Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘What’s that, where…?’ Breuer snatched up the slip of paper again. ‘the ninth of the first, 10.00 hours, you’re right! I must go and speak to the chief of staff this instant!’

Over in the CO’s bunker he found Colonel von Hermann busy packing his things.

‘Good that you’ve dropped by, Breuer,’ von Hermann greeted him. ‘That means I can say my goodbyes right now. And please inform Lieutenant Wiese he should get ready to leave straight away! He’s coming with me to the new division as my adjutant.’

Breuer stood there, thunderstruck. The CO was leaving, and Wiese was going with him. Their little circle was breaking up. Everything was falling apart…

‘What have you got there for me?’ asked the colonel, reaching for the slip that Breuer still clutched in his hand. ‘Oh right, the leaflet with the Russian ultimatum! Yes, please destroy that! And make sure the men don’t get to learn about its contents.’

Von Hermann went over to his desk and started searching through some papers.

‘Here, this concerns the Intelligence Section.’ He handed Breuer a typewritten form, which read:

TO THE GENERAL COMMANDING, 14 THPANZER CORPS.

SECTION IC.

COMMUNIQUÉ TO BE READ TO THE RANKS.

On 8.1.43, at Makeyevka, Russian peace envoys delivered a sealed letter addressed to the Supreme Commander of the Sixth Army containing a call to surrender. German representatives refused to take delivery of the letter, and the Russian officers were immediately dismissed.

Now the enemy has realized that he cannot conquer the Cauldron by force of arms, he is trying to undermine our resistance with transparent propaganda tricks. He will not succeed! The Sixth Army will hold Stalingrad until the hour of liberation approaches.

In future, if any enemy peace negotiators attempt to approach our lines, they should be fired upon.

Breuer woke from sleep with a start. He looked about in confusion. His heart was thumping wildly and his chest felt like it was being held fast by bands of iron. What the hell was going on? Had he been having a bad dream? The room was filled with the steady breathing of other sleepers. From beneath the table he was sleeping on came the monotonous sawing sound of Fröhlich’s snoring. The first light of dawn was breaking through the small window. The lamp hanging from the ceiling, whose wick had been turned down to just a pinprick of flame, flickered gently and the grey half-shadows in the room were heavy with foreboding. And all of a sudden Breuer knew what had woken him from his slumbers.

‘Hey, Fröhlich!’

A reluctant grunt came from below.

‘Hey, wake up, will you man? Just listen!’

Fröhlich’s sleepy face appeared from beneath the tabletop, gazing up questioningly at the first lieutenant, who was listening intently. And now Fröhlich heard it too as it drifted over to them, a persistent dull rumble that sounded like a far-off drum roll.

‘Artillery fire!’

‘Yeah, that’s right, artillery fire,’ Breuer replied. Gingerly, the two of them picked their way over their sleeping comrades and emerged into the biting cold of the early morning. Out here, the noise, only faintly audible down in the bunker, filled the entire expanse of the landscape: an incessant rumbling punctuated with muffled thuds, which appeared to be bursting forth from the skies and the earth simultaneously and making the ground tremble like it was suffering a shivering fit. The western sky, though, where the shadows of the fast-vanishing night still hung, was bathed in a blood-red glow, into which tongues of yellow flame kept shooting all along the horizon. The two men stood and held their breath. Breuer placed a heavy hand on the shoulder of the Sonderführer.

‘It’s the main Russian offensive,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s beginning.’

A main field dressing station on the edge of the Rossoshka Valley, just one of many. It had been set up to deal with two hundred casualties at most, though now there were more than six hundred men lying there. They lay packed in like sardines in the semi-darkness of the old stable block, those torn, mutilated, frost-disfigured human bodies that still harboured a glimmer of life. And they sat in the long corridors, every man sitting between the legs of the man behind him, their ragged clothes teeming with lice as dense as a coating of mould. And when one of them moved, a ripple of pained groans ran through their ranks. The stench of a wild animal’s cage, rank enough to make you catch your breath, filled the building. Lumps of peat were burning in two empty petrol drums, sending clouds of acrid smoke billowing up to the wooden-boarded roof of the stables, which was holed in many places. But the cold also seeped into the room through the small glassless windows and the crumbling clay walls, creeping into the men’s faces and hands and freezing solid the contents of drug vials.

This house of misery, which frequently shook from the impact of artillery shells nearby or bombs dropped in the night by planes, had cast its spell over Padre Peters and refused to let him go. The images of this horrific world followed him into the spells of fitful sleep he managed to snatch at dead of night. There was that trench beside the shed, for instance, full to the brim with amputated limbs… and the untold number of new ‘admissions’ every day, who lay outside in the snow and were forced to wait until space was made for them inside. The medical orderlies sullenly weaved their way between them, here and there dragging to one side the stiff cadaver of someone who had lost too much blood and had not survived the severe frost. Padre Peters had to witness all of this. Then there was the field surgeon here, a tall, gaunt fellow who wore a permanent hangdog expression and who barely slept, keeping himself awake with coffee and other stimulants. In the light cast by an oil lamp, he would stand over the simple trestle table that served as an operating table and worked with cramped hands on opened-up bodies that steamed in the chill air like a washing tub. He was in the habit of weighing up the seriousness of the men’s injuries with curt dispassion: ‘Stomach wound – that’ll take an hour. Can’t do anything about that… not now, anyhow.’ Not now; that meant never. But in an hour, he and his team here could perform three amputations; if they immediately wrote off one hopeless case, then there was a slim chance they could save the lives of three other men. It was a simple calculation, dreadful in its sober logic.

Padre Peters saw all this, day in, day out. And he saw assistants and orderlies keel over during operations from lack of sleep; he saw wounded men lying there apathetically, sunk in profound hopelessness and waiting silently for the end to come; he saw those who, out of sheer desperation, tried to help themselves and, either by using subterfuge or by summoning up their last remaining strength, somehow managed to get themselves as far as the operating table. When they were rebuffed and told to get lost, they begged the medical staff to be merciful and put a bullet through their heads or give them a lethal injection. He saw the feverish waves of renewed hope swell up over the lines of men whenever the surgeon major managed to flag down a couple of empty lorries and dispatch thirty to forty men, primarily those with brain or eye injuries, to the airfield at Pitomnik, or when a rumour frequently spread and given credence – namely that German tanks were approaching – was revived and did the rounds once more.

And he saw starving men, emaciated by dysentery and bouts of diarrhoea – not the countless men in this condition who perished of sheer weakness in snow holes out in the open somewhere, but the few who still had sufficient strength to drag their hopes to this field hospital. He looked into their mask-like, twisted faces, which had a bluish pallor to them, and their wide, staring eyes that glowed feverishly in dark hollowed-out sockets, and watched them wolf down the food that was handed them like wild animals, only to double up on the floor, wracked by violent stomach cramps, just a few minutes later. The doctor would shrug his shoulders: ‘Nothing to be done; their bodies just won’t accept solids any more. What they need is two months’ worth of glucose injections.’ And for a few seconds, Peters would see a fleeting mirage of white hospital beds, light, sun, and nurses in crisp white uniforms with kindly eyes and soft, gentle hands…