William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Stunned, Kohler shouted: “Shouldn’t we at least offer an opinion among ourselves? The man’s heart has shrunk to that of a child. There’s not a bit of fat in him. He has starved to death.”

His remarks were met by deadly silence, and Kohler realized that no one was about to side with him against Sixth Army Headquarters, which had banned all mention of starvation as a factor contributing to death. Disgusted with his peers, Kohler stormed from the room.

Lt. Heinrich Klotz, leader of the oldest company of men in Sixth Army, would have seconded Dr. Kohler’s cry of outrage. During the past weeks, he had watched his soldiers disintegrate physically. When a doctor examined the unit, he shook his head, exclaiming: “I must say, the condition of your people is even worse than that of the Rumanians.”

The men of Klotz’s company died quietly. One night a forty year-old man went to sleep and never woke up. Two other soldiers walking back from a trench-digging detail just stumbled and fell down. When the lieutenant reported their deaths, a superior demanded they be listed as “killed in action.” Klotz did as he was told.

While increasing numbers of Sixth Army troops toppled into the snow from the effects of malnutrition, the distance between them and their comrades who had tried to rescue them widened perceptibly. Now, more than eighty miles southwest of the Kessel, General “Papa” Hoth’s original relief expedition was slowly being forced backward by Russian divisions pressing in close pursuit.

Acting under Manstein’s order to protect the city of Rostov as long as possible, Hoth was conducting a masterful delaying action as he feinted, ambushed, and kept the Soviet units off balance. Hoth’s tactics exasperated not only the Red Army, but also Hitler, who began to complain to Manstein about this strategy of “elastic” withdrawal. When the Führer finally insisted that Hoth stop and hold every foot of ground, on January 5, Manstein abruptly offered his resignation in a curt telegram to Rastenburg: “Should… this headquarters continue to be tied down… I cannot see that any useful purpose will be served by my continuing as commander of Don Army Group.”

Faced with such an outburst from Manstein, Hitler backed down and allowed General Hoth to retreat as planned.

The Russian divisions stalking Hoth were under the control of Andrei Yeremenko, who was still smarting over his recent demotion in favor of Rokossovsky. Intent on restoring his position with STAVKA and the premier, the general was pushing hard to seize Rostov and foil German Army Group A’s withdrawal from the Caucasus. To that end he had already taken Kotelnikovo, fifty-two miles northeast of Rostov, and there his troops had been embraced by thousands of ecstatic Russian civilians, who blurted out a torrent of stories about Nazi oppression: three hundred boys and girls deported as slave laborers to Germany; four people shot for harboring a Russian officer. One man sorrowfully told how… they burned down the public library.” Another described, “a lot of rape…” The litany of crimes shouted out by the citizens of Kotelnikovo infuriated their rescuers.

Southwest of Kotelnikovo, Sgt. Alexei Petrov spurred his gun crew on toward Rostov. The squat artilleryman had lost count of the times he had crossed and recrossed the twisting loops of the lower Don, but he ignored his exhaustion as he pursued an enemy who had held his family in bondage for more than a year.

In the midst of this offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a steppe village, the inhabitants— men and women—ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.

The Kazakhs screamed insults and shouted: “We don’t want any Russians here!” while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: “Destroy them all.”

In the general bombardment that followed, Petrov fired high-explosive shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off anyone who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.

Gazing at the crackling flames, Petrov suddenly wondered why these people had such hatred for the state. What was it about Communism that made them turn on their brothers? He was plagued by a terrible guilt for killing his own brethren.

"Eins, zwei, drei, vier! Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The harsh cadence rang across the steppe as German officers inside the Kessel trained recruits for the infantry. Clerks, cooks, telephone operators, orderlies, men under company punishment for crimes—they all marched up and down the balkas in close-order drill. The man who taught them, Lt. Herman Kastle, did not enjoy his job. Some of the troops had been his friends for years, and he knew he was sending them to a sure death.

The soldiers he hurriedly prepared for combat were in a state of shock. Few had ever dreamed they would have to face the Russians across no-man’s-land. Most had enjoyed soft assignments; almost none of them had come out of their warm bunkers during the winter.

As Kastle issued final instructions before sending them off to battle, one soldier broke down completely. Sobbing hysterically, he clutched at the lieutenant and begged to be spared. Kastle talked urgently to him, trying to quiet his fears. The man listened and then, while the column started to march off, he wiped his tears away and ran to take his place in formation.

Kastle watched him out of sight.

Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert was already at the main line of resistance. Ever since he had de-trained from Germany, he had walked back and forth across the steppe: standing guard duty, lining up for inspections, sitting on buses which never broke out of the Kessel. Now he was merely two hundred meters away from the burned out hulk of a Soviet tank whose driver, charred to a “black tailor’s dummy,” seemed to stare back at him every day.

When he first saw the body, Brunnert had felt a brief spasm of compassion. The man must have suffered indescribable tortures trying to escape the flames. Still, Brunnert reasoned, the same thing had happened countless times to Germans in the war and that thought helped him forget the gruesome sight in front of his foxhole.

His life followed a strict pattern. He stood watch every four hours and at 5:00 P.M. every day, he crawled back to the company kitchen for rations. Otherwise he read and reread Soviet propaganda leaflets that showered down from the sky. Brunnert never once thought of defecting, but the pictures on the literature haunted him: a beautiful Christmas tree, beneath which a woman buried her face in a handkerchief. Beside her a little child sobbed her grief as they both stared at their present, the body of a soldier father. In another leaflet, a woman sang carols with her children while the figure of the dead father hovered over them like a ghost.

For over a week, Brunnert and his friend Gunter Gehlert had shared a bunker and adjusted to the presence of the enemy nearby. On January 7, just as Gunter came to relieve Brunnert at the machine gun, a shell burst only yards away. Brunnert screamed and fell face down into the trench. He stared dumbly at one of his fingers, split open like a blossoming rosebud.

His legs were hit, too, and he lay in a spreading pool of blood but remained conscious while Gunter brought a medic. In shock, Brunnert watched wordlessly as they frantically fashioned a dressing. When darkness came, Gunter put Brunnert on a sled, pressed money into his hand and asked him to give it to his own parents when he got home.