William Vollmann - Europe Central

395 “Now they’d split us into two mutually isolated sub-fortresses.”—von Manstein (p. 364) writes that there were actually three pockets formed on 24 January, a claim which I have not read anywhere else. Goerlitz asserts that Sixth Army was split into two on 26 January.

395 Paulus to OKW, 24 January 1943: “No basis left on which to carry out mission…” —Abridged and “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 358.

395 General Heitz’s slogan: “We fight to the last bullet but one”—Beevor, p. 382.

396 “The Jew Babel” on the Jews of Zhitomir— The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 380 (diary entry for June 3, 1920).

396 Von Reichenau on the liquidation of the Jewish children: “I have ascertained in principle…”—Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 153 (abridged and slightly altered).

400 Signal of 29 January 1943: “To the Führer!…”—After Beevor, p. 379, abridged.

400 Daily briefing of 30 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks…”—Mehner, vol. 6, p. 123; my trans. and abr.

400 Paulus to General Pfieffer: “I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal”—Beevor, p. 381.

400 The German surrender at Stalingrad—The Soviets are said to have captured 2,000 officers and 91,000 thousand men. Very few of those ever came home. In 1958 von Manstein wrote: “Of the 90,000 prisoners who finally fell into Soviet hands, not more than a few thousand can be alive today” (p. 360). The original strength of Sixth Army was about 300,000. Presumably the 200,000-odd men not captured had already been slain in the fighting. Mitcham (p. 239) cites “the commonly accepted figure” of 230,000 Germans killed or captured in the course of the siege, not counting the wounded who were lucky enough to get flown out. Von Manstein (p. 396) estimates that between 200,000 and 220,000 soldiers were in the pocket as of the beginning of the encirclement. “Altogether, the Axis must have lost over half a million men” (Beevor, p. 398). According to Beevor (p. 394), the Russians endured 1.1 million casualties at Stalingrad, 485,751 of which were deaths.

400 Regarding the necessity for Sixth Army’s ordeal at Stalingrad, the words of von Manstein (op. cit., p. 354) deserve to be quoted: “Every extra day Sixth Army could continue to tie down enemy forces surrounding it was vital as far as the fate of the entire Eastern Front was concerned. It is idle to point out today that we still lost the war in the end and that its early termination would have spared us infinite misery. That is merely being wise after the event. In those days it was by no means certain that Germany was bound to lose the war in the military sense. A military stalemate… would have been entirely within the bounds of possibility if the situation on the southern wing of the German armies could in some way have been restored.”

400 German eyewitness: “Sorrow and grief lined his face”—Craig, p. 372.

400 Major-General Schmidt to Paulus: “Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.”—Beevor, p. 388. These words were actually uttered a few hours later, immediately before Paulus’s interrogation.

401 Unnamed Russian general, to Paulus: “We now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga”—Closely after Vasili I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (Bristol, U.K.: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967; orig. Russian ed. ca 1964), p. 17. In the original, Chuikov was speaking neither to Paulus nor sarcastically.

401 Paulus to his captors: “That would be unworthy of a soldier!” and following conversation —After Beevor, p. 390; with some parts verbatim and some parts invented.

403 Paulus’s experiences in the USSR, 1943-53—Based on the occasional mentions of him in Bodo Scheurig, Free Germany: The National Committee and the League of German Officers, trans. Herbert Arnold (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan Press, 1969; original German ed. 1961).

403 The London Sunday Times correspondent A. Werth: “Paulus looked pale and sick…” —Werth, Russia at War, p. 549.

403 Hitler on Paulus’s surrender: “What hurts me the most personally…” and “So many men have to die…”—Warlimont, p. 306 (fragment no. 47: midday conference [transcript], 1 February 1943).

404 Field-Marshal Keitel: “I always took his side with the Führer…”—Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, Back Bay Books, 1992), p. 310, slightly altered.

404 Rudenko: “Have I rightly concluded from your testimony…” and Paulus’s reply—Ibid., p. 311.

405 The defense attorney: “What about you, Field-Marshal Paulus?” and Paulus’s reply—Loc. cit., somewhat altered.

405 Ribbentrop: “That man is finished…” and Jodl’s reply—Gilbert, p. 148 (12 February 1946).

406 Colonel Heim’s characterization of Paulus: “Well groomed…”—Goerlitz, pp. 47-48.

406 Ernst Paulus’s postwar relations with his father—The silver-framed photograph from Poltava is, of course, my fabrication. For what it is worth, Ernst Paulus inserted the following into Goerlitz’s compilation (p. xiii): “So, in all reverence, I dedicate this book to the memory of Sixth Army.”

407 Hitler’s will: “:… and therefore to choose death of my own free will…” Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Documentation Center, Long Dark Nazi Years: A Record of Documents and Photographs of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution (Haifa, 1999), testament p. 4 (pages of this book not consistently numbered). This document was discovered in a secret compartment of a suitcase in possession of a Frau Irmgard Unterholzer in Tegernsee.

407 Ditto: “May it be one day a part of the code of honor…”—Ibid.; testament p. 6.

407 Hilde Benjamin, nicknamed the Red Guillotine—She makes a few cameo appearances in Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). There is no information available to me that she ever met Paulus in real life.

407 Hitler to Paulus: “One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web…”—Slightly altered from Warlimont, pp. 326-27 (fragment no. 5; discussion with Sonderfuuhrer von Neurath concerning Italy on 20 May 1943).

408 Field-Marshal von Manstein on closeness between officers and men as the “Prussian tradition”—Op. cit., p. 207.

408 Paulus’s prewar service report (1920): “Modest, perhaps too modest…”—Quoted in von Mellenthin, German Generals, p. 104.

408 Hilde Benjamin on Paulus: “An innocuous representative of the former military-professional caste…”—I have fabricated this.

409 Paulus’s Dresden lecture: “At the same time, particular attention was invited to Sixth Army’s inadequate stock of supplies”—Goerlitz, p. 219 (memorandum: “The basic facts of Sixth Army’s operations at Stalingrad [Phase I],” by Paulus).

409 Gehlen: “My department predicted ten days in advance precisely where the blow would fall at Stalingrad!”—After Gehlen, p. 56. In his memoirs, Gehlen is nearly always right. David Thomas paints a different picture.

409 The show trial of the Gehlen Organization—On 11 November, two ringleaders were guillotined in Dresden between 4:18 and 4:22 A.M., for the crime of industrial espionage.

409 “Five hundred and forty-six spies arrested!”—Number supplied by Gehlen, p. 174, who contemptuously adds: ‘A fantastic figure which should itself have sufficed to convince any neutral observer that this was pure propaganda; it reminded me of the RAF and Luftwaffe claims in the Battle of Britain.”