Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Around fifteen kilometres west of Stalingrad, sprinkled on the huge white platter of the steppe, a handful of gloomy wooden houses and dilapidated shacks cowered by the side of the railway tracks running north. The presence there of buildings providing shelter and of track-mending materials (still in use until recently), plus the proximity to the headquarters of German Army High Command, was reason enough for the place to have drawn the diligent attention of long-range Russian artillery and repeated visits by Soviet Air Force bombers. They used a water tower to help them to spot and home in on their target. Anyone who knew the hamlet tried to give it a wide berth. Vehicles sped along the streets here like they were being hounded.

In this dismal place, surrounded by the constant stench of death, stood the Sixth Army’s only field hospital. This was the main assembly point for the huge numbers of crippled men who, bewildered and disorientated, streamed in from all corners of the Cauldron seeking help and salvation. Here, unable to go any further, they holed up in unprotected nooks and crannies, at first overcome by sheer desperation. Little by little, though, they increasingly resigned themselves to their fate, a fate the vast mass graves of the cemetery here left them in no doubt about.

Padre Peters had remained in Gumrak. This terrible place held him fast in its grip. The army pastor stationed there, who over several weeks had tried to bring help and solace, had been buried when his bunker took a direct hit from a bomb. Peters took his place. His regular beat took in the densely packed wooden houses along the road; often one or other of these would be razed to the ground overnight by bombing or shelling. He crawled into the few unlit bunkers that remained in a landscape pitted with craters or stumbled over the train tracks to lines of railway carriages on sidings. These were home to the so-called ‘lightly wounded’. Often he would spend minutes crouched between the iron wheels, with bomb splinters humming around him, before the sliding doors were pushed open to let him in. Not infrequently one of the carriages took a hit and each time, as if by some miracle, out of the twenty or thirty occupants some six to ten got out alive. To keep the carriages warm, they burned the wooden crates that shells came packed in, stacks of which were piled up at the entrance to the village. The wounded men had to fetch them themselves. They also had to forage for their own food. Because the daily ration of sixty grams of bread that the army had once set aside for the wounded had long since dried up, they would wait for sick horses to keel over or hobble to the abattoir three kilometres away, where, if they got lucky, they could pick up a bloody chunk of horsemeat or a handful of oats. Apart from that, all they had to eat were the scrapings from empty cans of tinned meat and snow.

In the ten days he had been there, Padre Peters had celebrated communion twice in the larger of the two stone station buildings. This was no easy task; the stairs and corridors were crammed with men who were either wounded or dead. It was hard to tell which, because, as the shockwave of exploding bombs smashed the windows, one after the other the resulting gaps were bricked up, cutting out what little natural light was available. At least this made the building slightly warmer. Finally, one morning, when a bomb fell no more than a couple of feet away from the outer wall of the building into the cesspit of the latrine and blew out all the remaining glass, without causing any other damage, the interior was plunged into an airless total darkness. Thoroughly demoralized, the doctors at the field hospital suspended almost all their operations.

Holding a lit candle and treading on silent, yielding bodies, the padre pushed his way through to the door that separated the building’s two rooms. In the sooty smoke rising from the brick fireplaces he read a few passages from the Bible and delivered a brief sermon about the only path left open now: the path to heaven. His words fluttered bashfully into the oppressive silence. His face burned from the concentrated gaze of the eyes that stared at him from out of the gloom, wide-open eyes that had seen the truth. He couldn’t help them any more. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel. In a numb stupor, Peters was wading through a thick mire of misery, from which individual images rose up now and then like toxic bubbles. Only rarely did one of these – and not even always one of the most terrible – remain with him. One that did was the picture of the two dead Romanians left lying on the street in Gumrak not far from the circular stone fountain basin where corpses had been piled up like logs. Every day, their rigid bodies were mutilated a bit more by passing traffic until finally they were squashed flat, steamrollered like the two naughty boys under the philosopher Diogenes’ barrel in a picture-story by Wilhelm Busch. [1] ‘picture-story by Wilhelm Busch’ – the cautionary tale ‘Diogenes and the Naughty Boys of Corinth’ ( Diogenes und die bösen Buben von Korinth ) by the nineteenth-century German illustrator Wilhelm Busch. In it, the boys decide to play a joke on Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who was famous for living in a barrel, by setting his home rolling down a hill. They get their comeuppance when they are flattened by it. Or the image of the bodies that had been heaped up to make a set of steps into the tall cattle trucks on the sidings and which he had to climb every day. Also etched indelibly on his memory was the face of a young soldier who had sunk to his knees in front of the sentry outside the station building and begged to be let in. The next morning he was still there, bent double and slumped over to one side. The last tears he had cried still clung to his frozen, dead cheeks like pearls of ice.

Through the houses and the foxholes, through the bunkers of the POW camp on the outskirts of the village and through the barracks and tents attached to the field hospital out there in the balka , Padre Peters wandered wraithlike, a shadow of his former self. Time and time again, he encountered individuals who were eager to open up to him and who clung to his paltry words with desperate faith and hope. But this was nothing but a crazed hope for the earthly miracle that Hitler had failed to deliver, and which God was now expected to perform. By now Peters was already too weak to try to disabuse them of this blasphemous misconception. His conscience barely even registered a twinge of shock as he heard himself promising them that the miracle would come to pass. He lied like a doctor telling a dying patient that he’ll rally and recover. And as he did so, Peters preached and prayed and baptized. Yes, incredibly he was still baptizing people! One soldier lay there with a wound in the small of his back that refused to heal. He asked Peters to baptize him. He also requested that his father should not be told about it, or he’d be angry. Peters baptized him with the full panoply of religious ritual, including a candlestick with a baptismal candle. But his heart remained dark. The other soldiers looked on with a mixture of emotion, embarrassment and solicitousness. After several days, when he found the soldier again in a hole somewhere (the house where he had been convalescing had collapsed one night), he was dead. The stub of the candle was still by his head.

As the few healthy men remaining increasingly took refuge in camaraderie, instilling courage into one another through the dreadful hours of the night with songs and stories and dirty jokes, all to hide their dread of dying, Peters retired to his bunker, which was covered with pieces of railway line and never saw so much as a glimmer of daylight, and which rocked like a little boat on the open sea whenever bombs rained down. There he would idle away his time in daydreams, undisturbed by the frequent comings and goings of others. They’d feel their way down the clay steps and acclimatize themselves to the darkness before sinking down in a corner, where they’d lie exhausted; after several hours, they would either leave or remain lying there, dead. Peters, too, would doubtless have wasted away here had it not been for Corporal Brezel.