Europe Central (59 page)

After the general conference ended, the Führer summoned each commander in turn. To the victor of Kharkov he said: My dear Paulus, I’ve given you an extremely important task. It’s not just a question of annihilating a few more Russian divisions. Any one of my generals could do that.

Paulus experienced a feeling of intense pleasure. He bowed a little, not daring to speak.

The fuel situation is becoming critical, the Führer went on. If I don’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, I’ll have to liquidate this war. The
political generals
don’t understand that.

I understand, my Führer. Sixth Army will carry out its assignment.

That is beyond doubt, said the Führer with a smile. Rising, he pressed Paulus’s hand.

Comprehending that he’d been dismissed, Paulus murmured farewell and had already turned to leave the briefing car when the Führer said: Paulus.

Yes, my Führer.

Don’t worry about being slightly under strength. You know, the losses we suffered last winter had one positive aspect. All the weaklings died. As you go into action this summer, you’ll find that Sixth Army is the better for it. There’s hardly a man left on the whole Ostfront who’s not as hard as armor plate and as fanatical as ten Bolsheviks!

Yes, my Führer.

The Russians can barely stand up. You’ve seen the reports. We’re going to crush them all by the end of this summer. Moreover, we’ll soon have V-weapons in unlimited quantities.

Paulus, still dazzled by the Führer’s praise, did not begin to wonder until later whether among those
political generals
his predecessor, Field-Marshal von Reichenau, might be included. At von Reichenau’s funeral, as they stood in the niche beneath the immense iron cross, the Führer had laid a hand upon Paulus’s shoulder, murmuring the phrase which daily appeared in the black-bordered section of every newspaper:
Ordained by fate our proud sorrow.

To be frank, Paulus shared many of Coca’s views about Operation Barbarossa. He had been against this entire war because it seemed unwinnable; of course our Führer’s genius had convinced him otherwise: First Poland, then France, Norway and all the rest. Operation Blau could be defined as a logical gamble, with an excellent chance of success; still, given the losses at Moscow, Paulus would have preferred that we go on the strategic defensive. Ever since last winter, the left side of his face kept twitching. So far, Russian troops had proved themselves incapable of operational initiative; nonetheless, as Coca never tired of pointing out, there were more of them than of us. (In confidence, General Beck had told him the following story: Last winter, a certain Communist saboteur named Zoya, who from her features must have been of Jewish extraction, had shouted out, just before receiving her punishment:
You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us!
This would not have been the right anecdote to pour into Coca’s ear.) Then there was this business of the Final Solution, although he certainly stood ready to do his part to overthrow the Jewish world dictatorship. In a nutshell, Lieutenant-General Paulus disapproved of several aspects of the new Germany. But . . .

I would be unfair to Lieutenant-General Paulus were I to give you the impression that he was “ambitious” in the narrow sense of that word. Had he come of Gallic or southern Mediterranean stock, he doubtless would have been drawn to the
fêtes
which distinguish those junior peoples. Since he was German, his enthusiasm for spectacle—which is really all it was—expressed itself more soberly. He attended military celebrations of all kinds, even when the service branch involved wasn’t his; for instance, he’d been present when triple blue-black rows of naval men on the foredeck received their Iron Crosses. He lost his leisure for that after we broke up Czechoslovakia. But later still, on the Ostfront, he seemed to take pleasure in personally pinning decorations on the troops, even right down to distributing pleasantly colored shoulderpatches to our native Ost-volunteers: Cossack horsemen, Ukrainian police troops, and for that matter the occasional Russian “Hiwi,” whose pretenses the rest of us preferred not to encourage. This richly ceremonial giving and taking of honors seemed to nourish him. (Well, wasn’t that harmless? Coca liked to dress up for the opera.) When Field-Marshal von Reichenau had told him, with an almost brutal slap on the back, that the Führer had been persuaded (by von Reichenau, he understood) to give him command of Sixth Army, his sensations rushed far beyond happiness, into the realm of shock. This had not been prefigured. Most of us find it easy enough to believe that whatever benison fate grants us must be deserved; but to Paulus, who preferred real iron to dreams of gold, the great change felt almost unbearable. Sixth Army, you see, was not just any army; it was our Reich’s single greatest fighting force: twenty German divisions, two half-spent Romanian divisions, a Croat regiment, great numbers of Organization Todt people and other civilians—considerably more than a quarter of a million men. And it was his; he’d achieved everything that Coca had ever hoped for him. He could not rise higher than this, except to become a Field-Marshal. Who then was he to rebel against this opportunity?

