Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘That’s sheer insanity!’ he roared. ‘And are you telling me the Army High Command’s going along with that? Has everyone here gone stark raving mad? How much longer are they going to dance to the tune of this crazy corporal? The Officer Corps, the generals and the field marshals – the whole German general staff is letting itself be led by the nose by this upstart, incompetent, loud-mouthed little thug? It’s enough… enough to…’

He stared at the wall and clenched his fists, ready to strike an unseen opponent.

‘Pull yourself together, Dannemeister!’ the colonel rounded on the chief of operations. ‘Don’t forget that you’re an officer! I won’t stand for any criticism of the Führer in my presence, understood? You can think what you like as far as I’m concerned, but keep your thoughts to yourself!’

The lieutenant colonel was startled by the unexpectedly sharp tone of the colonel’s rebuke. Cowed into submission, he asked quietly, ‘So what do we do now, Colonel?’

‘What do we do?’ the colonel repeated in astonishment. ‘You’re asking me that? You’re a soldier yourself, man! We’ll follow orders, that’s what!’

The apathetic mood of indifference that had come over Lieutenant Wiese prevented him from speculating on why the colonel had chosen him, of all people, to be his adjutant. He never took him on inspection tours, gave him no tasks to perform and left him entirely to his own esoteric devices. But Wiese was shaken out of his ivory tower when the colonel summoned him out of the blue one evening.

‘There are professional and personal reasons why I’ve ordered you here,’ said von Hermann, pushing one of the two chairs in his room towards Wiese and offering him a cigarette. ‘We’re in the endgame, Wiese; the Cauldron’s falling apart. The final act of the tragedy has begun.’

The lieutenant looked wide-eyed at the colonel, who in the meantime had stood up and was slowly pacing up and down the room.

‘No one will want to hear the truth about Stalingrad,’ he went on, ‘but I honestly believe Germany needs to know about it. There must be men over there with the courage to report what really happened. And that oughtn’t to be just a soldier, it needs to be someone who can… well, who can tell the story from a human perspective, if you catch my drift? And I’d also like…’ – here his voice gave a slight tremble – ‘I’d like it if my wife heard from the right person something that I can’t put down on paper – about how we met our end here, and also… how our son died.’

Wiese slowly rose to his feet. He had turned white as a sheet.

‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ the colonel went on, ‘you didn’t know, did you? Yes, he’s dead. Anyway, the Corps has been ordered to appoint a messenger to the army group. I’ve nominated you, Wiese. Everyone was in agreement. You’ll fly out tomorrow from the airfield at Pitomnik. Here, take this package. My wife’s address is on it. You can collect the other officers’ letters tomorrow from the adjutant.’

Wiese felt like his legs were made of lead and the room swam before his eyes. The colonel looked at him, seemingly waiting for an answer. Then he placed his hand on his shoulder.

‘I quite understand, Wiese,’ he said in fatherly tones. ‘Just make sure you get on that flight. After this war, Germany’s going to need men like you who aren’t just soldiers.’

Searching for an adequate response, the lieutenant was tongue-tied. But then he blurted out something really stupid, something every soldier would have laughed at because it was so out of place and old-fashioned, reminiscent of the spiked helmets and shaven heads of the Prussian military:

‘At your command, Colonel, sir!’

First Lieutenant Breuer lay stretched out on his plank bed with his eyes closed. He could feel the lice crawling slowly up and down his prone form. His body, emaciated by dysentery and hunger, burned and itched all over. But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was also corruption that ate away at a person from the inside.

That final night in Dubininsky, he’d drawn a line under everything in the belief that that fateful order – ‘The position is to be held to the very last man!’ – was going to be carried out to the letter. Like the fool he was. Could he really have thought for one moment that a man like Unold would see it as his solemn duty to be the last man to fall at Dubininsky? Hadn’t he known that the ‘last man’ always meant someone else and never yourself? Well, he knew it now!

What had happened? There had been one icy night full of anticipation, involving a lot of shouting and nervous to-ing and fro-ing and frozen limbs. But the Russians had never appeared. It hadn’t come to that quite yet. The front hadn’t been destroyed everywhere; in the north, the Russian attempt to break through came to nothing, while at the salient at Marinovka a German division had held a supposedly hopeless position for several days. And even at the place in the west where a breakthrough had been achieved, the enemy were hesitant at driving forces through the gap they had opened up. The Russian military leadership was taking its time. Victory was already assured, and there was no desire to make needless sacrifices just in order to chalk up a high-profile success. This had enabled the Germans to use the remnants of their defeated units to establish another front in the Rossoshka Valley, where favourable terrain facilitated the formation of a shortened defensive line. This line held for four days. What remained of the German artillery fought in the most forward positions there and used up the last of its shells in a direct bombardment. It was a last-ditch effort. On the fifteenth of January, the last of the field guns and the smoke mortars were blown up. Now there was precious little left to hold back the Russian advance.

Breuer only learned all this long after the event. The morning after in Dubininsky, all he’d heard was an order from Unold: ‘Get yourselves ready immediately! The divisional staff is relocating to the rear!’ Confronted with uncomprehending, questioning faces, Breuer had muttered something about a fresh start. But then his nerves had frayed: ‘Any shithead can die!’ he’d yelled. ‘But it takes a general staff officer to have brains and show some leadership!’

The first lieutenant thrashed about uneasily on his pallet. A choking sense of disgust rose in his gorge. They’d fled twenty kilometres to the east in the last of the serviceable vehicles, trading in their last vestiges of dignity and self-esteem for a few days’ delay of the inevitable conclusion. How squalid the whole situation was!

Now they were holed up here in a gully not far from the main road leading from Gumrak to the centre of Stalingrad. On the map, the place was identified as ‘Stalingradski’. Once again, they’d escaped from the front. But the frequent impacts from Russian artillery shells, fired across from the east bank of the Volga, must have brought it home even to Unold how pointless it would be to keep on running. They were caught in a trap that was closing tighter with every hour that passed. Up on the plateau above stood the last few vehicles they’d been able to salvage: a crew bus, a few lorries, staff cars and Kübelwagen , and last but not least the mess truck with the alcohol supplies (which Unold had commandeered for his personal use). All the rest, which they could not get started or had no more fuel for, they had destroyed at Dubininsky. Nor had they bothered any more to put the vehicles under cover here, in however rudimentary a fashion. The jalopies had done their bit. There was no fuel left for any more retreats.