Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 Read online

  Russian soldiers from front-line units, especially Guards divisions, are said to have been more correct in their treatment of the vanquished than second-line units. But some drunken soldiers, celebrating victory, shot prisoners, despite orders to the contrary. Even members of elite formations rapidly stripped their captives of watches, rings and cameras, as well as the Wehrmacht’s highly prized mess tins in aluminium. Many of these items would then be bartered for vodka. In some cases a decent pair of jackboots would be seized off a prisoner, who would be thrown the Russian’s decrepit cast-offs in return. One doctor lost his prized copy of Faust, a small leather-bound edition printed on onion paper, which a Russian soldier wanted for rolling makhorka cigarettes. Blankets were also snatched off backs, sometimes just for the satisfaction of revenge because the Germans had taken the warm clothes of so many Russian civilians.

  As the gaunt prisoners stumbled out of cellars and bunkers, their hands held high in surrender, their eyes searched for a piece of wood that could serve as a crutch. Many were suffering from such bad frostbite that they could hardly walk. Almost everyone had lost toenails, if not toes. Soviet officers observed that the Romanian soldiers were in an even worse state than the Germans. Apparently their rations had been cut off earlier in an attempt to maintain German strength.

  The prisoners kept their eyes down, not daring to look at their guards or the ring of emaciated civilians who had emerged from the ruins in such astonishing numbers. All around, odd shots broke the silence of the former battlefield. Those in bunkers sounded muffled. Nobody knew whether each report signified the end of a soldier found hiding, of one who had offered resistance in some way, or of a severely wounded soldier receiving the coup de grâce.

  These defeated remnants of the Sixth Army, without weapons or helmets, wearing woollen caps pulled down or even just rags wrapped round their heads against the hard frost, shivering in their inadequate greatcoats fastened with signal cable as a belt, were herded into long columns of march. A group of survivors from the 297th Infantry Division was confronted by a Russian officer, who pointed at the ruins around and yelled at them: ‘That’s how Berlin is going to look!’

  Field Marshal Paulus, accompanied by Lieutenant Lev Bezyminsky of Red Army intelligence, was driven from 64th Army headquarters in his own staff car to Don Front headquarters outside Zavarykino, some fifty miles from Stalingrad. Schmidt and Adam followed under escort in another car. They were shown to their quarters, another five-walled izba. A permanent guard detachment under Lieutenant C. M. Bogomolov awaited them. The other ‘Stalingrad generals’ were brought to another izba close by, where they were watched by Lieutenant Spektor and a platoon of men.

  Bogomolov and his men, keenly conscious of the historic moment, eyed their charges with fascination. The tall Paulus had to duck low on entering. Following Adam’s example, he had abandoned his dress cap for an ushanka fur hat. He still wore the uniform of a colonel-general. Paulus was followed by General Schmidt and Colonel Adam, who impressed the guards by his ‘rather good command of Russian’. Paulus’s soldier driver came last carrying their heavy suitcases. The Mercedes staff car was promptly appropriated by General W. I. Kazakov, the Front artillery commander.

  Paulus and Schmidt occupied the inner room of the izba, while Colonel Adam and the escort were quartered in the outer room. They were joined by two NKVD agents sent from Moscow by Beria. Late in the evening, General Malinin, the front chief of staff, and Colonel Yakimovich, a senior staff officer, arrived. Bezyminsky, acting as interpreter, informed Paulus and Schmidt that their task was to search their luggage for ‘forbidden articles’, which included all sharp metal objects. Schmidt exploded. ‘A German Field Marshal’, he yelled, ‘does not commit suicide with a pair of nail scissors!’ Paulus, who was exhausted, signalled to him with a wave of the hand not to bother, and handed over his shaving kit.

  Shortly before midnight, Paulus was told that the Red Army commanders were now assembled and waiting to interview him. Lieutenant Yevgeny Tarabrin, the German-speaking NKVD officer sent to escort him everywhere, heard Paulus whisper to Schmidt, as he helped him into his overcoat: ‘What should I say?’

  ‘Remember you are a General Field Marshal of the German Army,’ Schmidt is said to have hissed back. More surprising, and most significant to the ears of Red Army intelligence, the Russian officer reported that Schmidt used the du intimate form of address to his superior.*

  Only half an hour before the meeting began, Captain Dyatlenko of the NKVD received orders to report to the izba used by Marshal Voronov, who had just been promoted by Stalin. ‘So Captain,’ Voronov greeted him affably. ‘You no doubt remember the time the old man didn’t want to receive you. Well, now he’s visiting us himself. And you’re going to receive him.’

