Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Close your right eye, please!’ he told the lieutenant.

Groggy from the pain, Breuer complied. The wall of darkness descended once more. But it was no longer unrelieved blackness. Bright spots floated up and down in it and coalesced into circular patterns that increased steadily in size. And all of a sudden he saw before him Wiese’s face, looking just as it had the last time he’d seen him, in the semi-darkness of the bunker at Gumrak. Slowly the face began to change, becoming broader and coarser, while the hair above the slyly twinkling eyes turned ginger. It wasn’t Wiese any more, it was his driver, Lakosch. Lakosch the deserter – what was it he’d said back then? ‘I wanted to see if I could save my comrades!’

The doctor gave a smart tug and pulled off the last corner of the eye bandage adhering to Breuer’s skin. Breuer gritted his teeth against the sharp pain that stabbed right to the back of his head. Saving his comrades, that was it! Escorting them to pastures new after the apocalypse…

‘Christ, man, you were incredibly lucky!’ said the doctor. ‘Instead of draining out of the eye, the aqueous humour has gone viscous and formed a crust. For the time being there’s nothing we can do. Turn your head to the light, will you? Can you see anything?’

‘Yes, I can see something,’ said Breuer quietly. ‘A very faint shimmering pattern… I think – yes, it’s getting brighter!’

General von Hermann had come to terms with himself. He knew now what he had to do. There was only one solution.

His decision had not been reached without some deep soul-searching. The question he was wrestling with was the same one that had been troubling all the senior staff officers of the Sixth Army since the tenth of January – namely, what should they do when the end came? There had been long discussions on the subject. At the beginning, when the situation hadn’t been quite so grave and the question was more in the realms of theory, the general consensus had been that they were duty-bound as officers to shoot themselves. The idea of suicide suddenly became all the rage – in theory, at least. And von Hermann, who as a Christian had spoken out against it right from the outset, had been subjected to some very disparaging looks, which carried more than a hint of an accusation of cowardice. But now that the subject had taken on a deadly earnest, no one spoke about shooting themselves any more.

A truly oracular directive had been issued from on high: ‘The officers commanding the Sixth Army will share the fate of the troops until the bitter end!’ This gave rise to long and heated debates, until eventually most people came to the view that it meant that the staffs would lead right to the last in order to facilitate an ordered surrender.

Facilitate surrender? Such a sudden about-turn! There was a standing order that ran: ‘Fight to the last man and the last bullet!’ Up till now, every order and directive issued by Army High Command had dismissed out of hand any thought of going into captivity. Soldiers who even mentioned surrendering were summarily shot. And now – out of the blue – this? Now, when the staffs ought to have been sticking firmly to their own orders, there was talk of capitulation?

General von Hermann recalled that Lieutenant Colonel Unold of the General Staff in particular had been a strong advocate of doing the decent thing when the time came. ‘The very idea of a general or General Staff officer standing in the trenches with his rifle like Private Dogsbody is quite preposterous!’ he’d said, for instance. ‘We didn’t undergo our training at the military academy to do that sort of thing!’ And General Schmidt, the Sixth Army’s chief of staff, had only recently offered the view that the world should be spared the undignified spectacle of a German Army staff being routed on the battlefield by the Russians.

Undignified? What was there about the whole escapade at Stalingrad that wasn’t undignified? It was undignified that thousands of wounded men should have died in filthy holes in the ground, that thousands had starved to death, and that soldiers who were half dead already were being hounded into battle!

Two days before, he’d been at the front. He’d seen a field hospital full of wounded men – a long, two-storey building that was some kind of former warehouse – set ablaze by shellfire. A few men on the upper floor had saved themselves by climbing out of the windows onto trees. But the flames from below steadily licked up to where they were perched. The men in the trees started screaming, ‘Shoot us, shoot us!’ And the soldiers below opened fire, and one after the other the trapped men plunged into the flames…

That had all been undignified, shameless and criminal. ‘Stalingrad began as an assault, became a defensive action, and ended up as a crime!’ he had written in a letter to his wife. The German Wehrmacht, he claimed, ‘had lost face’.

But was it really so undignified for General Staff officers to engage in combat? Maybe that would have been one way for them to save ‘face’. They certainly had a duty to do so, he felt.

That was General von Hermann’s view of things, at least. No doubt he was the only one to think this way. But as far as he was concerned there was only one way out. He’d thought it through with unerring consistency. Orders were orders. And they applied to everyone. To the common soldier and commander alike, without exception. Every soldier’s duty and honour required it, as did his oath. It was terrible that this oath of loyalty was sworn to a criminal… but it remained an oath nonetheless. Such were the thoughts of General von Hermann as he dispassionately received one piece of bad news after another during the cold days of January, and as he succinctly and unequivocally issued his orders. He had become hardened, so desensitized that his officers were alarmed when they looked into his stony face. He showed no pity any more, least of all to himself.

It was different at night when he lay sleepless on his camp bed, shrouded in darkness and staring into the black void. It was then that the searching and questioning began. Was an oath really still binding on someone when they’d sworn it to a criminal? Weren’t there obligations that overtrumped this? For instance, a person’s loyalty to their family, or their fellow countrymen – or to God? Was he really acting as a Christian? He felt, alarmingly, that the ground had suddenly been cut from beneath his feet. Yes, there genuinely was another way: to refuse to carry out the criminal order, to counter it with a firm ‘No’ and suffer the consequences, to make a clean break with everything that had gone before. And yet that was mutiny, revolution! The general shuddered at the thought. Revolution: that was something for people who wore flat caps – it was the guttersnipes who stirred up revolution. He, on the other hand, was from an old military family, an aristocrat. He couldn’t possibly have anything to do with revolution! That would mean declaring war on the world that he belonged to by dint of birth and education, severing his own roots and sawing off the very branch he was sitting on. It was tantamount to self-sacrifice, a moral self-annihilation.

Yet at the same time he could see how the aristocratic, militaristic world in which he was rooted was crumbling before his eyes. Every day brought new evidence of its demise in a series of horrifying images. Nor was it just being destroyed from outside – from within, too, it was disintegrating into meaningless phrase-making, hypocrisy and cowardice, and bursting open like a plague boil. The wretchedness of its exponents was causing it to break apart, to spiral into terminal decline in the same way the proud Age of Chivalry had degenerated into tawdry exploitation by robber barons and eventually collapsed in disgrace and dishonour.