Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (103 page)

At that moment the Sixth Army's operations at Stalingrad lost their strategic meaning. According to the laws of strategy, the Army should now have been pulled back from its positions jutting out far to the east, in order to dodge the enemy counter-blow that was to be expected and in order to gain reserves. Paulus himself flew to the Fuehrer's Headquarters on 12th September and tried to win Hitler over for such a decision. It was in vain. Hitler remained stubborn. He was unfortunately confirmed in his attitude by the disastrous reports from the Eastern Department of the General Staff, to the effect that the Russians had no appreciable reserves left along the Eastern Front.

Hitler stuck to his orders that Stalingrad must be taken, and the weakened Sixth Army got its teeth into the city. The longer the fighting continued the more did the capture of the last few workshops and the last few hundred yards of river-bank become a matter of prestige for Hitler, especially as he believed that, after the reverses in Africa and in the Caucasus, he must not give ground at Stalingrad. Prestige, and not strategic considerations, demanded the struggle for the last ruin.

This view was also shared by Weichs's Army Group, whose shrewd chief of staff, General von Sodenstern, has said: "Stalingrad had been taken and eliminated as an armaments centre; shipping on the Volga had been cut. The few technical bridgeheads which the enemy had in the city were no objective that justified the pinning down and using up of the bulk of available German forces. Army Group command was, instead, vitally interested in getting the troops into adequate winter positions as soon as possible, reinforcing the fast formations, and making them mobile for the winter; in addition, it was anxious to form the urgently necessary tactical reserves behind the expected key points of the defensive fighting, and in particular behind the three Armies of Germany's allies on the Don. Such reserves could be drawn only from Sixth Army. That was why about the end of September or the beginning of October, as soon as it was found that Stalingrad could not be taken at the first assault, the command of Army Group B proposed that the offensive against Stalingrad should be suspended altogether. It had also asked for permission' to evacuate the front bulge of Stalingrad and, instead of holding the arc, to adopt a position along a chord covering the area between Volga and Don; the left wing of Fourth Panzer Army was to have been bent back south-west of Stalingrad and the new line to have run north-west towards the Don. The Chief of the Army General Staff agreed. But he did not succeed in getting the proposal approved by Hitler."

This then was the background to Hitler's disastrous order to Paulus on 24th November, with its two key demands: hold out and await supplies by air. Goering's promise merely supported Hitler in his attitude against his generals—but it was not the decisive motive for his order. It sprang not from the grandiloquence of one of Hitler's paladins, but from Hitler's own intentions. Stalingrad was the brain child of his strategy, the product of his war which had been a gigantic gamble from the outset, based on victory or ruin.

One often hears the view to-day that because Hitler's hold-on order with its reference to airborne supplies was an unmistakable death sentence on the Army Paulus should not have obeyed it.

But how could Paulus and his closest collaborators in Gum-rak judge the strategic motives behind the decision of the Supreme Command? Besides, had not 100,000 men been encircled in the Demyansk pocket for some two and a half

months the previous winter, supplied only by air, and had they not eventually been got out? And had not Model's Ninth Army held out in the Rzhev pocket in accordance with orders? And what about Kholm? Or Sukhinichi?

At the operations centre of the surrounded Sixth Army there was a witness from 25th November onward whose observations about Stalingrad have not up to the present received the attention they deserve—Coelestin von Zitzewitz, now a businessman in Hanover, but then a General Staff major in the Army High Command. On 23rd November he was dispatched to Stalingrad with a signals section by General Zeitzler, the Chief of the General Staff, as his personal observer with instructions to send a daily report to Army High Command about the situation of the Sixth Army.

Zitzewitz was summoned to Zeitzler at 0830 hours on 23rd November and informed of his assignment.