Colonel-General Halder at OKW had once remarked: One of the sacrifices which commanders have to make is to overcome any scruples they may have.

That is beyond doubt, said Paulus.

Then Halder, leaning unpleasantly forward, seemed to want to involve him in something, but what that was Paulus preferred not to know.

3

Operation Blau commenced on 28.6.42. On 30.6.42 he broke through the enemy’s Twenty-first Army and brushed aside the wreckage of the Twenty-eighth, cutting a deep gash in Stalin’s Southwestern Front. They halted for the evening on a meadow. His Panzer troops were singing “Erika, We Love You” in four-part harmony as they stacked their rifles on the railroad tracks; nobody feared the Russian stragglers. From his tent he immaculately came, smiling at the melody, and instantly a voice shouted:
Achtung! Stillgestanden!
so that they all leaped to attention for him, their faces tanned to the brownish-pink hue of the mineral called germanite, at which he smiled a little more, then retired, to give them peace for their singing. But now they remained self-consciously silent. He too felt not quite at ease; his Knight’s Cross from Kharkov wasn’t quite enough to prove him; it was almost as if he were a child again, allowed to eat supper with his parents only provisionally, under imminent threat of criticism for the way in which he cut up his meat. His father had never overlooked the slightest error, which might have been why it was so crucial for him to study every question until its solution lay beyond any doubt. At times he even felt nervous in front of Coca, whose ancestry could be traced to the Roman emperor Justinian. He still couldn’t quite believe that he’d been set over these three hundred thousand men outside. How ought he to treat them? This was his first large-scale command. Coca had warned that many would be jealous. He replied that he didn’t care about that. All he wanted was to do his duty. Laughing in loving disbelief, she ruffled his hair. She had already picked out a spot on the mantelpiece where his Field-Marshal’s baton would go. First Beethoven on the gramophone, then Bach. He bent over the daily enemy situation report from Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group South section. The signals intelligence report was attached, and it contained the transcriptions of the pathetic radio entreaties of encircled Red Army formations, followed by the equally desperate threats of their commanders:
No retreat will be tolerated
. . . They certainly could not be considered first-rate troops. The orderly was ready with a clean pair of white gloves. He turned to the map of our own dispositions. Sixth Army was approaching Kalach, while Fourth Army was advancing northeast toward Stalingrad, a city he certainly intended to bypass unless the Führer instructed him to the contrary; like Moscow and Leningrad, it would fall of its own accord. (He still would have felt easier had the objective of Operation Blau been Moscow.) The main thing was to drive southeast toward the enemy’s oil supply, rolling over these wheat fields which were as bare as the heads of Ukrainian Cossacks. He was inclined to subdivide Sixth Army into northern and southern attack groups, but this was something he preferred to sleep on. Now to resume his study of the Volga. The western bank of that watercourse, proved the map, was higher than the eastern—convenient for him. The orderly, who happened to be very vain and whose dream was to have his photograph appear in
Signal
magazine, came to light the lantern on the field-desk.—And tell Major-General Schmidt that I need those supply dispositions tomorrow, he said.—By your order, sir, replied the orderly happily. And now Paulus was alone again with his maps. It had become incumbent on him to work even longer now than in the days of his attachment to Panzer HQ in Berlin; Coca would have been indignant had she seen how little rest he got. But he didn’t dare let up. He never stopped sincerely trying to get frontline information. He’d observed Lieutenant-General Rommel at Tobruk during the height of Operation Sunflower. To this day he remained shocked at the way that officer gambled with destiny and exceeded his authority. And yet he’d had good luck; the Führer had made him a Field-Marshal just this month. (To become a Field-Marshal is, in a sense, to live forever.) Paulus himself believed far less in luck than he did in application. So he sat there in his tent long after most of his soldiers were asleep, hovering over the map as if he were a fighter pilot in the Soviet sky; while in the hot darkness above, the moon shone like von Reichenau’s glass eye.
Ordained by fate our proud sorrow.
—Well, Paulus, tell me, what orders am I issuing now?—That was what the Field-Marshal always used to say! (Paulus had considered their policy in the occupied territories to be too ruthless, but von Reichenau admonished him: You’ve got no basis for making a problem out of the Slavic question.) He still believed that the Soviet command structure might well collapse in another four to six weeks; our Führer had said that Russia would then become the German India. Meanwhile, what orders was he to issue now? (The orderly came to see whether he needed any more cigarettes.) He knew for a fact that neither Rommel nor von Reichenau had ever studied maps as thoroughly as he did.—You’re too good for such people, Coca always said.

