Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘In the west, there’s no longer a watertight front to speak of. We can hold out for ten days more at the most. But ten days’ worth of desperate, if heroic, fighting isn’t going to help anyone any more. I would respectfully ask the Colonel General to consider what these ten days might mean for us. The breakup of the army, the chaos and the senseless slaughter of us all! The Russians are still standing by their offer of an honourable surrender. That couldn’t possibly compromise any larger military strategies now. And there’s no help to be expected from outside any more. I’m giving the Colonel General my solemn word of honour: I can assure you no help will be arriving! I pride myself on knowing how things stand over there. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, after all! They’ve written us off. That’s why – and I’m sure the Colonel General will forgive the forwardness of an honest German concerned about the welfare of his compatriots – I’m begging and imploring you to take this step! The Colonel General holds all our fates in his strong hands… please capitulate now!’

Colonel General Friedrich Paulus sat calmly and collectedly at the table, his slender hands folded in front of him and resting on the tabletop. His head, with its wispy hair flecked with strands of grey, was slightly bowed, and his face displayed a quiet courteousness. His eyelids, though, were afflicted by an unsettling and uncontrollable blinking and twitching. Nothing in his demeanour gave any sign of the deep distaste he felt for this garrulous colonel they’d saddled him with, this windbag who was speaking so glibly about the most difficult topic of all, these terrible matters that tormented him day and night. He reached over to a side table and picked up a note, which he passed to Knippke with his fingertips.

‘Read this, please!’

The colonel jammed his rimmed monocle into his eye and read the note. The red slip of paper, printed on both sides with smudged ink, was a leaflet produced by the Red Army. It gave an exhaustive overview of the situation, which was accurate on all points and really quite restrained in its presentation of the facts. It came to the conclusion that further German resistance was fruitless. The colonel looked up.

‘What do you have to say to that?’ enquired Paulus.

‘It… Well, every word of it’s true, Colonel General.’

‘It’s also virtually word for word what you just said. Have you seen this pamphlet before?’

‘Colonel General, I really must protest!’ The colonel’s tone was one of polite indignation. He genuinely didn’t know the pamphlet.

‘Then how is it that you’re saying exactly the same thing?’

‘Because…’ Groping for a reply, the colonel pulled a face like a constipated sheepdog. Then the answer suddenly came to him. ‘Because it’s the truth!’ he blurted out vehemently. ‘There is only the one truth, Colonel General!’

The commander-in-chief stood up, his bushy eyebrows raised.

‘If I were to follow your advice, I’d be doing exactly what the enemy wants. It’s out of the question for that reason. True or not, it’s quite impossible!’

Faced with this irrefutable soldierly logic that made no sense at all, the colonel blanched. Impossible? He could feel the ground swaying beneath his feet. He tried just one more tentative approach, but already knew it would all be to no avail.

‘Should we hesitate to do the right thing,’ he said weakly, ‘just because—?’

‘How do I know if it’s the right thing?’ Paulus broke in. ‘Can I second-guess what’s being planned at the Führer’s HQ? Do I know what preparations I might be stymieing? No, I cannot and will not disobey my orders!’

The colonel took the slender hand that was extended to him, tired and limp, and bowed without a word. He couldn’t understand the C-in-C. All he needed to do was… It all seemed so straightforward to him, so laughably straightforward, just as every load seems light to the person who isn’t having to carry it on his own shoulders. The colonel departed, leaving the commander alone. He propped his chin in his hands. He was tired, immeasurably tired. The last two months had weighed down heavily upon him. During peacetime, he had headed an intelligence division. That had been his last operational command. Then, in quick succession, he had been appointed chief of staff of the Sixteenth Panzer Corps, of Army Groups Command and of the Sixth Army under the strong and inflexible Field Marshal von Reichenau, before becoming deputy chief of the German Army General Staff. Always a second in command, always in the shadow of someone stronger… And then he was given command of the Sixth Army. And found himself at Stalingrad – he, who had never learned to stand on his own two feet! And so he let himself be carried along, and looked on meekly while his own chief of staff was promoted over his head.

What was now being asked of him was an act of salvation, an open revolt against Hitler. That called for either great courage or great cowardice. Paulus possessed neither. He was neither a hero nor a scoundrel, perhaps in the end not even a soldier. All he was was weak, weak like other men: too weak to bear the burden of responsibility that a merciless fate had heaped upon him. Under this crushing weight, he dragged himself on day by day, and closed his eyes. And he also no doubt convinced himself that it wasn’t he who was carrying this weight but that terrible man in Berlin who issued the orders. He clung to these orders, they were the stick on which he supported himself, and they saved him from having to take action on his own initiative, a prospect he frankly dreaded. So he shut his eyes, failed to notice how his flaccid weakness turned to cruel harshness all around him, refused to see how this corrosive weakness condemned hundreds of thousands to a senseless death, and did not realize that his duty did not lie in the place where he sought it.

And so he became guilty, guilty before his peers.

Breuer had crawled over onto the pallet bed beside the groaning wounded man. As the new day dawned, loud voices roused him from a deep sleep. He sat up. Grey light penetrated the dirty glass of the windowpane. He cast an eye over the man next to him. During the night, his hands had stopped moving and his stertorous breathing had ceased. Glassy eyes stared past a pointed, waxen nose. The captain was already up and about. He was listening with a bleary face to the agitated report of his sentries. ‘They’ve been marching the whole night… and there’s still some arriving now! All from the Forty-Fourth!’

Breuer went outside with the captain. The Russian artillery was still firing. Cautiously they picked their way out onto the road that ran close by the bunkers. Larger and smaller groups of men were trudging along it, tired and apathetic, and seemingly oblivious to the shell bursts landing slap in the middle of the road and tearing great craters in its surface. There were no vehicles in evidence. The men were carrying only small arms; a few had machine guns, while others were dragging sleds laden with wounded comrades. A lone anti-tank gun trundled by, pulled by a team of soldiers. The captain asked the men where they’d come from. Nobody replied. Eventually a small column of men came into view; they looked fresher than the rest. Their leader, a lieutenant, gave the captain all the answers he was seeking.

‘We’re from the Forty-Fourth. We’re the Bicycle Squadron!’

‘Where are you headed?’

The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders.

‘Somewhere or other… I’ve no idea. Most likely all the way to Stalingrad – into the city.’

‘Right, but what about the front?’

‘The front? There’s no one else following on behind us. We’re the rearguard!’