The Third Reich at War (69 page)

15. The Eastern Front, 1942

In underground holes like these, they waited for the regular Soviet attacks, conserving their ammunition and supplies as best they could.
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By the time the festive season arrived, Paulus’s army was effectively doomed. Christmas provided the occasion for an enormous outpouring of emotion in the troops’ letters home, as they contrasted their desperate situation with the peace and calm they had known in their family circle in past years. They lit candles and used broken-off branches to make Christmas trees. Not untypical was the letter of one young officer to his mother on 27 December 1942:

Despite everything, the little tree had so much Christmas magic and homely atmosphere about it that at first I couldn’t bear the sight of the lighted candles. I was really affected, to such an extent that I cracked up and had to turn my back for a minute before I could sit down with the others and sing carols in the wonderful sight of the candlelit tree.
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The troops took comfort from radio broadcasts from home, especially when they played sentimental songs, which they sometimes learned by heart and sang themselves. ‘There’s a song we often sing here,’ one soldier wrote to his family on 17 December 1942. ‘The refrain goes: “It’ll all soon be over - it’ll end one day - after every December will come a May” etc.’
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Writing letters home became a way of keeping human emotions going; the thought of getting back to Germany and to their families held despair at bay. Nearly 3 million letters made their way from the encircled army to Germany during the months of the conflict, or were found, unposted, on troops killed in action or taken into captivity.
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The troops did not freeze to death as they had the previous winter. ‘By the way,’ wrote Hans Michel from Stalingrad on 5 November 1942,

