The German War (56 page)

However strong its mythology of honour and comradeship, like all mass armies the Wehrmacht was an assemblage of civilians in uniform: even those like Helmut Paulus, Eugen Altrogge and Hans Albring who had joined up straight after finishing high school were beginning to make choices about their futures. Above all, it was their myriad ties to home which gave a purpose and meaning to a war everyone longed to end. When Albring and Altrogge imagined meeting up again after two years of war, they pictured themselves walking through the streets of the small town in the Münsterland where they had grown up and going to a concert to hear Mozart and Haydn.
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It was not until 10 September that the Germans took the Soviet naval base of Novorossiysk on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. It was an incomplete victory: the Soviet 47th Army still held the heights south of the port as well as important coastal roads, and supply from Romania by sea continued to be hazardous. The capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, remained the real prize. It lay beyond the Transcaucasian mountains, far to the south-east on the shore of the Caspian Sea. To have any prospect of reaching it, or even the oil wells of Grozny, List’s armies would need a massive influx of supplies and reinforcements. Instead, Army Group A had to send much of its armour and its entire anti-aircraft defences to assist the German 6th Army, and by late September was having to accept that its own advance had stalled. If it could not take the oil for itself, it could try to deny it to the other side. On 10 and 12 October, the 4th Air Corps set the refineries at Grozny ablaze, causing huge destruction. While Maikop and Grozny accounted for 10 per cent of Soviet supplies, Baku provided 80 per cent of Soviet supplies. Yet Baku lay at the limit of the German bombers’ range and well beyond that of their fighters. To attack it, the 4th Air Corps, reduced to fewer than 200 operational bombers, would have had to fly a direct route without protection at a time when the Red Air Force had significantly increased its own presence. After the extraordinarily rapid advance from Rostov to Krasnodar, the Caucasian campaign was stalling. When Bavarian mountain troops planted their battle flag on the west peak of Mount Elbrus on 23 August, their Führer was furious at the waste of effort.
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With the failure of the key objective of the campaign, Franz Halder chose this as his moment to stand down as Chief of the General Staff. For Hitler, however, the real and symbolic battle was being fought far to the north of the oil wells. The German 6th Army had been tasked with shielding the advance into the Caucasus by pushing towards Stalingrad. This industrial city, which had played an important role in the Russian civil war, controlled the last great western bend of the river Volga before it flowed into the Caspian Sea. Only after a month of fighting did the 6th Army succeed, on 23 August, in crossing the river Don. With no other natural obstacles, German tanks covered the distance from the great eastern bend of the Don to the western one of the Volga the same day, reaching the northern suburbs of Stalingrad. For the next three days, Richthofen’s 4th Air Fleet bombed the city, killing numerous Soviet civilians.
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On 30 August, Fritz Probst was approaching Stalingrad from the north-west. He wrote excitedly to Hildegard: ‘I believe I’m not betraying a secret’ – he was – ‘if I write to you that this city will be fiercely fought over. They are on the edge of the city in the north and south but still far from it in the west. It will then become another small pocket, and when it’s been gutted, then there’ll be peace here.’ He could not wait for it all to end, consumed by the thought that he and Hildegard were ‘becoming old and the best years are passing us by, untapped’. On 12 September, the Germans entered the city and began fighting for control of it, building by building.
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For Probst, these weeks brought a revelation of a different kind. This gruff man with his stilted, uncomfortable style of writing had discovered a new intimacy on paper. ‘If I had you here, I’d not stop kissing you,’ he wrote to Hildegard. The rose she had sent him ‘tells me absolutely everything, everything which is between us. Sadly, I can’t express my love to you through red roses, because there are none here, but I can in these lines.’ When the war was finally over, ‘then, when I once more hold you in my arms and find your mouth to kiss, everything will be forgotten and I know for sure we’ll then be the happiest of beings’. For now, all he could do was to wish that Hildegard would dream of him, ‘for dreams are the only things that unite us’. He too had had ‘some sweet dreams’ but, he confessed, ‘on waking the disappointment is too great.’
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As the couple at last found words to bridge the ever-growing distance which the German advance had placed between them, Fritz Probst felt his feelings were best expressed by Lale Andersen’s new musical hit,
‘Es geht alles vorüber’
– ‘Everything Passes’:
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Everything passes, it will all be over,

After every December comes another May.

