William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

He dragged his dead legs for nearly a mile, reached the main road to Stalingrad, and collapsed alongside the stream of traffic. When he tried to climb into the back of a truck, his legs collapsed and he fell down. With a final burst of strength, Wirkner rose once more to clutch a howitzer with his frozen hands. Grunting from the pain, he pulled himself over the gun barrel and dangled precariously, his head hanging down on one side, his feet on the other.

The howitzer crept toward the city. With his face inches from the ground, his eyes bulging and his head pounding from blood draining into it, Wirkner drifted in and out of consciousness. The sounds of speeding cars washed over him and he heard the mournful prayers of soldiers lying on the ice. Screams, machine -gun fire, and curses came at him from all sides. He fainted again and when he woke up, he was surrounded by Germans sitting beside the road. When he called weakly for help, they failed to respond. Wirkner heard the wind and gunfire but nothing from his companions. They were all dead.

The lights of a truck flashed over him and he tensed for a terrible blow, but the driver had seen him move and stopped to pick him up. Wirkner rode the rest of the way into Stalingrad, where, again on all fours, he dragged himself into a dark cellar and “switched off his mind.”

At Gumrak, Russian tanks were rolling over the runways and firing point-blank into hospital bunkers. Hundreds of German wounded died where they lay, abandoned by countrymen now stampeding into Stalingrad. Along the main road into the city, a long line of trucks and cars roared through the fog, while in the fields beside the highway, a thin line of troops sat in hip-deep snow as a rear guard protecting the disorderly retreat. Panicked at the thought of being left alone to face Soviet armor, some of them swiveled their guns around and fired into the vehicles. When a driver was hit and his truck stopped, the gunners ran to the road, pulled their victim from the front seat and drove off themselves.

On the morning of January 24, the “Road of Death” as the truckers called it, was a five-mile stretch of snow coated with frozen blood left by the passage of Sixth Army to its final positions. By now more than a hundred thousand Germans had plunged into the black basements of Stalingrad.

Cpl. Heinz Neist rode into the city on a sleigh dragged by friends. Totally exhausted, Neist shivered under a thin blanket while Russian artillery knocked down what buildings were left standing. To Neist it seemed that “everything had been annihilated.” The world was dead. He was in a state of despair.

Quartermaster Karl Binder had burrowed into the Schnellhefter Block, a series of workers’ houses just west of the tractor factory. Still the efficient organizer, Binder was trying to establish a food sharing program in his sector, but his problems defied solution. Although the Ju-52s and He-111s still were dropping supplies by parachute, most of them drifted inside Russian lines and were lost. The few that landed among the Germans were supposed to be brought immediately to central points for equal distribution, but the soldiers frequently hid them away for their own use. German military police held summary courts-martial for those found stealing and executed the offenders.

A few hundreds yards away from Binder’s refuge, in the tangled wreckage of the tractor works, tailor Wilhelm Alter was busy working on a “thing of beauty.” With a piece of brown cloth and fur from a coat collar, he was making a Cossack hat for an officer who was looking ahead to the rigors of captivity. Besides having the chance to pass the time doing something creative, Alter was especially pleased about the payment due for his labor. The officer had promised him an extra piece of bread.

In the same sector, veterinarian Herbert Rentsch had assumed command of a machine-gun company. He had also made a heartrending decision about his horse, Lore. Forced out of a balka toward the city, Rentsch went to the black mare, led her into a tunnelled-out bunker and tied her to a post. As Lore stood patiently beside her master, Rentsch patted her neck and gently stroked her emaciated flanks. When she turned her head to nuzzle his hand for food, he choked back a sob and ran away. His one hope was that the Russians would find her quickly and treat her with tenderness.

In central Stalingrad, Sgt. Albert Pflüger, despite his broken arm, set up a machine gun to interdict some side streets, then sat back to think about the future. Fully aware that the Russians had already won the battle, he conjured up the possibility that Hitler and Stalin had reached an agreement on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Pflüger also “dreamed” that the Americans were going to intervene with Stalin to prevent the mass killings of captives.

These delusions helped immensely as he prepared himself for the ordeal he knew was coming.

“Hold out for the next few days? For what?” asked an increasing number of German officers and men as they scurried for shelter in the broken-down houses of Stalingrad. They had finally begun to question the purpose of fighting for a thousand cellars at the edge of Asia.

With the fall of Pitomnik and Gumrak, all but a tiny hard core of Nazis faced the ghastly truth. Stalingrad would be their tomb. Abandoned to a miserable fate, they vented their rage in their letters, and one of the last planes leaving the Kessel carried seven sacks of mail scribbled on toilet paper, maps, anything that passed for stationery.

At Taganrog, German military censors analyzed the letters, sorted them into appropriate categories and forwarded a report on to Berlin and the Propaganda Ministry, where Dr. Joseph Goebbels read the findings.

1. In favor of the way the war was being conducted: 2.1 percent

2. Dubious: 4.4 percent

3. Skeptical, deprecatory: 57.1 percent

4. Actively against: 3.4 percent

5. No opinion, indifferent: 33.0 percent

Nearly two out of every three writers now complained bitterly against Hitler and the High Command. But their protest was tardy and irrelevant. Fearful of the effect of these letters on the German population, Goebbels ordered the letters destroyed.{A few were saved and published after the war.}

Meanwhile, Erich von Manstein read a wireless from Stalingrad that convinced him the Sixth Army was finished.

Attacks in undiminished violence… Frightful conditions in the city area proper where about 20,000 unattended wounded are seeking shelter among the ruins. With them are about the same number of starved and frostbitten men, and stragglers, mostly without weapons…. Heavy artillery pounding the whole city…. Tractor works may possibly hold out a little longer…

Positive that Paulus had done all he could ever do, Manstein called Hitler and recommended that Sixth Army be allowed to surrender. Hitler would not consider the idea. Manstein argued that “the Army’s sufferings would bear no relation to any advantage derived from continuing to tie down the enemy’s forces…”, but the Führer repeated his claim that each hour that Paulus continued to fight helped the entire front. Then he charged that capitulation was futile. The men at Stalingrad would have no chance to survive since “the Russians never keep any agreements…”

That thought was uppermost in the minds of more than one hundred thousand Germans penned up like cattle at Stalingrad to await their executioner. Unable to control their destinies, they succumbed to the malignancy of fear, which centered around one question: “Will the Russians kill us outright or send us into slavery at some terrible Siberian prison camp?”

Few expected decent treatment. Too many had seen the butchered remains of German prisoners left on the battlefield by retreating Soviet troops. They also knew what their own countrymen had done to Russian soldiers and civilians during the occupation of the Soviet Union.