William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

At the Univermag, Arthur Schmidt had intercepted a colonel named Steidle who wanted to plead with Paulus to capitulate. Raging at the man, Schmidt threatened him with the firing squad.

In public Schmidt showed a tenacious will to resist to the final bullet but in secret, he was having conversations with two officers, one a Colonel Beaulieu, who had spent some years in Russia in the twenties and the other, Capt. Boris von Neidhardt, a Bait and former czarist officer. Both men spoke fluent Russian and were knowledgeable about life in the Soviet Union. Schmidt spent hours with each man, asking probing questions about their experiences.

Col. Wilhelm Adam, Paulus’s adjutant, intercepted Beaulieu after one of these talks and asked what was going on behind Schmidt’s closed door. Beaulieu was candid, “Schmidt asked me to tell him about the Red Army. He was particularly interested to learn what one had to expect of their soldiers and officers. I didn’t know that your chief of staff could be so friendly.”

The suspicious Adam checked with Neidhardt and found that Schmidt had quizzed him on the same topics.

On the evening of January 29, Adam received further proof that Schmidt had no intention of fighting to the last breath. Schmidt’s orderly suddenly pulled Adam into the chief of staff’s room, and pointing to a suitcase in the corner, whispered, “To all his subordinates he says ‘you must hold out, there will be no capitulation,’ but he himself gets ready for captivity.”

Seething with hatred, Adam went back to his cot and brooded.

From his basement window just off Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger looked past his machine gun at a water fountain on the intersection. For days it had been the focal point of firefights, and Pflüger had killed a number of Russians trying to reach it. There was also a line of dead Germans around it, cut down as they crawled across the ice with empty canteens.

With his war now reduced to fighting for a sip of water, Pflüger was ready to surrender. But first he wanted to hear a speech being given by Adolf Hitler on January 30, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Third Reich. At noon, he stood with others beside the radio and waited for the Führer’s voice to flood into the cellar. It did not. The announcer said that Hermann Goering would speak instead, and the Reichsmarshal was his bombastic self:

…What herculean labors our Führer has performed… out of this pulp, this human pulp… to forge a nation as hard as steel. The enemy is tough, but the German soldier has grown tougher…. We have taken away the Russians’ coal and iron, and without that they can no longer make armaments on a large scale…. Rising above all these gigantic battles like a mighty monument is Stalingrad…. One day this will be recognized as the greatest battle in our history, a battle of heroes…. We have a mighty epic of an incomparable struggle, the struggle of the Nibelungs. They, too, stood to the last….

In Pflüger’s cellar, men groaned and someone cursed the “fat man” in Berlin.

Goering continued “…My soldiers, thousands of years have passed, and thousands of years ago in a tiny pass in Greece stood a tremendously brave and bold man with three hundred soldiers, Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans…. Then the last man fell… and now only the inscription stands: ‘Wanderer, if you should come to Sparta, go tell the Spartans you found us lying here as the law bade us.’ …Someday men will read: ‘If you come to Germany, go tell the Germans you saw us lying in Stalingrad, as the law bade us…’”

It was suddenly clear to Pflüger and thousands of Germans standing by shortwave radios that Hitler already considered them dead.

After Goering’s speech ended, the German national anthem was played, and Pflüger joined hands with his comrades to sing: “ Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.” He sobbed unashamedly at the beautiful words. When the anthem was followed by “ Horst Wessel,” the Nazi party song, someone in the room lashed out with his gun butt and broke the radio to pieces.

To the last, however, Paulus publicly worshipped at the feet of the Führer:

January 30th:

On the tenth anniversary of your assumption of power, the Sixth Army hails its “Führer.” The swastika flag is still flying above Stalingrad. May our battle be an example to the present and coming generations, that they must never capitulate even in a hopeless situation, for then Germany will come out victorious.

At a railroad embankment near the engineering school, Gen. Carl Rodenburg sighted his rifle and carefully squeezed off a shot. Then he turned and asked his aide to find another target. The monocled general had come to the “range” as he called it, to have a last crack at the enemy. He fired for over an hour while the aide, newly promoted to captain, chose his targets. As the general turned once more to speak to the young officer, a Russian bullet tore into the man’s head, killing him instantly. The sorrowful Rodenburg left the body in the snow and went back to his bunker to await the end. It was some consolation to him that at least the captain’s family in Germany would get a bigger pension because of his new rank.

Inside the NKVD prison, several hundred German officers and men waited for the confrontation with Russian soldiers. Some drank heavily, and in an upstairs room, one officer enjoyed pancakes cooked for him by a pleasant Russian woman, who had magically appeared in anticipation of victory.

Other soldiers prepared by dressing in clothing taken from corpses: extra underwear, two shirts, double socks, sweaters— anything they could find to ward off the cold weather they knew awaited them on the march to internment.

Shots rang out in one of the cells and several soldiers rushed to the open door to find a sergeant standing over three officers sprawled in death. Behind the sergeant, a blond lieutenant sat at a table and stared intently at a girl’s picture, framed by the light of two candles. The lieutenant seemed completely oblivious to the scene around him.

Hearing the commotion at the door, the sergeant whirled on the spectators and shouted; “Goddamn you, go away or you’ll get the next one!”

As they retreated from the doorway, the sounds of two more shots rocketed off the walls and when they looked in again, the blond lieutenant had fallen face down on the floor. His head was a mass of blood.

The sergeant was there, too, with a self-inflicted bullet wound in the mouth. He had carried out the suicide pact exactly as ordered.

At the southeastern side of Red Square, Col. Gunter Ludwig held the cellar of an office building beside the Gorki Theater. His post was also the last defense line the Germans manned in front of the Univermag. On the evening of the thirtieth, a military policeman arrived and told the colonel that General Schmidt wanted to see him. Ludwig was suddenly fearful, for during the day he had been talking to Russian officers about surrender. Knowing

Schmidt’s threats of a firing squad for those who quit the battle, he walked to the department store feeling like a condemned man. Schmidt greeted him sternly and asked about his position on the lower part of the square. After Ludwig told him his men were still deployed there, Schmidt offered him a seat and said, “Listen, I just heard that you negotiated with the Russians today.”

Ludwig admitted he had, and justified his actions by describing the woeful condition of his troops. As he spoke, Ludwig watched Schmidt carefully, trying to gauge his reaction. The general paced the room, then whirled, “You mean you just went to the Russians and negotiated capitulation, and no one even thinks of coming to us, to army headquarters?”