Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Don’t be foolish, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it’s all pointless! The handful of men they’ve cobbled together there can’t hold out for more than two or three days at most, and they’ll be annihilated in the process. It’s a crime! And all just because some nutter’s still got a point to prove!’

But it seemed there were more such ‘nutters’ around. Without warning, a general appeared in the cellar. They could hear him storming down the corridor even before he entered the room. Wearing a peaked cap with earmuffs, carrying a knotted stick in his hands and accompanied by two helmeted officers with carbines, he burst in, cursing and yelling.

‘No preparations… no barricades… not a single man with a rifle to be seen! And there’s someone waiting out there in the corridor with a white flag! What’s the meaning of this, eh?’

The officers had stood to attention when he came in. They did not recognize this tigerish face, which was currently as dark as a thundercloud. They had no idea who they were dealing with. Having gone for days without any orders or news, they knew nothing of the changes that had taken place in the interim in the leadership of the Sixth Army. So they were unaware that General von Seydlitz, commander-in-chief of the eastern front of the Cauldron, had finally decided, after one last fruitless appeal to Paulus, to take matters into his own hands.

‘Since the High Command has given up issuing orders, I’ll give them instead!’ he’d informed his commanders. ‘And my orders are these: to prevent scattered units engaging in senseless fights to the death and incurring pointless casualties, I’m giving the commanders of individual detachments the authority to cease hostilities locally once they’ve exhausted all their ammunition.’

This very sensible new autonomy had succeeded in stirring the top brass from their lethargy once more. Very gently and carefully, von Seydlitz had been relieved of his command, though in secret Schmidt had even weighed up the option of having him arrested. Command of the eastern front, now only some two kilometres long, was transferred to the ‘Tiger’, who had found himself separated from his corps and displaced to the central sector by the surprise splitting of the Cauldron. The draconian orders of the last few days had been his doing: anyone touching a supply drop without authorization to be shot on sight. Likewise anyone who attempted to make contact with the enemy. And so on, and so forth… summary execution for a whole range of misdemeanours.

And here he was in the flesh. Uninformed and innocent, yet somehow in thrall to the aura of death and destruction that this figure exuded, the assembled officers stared into the poisonous face of the old general. No one could find anything to say in reply. Only Dr Korn, who was just in the process of replacing Lieutenant Dierk’s bandages, mumbled something about the number of wounded men.

‘Wounded? What do you mean, “wounded”?’ roared the general. ‘You’ve been ordered to fight to the last man! Anyone who’s still able to hold a rifle should be out there, this instant! Understood?’ He turned to the officers who’d come in with him.

‘No matter where you go, you find these slackers loafing about without any sign of get-up-and-go in ’em! What do you reckon to that, eh?’ he hissed at the men, who stood there like statues.

‘Do you even know where the front line is right now?’ he asked, turning back to the room.

Breuer was standing in the corner. He struck himself as being somewhat detached from proceedings. His thoughts were turning somersaults in his head. What did this general want with them? Fighting to the last man, huh? Yeah, that’s right: ‘man’ was the operative word here! There was a world of difference between ‘man’ and ‘general’. After the last man had fallen the general would pack his bag and head off into captivity in the comforting knowledge that he’d carried out his orders to the letter. Lakosch, he was just such a ‘man’. But he’d chosen not to fight to the last. He’d done more, he’d tried saving his comrades, ‘men’ like him. Now he was over with the Russians, and the general, this slave-driver whipping them up for one last Dance of Death, was here. Yes, where was the front line?

As if in a dream, Breuer heard his own voice fill the ominous silence and felt all eyes glued on him: ‘The front line runs between Justice and Injustice, General, sir! And you – you’re on the wrong side.’

The general looked at his interlocutor with piercing eyes. Then he shrugged his shoulders faintly and turned away. ‘Some kind of lunatic!’ he thought to himself, comfortingly. You ran across this kind of thing a lot now. In the meantime, though, Captain Eichert had regained his composure. He fought to suppress a coughing fit.

‘There are five hundred wounded men in this building, General,’ he said with studied calm, though his voice sounded hoarse. ‘Five hundred severely wounded men. We’re not firing another shot here – unless it’s to protect these wounded men from lunatics!’

The two men’s gazes locked. And in this instant it dawned on Captain Eichert what he’d just done. It amounted to insubordination, refusal to obey an order, insulting a superior – the worst crimes a soldier could commit! But he held his ground. He thought of his division and the three defeats it had suffered, and the wrecks of men that were lying around here now. He had fought on the western front of the Cauldron from day one, constantly at hotspots, fighting courageously and successfully over and over again without ever questioning the point and the purpose or the number of casualties – as he’d been ordered to. He’d led the poor wretches from the Fortress Construction Battalion to their deaths when all was already lost – as he’d been ordered to. They’d held out on the railway embankment for three long days, had taken out twelve Russian tanks and had slowly bled to death – as they’d been ordered to. They’d blown up their last heavy guns – as they’d been ordered to. They’d done everything they believed it was their duty to do, they and thousands of brave soldiers and officers from other units, all of them loyal and courageous. They’d carried out every order bar none, even the most senseless. Without them, the Cauldron would never have survived for so long, and the criminal game of the top brass could never have been played out to the final act. But there was a limit that no order could overcome. And that limit had now been reached.

Through narrowed eyes, Eichert calmly took the measure of the general. The right corner of his mouth had curled up slightly, forming a sharp vertical crease in his cheek. He knew what had to happen now. He knew from fourteen years’ experience the mechanisms of military discipline that would now kick automatically into action. But he was ready for anything.

And then the Tiger lost his nerve and looked away. All of a sudden his face slumped and he looked old and grey. He turned to his companions.

‘Very well, then, this building’s a field hospital,’ he said dully. ‘Okay, let’s be on our way. Time’s short.’

And turning up the collar of his coat, he stomped out. And those who remained behind realized: it wasn’t simply a general who had just climbed down.

The thirtieth of January 1943 – ten years since the Nazi ‘takeover of power’! Everyone’s thoughts turn around this date. What had things been like back then? Ten years ago… [1] The following list comprises a mixture of Nazi slogans and names of policy initiatives, snatches of nationalistic and popular songs of the period, and excerpts from speeches predominantly by Adolf Hitler but also by Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Where Gerlach has quoted a line of the popular wartime song ‘Lili Marleen’ – as performed by the German singer Lale Andersen (‘ aus der Erde Grund – grüßt dich im Traume …’) – rather than offer a literal translation, I have taken the liberty of substituting a line from Vera Lynn’s contemporaneous version of the song, which will be more familiar to English readers.