Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘How far have they penetrated by now, then?’ asked Breuer, suddenly realizing that he had heard absolutely nothing more about the enemy’s position since yesterday.

The lieutenant colonel shrugged his shoulders.

‘The Corps doesn’t know, or at least it isn’t saying precisely. I reckon it must be about fifty or sixty kilometres. Ivan won’t risk pushing forward any further, even if he doesn’t encounter any opposition. The Russians haven’t got a good enough command structure or supply lines to pull that off. We know as much from last winter. And they’re running scared about us attacking their flanks if they push on too far.’

Meanwhile, Captain Engelhard had been called to the phone. When he returned, his usual professionally composed demeanour could not conceal his pleasure and excitement.

‘We’ve had word from the Corps!’ he called over to Unold. ‘The army has released the Sixteenth and Twenty-Fourth tank divisions from the front. They’re on their way here already!’

The mood in the room lightened in an instant. A hubbub of animated chatter broke forth.

‘The Twenty-Fourth has been newly equipped in the interim!’

‘And it was the Sixteenth that made the breakthrough to the Volga in the summer!’

‘Now we can really give them hell, gentlemen!’

‘Well, it was a bloody cheek of them to attempt this breakthrough in the first place!’

‘And don’t forget, Heinz is waiting in the west with two more intact tank divisions!’ Major Kallweit interjected. ‘If he turns up with them, they’ll cut off the neck of the whole salient within a day. Then the Russians’ll really be in a fix!’

‘I’ll drink to that, Kallweit! Let’s raise a glass to Heinz!’ shouted Unold, pushing a full glass of brandy across to the tank commander.

‘I reckon the whole scare’s going to be over in a few days, anyhow. By which time the Russians’ll be a couple of tank divisions lighter, and they’ll have learned a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry.’

Their faces became flushed under the influence of the alcohol as they wallowed in memories and dreams of future glory. Unold, too, progressively slipped into a state of desperate, forced hilarity. Major Kallweit, who’d partaken very liberally of the drink on offer, was telling off-colour jokes in his typically dry way, eliciting roars of laughter from his listeners. By the time Captain Engelhard, remarking on the difficult day ahead of them tomorrow, discreetly hinted that they should call it a night, the case of wine was completely empty.

Breuer walked back to his quarters through the brightly moonlit night. The sound of military columns on the move drifted over from the far bank of the Golubaya River. Lieutenant Dierk trudged through the snow beside him. He was silent, and the moonlight cast strange shadows across his young, still unformed face.

‘That piece of filth! That miserable piece of filth!’ he exploded without warning. ‘How can someone like that call himself… or even dare to utter the Führer’s name?’

Breuer shot him an astonished look, and saw that his eyes were flaming with fury and welling up with tears. My God, he thought to himself, they’ve really got him hook, line and sinker – Dierk had been a Hitler Youth leader. With the natural enthusiasm of his twenty years, he had pressed and pressed until the powers that be finally allowed him to go to the Eastern Front. Breuer had spent a lot of time chatting with him, even sometimes attempting a circumspect discussion about shortcomings and weaknesses within the ‘movement’. These had usually ended with the lieutenant getting very aerated; yes, he conceded, there may have been certain regrettable occurrences, you encountered those everywhere after all, but one shouldn’t keep ‘whingeing’ about them and most importantly it was imperative not to lose sight of the greater goal.

But an outburst of the kind he’d just witnessed concerning their deserting divisional commander was something Breuer had never seen before. ‘The worst of it is,’ he remarked almost flippantly, ‘people like him are by no means uncommon – at least outside the army!’

‘Yes, they are!’ the lieutenant flared up. ‘They’re exceptions. Complete anomalies, thank God! But the thing is, scum like him can destroy something in an instant that it took ten proper soldiers years to build up. That’s the real tragedy of it!’

‘Look, please don’t misunderstand me, Dierk,’ said Breuer hesitantly. ‘You know I don’t harp on about such things in the normal run of events – but back home we’ve got this regional Party chief, right? Not only is he the county commissioner, he’s also the owner of a sawmill. Now, wearing his county commissioner’s hat, this “old Party lag” proceeds to award all the region’s contracts to himself, the same “old Party lag”, but this time in his guise as the sawmill boss. It’s also apparently quite OK for him, in view of the services that he’s rendered the Party, to charge higher prices than other timber yards, and as a regional Party chief who isn’t bound by any fixed pay scale for his staff, to exploit the men who work for him quite shamelessly, and to get the regional administration to grant him a grace-and-favour country house, and so on. Recently, a regular court convicted him of perjury. But in the event it was the president of the district court who was forced to stand down, while he remained in post. Since that incident, he hasn’t been able to look any decent person in the eye again. Yet despite all the legal actions and complaints against him, the Gauleiter stands by him and the Führer stands by him too! You see, that’s what I don’t get. Are things like that really just irrelevances?’

By this time, the two of them had reached the camp and were standing outside the Finnish tents. Only the soft tread of the sentry broke the silence. Lieutenant Dierk looked up at the disc of the moon, mourning pale and distant behind a veil of clouds.

‘I’ve no reason to doubt the truth of what you say, Breuer,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ve known each other too long for that. But what you’ve just recounted to me is an isolated instance, believe me! And why would the Führer stand by such a man, you ask? I’ll tell you – it’s because this man must have stood by Hitler when the movement was still small and insignificant. He fought with him, believed in him, and probably bled for him as well. You see, it’s one of the Führer’s guiding principles to reward loyalty with loyalty. That’s the whole ethos of the movement, it’s the secret of its success.’

As he spoke, the young officer’s eyes shone with an unnatural brilliance, as if under the influence of a drug.

‘And it’s that unswerving loyalty,’ he went on, ‘that makes me love the Führer. My life belongs to him, and I’d follow him to the ends of the Earth! Because I know that he’ll always keep faith with me, and with us all.’

Breuer refrained from saying anything more. It’s fortunate, he thought, that such young men still exist. Very few people in the Party – all too few – had such a pure heart. As he himself frankly admitted, he too had joined the Party back in 1933 for ulterior motives. Back then, he’d been a trainee teacher looking for a job, as well as being married with the first child on the way. How else could he have ever hoped to secure a post? He hadn’t exactly been overjoyed at being so craven. But these days he bore his burden more lightly.

A lorry bumped down the road leading from the railway station at Tchir to Kalach. The white cones cast by its headlights waved around in front of it, clutching clumsily at the grass steppeland that formed the verge of the carriageway. Here, in the back of beyond behind the lines, you could drive around on full beam with no qualms on a night like tonight, since no enemy pilot would venture out in such poor visibility. The clock on the truck’s dashboard stood at 2.25 a.m.