Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

From all sides, soldiers come stumbling as fast as they can through the deep, ice-crusted snow towards the blazing aircraft, shouting and waving their arms. A crash like this is a red-letter day, a welcome change from the bleak monotony of their daily lives; and besides, who can say what treasures the ‘Ju’ might be carrying?

‘Come on, lads! Maybe it’s a cargo of Scho-Ka-Kola!’ ‘Or salami!’ ‘Hope it’s not fuel or ammo!’

Lieutenant Wiese dashes round the burning plane. It’s in a bad way. One of its engines has embedded itself deep in the wing and is on fire. Thick smoke is also billowing from the middle of the fuselage. Soldiers are crowding around the cockpit, pressing their faces to the windows. Oblivious to the flames, two men have clambered up on to the side of the plane.

‘Get down from there!’ Breuer shouts at them. ‘Do you want to get burned alive, or what?’

‘But the crew’s still trapped inside, Lieutenant!’

Lieutenant Wiese rushes up to lend a helping hand. The pilot and co-pilot are trapped in the front part of the aircraft. It appears the access door into the cockpit from the cabin has got jammed after the hard landing. The heat of the fire has roused the two men, who must initially have been stunned by the impact of the crash. They are screaming and hammering wildly at the plane’s corrugated skin. Every now and then, their heads appear at the smoke-blackened windows. One of them seems to be wounded; his face is smeared with blood. The seamless aluminium sides of the plane and the smooth windows offer nowhere for the rescuers to gain purchase.

‘A hatchet! Someone fetch a hatchet!’ shouts Wiese. A couple of men head off towards the bunkers. The side loading-door of the aircraft is swinging loose on its hinges. Cubes of dried, compressed pea flour have poured from the opening, forming a huge pile. The flames are already licking around them. The troops have pounced on the heap, eagerly filling their pockets, forage caps and balaclavas with the goods. After running around the plane to try to gain access, Breuer and Geibel drag a body out from the tail section. It is the rear gunner. He isn’t moving but is still just about breathing. His face and hands are blistered from the intense heat. He is wrapped in a coat and carried away. All attempts to break into the cockpit prove fruitless. By this time, the metal skin of the aircraft is too hot to touch. Fierce flames now erupt from the engines and the cockpit, spraying burning fuel around, and the aluminium ignites, emitting a blinding bluish-white light that hisses and splutters. The heat is becoming unbearable and the smoke ever more acrid. All at once, there is a loud bang. Someone shouts:

‘Watch out! Get back! Take cover! The machine-gun belts are going up!’

There follows an erratic patter of small detonations. Burst cartridges buzz through the air with a metallic hum. The rescuers eventually manage to smash through the toughened glass of the cockpit windows, but the opening is too narrow to pull the pilots through. The sudden influx of air prevents them from suffocating, but that only makes their predicament all the more awful. The piercing screams of the men don’t sound human any more. Their piteous shrieks drown out the spitting, crackling sound of the voracious blaze.

‘Hee-ee-ee-lp!! … Shoot me! Shoo-oot me! … Eeeaurghh… aaaiiieeee… hee-ee-ee-lp… Mo–oother… Mo– aaaaaiih…’

Every so often, when the smoke clears, they catch glimpses through the window openings of the men’s faces contorted in their death agonies and framed with tongues of leaping flame.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty,’ gasps Breuer. ‘We’ve got to put them out of their misery!… Doesn’t anyone have a gun? This is ghastly!’

Lieutenant Wiese stands there staring at the inferno in helpless horror. A thought is hammering away in his brain with painful insistence: Dear God, we have to do something! We can’t just look on helplessly and impotently while two people are burned alive in front of us! We just can’t! His head threatens to explode.

He shields his eyes with his hand, as if hoping that this will efface the reality of these dreadful minutes. He feels the urge to run away, to bury his burning head in the snow, and to see and hear nothing more. But he doesn’t act on it. Instead, he does something else… All of a sudden, he feels as though his dislocated self has parted company with his body. He has a sense of floating, light as a feather, free and formless. He’s looking down on his body like it belongs to someone else, and sees himself straighten up, reach into the leather satchel at his side, pull out a pistol, release the safety catch and slowly, ever so slowly and without trembling, raise it to eye level and take aim. He sees the finger tense on the trigger, hears from afar the report of the shots, and watches the bullets fly straight into the terrible grimacing faces there in the fiery cage. And with an ardent rush of sympathy, he senses that the person down there has done something good and charitable but at the same time something terrible; and a warm feeling of contentment washes over him. That’s not me, no, that’s not me! Fate has spared me from having to make this dreadful decision. It’s not me!

The blood-curdling screams have ceased, and the faces have vanished from the windows. The nose of the aircraft is now one vast sea of flame, forcing the onlookers to retreat to a safer distance. Only Lieutenant Wiese stays rooted to the spot. His cap has fallen into the snow and the searing heat is scorching his face. He doesn’t notice it. He stands there like a statue. Slowly, his arm sinks to his side and the pistol drops from his hand. Then he turns around and walks stiffly and with hesitant steps towards the circle of men. His gait is that of a sleepwalker. His staring eyes look as if they are sightless. Silently, the men move aside to let him pass. Breuer stretches out his hand. ‘Wiese,’ he says quietly, ‘come here.’

The lieutenant’s vacant gaze passes straight through him. He staggers past them through the snow with weary steps. Meanwhile, at the rear of the aircraft, disregarding the flames, the soldiers keep returning to fall upon the cremated cubes of dried pea, jostling and fighting with one another and scraping up handfuls of pea-flour mixed with dirty snow into mess tins and cooking pots. One man’s clothes have caught fire. He runs across the field waving his arms and yelling. No one pays him any attention. He hurls himself into a deep snow bank and rolls around in it like a dog, whimpering.

Even after several hours, the wreck of the burned-out plane is still smouldering. Soldiers continue to poke around with sticks in the smoking debris; here and there, men are nibbling on charcoal-crusted lumps of pea-flour that have been welded together. The two dead men have been recovered from the wreckage. They lie in the snow, blackened and unrecognizable, shrivelled by the heat to the size of dwarves, and with a few strips of charred clothing still clinging to their grotesquely twisted limbs. Standing over them is Colonel von Hermann, who has driven out to the crash site with Captain Engelhard. He stares in silence at their desiccated, shrunken faces, which look for all the world like wizened apples. Then he slowly takes off his greatcoat and lays it over the bodies.

Colonel von Hermann sits in his bunker in front of the small trestle table. He rubs his hand a couple of times across his eyes, which he has screwed up like something is dazzling him. There is a knock at the door. The colonel wakes with a start from his reverie.

‘Come in!’

The sergeant from the adjutant’s office enters and gives a brisk salute.

‘Begging your pardon, Colonel, sir,’ he stammers, ‘I wanted… I thought… Lieutenant Colonel Unold isn’t here, is he, sir?’