Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

In silent accord, they began to prepare for captivity. Only by way of catering for all eventualities, naturally! For on the quiet many of them still believed that the ‘great miracle’ would happen.

‘Whereabouts are you going to sew your wedding ring for safekeeping?’ Schmid asked the paymaster, who was busy pulling on a double layer of underclothes.

‘I think I’ll sew it into the waistband of my trousers, under a button. That’d be the safest place.’

Captain Eichert sewed Russian banknotes into the lining of his greatcoat. Jankuhn rummaged in a small suitcase and offered the others all the pullovers and other garments he could not manage to squeeze into himself. Everyone went through their kitbags and carefully picked out the most essential items, discarding many things that they had long cherished. Diaries, letters and photographs were all consigned to the flames. Breuer was spared this agony; his only possessions were what he stood up in or carried about his person. He felt his camera in his greatcoat pocket. He weighed it in his hand for a long time. It was a Zeiss ‘Ikonta’ that had cost him a hundred and five Reichsmarks. When his first son was born, he had sold his typewriter and bought this instead. It had accompanied him through his first years of marriage and on the highways and byways of this crazy conflict. There was a length of iron piping on the stove. He picked it up and began laying into the camera, once, twice, a third time – the little camera refused to die; it wasn’t how it was meant to meet its end. Finally, Breuer gave up and tossed it into the fire. He then took a long, hard look at his mouth organ before eventually slipping it back into his pocket.

‘You’d best ditch your felt boots right now,’ said the paymaster. ‘They won’t last five minutes, then you’ll have to walk barefoot all the way to Siberia!’

He went outside and returned with a pair of brand-new brown jackboots. ‘Hey, will you look at all the stuff he’s still got!’ the others exclaimed. ‘Come on then, paymaster, turn all your clobber out this instant! You must have cases and cases of tinned food left!’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ replied Jankuhn, visibly irritated. ‘Say we still find ourselves sitting here for a fortnight or more – what do you plan on eating then?’

These were their preparations for when the end came.

Sonderführer Fröhlich wanders through the ruins of Stalingrad. He has no idea any more where the front line is, or where his comrades are. He couldn’t stick it out with the flak battery; they’d started to give him the creeps. And he hadn’t dared purloin any food. Now hunger is gnawing at him once more.

He’s a Baltic German. He wears the blue-and-white cross of the Baltic Territorial Force with pride. He’s determined not to fall into the hands of the Russians. ‘Anyone else,’ he says to himself, ‘but not that filthy rabble!’ The innate arrogance of the Baltic ‘master race’ is in the blood of this small fishmonger. Yet he remains hopeful. What was that he’d heard that time at the Staff HQ where he’d spent the night? ‘Gentlemen, I saw it with my own eyes,’ the colonel surgeon had whispered. ‘He smiled. The Führer actually smiled! Mark my words: something’s afoot!’ Fröhlich feels sure that something’s about to happen, too. The Führer keeps his word. The thirtieth of the month is still to come, the tenth anniversary of the ‘national revolution’. That’s the day it’ll happen! That’s when Hitler will reveal himself in all his glory, to the shame and disgrace of the unbelievers.

A courtyard in the vicinity of the Central Stalingrad commandant’s headquarters. The house next door is home to a food depot. The courtyard is full of people. They’re skulking around there, shifty and unarmed, waiting for an opportunity to storm the depot and overpower the paymaster there. In a corner is a large heap of weapons, including rifles and machine guns. An officer is standing next to it, recruiting men for a last stand. ‘Two hundred grams of bread for everyone who takes a gun!’ His face is flushed from shouting. Every so often, someone comes up, to shouts of derision or hatred from the crowd, sullenly picks up a gun and reaches out to take one of the hunks of bread. But things aren’t that simple, it transpires. The officer picks out various people and checks whether they can hold the gun properly and know how to shoot it. Not many of them can.

Fröhlich receives his portion of bread and is assigned to an officers’ patrol that’s detailed to ‘comb through’ cellars and bunkers. The squad comprises himself and two NCOs. A lieutenant’s in charge, a very young fellow with flashing eyes.

All the underground lairs they visit are crammed with people. In one, they’re playing cards (‘Hey, what’s happening? Has anything happened yet?’). In others, they’re burning banknotes, or stuffing themselves pointlessly full on stolen provisions, wolfing sardines and letting the oil run down over their stubbly chins. They’re waiting, starving, or dying in these holes in the ground. Germans, trembling Russian girls, Romanians, Croatians, and Italians as well (what are Italians doing here?). In one basement, they encounter a sea of black faces. Yellow, blue, grey and green faces aren’t uncommon. But black faces? It turns out that they’ve been lighting camp fires down there using car tyres!

Poking out from the entrance to one cellar is a stick with a scrap of white cloth tied to it. Inside, a group of uncommunicative old men are sitting round the walls. ‘OT’ – Organisation Todt (the name says it all!). They look like they’ve been turned to marble. None of them even turn their head.

‘You gone crazy or something?’ the lieutenant yells. ‘Take down that shameful rag outside this instant! Come on, clear out of here, you lot!’

He fires a shot into the ceiling from his carbine. A ripple of muffled grumbling breaks out, softly at first, but growing louder all the while. A voice rises above the hubbub, shrill and piercing: ‘Do the bastard in!’

One of them gets up. He approaches, a tall, stocky figure. His face is like a block of wood.

‘Piss off, sonny!’ he says quietly. ‘Go outside and take a pop at someone if it’ll amuse you. But leave us in peace! We’ve had a skinful of you lot!’

With a deft movement, he whips the carbine out of the officer’s hand, turns it upside-down and jabs the butt up under his chin. There’s a wooden thud, and the lieutenant keels over, flailing with his hands. Fröhlich gets out as fast as he can.

Outside, explosions are going off left and right. Mortars! The two NCOs have disappeared. Fröhlich flings himself into a house doorway. A blast hurls him to the ground before he has a chance to find his feet. Beams are splintering all around him. ‘Wood’s nothing!’ he thinks. ‘The fish smokery is tiled. A Horch six-cylinder limo. Sunday on the Wannsee and in the Spreewald…’ After some minutes, he struggles to his feet and stumbles into an adjoining room. Piles of rubble cover dead soldiers, one with his torso slumped across a table. Fröhlich wrenches open a door. A woman is lying on the floor, her face a bloody lump of flesh. Beside her an old man is kneeling, stammering out prayers and weeping. But in the middle of the room there stands a child, a little girl of about three years perhaps. Just standing there, rigid and mute. Her small mouth is open a fraction, and her big bloodshot eyes stare unblinking at the intruder. Her tiny hand is clutching a rag doll…

Fröhlich narrows his burning eyes. He recovers from the initial shock and runs out. Shooting is coming from all sides now – rifle fire and machine-gun bursts whipping down the street. Some people are cowering in the shelter of a wall; they brace themselves to make a run for it and then dash across the road. In mid-sprint, one of them suddenly leaps up like a rubber ball, flings his arms into the air and then swings them down between his legs and pitches forward like he’s doubling up with laughter. ‘Aieeeee!’ comes his shrill scream, ‘aiieeeee!’ Suddenly he straightens up, falls silent, and topples over like a felled tree.