Everything passes, it will all be over,

But for two who love, then faithful they’ll stay.

Sung in her lilting, gently caressing voice, the promise of Andersen’s refrain would be echoed by many other letter-writers that autumn and winter on the Stalingrad front. As he commiserated with Hildegard over their twenty months’ separation, Fritz Probst told her to ‘hold your head high, small, brave soldier’s wife: after this autumn a new spring must come’. Fritz Probst had no idea that a few weeks later he would suddenly be granted home leave.
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As the Red Army ferried more and more reinforcements across from the eastern bank of the Volga at night, it began to look if the Bolshevik regime had chosen – fittingly, it seemed to the Germans – to make its final stand at the city named after their leader. Opening the Winter Relief charity drive with a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on 30 September, Hitler promised that ‘The occupation of Stalingrad, which will also be carried through, will deepen this gigantic victory [on the Volga] and strengthen it, and you can be sure that no human being will drive us out of this place later on.’ He declared that

In my eyes, in 1942 the most fateful trial of our people has already passed. That was the winter of ’41 to ’42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen.

For the time being the Germans looked insuperable, with the nightly barges ferrying Red Army troops across the Volga merely slowing down the inevitable loss of the city. His leave over, Fritz Probst returned to his building battalion in early November. Coming back from Görmar in Thuringia, he promptly fell ill and had to be nursed back to health in an army field hospital. With nothing to look forward to on the Stalingrad front other than the ‘long and boring winter evenings in which I will think back on the beautiful hours, you know which ones I mean in particular . . .’, he hesitated to say more, in case his mother happened to open the letter before Hildegard did. Instead, he encouraged her to tell him herself about these things: ‘You can write as much [as you want] because I am the only one to read your letters and it’d be wonderful if you would write to me about it.’
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Only the huge distance they had covered and their over-extended supply lines pointed towards German vulnerability, and these formed the basis of the Soviet counter-offensive. On 19 November the Red Army launched an assault on the northern flank of the Stalingrad front; the next day, it attacked from the south too. The aim was to cut through the lines held by Romanian and Italian troops to the west at the Don, and so isolate the bulk of the 6th Army. As a radio operator, Wilhelm Moldenhauer was one of the first to hear the news, but he was also careful not to break regulations and, on 20 November, restricted himself to commenting cryptically to his wife, ‘Now it’s turned out differently from the way we’d figured it out.’ By 22 November the million-strong Soviet offensive had cut through the enormously overstretched Axis lines. To the east, the Romanian 4th Army and the German 6th Army were now isolated in a vast no-man’s-land in the Volga bend in and around Stalingrad, cut off from the rest of Army Group B to the west. At the same time, a second Red Army offensive was launched to capture the land bridge to List’s Army Group A in the Caucasus: this the Germans succeeded in fighting off.
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The Wehrmacht thought it had been through this before. At Demyansk, an army corps of some 100,000 troops had been trapped by the Red Army’s Rzhev-Vyaz’ma counter-offensive in January 1942. For four months, the German divisions there had been supplied by air, tying down five Soviet armies, until the German relief effort broke through the encirclement. Against the advice of his staff, Göring now rushed to pledge that the Luftwaffe would provide an air bridge. Reassured that the gamble might pay off, Hitler gave the order to turn the Stalingrad pocket into a ‘fortress’. Just as in the previous winter, he rejected all demands to retreat.
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The promise of an air bridge was a powerful one and reassured soldiers’ families, who had already been impressed by the special airmail service run by the military post throughout the summer’s advance. The air bridge would not only bring supplies in, but also guarantee that the wounded were brought out. In early January, Liselotte Purper arrived at the airbase in Lwów to take propaganda photos of a wounded soldier being unloaded from a Ju 52 transport. It was so cold that she had trouble seeing the viewfinder. To spare the wounded man the ordeal of being repeatedly shunted in and out of the plane, Liselotte had a medical orderly bandaged up to take his place on the stretcher. After a dozen men had pushed the plane around to face the other way, she had the right light and the pictures came out well.
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It had taken the whole of the 1st Air Fleet to supply the Demyansk pocket. Eight months later, supplying the 290,000 troops trapped in the Stalingrad ‘cauldron’ was beyond the capacity of the Luftwaffe. While Demyansk had needed some 265 tonnes of supplies per day, the 6th Army required an estimated daily minimum of 680 tonnes. Operating over a much longer distance and facing a much better organised Red Air Force, the Luftwaffe had already suffered heavy losses and the relief effort would only accelerate the rate of attrition. Erhard Milch, the dynamic head of Luftwaffe procurement, took direct command, but even he could find no way of delivering more than 100 tonnes a day.

