Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘My laaa – My lasht requesch,’ he mumbled, ‘you, you’ve always been… roses on my…’

His head slumped forward, his hair flopped over his forehead and his slurred babble turned into a wheezing snore. He’d checked out. In vain, Lakosch tried to rouse him once more, but eventually gave up. Disgruntled, he set off home again, but not before pocketing a couple of cigars he spotted lying on a bench next to the camp bed. When the captain returned, his esteemed batman would have quite some explaining to do about the vodka. A couple of cigars here or there wouldn’t make much odds.

The command bunker at the Eighth Corps was thick with smoke. A group of some ten to fifteen officers, belonging to the General Staff for the most part, had assembled here. No one knew the reason for this meeting, which the Army High Command had scheduled for the morning of the thirtieth of December. It must be something extraordinary. Colonel von Hermann, the only divisional commander among COs from various corps headquarters, had already speculated on what it might be about during the drive here with Unold. He reckoned it could only concern the new plan for a breakout, rumours of which had even reached his isolated position at Dubininsky. This conjecture of his, shared by several others, was all but confirmed by what the commander of the Fifty-First Corps had to report about the eastern front of the Cauldron. Everything had been made ready there, he told them, with sectors clearly demarcated and daily objectives set. The balloon was due to go up on the third!

‘It’s very simple,’ the Fifty-First’s commander reassured them in response to the storm of questions that ensued. ‘In the north and east, we’ll disengage ourselves from the enemy gradually, while on the other parts of the front we’ll punch our way forward. In this way, the whole Cauldron will slowly start slipping – like a jellyfish, don’t you know! A kind of mobile Cauldron. And we’ll steadily move with it, heading for home.’

‘Mobile Cauldron, Mobile Cauldron,’ cantankerously muttered the only general present – an old corps commander with a head like a tiger – as he cast a disparaging eye around the walls of the new command bunker, which a pioneer company had only just completed after weeks of work. ‘Has the High Command approved this bloody nonsense, then?’

‘That’s what we’re about to find out, General!’

From outside came the sound of a car drawing up and the engine being switched off, and in the doorway there suddenly appeared – very tall and thin, with a slight stoop and clearly somewhat hesitant in his movements – General Paulus, Supreme Commander of the Sixth Army. The room fell silent, as the officers stood to attention. For a moment, their eyes rested on the general’s refined, ethereal features, which seemed somehow out of keeping with his uniform, appearing more at home above a lectern or in an academic’s study. This was the man who held all of their fates in his hand. Yet as each of them in turn stepped forward to shake this hand, which was proffered listlessly and limply, he was confronted anew with a realization that had been weighing down on the Sixth Army for some time now, like a nightmare – namely that he was not a rock that one could cling to in these desperate times. Embarrassed and not without a certain shameful feeling of pity, the officers averted their gaze from his face, once so handsome but now scarred by deep furrows and disfigured by a constant nervous twitching and blinking; and, as if drawn by some secret magic, lighted instead upon a large pair of steel-blue eyes spraying out their cold fire from behind the sloping shoulders of the supreme commander. These piercing, domineering eyes, the striking centrepiece of an energetic face beneath hair that had already greyed, belonged to the man who had entered the bunker at the same time as the general – General Arthur Schmidt, Chief of the Sixth Army’s General Staff.

‘Please, gentlemen, let’s take a seat,’ Paulus invited the officers in his muted, mellifluous voice. They took their places at a long table piled with dossiers and maps.

‘It’s a serious, a very serious matter that has prompted us to summon you here. The High Command has… It’s a matter of… Schmidt, perhaps you’d better explain the situation.’

Schmidt did not acknowledge this invitation with so much as a flicker of his eyelids. While Paulus bowed his head, looked at his folded hands and lapsed into silence and reverie, Schmidt’s compelling gaze spoke an altogether more unequivocal language. This look, which had a dangerous gleam about it, said clearly: ‘Look at me – I am the Sixth Army!’

General Schmidt began speaking. In terse sentences, laden with imperatives, he set forth the situation they were in once more – one that could not, for the time being, count on any outside assistance. The play of light in his strange blue eyes, which he somehow contrived to make flash in a constant variety of ways, held those attending the meeting in thrall. Even Unold, for whom this was nothing new, found himself – much to his annoyance – falling again for this deception. Adopting the cool and attentive expression of the professionally interested listener, he pretended to follow Schmidt’s address, but his thoughts wandered. He knew Schmidt from the days when he’d been an officer cadet, and he loathed the man with every fibre of his being. He hated everything about him: the exaggerated elegance of the pampered bachelor, his ostentatious fitness, and his whole paradoxical nature, in which an above-average intelligence was coupled with an utterly shameless deceitfulness, personable amiability could quite unexpectedly switch to cutting chilliness, and a self-indulgent capriciousness could co-exist with a pitiless severity towards others. ‘That smarmy fucker!’ Unold would spit in his bunker whenever the general, for the umpteenth time, had countermanded one of his orders. ‘Careerist poser! How that peacock loves to display his feathers!’ Among friends, he referred to Schmidt simply as ‘Lying Arthur’. Yet, time and time again, this loathing would collapse into impotent acquiescence whenever he came face to face with Schmidt. The simple truth was that Unold hated the man because he admired him. It was the hatred of unfulfilled love for an unattainable idol. In General Schmidt, fate’s spoilt golden boy, whose every move (at least on a personal level) met with success, Unold saw embodied something of the Nietzschean ‘superman’, such as he yearned to be. Hadn’t Schmidt told him only recently about a compensation claim of seventy-five thousand Reichsmarks that he’d submitted for a bombed-out bachelor pad he owned – and that he’d duly been granted it? ‘Bear in mind the wine cellar I had there!’ he’d said laughingly when he saw the stunned expression on Unold’s face.

Wait, what was that he just said? The lieutenant colonel was brought back to reality with a bump.

‘So you see,’ General Schmidt was saying, ‘we need infantry reserves. We requested that fresh forces be dispatched to us by air in good time. But by the middle of this month, High Command had already turned us down. Insufficient transport capacity. Even then we were forced to draw on reserves that we cobbled together from our logistics and staff units, and so on…’

Damn and blast, that didn’t sound like planning for a breakout! A ripple of unease passed through the room. Unold’s suddenly alert gaze lighted upon the divisional commander, who was sitting next to him. Colonel von Hermann had turned pale, and could feel the blood pulsing through his veins right to his fingertips. The news had hit him like an electric shock. So, the High Command had recommended the ‘combing out’ – for which read ‘winding up’ – of all the non-front-line occupations as early as mid-December, had it? At a time when Hoth’s rescue mission was still in full swing, then, they’d ordered a clearance sale of the entire army? Pure and simple, that was tantamount to saying, ‘We can’t help you, help yourselves as best you can…’ Had the top brass already written off the Sixth Army, in that case? Well then, if that was so, an immediate breakout using their own forces was the only thing that could save them! What were they waiting for?