Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Can I do anything more for the Field Marshal?’ enquired Schmidt, like a nurse addressing a patient.

‘No, I don’t think so… thank you! Perhaps you might see to it that we’re allowed to keep our cars? And my batman, too, if possible, I’d like to keep hold of him.’

The handover negotiations did not last long. Throughout, General Schmidt retained what he referred to as his ‘dignified bearing’. After all, he wasn’t the supreme commander who was putting the ruins of a defeated army at the mercy of a victorious enemy. He was merely playing at being a king signing away his realm.

Two officers emerged from the cellar of the department store. They were Colonel Kniffke, who was carrying a large black suitcase, and an even younger captain with a rucksack on his shoulders. On the square in front of the building, German soldiers and Red Army troops were standing round in a jumble and cheerfully chatting to one another in broken German and Russian. Some of the Germans were still carrying their weapons. It would have been easy to forget what had just happened here. The army staff cars had just drawn up. Troops loaded private luggage on to the back of a lorry, which at Schmidt’s request the Russians had provided specially for this purpose.

The captain surveyed the scene in front of him with some embarrassment.

‘I’m really not sure about this, Colonel, sir,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know… whatever happened to “fighting to the very end”?’

‘What’s your problem?’ exclaimed the colonel, spitting out the stub of the cigarette he’d been smoking. ‘Haven’t we done just that? I’d say we have! And today is “the end”!’

Eichert has also made all his preparations. It has all passed off very quickly and undramatically. On learning that the Russians have finally arrived, the officers stand up, silently collect their paltry belongings, including their kitbags, blankets and knapsacks, chuck their pistols into the flue of the stove and walk out. Breuer pushes his way through the knot of men gathered by the door. Outside, the Romanian general is already in conversation with a Russian officer escorted by armed soldiers.

Breuer introduces himself. ‘We’ve got about two hundred walking wounded and around five hundred with serious injuries in the building. What’s going to happen to them?’

The Russian officer looks at him calmly and dispassionately.

‘Do you have a doctor with you?’ he asks in German. ‘Very well, then, you should leave him behind here. We’ll see! Those of your men who can still walk should form up in four columns, with the officers at the head. All weapons are to be deposited in front of the building! Hurry up now, time is pressing!’

Captain Eichert is standing on a chair in the crowded corridor of the cellar.

‘Comrades!’ he says in a hoarse voice. ‘We’ve marched together for many years now, obeying our orders, never questioning our superiors and always believing that our cause was a just one. Many of our number, so very many, have given their lives for it. And now we know that we’ve been lied to and betrayed.’

Breuer stands leaning against the wall. He looks at the faces around him, faces upon which the three-month ordeal of the Stalingrad Cauldron – which has weighed down so much more heavily than the three and a half years of war and the decades of peace before it – has left its indelible scars. These faces are a world away from those of the young, fresh soldiers who would have stood in front of the primped-up Reichsmarschall in Berlin the day before. The soldiers here had seen more than other men; they’d stared into the abyss of hell.

And now an eerie transformation comes over these faces. In their crazed desperation, they must surely have still nurtured some belief and hope in spite of everything – even in spite of the funeral oration they’d been treated to yesterday. But now they realize: it’s over, really and truly over. And their faces turn to stone, and their feeble hands form fists. And suddenly one of them shouts:

‘We give thanks to our Führer! – Heiiiil Hitler!’

Others take up the chant. The cellar resounds to the drone of their voices: ‘Heiiiil Hitler! … Heiiiiiiiil Hitler!’ This cry, once uttered over and over again by millions in hysterical rapture, has never sounded like it does here now. It’s not mockery, it’s not ridicule, it’s a cold, clear, terrible reckoning. It’s like an executioner’s axe falling.

Breuer can feel his eyes growing moist.

‘Did it have to end this way?’ he thinks. ‘Yes, there was no alternative!’

‘So this is the end,’ the captain continues. ‘We didn’t want this to happen. But we followed in blind obedience all the same. We’re not blameless… And now I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that we go down this last difficult road together. We don’t know what the future holds for us. But whatever it brings, we should see as an atonement… Anyone who’s still got a weapon should dispose of it by the door in the courtyard! We were soldiers of the Führer – but from here on in, let us be human beings. Break step – Quick… March!’

The German forces trapped in the northern sector of the city – who had been cut off from all communication with Sixth Army High Command since 26 January – held out for a further two days, during which time they came under massive artillery bombardment and heavy attacks from the air.

The divisional commanders begged the CO of the XI Corps, who had supreme command over the northern end of the Cauldron, to put an end to this senseless slaughter. Regimental and squadron commanders lost all composure and went down on bended knee, imploring him to surrender. Unable to free himself from the stone labyrinth of conventions and prejudices in which he had been confined during more than forty years of military service, the old bullet-headed East Prussian general refused to heed their pleas.

‘No. I could never look the German people in the face again!’

On the night of 31 January–1 February, he had heard on the radio a ‘report from the front’, actually fabricated in Berlin, which spoke of the ‘heroic last stand being taken by Army Group Paulus’, which went on to claim that ‘Field Marshal Paulus has personally burned all confidential documents in his cellar. The officers and soldiers of his unit have fought to the last man and the last bullet!’

From this, he got the impression that Paulus himself had perished.

On 2 February, sometime between three and four in the morning, a radio message from Hitler came in:

‘Every day, every hour that you go on fighting facilitates the formation of a new front. I expect Army Group North to discharge its duty with the same heroism displayed by Army Group Centre!’

Yet by this stage, the northern sector of the Cauldron was already collapsing. Troops were surrendering in droves to the Russians, regimental and divisional commanders took it upon themselves to make contact with the enemy, and entire units laid down their arms. When, on 2 February 1943 at 11 a.m. German Standard Time, the general signed the order to surrender, he had no troops left to command.

The Battle of Stalingrad was over.

Twenty-two crack German divisions plus elements of other units were wiped out. It was the greatest military disaster in German history.

According to Soviet reports, the bodies of 147,200 German officers and men were recovered from the battlefield and laid to rest.

Over 91,000 men went into captivity, including 2,500 officers and clerical staff. That figure represented less than a third of the Sixth Army’s original complement of men and around half its officers. Of the thirty-two German generals in the Cauldron, seven had been flown out, one died in battle, one shot himself and one was posted as missing after 2 February 1943; this left twenty-two generals taken prisoner, foremost among them a field marshal.