Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 Page 56

  * Some 270,000 Ukrainians had already been recruited from prison camps by 31 January 1942. Others were civilian volunteers. The Stadtkommandantur in Stalingrad, according to one NKVD report, had 800 armed and uniformed Ukrainian youths for sentry and escort duty.

  * Grossman seems to have been going through a period of spiritual idealization, seeing the Red Army soldier in quasi-Tolstoyan terms. ‘In war,’ he wrote in another notebook, ‘the Russian man puts a white shirt on his soul. He lives sinfully, but he dies like a saint. At the front, the thoughts and souls of many men are pure and there is even a monk-like modesty.’

  * Jaundice was recorded separately. ‘Jaundice especially predominates here,’ wrote one officer. ‘And since jaundice means a ticket home, everybody is longing to get it.’ There do not appear to be any recorded examples of soldiers eating picric acid from shells, to make them turn yellow, as in the First World War.

  * Intelligence could be a dangerous branch in which to serve. On 22 November, three days after the great offensive began, the head of intelligence of 62nd Army was charged with ‘defeatism and counter-revolutionary ideas’ and accused of giving false information about the enemy. It is impossible to know whether the officer in question was being held responsible for political crimes or incompetence, either his own or as a scapegoat for a superior.

  * Volsky was already in almost everybody’s bad books. Just before the attack, he had written a personal letter to Stalin, ‘as an honest Communist’, warning that the offensive would fail. Both Zhukov and Vasilevsky had had to fly back to Moscow on 17 November. After hearing their arguments, Stalin telephoned Volsky from the Kremlin. He retracted his letter. Stalin was curiously unruffled. The possibility cannot be ruled out that this was a precautionary ploy to be used by Stalin against Zhukov and Vasilevsky in case Operation Uranus failed.

  *. Hitler, they thought, could be persuaded to step down as commander-in-chief by senior officers. A change of regime might then be accomplished without the disastrous chaos and mutiny of November 1918. This was an astonishingly naive reading of Hitler’s character. The slightest opposition was more likely to trigger a fearful bloodbath. It was the younger ones, such as Tresckow and Stauffenberg, who recognized that Hitler could be removed only by assassination.

  * The figures given at the time and in recent accounts range widely, sometimes without defining the nationalities involved. The most significant discrepancy is between the 51,700 Hiwis reported with divisions in mid-November, and the 20,300 listed in Sixth Army ration returns on 6 December. It is hard to know whether this was due to heavy casualties, Hiwis taking the opportunity to escape during the retreats of late November, or Russians being covertly incorporated into divisional fighting strengths. See Appendix B for more detail.

  * General Doctor Renoldi took more interest later. From his railway carriage, he rather chillingly described the collapse of soldiers’ health in the Kessel as ‘a large-scale experiment into the effects of hunger’.

  * Paulus later claimed that he had never issued an order to open fire on any Russian flag of truce, but Schmidt might well have done.

  * The examples published in an anonymous collection entitled Last Letters from Stalingrad, which had a powerful emotional effect when published in 1954, are now considered forgeries.

  * Winrich Behr, who knew Schmidt well, thinks this use of du highly unlikely although he considered that ‘there is no doubt that General Schmidt built up a strong influence over Paulus’.

  * Karmen’s photograph was doctored in Moscow. General Telegin was removed from the print because Stalin considered him insufficiently important for such a historic occasion. (Even Dyatlenko’s promotion to major was accelerated for the release of the photograph.) This incident developed into one of those grotesque farces of the Stalinist era. When the photograph appeared across the front of Pravda, with his face removed, Telegin was terrified that someone had denounced him for a chance remark. Nothing happened, however, so he thought he was safe, but then, in 1948, he was suddenly arrested on the orders of Abakumov (the head of SMERSH) for no apparent reason.

  * German guards were also used in other camps. The worst were some two hundred Germans (most appear to have been Saxons for some reason) who had deserted from punishment battalions. Armed with wooden clubs, and granted the designation of ‘Fighters against Fascism’, they refused to allow soldiers to fall out to relieve themselves during roll-call, even though the overwhelming majority were suffering from dysentery.

  * It is, of course, possible that General von Seydlitz secretly saw this operation as a chance of tricking the Soviets into sending him and thousands of Sixth Army prisoners home. But if this had been the case, one would have expected him to mention the episode after the war when he faced such heavy condemnation from former colleagues for having collaborated with Stalin’s regime.

  * This collection is listed under fiction as the authenticity of the letters is very much in doubt.