William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

At 12:35 P.M. that afternoon, Army Group Don at Taganrog logged the final words from Sixth Army at Stalingrad when a weather team filed its daily report: “Cloud base fifteen thousand feet, visibility seven miles, clear sky, occasional scattered nimbus clouds, temperature minus thirty-one degrees centigrade, over Stalingrad fog and red haze. Meteorological station now closing down. Greetings to the homeland.”

Reacting to Soviet proclamations about their stupendous triumph, the Nazi government reluctantly told the German people of the loss of the entire Sixth Army. For an unprecedented three days, all radio broadcasts were suspended. Funeral music droned into thousands of homes across the Third Reich. Restaurants, theaters, cinemas, all places of entertainment were shut down, and the trauma of defeat gripped the population.

In Berlin, Goebbels began to draft a speech calling for a realization that Germany must prepare for “total war.”

Two days after organized resistance ended, on February 4, A. S. Chuyanov of the City Soviet Committee phoned across the Volga to a foreman from the tractor factory. “It’s time to come back,” he said, and the workers who had waited months for that message packed their equipment and started home. They drove across the ice, past traffic masters directing long lines of Germans out of the city, and the jubilant Russians snickered at the wretched state of their enemies, many of them wrapped in shawls and women’s clothing to ward off the cold.

In five months of fighting and bombings, 99 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble. More than forty-one thousand homes, three hundred factories, 113 hospitals and schools had been destroyed. A quick census revealed that out of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of the previous summer, only 1,515 civilians remained. Most of them had either died in the first days or left the city for temporary homes in Siberia and Asia. No one knew how many had been killed, but the estimates were staggering.

In Dar Goya, the Fillipovs remained to mourn the irreparable loss of their cobbler son, Sacha. And behind General Rodimtsev’s grain mill headquarters on the Volga bank, Mrs. Karmanova and her son, Genn, celebrated their freedom after months of hiding in trenches and snowholes. On Red Square, two little girls, separated since September, hopped over corpses to meet in a joyful embrace. Their innocent laughter, carrying far in the still air, brought smiles to Russian soldiers, who were tossing dead Germans onto a roaring bonfire.

The Russian Sixty-second Army began to leave the city for a wellearned rest on the eastern side of the Volga. Within weeks, the rejuvenated troops would follow Vassili Chuikov to other battlefields. But behind them, in hospitals across Russia, they left thousands of comrades from the darkest days in Stalingrad who would be fighting another kind of war, the struggle toward physical and mental recovery.

In a hospital bed at Tashkent, the tiny blond sniper Tania Cherriova, was slowly recuperating from the stomach wound that had nearly taken her life. She had borne well the news that the operation she had endured would prevent her from ever bearing a child. She had obeyed the doctors’ orders to the letter and looked forward to a speedy release from confinement. But when she received a letter from a friend in the Sixty-second Army, her world fell apart.

The friend wrote that her lover, Vassili Zaitsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, had died in an explosion during the final weeks of fighting around the Red October Plant. The news drove Tania into acute depression. As days passed, her physical strength improved greatly but doctors noticed that she rarely exhibited interest in anything around her. Instead she just stared for hours into space as though trying to recapture a lost moment.

At another hospital, Lt. Hersch Gurewicz clumped about on his artificial leg and tried to get a new assignment in the Red Army. Told that he would have to be discharged for medical reasons, Gurewicz wrote directly to Stalin, begging for reconsideration. The letter won a reprieve and Gurewicz found himself a mail censor with a Polish contingent heading west toward the Ukraine. Gleefully, the lieutenant packed an extra wooden leg and headed back to war.

Several hundred miles to the north, guards at a railroad station in the Ural city of Novosibirsk gently wrapped their arms around the bandaged figure of Commando Capt. Ignacy Changar as he stood singing on the station platform. Transferred from a hospital in Moscow, Changar had gotten so drunk on the train ride that he had no idea where he was supposed to be.

Admitted to a military hospital, Changar began to flirt with the nurses, particularly one young girl who came from Kiev. When he asked repeatedly for her, she went to him wondering why such an old man would be interested in her. She had no idea that Ignacy was just twenty-one, because he now had snow-white hair.

What of the German Sixth Army? Swallowed up on the steppe, it had disappeared into the wastes of Russia and no one in the German High Command had witnessed its going. In the last days of the battle, Paulus had allowed several squads of men to make a break toward the west. But they all had been captured or killed by alert Red Army units.

Other Germans had also left on their own. Quartermaster Karl Binder took a group with him as far as Karpovka, thirty miles west of Stalingrad before the enemy surrounded him and forced his surrender.

Lt. Emil Metzger hid in a bunker in the vain hope that the Russians would leave the area and allow him to slip off at night toward the Don. But the Russians fired bullets down a ventilation pipe and wounded Emil in the right heel. Finally driven into the open by grenades, he walked off to prison camp with blood sloshing around in his boot.

Two Germans actually reached friendly lines. In late February, a Corporal Neiwig staggered into a command post of Army Group Don nearly 150 miles west of the Kessel. The sole survivor of a twenty-man group of escapees who had succumbed to the freezing cold, Neiwig knew little about the fate of the rest of his army. Within hours, as he tried to regain his strength from the trip, a Soviet mortar shell landed nearby and blew him to bits.

On March 1, Pvt. Michael Horvath walked into German positions near Voronezh, far to the west of Stalingrad. Captured on January 31, he had been shipped off to another front as an interpreter for Russian intelligence officers. Therefore, Horvath could add little information to what was known about the Sixth Army since the day of its capitulation. The German High Command and the German people were unable to tell how Paulus and his troops were faring in Russian hands.

The field marshal and his generals were, at that moment, living in relatively comfortable quarters near Moscow. But the men Paulus believed would be guaranteed food and medical care were dying in great numbers on the icy steppes.

Thirty miles northwest of Stalingrad, at Kotluban, a group of Russian nurses heard the German prisoners coming long before they saw them. They listened in astonishment to the mournful groaning as lines of soldiers crept over the horizon and shuffled through snowdrifts toward them. Lowing like cattle, the Germ ans were a procession of rags and dilapidated earmuffs, blanketwrapped feet, and faces blackened by beard and frost. Almost all of them were crying, and the nurses felt an instinctive wave of sympathy for them. Then the Russian guards hoisted rifles and fired indiscriminately into the columns. As the victims fell down and died, the rest of the Germans plodded along, at a half mile an hour, and the nurses shook their fists in outrage at their own soldiers.

Quartermaster Karl Binder was in another of these processions. Marching toward Vertaichy on the Don he flinched at every shot, and at each dull whack of a rifle butt crashing down on a skull. Hundreds of bodies lay beside the trail, freshly killed Germans, Russian women and children dead for weeks, Soviet and German troops mutilated in months-old battles.