William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

At villages along the march, civilians broke into the lines to rob the prisoners of lighters, fountain pens, and fieldpacks. His hands blue from the cold, Binder plunged on and tried to distract himself by thinking of his family safe at home in Germany.

Emil Metzger had already walked more than a hundred miles to a train that took him to the foothills of the Urals in Siberia. Besides the bullet still in his heel, Metzger had fallen victim to typhus and, by the time he reached a straw cot in a primitive barracks, was close to death. Handing his pictures of Kaethe to a chaplain he said: “Give these to my wife if you get back.” Then he lay down to die.

In the morning, Emil woke to an unreal silence. Nearly everyone in his barracks had perished during the night. Suddenly ashamed of his own willingness to give up the struggle, the lieutenant vowed he would survive. From that moment on, he ignored his fever and ate anything the Russians offered, though the food “was like eating his own gall.”

The German Sixth Army was scattered to more than twenty camps stretching from the Arctic Circle to the southern deserts.

One train carried thousands of Germans from the Volga to Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. Inside each car, stuffed with one hundred or more prisoners, a macabre death struggle ensued as the Germans killed each other for bits of food tossed to them every two days. Those closest to the door were set upon by ravenous soldiers in the rear; only the strongest men survived the weeks-long trip. By the time the train reached the Pamir Mountains, almost half its passengers were dead.

Other Germans remained in Stalingrad to help reconstruct the city they had devastated. Typhus swept their ranks and in March, the Russians dug a ditch at Beketovka and dumped nearly forty thousand German bodies into a mass grave.

Cpl. Franz Deifel, who had thought of killing himself in January, survived the plague and now picked up the bricks of Stalingrad. In March, Deifel heard a whistle from the tractor factory as the Russians ran the first train around that massive plant’s convoluted rail system. Later that month, Deifel also saw his first butterfly of the spring. A blaze of yellow and orange, it flitted nervously from ruin to ruin in the glorious sunlight of a cloudless day.

But for more than five hundred thousand other Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Rumanians, the Russian winter had been a harsh, unfair struggle. During a single, three-month span—February, March, and April of 1943—more than four hundred thousand of them had perished.

In many cases, the Russians let them starve to death. Every third day, Red Army trucks unloaded heads of cabbage, loaves of frozen bread, even garbage for the prisoners to eat. At Tambov, Krinovaya, Yelabuga, Oranki, Susdal, Vladimir, and other camps, the inmates fell upon the food and beat each other to death for scraps.

Other prisoners, more intent on survival, took matters into their own hands, especially in camps where military self-discipline had broken down. At Susdal, Felice Bracci first noticed it when he saw corpses without arms or legs. And Dr.’ Cristoforo Capone found human heads with the brains scooped out, or torsos minus livers and kidneys. Cannibalism had begun.

The cannibals were furtive at first, stealing among the dead to hack off a limb and eat it raw. But their tastes quickly matured and they searched for the newly dead, those just turning cold, and thus more tender. Finally they roamed in packs, defying anyone to stop them. They even helped the dying to die.

Hunting day and night, their lust for human flesh turned them into crazed animals and, by late February, they reached a savage peak of barbarism. At Krinovaya, an Italian Alpini soldier raced across the compound to find his priest, Don Guido Tuna.

“Come quickly, Father,” he begged. “They want to eat my cousin!”

The startled Tuna followed the distraught man across the compound, past quartered stomachs, headless cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh and meat. He arrived at the barracks door to see madmen smashing at it with their fists. Inside was their quarry, shot and mortally wounded by a Russian guard. The cannibals had followed the trail of warm blood to the door and now tried to pound it down to get at the terrified man.

The sickened Tuna screamed at the cannibals, telling them theirs was a heinous crime, a blot on their consciences, and that God would never forgive them. The flesh-eaters slunk back from the door; a few begged the priest for forgiveness. Father Tuna went inside to the dying soldier and heard his last confession. When the boy begged the priest to save him from the cannibals, Tuna sat beside him in his final moments. The cannibals left his corpse alone. They had thousands more to choose from.

In another barracks at Krinovaya, two Italian brothers had sworn to protect each other from cannibals in case death separated them. When one brother succumbed to illness, the cannibals crowded around the fresh corpse. The other brother straddled the dead man’s cot, and warned off the jackals hovering around the bed. During the long night he stood guard while the cannibals urged him to let them take care of the victim.

As dawn approached, they increased their verbal assault, telling the brother it was pointless for him to stay any longer. They even offered to bury the body for him. As he weakened, they moved closer to the bed and gently picked up the corpse he had sworn to defend. Exhausted from his vigil, the surviving brother threw himself on the floor and began to howl hysterically. The experience had driven him insane.

The Russians shot every cannibal they caught, but faced with the task of hunting down so many man-eaters they had to enlist the aid of “anticannibalism teams,” drawn from the ranks of captive officers. The Russians equipped these squads with crowbars and demanded they kill every cannibal they found. The teams prowled at night, looking for telltale flickers of flame from small fires where the predators were preparing their meals.

Dr. Vincenzo Pugliese went on patrol frequently and, one night, he turned a corner and surprised a cannibal roasting something on the end of a stick. At first it looked like an oversized sausage, but then Pugliese’s trained eye noticed the accordion-like pleats on the object and with a sickening start, he realized that the man was cooking a human trachea.

Prisoners who refused to eat human flesh used other tricks to survive. At Krinovaya, a group of Italian entrepreneurs retrieved excrement from huge latrine ditches and with bare hands picked out undigested corn and millet, which they washed and ate. German prisoners swiftly improved the process. Setting up an assembly line of sieve-like tin cups, they strained the feces through them and trapped so much grain that they started a black market in it.

At Susdal, Dr. Cristoforo Capone employed his fertile imagination to save himself and his comrades. Still a charming rogue who found humor in the darkest moments, he devised truly elaborate schemes. When a truck filled with cabbages parked outside the fence, Capone organized a group that stole the load and hid it under beds, in latrines and mattresses. While his friends ate voraciously, Capone then spread a trail of cabbage leaves from the empty truck to a nearby Rumanian barracks. The theft was finally discovered, and the Russians followed the trail and fell upon the Rumanians with clubs. Meanwhile, Capone’s friends ate every other piece of evidence.

The inventive doctor found yet another macabre way to sustain life. Divided into fifteen-men squads, the Italian POWs lived in ice-cold rooms where they walked incessantly to keep from freezing. Each morning a Russian guard entered, counted the men present and left rations for that exact number. As men began to waste away and die, Capone decided their corpses could serve a better purpose than being thrown onto the pile of bodies in the yard. From then on Capone propped bodies upright in their chairs and when the Russian guard made his daily count, he and his companions engaged them in spirited conversation. The guard always left the fifteen rations; soon Capone and his companions were looking better, feeling better.