The orderly brought a telegram from the Supreme Command. General von Küchler had been raised up to Field-Marshal for his role in breaking the enemy’s counteroffensive last winter.

The next day, when von Manstein got advanced to Field-Marshal for taking Sebastopol, he felt the prickings of envy, whose stimulus was not entirely unpleasant: If Field-Marshalships were getting passed out so frequently, why shouldn’t he receive one? Coca would be so proud then. She knew how to make the most of their connections, and doubtless she was doing her best for him right now. What a loyal wife she was! (Von Manstein ought to help him, too; Paulus had lent him assault artillery last June, at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa.) On more than one occasion since the beginning of this war he’d gazed upon the wide smiles of
-men getting decorated at Wolf’s Lair, and although he mistrusted the
for their aloofness from the regular army, he couldn’t help but think that someday he’d be standing up front with them, receiving not another routine promotion, but the reward for valor in the field; even then he’d begun to dream about someday becoming a Field-Marshal. Strange to say, the first time that vision had become consciously manifest was at a musical performance. Shortly before the commencement of Case Yellow, he and Coca had been privileged to hear Furtwängler himself conduct the State Orchestra in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, the sea of white sheet-music like unriven plates of luminescent armor, the music conquering everything; and all around him, myriads rapturously breathless, then standing to applaud, loosing strings of sound as deafening as machine-gun fire. Coca had worn her hair down like the teenaged film star Lisca Malbran, in a needless attempt to look younger. The truth was that she never had to worry about anything like that, at least not so far as he was concerned; she was so regal, so far above him that he felt fortunate merely to sit beside her, and he knew that she would still be just as beautiful to him when she had left middle age behind her. So now Furtwängler raised his baton, and the Fifth Symphony bewitched the hall with its “Fate” motif as lovely and sinister as a Ju-88 bomber about to leave its aerodrome at night, its propeller-shadows long black whirling stripes upon the runway’s glassy luminescence. He had been imagining that he was Furtwängler, the Führer of the music, whose melody now came streaming into everyone’s hearts; when suddenly he realized that after all he
could
be this; he too could own a baton encrusted with precious stones like Göring’s; and he began to see war somewhat as our Führer must, which is to say not as the implementation of preconsidered operations, but as music in and of itself, pulsations of godlike creativity whose patterns are their own harmonies. And when his tanks clanked down the tree-lined streets of Kharkov (a feat which triggered a message of congratulations from prominent Ukrainians), he felt as if he were truly at the conductor’s podium. What must it be like for the Führer on the reviewing stand at Nuremberg, when a hundred thousand Nazis chanted his name and antiaircraft beams swiveled across the night? And now von Manstein had been elevated almost to that plane—not that he didn’t deserve it. That made twelve already. How could he, Friedrich Paulus, become the thirteenth? After the reduction of Stalingrad, if the Führer did want that city, Sixth Army would press on to the Caspian Sea. Possibly, were his progress sufficiently rapid and his prisoners numerous enough, the Führer might remember him . . . Sitting down to his field-desk, he composed a message of congratulations to Field-Marshal von Manstein.