Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Bitter laughter ripples round the cellar. ‘It’s like an idiot’s guide to the war against Russia! Maybe that lot back home really believe the crap he’s talking!’

‘Shut your mouth, will you?’

…convinced that this is their final roll of the dice – they’re trying to squeeze the very last drop from their reserves… Their commanders are brutal in the extreme, but in spite of that we’ve beaten them up till now and we’ll keep on beating them… we’ll drive them back, all along the line! … Germany will fight and bleed but it will emerge victorious!

‘Emerge victorious, ha ha! “Emerge victorious” – that’s a good one! “All along the line”…’

‘If he’s talking about victory, I don’t reckon he’ll be mentioning Stalingrad!’

‘Shhh! Will you pipe down?’

The speaker’s voice reached a crescendo of sublime pathos:

…and now Stalingrad, the struggle for Stalingrad, rises up like some gigantic, monumental edifice! One day, this will go down in legend as the greatest heroic struggle in our history… and anyone who is in this city, from the general down to the last man, anyone who is fighting there for every stone, every hole and every trench will be a hero… a powerful heroic epic about a battle without equal, like the Song of the Nibelungs… men who fought on relentlessly to the bitter end… Even in a thousand years from now, every German will utter the name Stalingrad with a reverential shudder and recall that it was there that the Wehrmacht laid the foundations of Germany’s ultimate victory.

Silence had descended, so completely that you could hear quite distinctly through the walls the sounds of distant banging and hammering and of collapsing rubble.

‘What the hell is this?’ asked Eichert, looking at his fellow officers. ‘It’s a bloody funeral oration. He’s not speaking to us any more!’ His voice rose to a scream. ‘We’re already dead! Like lambs to the slaughter… slaughtered for propaganda!’ He grabbed Breuer by the arm and shook him. ‘Breuer, what’s going on? What does this mean? It – it’s just terrible!’

A horrible fit of coughing cut him short. Breuer had no time to reply. He cast a concerned eye at Lieutenant Dierk. He was sitting against the wall. His eyes were wide open and his chest was heaving as he gasped and wheezed for air. Sounding far-off and broken up across two thousand kilometres of ether, the solemn, bombastic words of the eccentric guest speaker still resonated clearly enough from the vibrating metallic box:

…my young soldiers, your hearts must surely be beating all the more proudly and joyfully in your breasts in the knowledge that you are part of a nation and an army like ours. It is a wonderful feeling, a regal feeling… to fight and fight again as heroes on the ruins of this city. Despite being so few in number…

‘Three hundred thousand,’ whispered Jankuhn, ‘only three hundred thousand of us!’

…your resistance is still a towering achievement. My soldiers, most of you will have heard of a similar example from history… When you consider that many thousands of years have gone by since Leonidas stood with three hundred fellow Spartans at a narrow pass in Greece… the sky grew dark from the number of arrows unleashed against them… the Persian ruler Xerxes had a force of thousands at his disposal, yet the three hundred men did not waver or yield; they kept fighting a hopeless battle… until the last man had fallen. And in this narrow pass there now stands an inscription: ‘Stranger, when you find us lying here, go and tell the Spartans we obeyed their orders.’ They were a mere three hundred, my comrades! Millennia have passed and today… this sacrifice of yours is just as heroic… one day, men will say: ‘Stranger, bear this message to Germany, that you saw us lying in Stalingrad…’

‘Saw us lying? Saw us lying?’ yelled Fröhlich, stretching out his hand as if reaching for something that no one else could see. A shiver ran down the others’ spines. Buried alive – defenceless, they were to be entombed here and condemned into the bargain to listen to these hypocritical eulogies to the great crime! It seemed that the speaker could sense the wave of bitterness rising up against him from the distant mass grave; he became ever more agitated and began to scream and curse:

…duty of the whole German nation! No one should start bleating and quibbling about whether this or that action was necessary, or whether our soldiers should have been defending Stalingrad or not. They were ordered to defend it, plain and simple! The law required it – the law of honour, but first and foremost the law of warfare…

‘The law of incompetence and megalomania and obstinacy!’ yelled Schmid at the blameless metal box. He tried to get up, but sank back in his chair with a sigh, overcome by the pointlessness of his protest. Göring’s voice went on pitilessly:

…in the final analysis, though this may sound callous, it is all the same to a soldier whether he falls in battle in Stalingrad, in Rzhev, in the deserts of North Africa or in the icy wastelands of the North; the main thing is that he has offered up his life…

‘Oh yeah, of course it’s all the same to us…,’ thought Breuer, shaking with rage at what he was hearing. ‘All the same to us whether we’re defending our homeland on its borders or two thousand miles away in the middle of nowhere, all the same whether we’re doing it for justice and freedom or for minerals, oil and wheat or whether our sacrifice is for our fellow Germans or for a bunch of criminals! All the same, all the fucking same…’

…or think of the Goths at the Battle of Mount Vesuvius. The same principle applies there too! They made the final sacrifice when they realized there was no hope left for them…

No hope left! For the tens of thousands of wounded and sick, no hope left… And this sack of shit dared to say that!

Captain Eichert had jumped to his feet.

‘Enough of this!’ he shouted. ‘Enough, I say!’

He grabbed the iron bar that lay on the stove and set about the radio like a madman. Göring’s voice fell silent. The radio crashed to the floor, dragging the battery with it. There was a tinkle of glass as the valves shattered. Eichert dropped the iron bar and mopped his brow with the back of his hand.

‘Betrayed and sold down the river,’ he said quietly, in a surprised tone as if he’d just had a fresh insight. ‘Abandoned, just abandoned… Naturally, so no one will be left to tell how things really were…’ Then his rage bubbled to the surface again: ‘They’re fabricating a new heroic epic so they can convince a new generation of hundreds and thousands… that miserable bunch of lying bastards!’

Breuer had not taken his eyes off Dierk the whole time. All of a sudden, he launched himself at the lieutenant and took a swing at his arm. A shot rang out and a bullet embedded itself somewhere in the ceiling. Breuer wrestled the pistol from Dierk’s hand.

‘Not you, Dierk!’ he gasped. ‘Not you, lad! I know where you’re coming from, but you can’t do that!’

After a few minutes, once the excitement had died down, and the soldiers had filed out, cursing under their breath, and the rest were sitting round drained and shattered, the captain leaned over and said to Breuer: ‘Why didn’t you let Dierk have his way? He’s right, you know – it’s better to put a bullet through your own… oh Christ, it’s all so desperate, so awful…’

‘You really want to do the Russian bandits’ dirty work for them, Eichert?’ Jankuhn asked bitterly. ‘That’s exactly what they want, for us all to do ourselves in… so no one ever gets back home! We’ve seen too much, we know too much! What’s the betting they’re still afraid of us, even now?’