As the failure of the Luftwaffe became evident, the need to restore the land-link became still more urgent. If the 6th Army remained cut off, then it could not prevent Soviet forces from filling the gap between the two German army groups and isolating Army Group A in the Caucasus as well. On 12 December Manstein launched a counter-attack which took the Soviet forces by surprise, and made rapid progress in the first two days, coming within 50 kilometres of the encircled 6th Army. Manstein’s attempt also made the Soviets break off their effort to cut off Army Group A in the Caucasus. But, despite all Manstein’s urging, the commander of the 6th Army, General Friedrich von Paulus, refused to order his troops to break out of its encirclement by attacking simultaneously from the east. Faced with a lack of fuel, shells and serviceable vehicles and the onset of fierce winter blizzards, as well as a direct order from Hitler not to retreat, Paulus ignored all contrary advice and decided to wait.

Different sections of the 6th Army experienced the attrition at varying rates. Wilhelm Moldenhauer’s radio truck was unheated, to conserve petrol, but he still retreated to it to hear the news and escape the confines of their dugout. At 4 by 2.5 metres, it was a tight squeeze for seven men, who took turns sleeping. The only advantage was that no one had to stand watch for more than an hour during the night; but getting your boots on and off in the dark bunker was, Moldenhauer wrote cheerfully, a real art. The tone of his letters home remained remarkably level through the weeks of December. Lack of leave and lack of post were the main concerns. Only his description of cooking would have alerted his family to his plight: they traded tobacco for horse bones to cook soups and chopped up dried white cabbage and a horse’s heart or lungs for a real delicacy.
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By 17 December, after being cut off for four weeks in this ‘muck’, Fritz Probst and his comrades in the construction battalion were, he wrote home, cold, hungry but healthy. Rations were down to 200 grams of bread a day, with soup at midday. No letters were getting through to them any more, but they had heard that a relief force had broken through the encirclement. Five days later things were much the same. One of his comrades had been mortally wounded by a bomb fragment. With no laundry in five weeks, the men had not shaved or washed for four: their beards were, he wrote to his wife, ‘all centimetres long, but we are keeping our hope and courage up, we know that victory is ours’.
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By the time that Fritz Probst had heard that relief was on its way, the chance had been lost. Its advance blocked by the 2nd Guards Army, Manstein’s force itself was now threatened with encirclement. A second Soviet pincer attack, launched on 16 December, sliced through the 130,000-strong Italian 8th Army and threatened to encircle Manstein’s own force. He had no choice but to send the 6th Panzer Division to save the battered remnants of the Italian army, and, on Christmas Eve, to order his own force to retreat. From now on the only link to the 6th Army was by air, but that same day a Soviet armoured raid managed to penetrate to the Luftwaffe’s forward airbase at Tatsinskaya. It destroyed fifty-six transport planes and the airfield itself.
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That evening, the German home front tuned in to a special radio link-up, connecting thirty transmitters, among them a plane and a U-boat. From North Africa to the Arctic Sea, the front stations came in formally: ‘Calling Stalingrad again!’ – ‘Here is Stalingrad! Here is the front on the Volga!’ came the reply. Private greetings were exchanged as in the
Request Concert
broadcasts of old and at the end of the programme the different stations joined in singing ‘Silent Night’ and the third verse of Luther’s great hymn ‘A mighty fortress is our God’. Meanwhile, the word ‘cauldron’ was not used to describe the bitter fighting in the ‘Volga–Don region’.
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