William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

The retribution the Germans feared was real. It was taking its toll among soldiers of the puppet armies already in captivity. At the monastery town of Susdal, northeast of Moscow, Felice Bracci and Cristoforo Capone shivered in windowless barracks and waited for their captors to increase the food ration to a bare subsistence level. They waited in vain. At Susdal, men died at the rate of two hundred a day from starvation.

At Oranki Prison, Rumanian troops staggered into camps from a hundred-mile forced march and pressed their hands on lighted stoves to take away the pain of frostbite. When they pulled back their fingers, the flesh remained on the stoves and the stench made them retch. Amidst screams of torment, many fell dead. The change of temperature from the steppe to warm rooms had brought on massive heart attacks. More than a hundred bodies were hauled out of the barracks feet first. The thump, thump, thump of their heads striking the stairs kept other soldiers awake for hours.

In a camp at Tambov, north of the Don, Italian soldiers crowded around a gate as Russian troops dumped cabbages from a truck onto the snow. Then thirty thousand prisoners rioted and fought each other for the food. Guards shot those they caught in the act of murder.

From January 24 on, the fighting in Stalingrad was spasmodic. Trapped in their frozen, dark cellars, German troops listened fearfully for the footfalls of Russian soldiers. Even the Russians took their time now, moving carefully in squads, in platoons, over the mounds of snow-covered wreckage. In countless minor engagements in the side streets of the city, the command “ Raus! Raus! ” echoed when the shooting stopped, and Germans climbed out of their holes with hands held high. The Russians kicked a few, punched others, but led most prisoners away without further incident.

Germans who witnessed these surrenders took heart. A network of runners carried the message that the enemy did not kill their captives and the news soothed many who were close to hysteria. For the moment they forgot their fear of capture while they fought another deadly struggle, the endless war with lice.

The gray parasites now dominated everyone’s life. Multiplying rapidly in the incredible filth, they swarmed from head to ankles in a voracious quest for food. Ravenous, relentless, they drove their hosts to the verge of insanity. Wherever they feasted, they left giant red welts. Worse, they infected their victims with disease.

In the wall of a balka, just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, more than two thousand German wounded had been jammed into a Russian air raid shelter, known as the Timoshenko Bunker. Tunneled into the side of the ravine like a giant anthill, the bunker’s tiered galleries were nearly two and a half miles long. The “hospital” once had contained electric lights, ventilation, even proper drainage facilities, but those conveniences had long since been destroyed. Now it was a fetid morgue, where only the patients’ body heat brought any warmth to the damp chambers. The air was foul, heavy with sickness and rot.

Doctors who ministered to the rows of wounded noticed an alarming increase of fevers ranging from 102 to 104 degrees. Some men died raving. Chills and a tendency to lung congestion were added symptoms which pointed inexorably to a damning medical diagnosis. Unchecked, it could now complete the extermination of the Sixth Army, which had never been adequately vaccinated against typhus.

In his cellar home to the north of Railroad Station Number One, Sgt. Hubert Wirkner lay among fifty other wounded soldiers and groaned from the fever wracking his frail body. His head ached; his eyes were bloodshot. Blood dripped through the bandages on his legs and arms. He had soiled himself repeatedly and hated the smell that clung to him.

Along the walls of the cellar, a collection of manikins stared unwaveringly at the wounded Germans. Marked in ink with the outlines of female reproductive organs, they had obviously been used in a maternity training program for nurses and interns. How ironic, Wirkner thought, that he and his comrades were in a former Soviet hospital but had no doctors to care for them.

Near the Tsaritsa Gorge, the grim black walls of the NKVD prison enclosed what was left of the German Fourteenth Corps, plus the 3rd and 29th Motorized Divisions. Most of the jail itself was gutted, but on the first floor enlisted men mounted guard at the windows. From there they monitored the huge yard, in which scores of wounded soldiers lay unattended in the snow. Though these men begged for help, no one paid any attention to their pleas.

In the bowels of the prison, a group of German generals lived with a retinue of aides. One of them, Edler von Daniels had not been sober for days. Gloriously drunk, he weaved back and forth among troops lying on the damp floors. “Boys,” he shouted, “who of you is against bringing this to an end?” When nobody objected to surrender, von Daniels showered them with packs of cigarettes.

The general was one of several plotting mutiny. Generals Schlomer, Pfeiffer, Korfes, and Seydlitz had been unable to convince Paulus that further resistance was futile. Increasingly annoyed at his constant refrain: “Orders are orders,” they centered their wrath on Arthur Schmidt, the eminence grise behind the throne. Convinced that Schmidt was the culprit who insisted on insane continuation of the fighting, they were planning to end the chief of staff’s domination and force Paulus to surrender.

Arthur Schmidt was indeed assuming active leadership of Sixth Army. Paulus seemed dazed by the calamity that had overtaken him. “Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes. His posture, so upright otherwise, was now slightly stooped….” The tic on the right side of his face now extended from jaw to eyebrow.

Schmidt, on the other hand, was a bulwark of strength, bullying defeatist officers with blunt commands, abusing protesters by phone, threatening malcontents with the firing squad. Where Paulus wilted under the enormity of the disaster, Schmidt shone in adversity.

In the early morning of January 24, General von Hartmann, commander of the 71st Division, had put down the book he was reading and said to General Pfeiffer: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust in a thousand years’ time, and the Sixth Army an illegible name, incomprehensible to all.” With his mind settled as to his own course of action, Hartmann led a small band of men out to a railway embankment. Standing upright in full view of Russians across the snowfields, he shouted: “Commence firing!” and shot a clip of bullets from his carbine.

Col. Günter von Below hurried from Paulus’s cellar with the order to “stop this nonsense.” But Hartmann ignored him and continued to fire at the enemy. Within moments, a Russian bullet tore into his brain.

A short time later, another German general settled his own affairs. Hearing that his son, a lieutenant, had been killed while trying to lead some men out of the city toward far-off German lines, General Stempel took out a pistol and shot himself in the head.{Though badly wounded in the escape attempt, his son survived.}

Only hours after Generals Hartmann and Stempel died, the 297th Division Commander, General Drebber, stood on a street near the grain elevator and saluted a Russian colonel, who politely asked: “Where are your regiments?” Drebber shrugged and replied: “Do I have to tell you where my regiments are?” Accompanied by several aides, he marched off to Soviet lines.

Just before 9:00 A.M. that morning, Friedrich von Paulus was handed a letter sent through the lines by Drebber. As he started to open it, a bomb exploded outside the basement window and showered both him and his adjutant, Col. Wilhelm Adam, with shards of glass and rock. Shaken and bleeding, the two men submitted to medical attention before Paulus sat down again to read the note.