The way in which Zitzewitz received his orders from the Chief of the General Staff throws an interesting light on how the situation was assessed at Army High Command. This is Zitzewitz's account:

"Without any preamble the general stepped up to the map spread out on the table: 'Sixth Army has been encircled since this morning. You will fly out to Stalingrad to-day with a signals section of the Operations Communications Regiment. I want you to report to me direct, as fully as possible and as quickly as possible. You will have no operational duties. We are not worried: General Paulus is managing very nicely. Any questions?' 'No, sir.' 'Tell General Paulus that everything is being done to restore contact. Thank you." With that I was dismissed."

On 24th November Major von Zitzewitz with his signals section—one NCO and six men—flew from Löt zen [Now Gizycko.] via Kharkov and Morozovsk into the pocket. What opinions did he find there?

Zitzewitz reports: "General Paulus's first question, naturally, was how did the Army High Command see the relief of Sixth Army. That I could not answer. He said that his principal worry was the supply problem. To supply an entire Army from the air was a task never accomplished before. He had informed Army Group and Army High Command that his requirements would be at first 300 tons a day and later 500 tons if the Army was to survive and remain capable of fighting. These quantities had been promised him.

"The Commander-in-Chief's view seemed to me entirely reasonable: the Army could hold out only if it received the supplies it needed, above all fuel, ammunition, and food, and if relief from without could be expected within a foreseeable time. It was up to the Supreme Command to do the necessary staff work and plan these supplies and the Army's relief, and then to issue appropriate orders.

"Paulus himself took the view that a withdrawal of Sixth Army would be useful within the general picture. He kept emphasizing that Sixth Army could be employed much more usefully along the breached front between Voronezh and Rostov than here in the Stalingrad area. Moreover, the railways, the Luftwaffe, and the entire supply machinery would then be freed for tasks serving the general situation.

"However, this was not a decision he could take on his own authority. Nor could he foresee that his demands concerning relief and supplies would not be fulfilled; for that he lacked the necessary information. The Commander- in-Chief had communicated all these considerations to his generals—all of whom were in favour of breaking out, like himself—and had then given them his orders for their defensive operations."

What else could Paulus have done—Paulus, a typical product of German General Staff training? A Reichenau, a Gu- derian, or a Hoepner might have acted differently. But Paulus was no rebel; he was a pure strategist.

There was one general in Stalingrad whose views differed fundamentally from Paulus's and who was unwilling to accept the situation created by the Fuehrer's order—General of Artillery Walter von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, commanding LI Corps. He urged Paulus to disregard the Fuehrer's order, and demanded a break-out from the pocket on his own responsibility.

In a memorandum of 25th November he set out for the Commander-in-Chief Sixth Army the views he had already passionately expressed at a meeting of all GOCs on 23rd November, but had then failed to carry his point. His point had been: immediate break-out.

The memorandum began as follows: "The Army is faced with a clear alternative; breakthrough to the south-west in the general direction of Kotelnikovo or annihilation within a few days."

The main arguments of the memorandum about the necessity of a break-out did not differ from the views of the other GOCs in Sixth Army, or from the views held by Paulus himself. The accurate assessment of the situation, worked out by Colonel Clausius, the brilliant chief of staff of LI Army Corps, voiced the opinions of all General Staff officers at all the headquarters in the pocket.

Seydlitz proposed that striking forces should be built up by means of denuding the northern and the Volga fronts, that these forces should attack along the southern front, that Stalingrad should be abandoned and a breakthrough made in the direction of the weakest resistance—
i.e.,
towards Kotelnikovo.

The memorandum said:

This decision involves the abandonment of considerable quantities of material, but on the other hand it holds out the prospect of smashing the southern prong of the enemy's encirclement, of saving a large part of the Army and its equipment from disaster and preserving it for the continuation of operations. In this way part of the enemy's forces will continue to be tied down, whereas if the Army is annihilated in its hedgehog position all tying down of enemy forces ceases. Outwardly such an action could be represented in a way avoiding serious damage to morale: following the complete destruction of the enemy's armaments centre of Stalingrad the Army has again detached itself from the Volga, smashing an enemy grouping in doing so. The prospects of a successful breakthrough are the better since past engagements have shown the enemy's infantry to have little power of resistance in open ground.

