired from the enemy side. More and more enemy soldiers started popping their heads over the tops of their trenches, watching our envoys.

When they reached the open battlefield a ground blizzard was in full swirl. The whole battlefield was strewn with shell cases and spent cartridges - mute witnesses to fierce and bloody battles. Vinogradov picked a smashed tank to be his ‘observation post’, and climbed inside it to get a better view.

But soon the envoys disappeared out of sight. The three Russians were now on the far side of no-man’s-land, in German-held territory. Captain Dyatlenko picks up the story.

Junior German officers approached us and asked in a bitter tone of voice: ‘What do you want?‘ We replied: ‘We are envoys, official representatives of the Soviet command, here to hand over a letter to your commander-in-chief, and we therefore request that you take us to him.‘ They then asked us to hand the letter over to them, which we categorically refused to do, since the letter had to be handed in person to Paulus or to a general of his staff.

They conferred amongst themselves for a while, and then proposed that we hand over our pistols and that they blindfold us. We agreed to the proposal. Luckily we had brought blindfolds with us in our pockets, and so avoided being blindfolded with dirty rags.

We were led by the hand and taken somewhere down in the ravine. We could feel ice beneath our feet, and were obviously walking along the floor of the ravine. Then we started going up a steep bank, falling over several times, and after a tiring journey we finally reached a dugout. They removed our blindfolds.

There were several senior officers there. This was clearly the observation post of the German divisional commander. The officers talked to their superiors over the telephone and scurried back and forth; this went on for several hours. Finally, we were informed that the division commander had spoken with Paulus, and that he knew the content of the letter from Soviet radio messages and refused to surrender. Smyslov then demanded that the division commander officially sign a letter on behalf of Paulus, stating that the ultimatum was rejected, but this demand too was turned down.

We were then blindfolded and led back the same way as we had come to the point on the front line from where, that morning, we had set out in the hope of accomplishing something worthwhile: hastening the end of hostilities in that sector of the front.

When we reached the place where the officers of the two sides had met that morning, the Germans removed our blindfolds, gave us back our pistols, and told us to walk forwards without turning round. That was one agonizing, nerve-racking walk.

No further word was received from Paulus within the deadline. By his silence, the German commander-in-chief condemned his army to another month of agony.