Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Unold’s been going on about that Rembrandt film [3] Rembrandt film – Rembrandt was a 1942 feature film directed by Hans Steinhoff depicting the life of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter. for weeks,’ Breuer went on. ‘He’s dead keen to see it. I don’t know what to do. If I can get hold of it he’s promised me I can finally have an orderly officer.’

Section Ic had had an orderly officer, an ‘03’, assigned to it, but the post had been unoccupied since the last incumbent was killed in a bombing raid.

‘What do we need another 03 for, Lieutenant, sir?’ interjected Herbert. ‘I mean, now we’re about to go into winter quarters…’

Breuer looked at the girlish face of the NCO, which became suffused with red flushes, fleeting as clouds in April, whenever he spoke. There they sat, fretting over rest and recreation, and all of them already with their thoughts on time away from the front. Finally, he said:

‘If you promise not to breathe a word about this, I’ll let you into a secret. Do you know what the general told me over at Corps HQ? “You’ll just need to honour us with your presence for a few days more,” he said, “then it’s home leave for you lot.”’

‘Back on home leave to Germany? But how—’ Fröhlich stopped midway through sinking his equine teeth into a slice of bread and gaped in astonishment at Breuer. ‘So, we’re not going to Millerovo, then?’

‘Apparently not. Seems like we’re heading back to Germany!’

A look of sheer astonishment crossed Geibel’s pasty face, like a full moon rising over a wheat field. Herbert looked at Lakosch, who grimaced ironically in response.

‘What did I say?’ cried Fröhlich, slapping his thigh in triumph. ‘Home for Christmas. And the war’ll be over by the spring!’

‘That’s right, Fröhlich,’ laughed Breuer. ‘Then you can open your fishmonger’s shop again and set up a branch on the Volga dealing in salmon and caviar.’ Saying this, he pulled a key from his pocket.

‘Lakosch, fetch me the little brown bottle from my trunk, will you? I reckon we’ve got good reason to raise a glass. Plus, from midday today, we’re part of the Tank Corps again. So if things ever get dicey for us here, General Heinz will bail us out somehow.’

The men nodded. They all knew the young general, whose rise through the military firmament had been nothing short of meteoric. Not long ago, he’d been at the head of their division, first as a colonel, then as a major general, and had been a very popular figure because he pushed himself hard too. Since the first of November he’d been leading the Tank Corps with the rank of lieutenant general. Lakosch put the bottle down on the table and leaned over to Herbert.

‘So, are you going to bake me that cake now, loser?’

Corporal Herbert nodded and smiled, his thoughts far away as he stared blankly into the middle distance.

Lieutenant Colonel Unold, the division’s first general staff officer, leaned across the wide table, studying the campaign map. On it, the blue, winding ribbon of the Don twisted its way through green- and brown-coloured expanses as it flowed in a wide arc on its eastward course. The hieroglyphic script of chalk annotations, comprising symbols and numbers, was divided into a red group and a blue group. The front ran along the river, the huge northern flank of the wedge that thrust towards Stalingrad. Relying on the natural barrier formed by the river and on the weakness of the Russian forces, the German Army High Command had manned this section of the front with relatively thinly spread-out Italian and Romanian divisions. As a result, these units had been unable to prevent the enemy from establishing a number of bridgeheads, which were being defended with grim determination. It was to one of these Russian bridgeheads that the mobile elements of their division – led for the time being by Unold after the division commander had been transferred – had now been ordered. For security reasons, they’d been told…

The lieutenant colonel’s narrow face displayed nervous irritation. From time to time, he’d grab a piece of chalk and make a few imperious corrections. The situation here wasn’t to his liking, not in the slightest.

It wasn’t the two or three new divisions the enemy had committed to the bridgehead at Kletskaya that bothered him. The reports on this painted a familiar picture: the troops were all either boys or old men, bad morale, poorly equipped and armed (some even had Model 41 muskets with unrifled barrels). Unold was a specialist. As a young captain on the general staff he had been active in the department ‘Foreign Forces/East’ at the Army High Command when the invasion of Czechoslovakia was being planned. He spoke Russian and liked to interrogate prisoners himself. He knew the Russians weren’t planning to launch any serious assault with divisions like this. But other things were troubling him. For instance, there were the two new bridges across the Don, constructed clandestinely, almost unnoticed. What were the Russians up to building these bridges, if not…?

At an adjacent table, Captain Engelhard, the division’s first orderly officer, was sorting through a pile of dispatches. He was young and had an elegance about him that was quite out of keeping with these surroundings. He had ended up at the divisional staff thanks to a bullet lodged in his lungs.

Now he stood up and placed a slip of paper on the desk in front of Unold. The lieutenant colonel skim-read the dispatch out of the corner of his eye and then, taking a sudden interest, picked it up. As he reread it, his lips widened into a thin line. His grey eyes cast a swift glance at the captain, who had remained standing by the table; then his hand, clutching the chalk, suddenly moved rapidly over the pale green wooded area north of the Don. He looked through narrowed eyes at the red circle he’d drawn there for a moment, and the muscles around his cheekbones twitched. Then, studiedly and almost lovingly, he drew a large number 5 inside the circle and below it the lozenge symbol denoting a tank.

‘Does the Lieutenant Colonel really believe they have a tank force there?’

Unold did not respond. He walked over to the low-silled window and looked out. His gaunt face shimmered like a death mask in the bluish light of the badly made windowpanes. Skating over the rough cobblestones of the empty village street, his blurred vision raced back through time and space…

Poltava, 1941. The windows of the administrative building that was home to Army Group South looked out on the monument commemorating the victory of Tsar Peter the Great over the Swedes. The Army High Command had dispatched General Staff Major Unold – as he then was – there in lieu of the third general staff officer, who was ill. However, he had recovered sooner than expected and Unold, suddenly finding himself at a loose end, had immersed himself more and more in the great work that the Imperial Russian general staff had compiled about the battle of 1709 outside this Ukrainian city, a volume he’d come across by chance. Excursions to the plains outside the city, whose blood-soaked earth yielded up to his digging an old helmet here or a rusty weapon there, brought what he had read vividly to life, and the lectures he delivered in the mess hall to an audience of staff officers and others soon earned the eloquent major the reputation of an authoritative expert on Russia’s great battle of liberation. In December 1941 – shortly after the failure to take Moscow – Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief, appeared one day at Army Group South. One evening in the mess, he expressed a wish to see the historic battlefield, and the next morning they were all driven out to the site in an open-topped Volkswagen Kübelwagen , [4] Kübelwagen – literally ‘bucket car’. The German equivalent of the Jeep, manufactured by Volkswagen. Its official designation was the Typ 82 light field car, and the nickname referred to the unglamorous appearance of this open-topped utility vehicle. VW also produced a military variant of its familiar ‘Beetle’ saloon car. muffled in furs and blankets: the field marshal, the CO of Army Group South General Field Marshal von Rundstedt, and Unold. Unold spoke for almost an hour. On the icy winter plain, he conjured up the rich hues of summer, peopled the place with colourful army columns and filled the frost-clear air with the tumult of battle, the roar of cannon and the cries of the wounded. It seemed to him that he’d never before spoken so well. The commander-in-chief only interrupted him with an occasional polite question. In the silence that followed his presentation, as the present once again settled over the scene, Brauchitsch uttered a sentence that hung – as the only enduring thing to emerge from this incident – like an inscription on a gravestone over these flat fields: