William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Reichenau’s insistence on “retribution” had resulted in monstrous crimes. After the front-line troops of Sixth Army divisions passed through towns, a motley collection of homicidal maniacs came in their wake and systematically tried to eliminate the Jewish population.

Divided into four Einsatzgruppen (special extermination squads) across Russia, they numbered approximately three thousand sadists, who had been recruited mostly from the ranks of Himmler’s police forces, the Schutzstaffeln, or SS (Elite Guard) and Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Security Service). Others wandered in from punishment battalions and psychiatric hospitals. At a training center in Saxony they had been taught to use the rifle and machine pistol and told explicitly what to do with them in the Soviet Union. Dressed in black uniforms, they traveled by truck convoy, and terrified villagers soon referred to them as the “Black Crows.”

Reichenau had helped the Einsatzgruppen as much as he could. Anxious to conserve ammunition, he even suggested each Jew be finished off with no more than two bullets. The mass killings affected the attitude of many Sixth Army soldiers who witnessed the Black Crows at work. Given free rein by their commanders, they enthusiastically helped exterminate the Jewish population. At times, soldiers in bathing suits and other casual off-duty attire snapped photographs of executions and sent them home to families and friends. A picnic atmosphere prevailed around ditches filled with bodies.

Those Germans who had protested the killings were ignored. Nothing interfered with the campaign of extermination. Nearly a million people died before Friedrich von Paulus assumed control and ended the genocide—at least in his sector—by rescinding both the Commissar and Severity Orders.

As commander of the Sixth Army, Paulus was victorious in his first major battle when, in May, the Russians had tried to upset German plans at Kharkov by attacking first. The Sixth Army was instrumental in rallying the Wehrmacht from near disaster and trapping more than two hundred thousand Russians in a giant envelopment. Congratulations poured in from old comrades, some of whom now assiduously courted his favor. It was clear to them that he was marked for greater responsibilities within the German Army’s High Command. Later, when Operation Blue appeared to be sweeping the Russians away like chaff in the wind, Paulus’s career expectations assumed even more gigantic proportions. Still fastidious, always the epitome of the cool, thinking machine, he traveled the barren steppe, seeking a last confrontation with the enemy.

An excellent cadre of staff officers made the task of running Sixth Army immeasurably easier. The chief of staff, Gen. Arthur Schmidt, was new but, like Paulus, he was a master of the smallest detail and promised to take much of that tedious work load upon himself. A thin-faced man with bulging eyes and a sharply pointed chin, Schmidt did not fit the traditional mold for German staff officers. Born in Hamburg to a merchant family, he had served in World War I as a soldier. Afterward he stayed through the convulsions of postwar politics and emerged as an officer under Hitler’s reborn Reichswehr.

He was autocratic, overbearing, and had a nasty habit of interrupting conversations when the subject bored him. Many of- Ilcers disliked his imperious manner. Some resented his rapid rise in rank and responsibility, but as he assumed his job under Paulus, Schmidt ignored his critics. Sharply different in temperament and tastes, the two men thought alike on military matters. As a result, the Sixth Army was functioning like a smoothly running watch.

Then there were the field commanders, including such men as Gen. Waither Heitz, head of the Eighth Corps, a “bull,” who had been in charge of the funeral procession for Chancellor Hindenburg, and now was a veteran professional who enjoyed soldiering and fox hunting. Walther Seydlitz-Kurzbach, of the Fifty-first Corps, the infantry arm of the army, was the stubborn, white-haired scion of a noble family in Prussia, a highly competent tactician, and only the fifty-fourth German to earn the coveted Oak Leaves to the Knighthood of the Iron Cross. Edler von Daniel, a hard-drinking womanizer, had been brought from peaceful occupation duty in Normandy to lead the 295th Division. Hans Hube, a severely wounded veteran of World War I and the only one-armed general in the German Army, had persevered to become commander of the famous 16th Panzer Division, now hurrying to forge a link around the Russians at the Don. Hube was known as “ Der Mensch ” (“The Man”) to his troops.

Thus Sixth Army was a model of military brilliance, and in his camper, Friedrich von Paulus reflected on the good fortunes of past weeks and wrote an effusive letter to a friend in Germany, “…We’ve advanced quite a bit and have left Kharkov 500 kilometers behind us. The great thing now is to hit the Russian so hard a crack that he won’t recover for a very long time…

In his enthusiasm, Paulus neglected to mention several nagging concerns. The dysentery he had first picked up in the Balkans during World War I was plaguing him. And on the strategy level, his left flank was worrisome. There, well to the north along the line of the tortuous upper Don, the armies of the satellite nations —Hungary, Italy, and Rumania—were struggling to hold the left flank while Sixth Army moved east. He was relying heavily on the strength of these puppet forces to blunt any enemy attack coming from that direction.

The armies Paulus worried about were moving slowly. Farthest toward the northwest, soldiers of the Hungarian Second Army had begun to dig in along the upper Don. To their right, men of the Italian Eighth Army were preparing to occupy a long stretch of looping river line running toward the east. The Italians not only had been given the job of containing any Russian threat from across the river, they also served as a buffer between the Hungarians and the Rumanian Third Army, which was to hold the territory from Serafimovich to Kletskaya deep in the steppe. The German High Command had inserted the Italians between the other two armies to avoid conflict between ancient enemies, who might forget the Russians and go at each other’s throats.

That rivalry was hardly an auspicious omen. It underlined the Germans’ desperate manpower situation, for the three satellite armies had been brought together in a haphazard manner. The Hungarian and Rumanian forces were staffed mostly by political officers who were unschooled in warfare. Both armies were riddled by corruption and inefficiency. The lowly soldier had it worst of all. Poorly led and poorly fed, he endured outrageous privations. Officers whipped enlisted men on the merest whim. When action got dangerous, many officers simply went home. One private wrote his family that even his priest had deserted in a moment of crisis. Worse, they were equipped with antiquated weapons: antitank guns were almost nonexistent; rifles were of World War I vintage.

Many similar conditions prevailed in the Italian Army. Dragooned into service far from their homeland, wary of the bond between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist state, the troopers grumbled unhappily as they marched through shattered Russian towns and villages. These men had not come on any crusade for lebensraum (“space for living”); they moved toward the Don because Benito Mussolini bargained for Hitler’s favor with the bodies of his soldiers.

The Italians had sent their best units into the Soviet Union. Proud military names such as the Julia, Bersaglieri, Cosseria, Torino, Alpini, graced the shoulder patches of troops struggling through the enervating heat. Their fathers had fought along the Piave and Isonzo rivers against the Austrians during World War I, and Ernest Hemingway immortalized their battles in A Farewell to Arms.