Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

A look of consternation crossed the officers’ faces. All-round defence? Without any fixed positions or any materials for fortification? There’d clearly been a will and a way to construct ostentatious staff bunkers. No shortage of time, materials or manpower for that task, apparently. But no effort had been expended on preparing defensive positions!

Breuer was standing next to Captain Engelhard’s desk. His eyes wandered over the map, the pencils all neatly laid out, the fastidiously stacked piles of paperwork and files. On the desk lay a sheet of white paper. Breuer’s gaze came to rest on the few oversized letters the page contained, which read:

‘They could not prevail, they could only fall in battle! 11.1.1943. Unold.’

In front of the sheet of paper sat Captain Engelhard, bolt upright and very composed. Absent-mindedly, his hand was doodling along the bottom edge of the page. He was drawing a series of little crosses. Disturbed from his reverie by Breuer’s attention, the captain glanced up.

‘You can write home one more time, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘Straight after this meeting, we’re sending a messenger down to the airfield with the post.’

‘Lieutenant Colonel Braun will be in charge of defending the fortified position at Dubininsky,’ Unold continued.

As he made this announcement, he pointed to an officer with a ruddy face and watery goggle eyes who was turning a lambskin cap round and round in his hands.

‘As of now, all units stationed in and around Dubininsky are under his direct command… and that includes our staff. I need to speak with you presently, Fackelmann, about putting together a special fighting group. First Lieutenant Breuer will serve as Lieutenant Colonel Braun’s adjutant and the rest of the staff officers will form an officers’ fighting unit at the front under the command of Captain Engelhard.’

The disquiet among those present increased palpably.

‘But that’s out of the question!’ a short captain muffled up like Father Christmas called out nervously. ‘We’re in the middle of baking… our division has to eat, after all! I can’t just drop everything all of a sudden and leave the loaves and the flour standing there. The whole lot’ll be nicked in the meantime!’

‘And what about my workshop?’ shouted another. ‘I’ve got two tanks and about thirty other vehicles under repair.’

‘And I…’ ‘And I…’ A cacophony of objections buzzed round the room. It transpired that a large number of those present ruled themselves entirely out of participating in the defence of Dubininsky on the grounds that they had more important tasks to perform.

‘Now just hold your horses a minute!’ Unold interrupted the hubbub. ‘I think you’re labouring under some kind of misapprehension. To put it bluntly: we’ve had it! There aren’t any other tasks any more. We’re under orders to die here, and that’s that! You’re aware that the Corps commander is here with his staff, too. Well, he’s already chosen the foxhole where he’s going to fight till the very last bullet. That’s how things stand!’

The room had fallen very quiet. Only the little bakery captain kept muttering: ‘My God, my God!’

At the back of the room, the door creaked and someone pushed their way rather roughly to the front. It was Captain Endrigkeit. He gave an awkward salute.

‘Lieutenant Colonel, sir, beg to report,’ he droned in his deep bass voice, ‘that we’ve seen the last of the prisoner.’

For a moment, Unold looked at him blankly. He’d forgotten completely about Lakosch in the interim. Then he remembered.

‘Very good, Endrigkeit!’ he replied briefly. ‘So that business is settled, then.’

‘No, not at all, Lieutenant Colonel,’ Endrigkeit persisted. ‘It’s not settled at all… far from it, in fact. Lakosch is gone, he’s done a bunk. When we opened up the bunker first thing this morning, he’d vanished.’

And that was indeed the truth of the matter. For a few moments, the lieutenant colonel’s face took on an expression of childlike helplessness.

‘Endrigkeit!’ he gasped, almost imploringly. ‘You’re driving me round the bend!’ Then he barked, at the top of his lungs: ‘Do you take me for a complete fool, you… I hold you fully responsible for what’s happened! I’ll have you court-martialled for this! Thrown in the glasshouse, and shot! I’ll get you sent to the front, you incompetent ass…!’

He broke off suddenly, as he realized how empty his threats were.

‘You’ll pay for this stunt of yours, Endrigkeit!’ he said through gritted teeth, before adding, quite calmly and impersonally: ‘You are to place yourself and your squad at Lieutenant Colonel Braun’s disposal for the defence of the village.’

No one in the intelligence division had any more time to think about the ‘Lakosch case’. First Lieutenant Breuer was immediately requisitioned by the new base commander. Lieutenant Colonel Braun’s frenetic activity knew no bounds. He was constantly having new brainwaves, and the orders he issued, in a hoarse croak of a voice, were frequently unintelligible. Breuer was on his feet from dawn to dusk without pause. He had to go round visiting units and brief detachments on defensive techniques; provisions, weapons and entrenching tools had to be found from somewhere. Stubbornness and ill will led to friction and clashes. From the outset, this was particularly the case up at the forward position on the road, where, with the help of the military police, the bands of soldiers streaming back from the breached front were to be intercepted. Men from the most diverse units pitched up there, exhausted, with no officers in charge and in some instances without any weapons. If the accounts they gave – a blend of truth and skittish fantasy – were to be believed, then German forces at the western front of the Cauldron had been wiped out. Two completely distraught medical orderlies recounted how Russian tanks had broken into their dressing station. Total panic had ensued. Stretchers with wounded men on them were simply left out in the open and abandoned. A captured Russian major who had been among the serious casualties had been swiftly ‘dispatched’.

‘What – you shot the wounded Russian?’ those listening cried in horror. ‘And left the body next to your German comrades? Are you crazy or what? You know what’ll happen to our wounded now, don’t you?’ The two men fell silent. Finally, one of them said, ‘Look, it’s all the bloody same now. The Russians are killing everything that moves anyhow!’

Only late in the evening did Breuer finally find the opportunity to request some free time from the lieutenant colonel in order to sort out his own affairs. He was dismissed brusquely. When he got to his bunker he found it empty. The men had already left. The little stove was glowing red-hot, and papers were lying scattered on the floor. Corporal Herbert had evidently burned all the files and dispatches that had accumulated again over the past few weeks. Breuer cast his eyes around the room, over the cracked clay walls, the rough plank table that had served as his and Wiese’s bed, the telephone, the little flickering storm lantern, and the slogan on the wall, already rather yellowed and faded. ‘I break on through and never look back…’ His thoughts were calm and collected. So this was the end. There would be no breakthrough and no future. Now they’d perish here on a distant foreign field, abandoned, forgotten, and with no hope of even a grave… It wasn’t death itself that frightened him. But he had a strong sense that he’d lost all faith in the point of his impending demise.

What are we dying for exactly? he asked himself. For the Fatherland? That could scarcely be defended from their position here on the Volga. For metal ores, oil and wheat? No, not for those commodities either. To save the Eastern Front, then? Well, if the twenty-two German divisions had been on the other side of the river, west of the Don, they might have stood a chance of saving the Eastern Front, but not here. So for what? Just because Hitler had once boasted ‘Once we’re dug in somewhere, there’s no shifting us’? Was that the reason they were being cut down here like robbers and bandits?