  Voronov was sitting at the table with General Rokossovsky, the front commander, and General K. F. Telegin, the front commissar. A photographer appeared wearing a fur-lined flying jacket. To Dyat-lenko’s astonishment, he treated Voronov with relaxed familiarity. It transpired that this was the famous documentary film-maker Roman Karmen, who had become friendly with Voronov during the Spanish Civil War. Karmen lined up the chair destined for Paulus, to get the right shot through the door from Voronov’s bedroom. He knew that the result was to be used to tell the world of the Soviet Union’s great victory.*

  The atmosphere was tense in Voronov’s izba when their ‘guest’ arrived. The tall, thin, stooping Paulus presented a grey figure, with his ‘mouse-coloured’ uniform and face ashen from nervous strain. His hair was turning to ‘pepper and salt’, and even the growth of beard was black and white. Only when Paulus approached the table did Voronov indicate the empty chair. ‘Sit down, please,’ he said in Russian. Dyatlenko jumped to his feet, and interpreted. Paulus made a half-bow and sat down. Dyatlenko then introduced the two Soviet commanders. ‘The Representative of the Stavka, Marshal of Artillery Voronov! Commander of the Don Front, Colonel-General Rokos-sovsky!’ Paulus jerked to his feet and made half-bows in each man’s direction.

  Voronov began to speak, pausing every few moments for Dyatlenko to translate. ‘Herr Colonel-General, it is rather late and you must be tired. We have also been working a lot during the last few days. This is why we will now discuss just one problem which is urgent.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Paulus broke in, taking Dyatlenko off balance. ‘But I am not a colonel-general. The day before yesterday, my headquarters received a signal saying that I had been promoted to general field marshal. It is also written in my military identity papers.’ He touched the breast pocket of his tunic. ‘It was not possible, however, to change my uniform in the circumstances.’

  Voronov and Rokossovsky exchanged glances of ironical amusement. General Shumilov had already informed Don Front head-quarters of Paulus’s last-minute promotion.

  ‘So, Herr General Field Marshal’, Voronov resumed, ‘we are asking you to sign an order addressed to the part of your army which still resists, telling them to surrender to prevent the useless loss of life.’

  ‘It would be unworthy of a soldier!’ Paulus burst out before Dyatlenko had finished his translation.

  ‘Is it possible to say’, asked Voronov, ‘that to save the lives of your subordinates is behaviour unworthy of a soldier when the commander himself has surrendered?’

  ‘I didn’t surrender. I was taken by surprise.’

  This ‘naive’ reply did not impress the Russian officers, who were well aware of the circumstances of the surrender. ‘We are talking of a humanitarian act,’ Voronov continued. ‘It will take us only a couple of days or even just a few hours to destroy the rest of your troops who continue to fight on. Resistance is useless. It will only cause the unnecessary deaths of thousands of soldiers. Your duty as an army commander is to save their lives, and this is even more the case because you yourself saved your life by surrendering.’

  Paulus, who had been playing nervously with the packet of cigarettes and ashtray laid on the table for his use, shirked the question by
sticking to formulae. ‘Even if I did sign such an order, they won’t obey. If I have surrendered, I automatically cease to be their commander.’

  ‘But a few hours ago you were their commander.’

  ‘Since my troops were split into two groups,’ Paulus persisted, ‘I was the commander of the other pocket only in theory. Orders came separately from Führer headquarters and each group was commanded by a different general.’

  The argument went ‘round and round in circles’. Paulus’s nervous tic was even more pronounced, and Voronov too, knowing that Stalin was waiting in the Kremlin to hear the result, began to show the strain. His upper lip twitched, the legacy of a car crash in Belorussia. Paulus, in his blocking tactics, even claimed that if he did sign the paper, it would be regarded as a forgery. Voronov replied that, in that case, they would have one of his own generals brought over to witness the signature, and he would be sent into the north Kessel with the paper to guarantee its authenticity. But Paulus, however lame his arguments sounded, stuck to his refusal to sign. Voronov finally had to accept that any further attempt to persuade him was useless.

  ‘I must inform you, Herr General Field Marshal,’ Dyatlenko translated, ‘that by your refusal to save the lives of your subordinates, you are taking on a heavy responsibility for the German people and the future of Germany.’ Paulus stared at the wall, depressed and silent. In this ‘tormented pose’ only the tic in his face indicated his thoughts.

  Voronov then brought the interview to a close by asking Paulus if his lodging was satisfactory, and whether he needed a special diet because of his illness. ‘The only thing I would like to request,’ Paulus replied, ‘is to feed the many prisoners of war, and to give them medical attention.’ Voronov explained that ‘the situation at the front made it difficult to receive and cope with such a mass of prisoners’, but that they would do all they could. Paulus thanked him, stood up and gave another half-bow.

  Hitler heard the news at the heavily guarded Wolfsschanze deep in the East Prussian forest, a place once described by General Jodl as a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp. He did not bang the table this time, he stared silently into his soup.

  His voice and anger returned the next day. Field Marshal Keitel and Generals Jeschonnek, Jodl and Zeitzler were all summoned to the Führer’s midday conference. ‘They have surrendered there formally and absolutely,’ said Hitler in angry disbelief. ‘Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with their last bullet. When you consider that a woman has the pride to leave, to lock herself in, and to shoot herself right away just because she has heard a few insulting remarks, then I can’t have any respect for a soldier who is afraid of that and prefers to go into captivity.’

  ‘I can’t understand it either,’ replied Zeitzler, whose performance on this occasion makes one wonder about his assurances to Manstein and others that he had done everything to convince the Führer of the true situation regarding the Sixth Army. ‘I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he is lying there badly wounded.’

