Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Peters saw day by day how the stretcher-bearers would stumble in unfeeling monotony with their loads to the place behind the shed, where the Russian Hiwis scraped out makeshift graves in the snow to bury the long line of corpses. And he stood in attendance while this was going on and noticed how one of the Russians pointed at the pile of bodies that had just been unloaded and announced in broken German: ‘Lives! Still lives!’ And he was right, there was a man among the corpses who was still alive! His mouth opened and closed in grinding motions in his frozen face, while the fingers of one hand, lying listlessly in the snow, tightened and unclenched again in the same rhythm. Without a word and with a studied air of indifference, the bearers heaved their burden back up onto their shoulders and trudged back to the stables.

Padre Peters saw all of this, and he saw it as a human being whose gaze was fixed not on the husk of the body but on the kernel of the soul. The men who were suffering so anonymously here, dying in his arms, in agony or with curses on their lips or in harrowingly dumb submissiveness, were not in Peters’s eyes simply soldiers, serial numbers or cannon fodder. Each of them revealed himself – often in deeply moving last testaments – to be a profound and multi-faceted individual blessed by God. They had all worked and loved and hoped and gone astray; they were the loved ones of women and children or the object of a mother’s anxious concern. As he looked on, this misery multiplied into a penitential procession by a whole people, and suddenly all the suffering and death broke over Padre Peters with unchecked force. He agonized and prayed to God to give him strength. And the inner strength he gained from these prayers he channelled into the services he conducted in rotation with his young colleague from the other denomination. Here he found words that, for a few brief moments, filled the dismal room with light and warmth and provided succour to the soul when the hand of the doctor could no longer help the body. It was in moments such as these that he truly felt his career to be a vocation.

But the situation went beyond all human endurance. The tide of misery threatened to engulf him. At that point, the part of his being that remained untainted triggered a kind of automatic self-preservation mechanism. Like in a leaking ship, the bulkheads within him shut fast against the overpowering swell of suffering, only letting through what his soul was able to deal with. This meant that, at times, he was totally abstracted, carelessly stumbling over the rows of wounded soldiers and oblivious to the groans of the men he trod on. Utterly unaware of what he was doing – if he’d realized the full extent of his actions, he would have been horrified at himself – he gradually learned, just as the surgeon standing there at his blood-soaked operating table had done, to apply a kind of triage system to his pastoral care. His brain would automatically register when a person was in dire need of spiritual comfort or could forego it, and he would only deploy the valuable psychological forces of empathy and sympathy in priority cases, dismissing anything that fell outside this category. Accordingly, he had begun by offering up a short prayer for the dead who were being buried outside. Now he gave that up. Every prayer for the dead was one less he could expend on men who, for the time being at least, were still clinging on to life. For all his active involvement at the dressing station, Padre Peters knew full well that everyone who came here was already marked for death and that the only question remaining was in what precise manner they would depart this life.

When the division had been relieved by a motorized division from the south at the start of January, Colonel Steigmann was the only one among his comrades who did not greet this switch with unalloyed delight. Sure, this relief was fully deserved, and the fact that the best-equipped unit in the Cauldron was now taking over the defence of its most difficult sector seemed to be in everyone’s best interests. But the self-confident, supercilious way in which the officers of the relief unit had looked at his tried-and-tested defensive system… he hoped these gentlemen wouldn’t have any nasty surprises! But everyone else was over the moon at being transferred to the quiet and well-secured southern sector. They really had been saved by the skin of their teeth; this was almost like a holiday! And there had been no envy or annoyance when the advance parties of the new unit came to cast a condescending eye over their pitiful defensive positions. ‘So this is where you’ve been living, eh? Oh well, no matter, no matter. We’ll build everything ourselves! We’ve brought whole columns of lorries along with building timber and T-beams!’ Fine then, so much the better! Good luck with that! Their own division at least were sick to the back teeth with this miserable sector, which they’d defended at such a high cost in blood.

The self-confidence of the ‘new boys’ didn’t always ring true. Another person who followed the changeover between the two divisions with very mixed feelings was Harras, recently promoted to the rank of lieutenant. His hopes had once more deceived him: Unold had refused his request for a transfer, and the supposedly imminent breakout from the Cauldron had come to nothing as well. Now he found himself embroiled in this unholy mess as a company leader. That trick he’d pulled a while back hadn’t paid off, despite being awarded the Iron Cross First Class and getting himself promoted. Quite the opposite, in fact: it would have been better to have stayed with the Russians. But the way back to the enemy lines was now barred too.

Besides, despite being relatively well equipped with winter clothing, it turned out that the men from the motorized unit, who were used to warm bunkers, could not cope with this snowy, shelterless wasteland. They were often found frozen to death in the morning in their foxholes, their rifles still in the firing position. From the very first day, the losses as a result of the severe cold were shockingly high, but there was no question of engineering work to improve the forward positions even though piles of railway sleepers lay ready behind the lines. You couldn’t raise your head above the parapet by either day or night now. With growing alarm, the unit leaders observed movements on the other side, which indicated that new forces were being brought into position. Had that always been the case here, or were they preparing for something special? The new division’s unfamiliarity with this sector contributed to a general sense of nervousness.

And so it came to the ninth of January. The preceding two days had passed off unusually quietly, so that evening in the battalion bunker a game of Skat was organized, something they hadn’t done for a while. The Arse – who had been made a captain on the first of January – was also less than overjoyed about the division’s relocation to another sector. His unhappiness manifested itself firstly in an increased intake of alcohol and secondly in him cursing about anything and everything – the lousy bunker, the feeble new troops and their endless complaints about the cold, the rations, the smoking stove, the dog-eared playing cards, and the top brass from the regimental staff upwards, who were solely responsible for the shit they were in. Yet none of this prevented him from being tirelessly active on behalf of his battalion from morning to night.

The fact that he showed his face at the forward front line on an almost daily basis and wasn’t afraid of contradicting the divisional commander if he felt it necessary had earned him the respect of the ordinary soldiers, though he did ask a lot of them. He was one of those eternal mercenaries for whom war and fighting at the front had become a way of life and who in peacetime generally go to the dogs for lack of any suitable job opportunities.