‘we’re well supplied with winter things; I’ve also got hold of 1 pair of socks, a fine woollen scarf, a second pullover, fur, warm underwear etc. They are all things from the wool collection. You have to laugh when you see one or other of the men wearing a ladies’ jumper or something similar.’ Those on watch were supplied with felt boots and fur coats in addition. The veterans of the Moscow campaign also noted that the winter was initially much milder in 1942- 3 than it had been the previous year.
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But the warmth created by layers of clothing was an ideal breeding-ground for lice. ‘Your red pullover,’ wrote one soldier to his wife on 5 November 1942, ‘is a proper louse-trap; I’ve caught quite a few there already (excuse the jump in my thoughts, but one bit me just now).’ Another wrote that although he was not the worst affected, ‘I’ve already snapped a few thousand.’ Some tried to make light of the problem in letters home (‘one can genuinely say “everyone has his own zoo”,’ quipped one), but in the long run the physical irritation and discomfort they caused added to the growing demoralization of the German troops. ‘They can drive you mad,’ wrote one infantryman on 28 December 1942. ‘You can’t sleep properly any more . . . You gradually get filled with disgust for yourself. You don’t have any opportunity to wash yourself properly and change your underwear.’ ‘The damned lice,’ complained another on 2 January 1943, ‘they totally eat you up. The body is totally consumed.’
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Far worse, however, was the growing shortage of food, which weakened the men’s resistance to the cold, however warmly dressed they might have been. ‘We’re mainly feeding ourselves just with horsemeat,’ wrote one German soldier on 31 December 1942, ‘and I myself have eaten even raw horsemeat because I was so hungry.’
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‘All the horses have been eaten in a few days,’ reported the staff officer Helmuth Groscurth on 14 January 1943, adding bitterly: ‘In the tenth year of our glorious epoch we are standing before one of the greatest catastrophes in history.’
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‘Although I am exhausted,’ wrote another soldier on the same day, ‘I cannot sleep at night but dream with open eyes again and again of cakes, cakes, cakes. Sometimes I pray and sometimes I curse my fate. In any case, everything has no meaning or point.’
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‘I only weigh 92 pounds. Nothing more than skin and bones, the living dead,’ wrote another on 10 January 1943.
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By this time, the weather had deteriorated sharply, and the weakened troops were unable to resist the cold. Fighting in such circumstances was virtually impossible, and the troops became steadily more depressed. ‘You’re nothing more than a wreck any more . . . We’re all completely desperate.’
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‘The body is gradually losing its capacity for resistance as well,’ was the observation in another letter, written on 15 January 1943, ‘because it can’t go on for long without fat or proper food. It’s now lasted 8 weeks and our situation, our sad predicament, is still unchanged. At no point in my life up to now has fate been so hard on me, nor has hunger ever tormented me so much as now.’
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One young soldier reported that his company had been given only a single loaf for six men to last three days. ‘Dear Mummy . . . I can’t move my legs any more, and it’s the same with others, because of hunger, one of our comrades died, he had nothing left in his body and went on a march, and he collapsed from hunger on the way and died of cold, the cold was the last straw for him.’
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On 28 January 1943 the order was issued that the sick and wounded should be left to starve to death. The German troops were in effect suffering the same fate that Hitler had planned for the Slavs.
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Even faith in Hitler now began to fade. ‘None of us is yet abandoning his belief or his hope,’ wrote Count Heino Vitztbum, an aristocratic officer, on 20 January 1943, ‘that the Leader will find a way to preserve the many thousands in here, but unfortunately we have already been bitterly disappointed many times.’
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Not only was food running out, so too was ammunition. ‘The Russians,’ complained one soldier on 17 January 1943, ‘have built their weapons properly for winter; you can take a look at whatever you like: artillery, grenade-throwers, Stalin organs and airplanes. They are attacking without a break day and night, and we’ve got to save every shot because the situation doesn’t allow it. How much we wish we could really shoot properly once again.’
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Men began to wonder if it would be better to be taken prisoner than to continue the hopeless struggle, although, as one remarked on 20 January 1943, it would not be so bad, ‘if it was Frenchmen, Americans, Englishmen, but with the Russians you don’t really know whether it would be better to shoot yourself.’ ‘If it all goes wrong, my love,’ wrote another to his wife, ‘then don’t expect me to be taken prisoner.’ Like others, he began to use his letters to say his farewells to his loved ones.
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Enough letters of this kind were opened by the SS Security Services back in Germany to provide a realistic picture of their effect on morale. Already in mid-January, the confidential reports of the SS Security Service on morale on the home front noted that people did not believe the propaganda emanating from Berlin. Field-post letters from the front were seen as the only reliable source of information. ‘If the situation in the east is currently regarded by large parts of the population with a disproportionately greater concern than it was a week ago, this is to be explained by the fact that the field-post letters that are now arriving at home overwhelmingly sound very serious and to some extent extremely gloomy.’
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By this time, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovskii, an experienced officer who had been purged and imprisoned by Stalin in the 1930s but reinstated in 1940 and given command of the Red Army troops to the west of Stalingrad, had begun advancing across the pocket from west to east, capturing the last airfield on 16 January 1942. Aerial bombardment, artillery fire and tanks, backed by massed infantry, overwhelmed the weakened German defences. In the southern sector, the Romanian troops simply ran away, leaving a huge hole in the defensive line through which the Red Army poured its T-34 tanks. The weather had turned cold, and many German soldiers collapsed from exhaustion and froze to death on the ground as they retreated. Others pulled the wounded along on sledges, passing along icy roads littered with abandoned or shattered military equipment. In a few sectors the German forces put up a fight, but very soon they were all driven back into the ruins of the city, where 20,000 wounded were crowded into makeshift underground hospitals and cellars which had to be entered past piles of frozen corpses. Bandages and medication ran out, and there was no chance of ridding the patients of the lice that crawled over them. Even those who were not hospitalized were sick, starving, frostbitten and exhausted.
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Eight days before, the Soviet High Command had made Paulus an offer of honourable surrender. 100,000 German troops had been killed in the battle by this point. The situation of the rest had clearly been hopeless since the failure of Manstein’s breakthrough attempt. Senior officers were beginning to surrender to the enemy. But once more, Hitler ordered Paulus to fight on. The general ordered that in future all Soviet approaches should be met with gunfire. On 22 January 1943 Paulus suggested all the same that surrender was the only way of saving the remainder of the troops. Once more, Hitler rejected his request. Meanwhile, Rokossovskii’s advance drove further forward, splitting the pocket into two and forcing the remaining 100,000 German troops into two small areas of the city.
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Goebbels’s propaganda machine was now abandoning its earlier talk of victory. Increasingly, newspaper and newsreel stories emphasized the heroism of the encircled soldiers, a lesson for all in the glory of continuing to fight, never giving in even when the situation seemed hopeless. The telegram sent by Paulus the night before the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933 was grist to the propaganda mill: ‘On the anniversary of your seizure of power, the Sixth Army greets its Leader. The swastika flag is still flying over Stalingrad. May our struggle be an example for the present and coming generations that we should never capitulate even when we have lost hope. Then Germany will win. Hail my Leader. Paulus, Colonel-General.’
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The same day, Hermann G̈ring gave a speech, broadcast over the radio, in which he compared the Sixth Army to the Spartans who died defending the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian hordes. This, he said, ‘will remain the greatest heroic struggle in our history’. It did not escape the attention of many of the troops crouching round their radios in bunkers scattered around Stalingrad and its outskirts that the Spartans at Thermopylae were all killed. To underline the message, Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal on 30 January 1943, a measure intended - and understood clearly enough by its recipient - as an invitation to commit suicide.
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But Paulus, at the very end, finally turned against his master. On 31 January 1943, instead of committing suicide, he surrendered, along with all the remaining troops in the part of Stalingrad he still occupied. Rokossovskii arrived to take the formal surrender, accompanied by a photographer and an interpreter, secret policemen and army officers and Marshal Voronov from the Soviet Supreme General Staff. Paulus’s dark hair and incipient beard had begun to turn white under the strain of the past months, and he had developed a tic in his facial muscles. The Soviet generals asked him to order all his remaining troops to give themselves up, to prevent further bloodshed. In a last remnant of deference towards Hitler, Paulus refused to order the other pocket of resistance to cease fire. The remnants of six divisions were holed up in it; Hitler ordered them to fight to the end. But the Russians bombarded them mercilessly, and they surrendered on 2 February 1943. Altogether some 235,000 German and allied troops from all units, including Manstein’s ill-fated relief force, were captured during the battle; over 200,000 had been killed. Dressed in rags, filthy, unshaven, lice-ridden and often barely able to walk, the 91,000 German and allied troops left in Stalingrad were lined up and marched off into captivity. Already weak, starving and ill, demoralized and depressed, they died in their thousands on their way into prison camps. The Russians were unprepared for such large numbers of prisoners, food supplies were inadequate, and over 55,000 prisoners were dead by the middle of April 1943. Among their number was Helmuth Groscurth, whose diaries from 1939-40 gave later historians important insights into the early development of the military-conservative resistance to Hitler; captured in the pocket that surrendered on 2 January 1943, he succumbed to typhus and died on 7 April 1943. Altogether, fewer than 6,000 of the men taken prisoner at Stalingrad eventually found their way back to Germany.
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IV

