William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

At the edge of Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger packed a few pieces of bread and sausage while the Russians tiptoed down the cellar stairs. In the corner of the room, three Hiwis dressed in German uniforms crouched nervously. As the Russians began to seize rings and watches, the terrified Hiwis bolted from the basement into the street. The Russians chased them for a block and shot them dead.

At the NKVD prison, the surrender was orderly. From the catacomb of cells, the Germans poured into the courtyard, ringed with piles of corpses. In the middle of the assembly area, a German cook, incongruously attired in a spotless ‘white apron, stood by a stove. As Russian guards circulated among the prisoners and shared cigarettes with them, the cook continued to ladle out mugs of hot coffee both for his men and their new masters.

Further north, Cpl. Heinz Neist heard the Russians pounding down into his cellar. One of them confronted him and pointed, at the wedding ring on his hand. When Neist used sign language to explain that it was difficult to pull off, the Russian whipped out a knife and made a motion to slice the finger away.

At that moment, the corporal heard a voice shouting, “All nice young Germans, goddamn Hitler,” and Neist beckoned the speaker over to help him with the irate looter. But the officer just shook his head and said: “Give the ring, give everything you have, save your life.” Struggling frantically with the wedding band, Neist finally loosened it and handed the treasure to the happy Russian who then left him alone.

That same day, January 31, hundreds of wounded German troops were killed where they lay.

In his cellar north of Red Square, the desperately ill Hubert Wirkner heard a noise and turned to see a Russian soldier pouring gasoline in through the window. Summoning all his strength, he lunged from his bed and crawled on his deadened arms and legs toward the stairs.

Behind him the Russian lit a match and tossed it onto the fuel. The cellar exploded in a violent orange cloud and turned fifty men into human torches. As some of the flaming bodies clutched frantically at the window bars the Russians pounded their hands with rifle butts.

At the bottom of the stairs, Wirkner dumped a pail of water over himself and groped upward toward fresh air. Clouds of smoke choked him and the awful screams of the burning patients followed him as he fell out the door into the snow. On all fours, he crouched like a dog while a Soviet officer came up to him, cocked his pistol and shoved it in Wirkner’s ear. While he waited to die, another voice broke in, “Comrade Stalin wouldn’t like that.” Wirlcner’s executioner pulled the pistol away and stalked off. Safe for the moment, Wirkner dragged himself across the street to find another sanctuary.

On February 1, at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler had not taken the news of surrender calmly.

Sitting before the huge map of Russia in the main conference room, he spoke with Zeitzler, Keitel, and others about the debacle: “They have surrendered there formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog and shot themselves with their last bullet….”

Zeitzler agreed: “I can’t understand it either. I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he [Paulus] is lying there badly wounded.”

“No, it is true,” Hitler said. “They’ll be brought to Moscow, to the GPU right away, and they’ll blurt out orders for the northern pocket to surrender, too. That Schmidt will sign anything. A man who doesn’t have the courage, in such a time, to take the road that every man has to take sometime, doesn’t have the strength to withstand that sort of thing…He will suffer torture in his soul. In Germany there has been too much emphasis on training the intellect and not enough on strength of character….”

The conversation droned on.

Zeitzler said, “One can’t understand this type of man.”

Hitler was disgusted: “Don’t say that. I saw a letter…. It was addressed to Below [Nikolaus von Below, Winrich Behr’s close friend]. I can show it to you. An officer in Stalingrad wrote, ‘I have come to the following conclusions about these people—Paulus, question mark; Seydlitz, should be shot; Schmidt, should be shot.’”

“I have also heard bad reports about Seydlitz,” Zeitzler offered.

“One could say that it would have been better to leave Hube in there and bring out the others,” Hitler added. “But since the value of men is not immaterial, and since we need men in the entire war, I am definitely of the opinion that it was right to bring Hube out. In peacetime, in Germany, about eighteen or twenty thousand people a year chose to commit suicide, even without being in such a position. Here is a man [Paulus], who sees fifty or sixty thousand of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end. How can he surrender himself to the Bolshevists?… That is something one can’t understand at all.”

“But I had my doubts ‘before,” Hitler continued. “That was at the moment when I received the report that he was asking me what he should do [about the Russian ultimatum to surrender]. How could he ever ask about such a thing?…”

“There is no excuse,” declared Zeitzler. “When his nerves threaten to break down, then he must kill himself.”

Hitler nodded, “When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself….” Hitler stared at Zeitzler, who replied: “I still think they may have done that and that the Russians are only claiming to have captured them all.”

“No…” said the Führer vehemently. “In this war, no more field marshals will be made…. I won’t go on counting my chickens before they are hatched….”

Zeitzler shrugged: “We were so completely sure how it would end, that granting him a final satisfaction….”

“We had to assume that it would end heroically.”

Zeitzler agreed, “How could one imagine anything else?…”

Hitler sounded depressed: “This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling….”

In the northern part of Stalingrad, Eleventh Corps commander, General Strecker, held out for another forty-eight hours in a futile gesture of defiance.

On the morning of February 2, all the Russian artillery concentrated on this area, and for two hours, shells rained down on the pitiful survivors of the Sixth Army. Then the barrage was over and thousands of Russian troops rushed the cellars while German machine-gunners fired their last belts of ammunition. Enraged at the fanatic resistance, the Russians pulled prisoners out of foxholes and beat them savagely. With clubs and fists they pummeled the die-hards, cursing the “Nazi swine” who continued the bloodshed long after Paulus had quit the field and stopped the killing.

Suddenly white flags popped out of windows up and down the side streets across from the factories. The stronghold began to collapse.

While Hans Oettl paused to urinate outside his building, a Russian sergeant poked a gun in his back and demanded in broken German that he call everyone out of the cellar to surrender. Oettl refused and stared into the silver-toothed grin of his captor, who made a motion with his weapon as if tu kill him. When Oettl still refused, the sergeant shouted “ Raus!” into the stairwell and Oettl’s companions streamed into the brilliant sunlight with their hands over their heads.

Across the main road from Oettl’s basement, the Russians poured into the tractor factory assembly rooms where hundreds of wounded lay on shelves against the walls. Other Germans dangled grotesquely from belts hooked onto stanchions. Unwilling to endure captivity, they had taken their own lives during the hours before dawn. Just before the Eleventh Corps command post was overrun, General Strecker issued a last message to the Fatherland: “Eleventh Corps and its divisions have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”