  Hitler kept coming back again and again to Paulus’s failure to commit suicide. Clearly, it had entirely sullied the myth of Stalingrad in his imagination. ‘This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling… What is Life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway… What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.’

  The northern pocket, with the remnants of six divisions under General Strecker, still held out. Strecker, with the headquarters of XI Corps in the Stalingrad tractor plant, signalled: ‘Troops are fighting without heavy weapons or supplies. Men collapsing from exhaustion. Freezing to death still holding weapons. Strecker.’ His message was robust, but conspicuously avoided Nazi clichés. Hitler, who received the signal after the meeting with Zeitzler, replied late in the afternoon: ‘I expect the north Kessel to hold out to the last.’ To emphasize the point still further, he issued a Führer directive a short time later: ‘XI Army Corps must resist to the last to tie down as much enemy strength as possible to facilitate operations on other fronts.’

  The four Soviet armies had redeployed rapidly to crush the last pocket. With a concentration of 300 field guns to just over half a mile, the factory district was smashed once again. Any surviving bunkers were destroyed at point-blank range, some with field guns, some with flame-throwers, sometimes with tanks driving right up and sticking their barrel into an embrasure.

  Strecker believed that, purely to help Manstein, there was a military purpose served by fighting on, but he utterly rejected any idea of self-destruction for propaganda purposes. In his mind, there was no doubt where the duties of an officer lay, as a conversation with a regimental adjutant shortly before the end showed.

  ‘When the time comes,’ the adjutant assured him, ‘we will commit suicide.’

  ‘Suicide?’ exclaimed Strecker.

  ‘Yes, Herr General! My colonel will also shoot himself. He believes we should not allow ourselves to be captured.’

  ‘Well let me tell you something. You will not shoot yourself, nor will your colonel shoot himself. You will go into captivity along with your men and will do everything you can to set a good example.’

  ‘You mean…’, the young officer’s eyes lit up, ‘I don’t have to shoot myself.’

  Strecker spent most of the night of 1 February at the regimental headquarters of an old friend, Colonel Julius Müller. A single candle burned in one corner of the bunker as the small group present talked about the recent fighting, past friends and the imprisonment ahead. ‘No one mentions all the suffering,’ Strecker noted, ‘no one speaks bitterly.’ In the early hours of the morning, Strecker stood up. ‘Müller, I have to go,’ he said. ‘May you and your men go with God.’ Strecker was greatly taken with Thomas Carlyle’s description of God as ‘the true Field Marshal’. No doubt, his vision of heaven was a place of perfect military order.

  ‘We will do our duty, Herr General,’ Müller replied as the two men shook hands.

  Strecker had already rejected the requests of his divisional commanders to surrender, but at four in the morning of 2 February, Generals von Lenski and Lattmann asked Strecker once more for permission. Strecker refused again. Lenski then said that one of his officers had already left to negotiate terms with the Russians. Strecker saw no point in continuing. He and Groscurth drafted their final signal. ‘XI Army Corps has with its six divisions performed its duty down to the last man in heavy fighting. Long live Germany!’ It was received by Army Group Don. Strecker asserted later that he and Groscurth had deliberately omitted any acclamation of Hitler, but the version recorded and then sent on to East Prussia ended with ‘Long live the Führer!’ Somebody must have thought it politic to make the signal more palatable at the Wolfsschanze.

  When two Russian soldiers appeared looking rather hesitant at the entrance of the command bunker, Groscurth shouted at them to fetch a general. Strecker wrote afterwards that many of their own soldiers were ‘only barely alive’.

  Foreign journalists were taken on a tour of the factory district a few days later. ‘What the normal relief of the terrain had been no one could tell,’ wrote the British correspondent, Alexander Werth. ‘You wound your way up and down, up and down; what was a natural slope, or what was the side of a dozen bomb-craters that had merged into one, no one could say. Trenches ran through the factory yards; through the workshops themselves; at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shape, and there were tin helmets, German and Russian, lying among the brick debris, and the helmets were half-filled with snow. There was barbed wire here, and half-uncovered mines, and shell cases, and more rubble, and fragments of walls, and tortuous tangles of rusty steel girders
. How anyone could have survived here was hard to imagine.’

  The morning of 2 February began with a thick mist, which was later dispersed by sun and a wind which whipped up the powdery snow. As news of the final surrender spread among the 62nd Army, signal flares were fired into the sky in an impromptu display. Sailors from the Volga flotilla and soldiers from the left bank crossed the ice with loaves of bread and tins of food for the civilians who had been trapped for five months in cellars and holes.

  Groups and individuals walking about embraced those they met in wonder. Voices were subdued in the frozen air. There was no shortage of figures in the colourless landscape of ruins, yet the city felt deserted and dead. The end was hardly unexpected, or even sudden, yet the Russian defenders found it hard to believe that the battle of Stalingrad had finally come to an end. When they thought about it, and remembered the dead, their own survival astonished them. Out of each division sent across the Volga, no more than a few hundred men survived. In the whole Stalingrad campaign, the Red Army had suffered 1.1 million casualties, of which 485,751 had been fatal.