It was impossible to explain away a defeat of these dimensions. The retreat from Moscow the previous year could be presented as a temporary measure, a tactical withdrawal that would be made good later on. But it was scarcely possible to take such a line in the case of Stalingrad. The complete encirclement and destruction of an entire German army could not be glossed over. In private, Hitler railed against the weakness of the Romanian and Italian troops, but most of all he was furious at what he saw as the cowardice of Paulus and his senior officers, who had preferred to lose their honour by surrendering rather than save it by killing themselves. Worse was to come, for, beginning almost immediately after the invasion, the Russians began attempts to ‘re-educate’ German prisoners of war as ‘anti-fascists’, starting with NCOs and then moving on to the officers. A judicious mixture of the carrot and the stick won over a growing number of prisoners to the cause, the majority of them going along with it because it was the easiest thing to do. A small number of convinced German nationalists among them were persuaded that Hitler was destroying Germany, and that joining his enemies was the quickest way to save their country. A few opportunists, many of them ex-Nazis, were particularly vocal in their support for ‘anti-fascism’. By July 1942 the Soviet secret police had met with sufficient success to start building an organization of converted prisoners, turning it the following year into a ‘National Committee “Free Germany” ’. The young pilot Friedrich von Einsiedel became one of its leading figures, gravitating towards the Communist wing of the organization along with a few others who had entertained serious doubts about the Nazi cause even before they had been taken prisoner. Most spectacularly, however, the National Committee was also joined by Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who was persuaded by the Russians to make a series of propaganda broadcasts to Germany on their behalf. The broadcasts probably had little effect, but the mere fact that Paulus was making them was a deep embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, and provided further proof to Hitler, if he needed any, that the army leadership was not to be trusted.
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