Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

A VW Kübelwagen that was trying to get past the truck sticks fast in the verge. Its tyres, wrapped with snow chains, spin wildly, kicking up dirty snow behind it. An officer paces back and forth beside the car. His long fur coat is unbuttoned and his sheepskin cap has tipped back on his head. It is Colonel Steigmann.

‘Stop!’ he shouts. ‘Lend a hand here, will you? Come on, someone give us a push!’

He shouts himself hoarse. No one is listening to him. He leaps over to the line of figures shambling past, tugging at their sleeves and staring into their expressionless faces. They casually shrug him off, push him aside. He shrinks visibly, all the determination drains from his face and his eyes narrow and moisten. The giant of a man shivers with impotent rage.

Harras lets himself be carried onward. Mechanically he moves his stiff feet: one – two, one – two. The road appears endless to him, and time infinite. He is bemused by the unreality of this grim night. It is as though he has been transported to some dead planet in the outer realms of the universe. Is this still the Earth, then, this awful, silent, icy wasteland surrounding him here? Are these still human beings, these grimacing, unfeeling wraiths? In his state of utter exhaustion, tantalizing images start to swim before his consciousness, images full of light, warmth and life. Spring meadows full of flowers, sunshine, the scent of lilac, and soft music…

Once more the column grinds to a halt. Half-frozen bodies slip down from the lorries and try to instil some warmth into frozen limbs by shaking their arms jerkily and stamping up and down. Meantime, others on foot who still have some energy and hope left crowd around the trucks to see if they can find themselves a free space, but are pushed away fiercely by those sitting up back. Harras gropes his way along the line of stationary vehicles. He knows he could keel over at any moment and he doesn’t even fight against it any longer. He is brought up with a jolt as he walks into the back of another person. A pair of eyes looks at him from above a heavily frosted scarf. From their depths there suddenly comes a flicker of recognition.

‘Is that you, Lieutenant, sir?’ says the figure. ‘Are you still alive?’

Saying this, he tugs aside the scarf. It is his batman.

‘Hey, Franz, Karl! Give me a hand here! It’s our lieutenant!’

Hands are extended towards Harras, hauling him up into the back of a lorry. He sinks down between crates and barrels and densely packed figures dusted with snow. Men from his company are among them. The truck is one from the battalion’s transport unit. Someone pulls a sheepskin from the back of the lorry and blankets are thrown over him. The truck moves slowly forward.

Somewhere further back in the stream of vehicles, Colonel Steigmann’s VW is on the move again. A colonel without a regiment – a head without a body. Can a head keep on living when the body has been torn to pieces? At one point, there’s a bang somewhere at the rear. Damn it, thinks the driver, a puncture! But the car trundles on at the same slow tempo. Just a backfire!

Harras is unable to provide any answers to the brief questions his men ask him. An overpowering feeling is welling up within him and stifling his ability to speak. He looks up to the pitch-black night sky, where the bright stars once more seem close and familiar to him. People! This is the one thought that comes into his head: these are people, after all! He drags the sheepskin over his head and nestles his frost-stiffened face in the woolly pelt. He feels small and safe, like a child back in the arms of his mother. Her deep voice is ringing in his ears. ‘My boy, my boy!’ That’s what she always used to say to him. She’d been so proud of him, and had shown such faith in him. Tears are running down his face. ‘What have they done to us?’ he thinks. ‘My God, what have they done to us?’

Colonel Steigmann’s car finally noses its way into the mayhem of the Talovoy Gorge. The divisional staff must be somewhere around here! The driver switches off the engine. There’s no movement in the back of the car. The driver turns round and sees that the colonel is lying dead, his pistol still clutched in his hand. The blood on his face is frozen. So, it hadn’t been the car backfiring after all…

That was the night of the sixteenth of January, 1943. For some time thereafter, long lines of abandoned, looted vehicles, discarded clothes, scattered papers, weapons and equipment, frozen-stiff bodies crouching down in the lee of cars or crushed and splattered to an unrecognizable pulp on the carriageway scarred the route from Pitomnik to Talovoy. In the event, it turned out that all this chaos and panic, and all the many deaths that ensued, had been triggered by nothing more than a Russian raiding party, supported by two or three tanks, which had probed as far as the village of Pitomnik and, after a few firefights, had promptly withdrawn again.

The lieutenant colonel had made himself comfortable at the quarters. Major Siebel had gone out early that morning with Breuer, so he was hoping to spend a pleasant day with no disturbances. A search of their new quarters had turned up a well-thumbed volume bound in linen. Stretched out contentedly on a bench, he carefully polished his pince-nez and then, with raised eyebrows, opened the book. In large red letters on the title page he read the word ‘Bread!’ and underneath it the subtitle ‘The Defence of Tsaritsyn’. What was this – the author’s name was Tolstoy? That was that old Russian count with delusional ideas on religion and social reform! But that Tolstoy’s Christian name was Leo, if memory served, whereas this writer was called Alexei. Ah well, probably a son of the old Tolstoy. Sometimes becoming a writer was a hereditary thing… He started leafing through the book. It was all about this dump here, Stalingrad! The city had once been called Tsaritsyn, had it? Aha… And it turned out that German troops had been here before in numbers, in 1918. Well, well, you learn something new every day! Seems it had been a do-or-die affair for the Bolsheviks back then, too. Well, hadn’t he been saying all along that what happened at Stalingrad would decide the outcome of the war! If the Germans were to succeed this time around, then it’d finally be curtains for Stalin and his comrades. He put the book down and picked at his teeth reflectively. All the same, it had to be said that things weren’t going too well right now. After what he’d witnessed in the past couple of days… The German Army High Command seemed to have no overall grasp of the situation! And there was no order, no discipline! Things wouldn’t have been like that in the ’14–’18 war…

The lieutenant colonel threw the book onto the table and jumped up. Wouldn’t this infernal noise ever cease? A badly tuned engine had been left rattling away outside the bunker for quite some time; every now and then the sound was interrupted by the engine backfiring. The lieutenant colonel flung open the door. Christ Almighty, it was cold out there! From the ridge opposite, a long column was snaking down into the gorge, an unbroken line of lorries and cars. Vehicles were already beginning to crowd into the broad square in front of the bunkers. Immediately outside the door stood an open-topped Kübelwagen , snorting and shuddering like an exhausted horse. A man was looking inside the open bonnet. In his fur greatcoat, which reached almost to the ground and had a broad turned-up collar, he looked like a polar bear.

‘Hey, you! Are you out of your mind, or what? Turn the engine off, will you, or clear off!’

The frost in the air deadened the words to virtual silence. The man didn’t even bother turning round. The cold appeared to have robbed him of all capacity of hearing and speech. It also dissuaded the lieutenant colonel from investigating the matter any further. Coughing, he turned away and slammed the door behind him. He switched the light on, threw a couple more logs into the stove and immersed himself in his book once more. But he was not to be granted any peace. Outside he heard the sound of clumping footsteps. The door flew open and a group of soldiers barged their way into the room. Their bluish-yellow faces, frozen-stiff coats and jackets, and snow-encrusted bundles of rags wrapped around their feet instantly turned the atmosphere into the inside of a refrigerator. The men at the front stopped and blinked stupidly at the unaccustomed brightness. The lieutenant colonel furrowed his brow and peered over his pince-nez at the interlopers.