William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Because the frigid temperature kept the corpses from decomposing, the doctor kept them for weeks. When his own room was “bursting with protein,” he felt compelled to help neighboring prisoners so he instituted a form of “lend-lease.” Each day, he carried the petrified bodies back and forth to different rooms, dropping them off wherever increased rations were needed.

By May of 1943, the Russians began to feed the prisoners better. As one captive explained, “They wanted some soldiers to go home after the war.” Doctors and nurses moved in to care for the survivors; political agitators roved the camps, seeking candidates for anti-Fascist training. After several months of indoctrination, one German exclaimed, “I never knew there were so many Communists in the Wehrmacht!” In most cases, those who turned on Hitler and Mussolini had a specific goal in mind. Cooperation meant extra food.

Thousands of German families still waited for word of their loved ones at Stalingrad. In Frankfurt on the Main, Kaethe Metzger watched while American planes leveled the city in 1944. When Allied armies crossed the Rhine in 1945, she fled to the suburbs and, after Frankfurt fell, she returned to her old neighborhood several times to see if anyone had heard news of Emil. Kaethe never doubted that she would see him again, even though each time she asked her friends if her husband had contacted any of them, they shook their heads and turned away.

After the war, Frankfurt slowly surged with life as the rubble was carted away and the city became headquarters for the Allied Army of Occupation. When construction began on apartment houses and stores in the downtown area, Kaethe found a small flat for Emil and herself. Through the years of the cold war she waited—the Berlin airlift in 1948 and the first trickle of prisoners to return from behind the Iron Curtain. Kaethe refused to give up hope. On July 7, 1949, a yellow telegram arrived from Frankfort on the Oder, inside the Russian zone of East Germany. It said simply, “ Ich komme, Emil.”

Kaethe cried all that day. Then she began to worry about what to wear when she met Emil at the train station. Like a schoolgirl, she prepared for her husband’s return.

Peering nervously through a train window, Emil Metzger was traveling across his fallen nation. Passing lush farmlands, he recalled the terrible devastation he had seen in Russia and the six years he had spent in a Siberian prison camp. How long, he wondered, would Germany remain divided, bankrupt, a pariah in the family of nations. Would there be any place in the new world for a man who had served so discredited a cause?

The train slowed and pulled into the enormous yards at Frankfurt. His heart pounding, Emil rose and stretched. His right foot throbbed painfully from the bullet still imbedded in his heel, but he paid no attention to it as he descended to the platform and was carried along by the frantic rush of fellow passengers. Suddenly he was in the midst of a screaming, hysterical group of civilians. Someone shouted his name and he nodded absently at an old friend thrusting a bouquet of flowers at him.

Then he saw her, standing quietly apart from the crowd. Pushing through the people in front of him, he never took his eyes off Kaethe, looking radiant in a colorful print dress. He reached out, their hands touched and then they were together, sobbing and clinging desperately to each other. But as he smothered his wife with kisses, Emil was suddenly afraid. The woman he held was almost a total stranger. Although he had never spent an hour in prison camp without thinking about her—about her smile and laughter and how much he wanted to be with her—it struck him forcibly that, in their nine years of marriage, this was only their fifth day together as man and wife.

Col. Wilhelm Adam. Paulus’s adjutant surrendered with him at the Univermag Department Store. In prison camp, he joined the Communist-inspired Bund Deutsche Offiziere, an “anti-Fascist” group that broadcast appeals to the citizens of the Third Reich against the Hitler regime. After the war, Adam returned home to East Germany and became an official in the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic.

Col. Nikolai Batyuk. The arthritic commander of the Soviet 284th Division on Mamaev Hill was promoted to general and later died in another battle in western Russia.

Capt. Winrich Behr. Today “Teddy” Behr is an executive with a West German telephone company. He still maintains close contact with Nikolaus von Below and Arthur Schmidt, his confidants from the days of the Kessel .

Col. Günter von Below. Kept in captivity until 1955 with a “hard-core” group of Sixth Army officers, Below lives in retirement at Bad Godesburg, West Germany. His affection and respect for Friedrich von Paulus remain constant.

Q.M. Karl Binder. He survived the death march and in 1948 went home to Swabisch -Gmund, southeast of Stuttgart. In his modest apartment, the ever-efficient pensioner keeps an unofficial roster of those Germans who came back from Soviet prisons. Out of 107,000 Sixth Army soldiers herded into prison camps in 1943, he has found less than five thousand survivors.

Lt. Felice Bracci. Now an employee of the Banco Nazionale del Lavore in Rome, the adventurous Bracci recently realized another of his life’s ambitions. In 1969, he saw the Pyramids that he had forsaken in 1942 in order to explore the steppe country of Russia.

Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert. After a long recuperation from wounds suffered at Stalingrad, Brunnert went into the front lines around Berlin in 1945. Wounded a second time, he escaped capture by the Red Army and returned home to Boblingen.

Lt. Cristoforo Capone. When the “rogue” arrived home in 1946 as an emaciated stranger, his daughter Guiliana shrank back, screaming: “Mommy, who is this man? Send him away.” Along with a brilliant career as a heart specialist, Capone enjoys a legendary reputation for his courage, according to the comrades who endured privation with him in prison. More than one hundred thousand Italian soldiers went into captivity with the doctor but only twelve thousand ever saw sunny Italy again.

Capt. Ignacy Changar. After recovering from massive head wounds in the Novosibirsk Hospital, the commando leader married the nurse who had been so shocked by his prematurely white hair. Today Changar lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he solemnly raised tumblers of vodka with the author to the memory of his fallen comrades at Stalingrad.

Sgt. Tania Chernova. More than a quarter century after her vendetta against the enemy, the graying sniper still refers to the Germans she killed as “sticks” that she broke. For many years after the war she believed that Vassili Zaitsev, her lover, had died from grievous wounds. Only in 1969, did she learn that he had recovered and married someone else. The news stunned her for she still loved him.

Gen. Vassili Chuikov. The great leader of the Sixty-second Army, renamed the Eighth Guards, led it on to the glorious triumph at Berlin in May 1945. Rewarded with the highest decorations and honors, he eventually became commander of all Russian land forces in the postwar period. In 1969, the semiretired marshal flew to Washington to represent the Soviet Union at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s funeral. Chuikov spends most of his time now at his country dacha outside Moscow.

Lt. Pyotr Deriabin. Recruited into the Soviet Secret Police, Deriabin defected in 1954, and exposed some of the KGB European espionage network to CIA officials.