All this was correct, convincing and logical. Any General Staff officer could subscribe to it. The problem lay in the final passage of the memorandum. This is what it said:

Unless Army High Command immediately rescinds its order to hold out in a hedgehog position it becomes our inescapable duty before our own conscience, our duty to the Army and to the German people, to seize that freedom of action that we are being denied by the present order, and to take the opportunity which still exists at this moment to avert catastrophe by making the attack ourselves. The complete annihilation of 200,000 fighting men and their entire equipment is at stake. There is no other choice.

This highly emotional appeal for disobedience carried no conviction with Paulus, the cool General Staff type. Nor did it convince the other Corps commanders. Besides, a few polemically coloured and factually untenable statements left Paulus unimpressed. "The Army's annihilation within a few days" was a wild exaggeration, and Seydlitz's argument on the issue of supplies was unfortunately also incorrect. Seydlitz had said: "Even if 500 aircraft could land every day they could bring in no more than 1000 tons of supplies, a quantity insufficient for the needs of an Army of roughly 200,000 men now facing large-scale operations without any stocks in hand."

If the Army had in fact received 1000 tons a day it would probably have been able to get away.

Nevertheless Paulus passed on the memorandum to Army Group. He added that the assessment of the military situation conformed with his own views, and therefore asked once more for a free hand to break out if it became necessary.

However, he rejected the idea of a breakout against the orders of Army Group and the Fuehrer's Headquarters. Colonel-General Freiherr von Weichs passed on the memorandum to General Zeitzler, the Chief of the General Staff.

Paulus did not receive permission to break out. Was Seydlitz therefore right in demanding disobedience? Setting aside for the moment the moral or philosophical aspect of the matter, the question remains of whether this proposed disobedience was in fact practicable.

How had Khrushchev acted when General Lopatin wanted to withdraw his Sixty-second Army from Stalingrad at the beginning of October because, recalling its frightful losses, he could foresee only its utter destruction? Khrushchev had deposed Lopatin before he could even set the withdrawal in motion.

Paulus, similarly, would not have got far with open insubordination to Hitler. It was a delusion to think that in the age of radio and teleprinter, of ultra-shortwave transmitter and courier aircraft, a general could act like a fortress commander under Frederick the Great, taking decisions against the will of his Supreme Commander and watching while his sovereign could not do anything about it. Paulus would not have remained in command for another hour once his intention had been realized. He would have been relieved of his post and his orders would have been countermanded.

Indeed, an incident affecting Seydlitz personally shows how reliable and quick communications were between Stalingrad and the Fuehrer's Headquarters at the Wolfsschanze, thousands of miles away. The incident, moreover, illustrates the dangers inherent in a precipitate retreat from the safe positions along the Volga.

During the night of 23rd/24th November—
i.e.,
before handing in his memorandum—General Seydlitz had pulled back the left wing of his Corps on the Volga front of the pocket, contrary to explicit orders. This move was intended by Seydlitz as a kind of signal for a break-out, as a priming of the fuse for a general withdrawal from Stalingrad. It was designed to force Paulus's hand.

The 94th Infantry Division, which was established in well-built positions and had not yet lost touch with its supply organization, detached itself from its front in accordance with Seydlitz's orders. All awkward or heavy material was burnt or destroyed—papers, diaries, summer clothing, were all flung on bonfires. The men then abandoned their bunkers and dugouts and withdrew towards the northern edge of the city. Foxholes in the snow and icy ravines took the place of the warm quarters the troops had left behind: that was how they now found themselves, this vanguard of a break-out. But far from triggering off a great adventure, the division suddenly found itself engaged by rapidly pursuing Soviet regiments. It was over-run and shot up. The entire 94th Infantry Division was wiped out.