William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Lt. Anton Dragan. After the war he wrote Chuikov a letter explaining that he had been the commander of the 1st Battalion, 42nd Regiment, 13th Guards Division. It was the first proof Chuikov had that anyone had survived from the heroic group that fought the Germans from the main railroad station to the edge of the Volga. In 1958, Chuikov spent part of his vacation with his old comrade. In Dragan’s home in the village of Likovitsa, they reconstructed the gruesome details of the firefight that gained precious hours and days for the Sixty-second Army in September 1942.

Mikhail Goldstein. The violinist fled to the West during a tour of Eastern European countries in the 1960s. When the author visited with him, he was still performing occasional concerts and lecturing to students at conservatories.

Capt. Hersch Gurewicz. While working as an army mail censor, the one-legged officer intercepted a letter written by his father and traced him to Berlin. When Gurewicz stood before him, his father collapsed in tears for he thought Hersch had died during the war. Several years later, he told his son that the Gurewicz family was Jewish, a fact he had hidden to spare them from virulent anti- Semitism in the Soviet Union. Gurewicz emigrated to Israel, where he recently suffered one more war wound: an Arab sniper shot him in the arm.

The nurse he loved at Stalingrad did not die. Miraculously recovered from the loss of all her limbs, she married and bore several children.

Gen. Franz Holder. Driven into retirement by Hitler, Halder joined the abortive coup against the Führer’s life. Sentenced to death, he was rescued by Allied soldiers in the last weeks of the war. For years afterward, he helped American historians write the history of the Wehrmacht in World War II.

Gen. Ferdinand Heim. Ordered to stand trial for dereliction of duty, the commander of the 48th Panzer Corps spent months in Moabit Prison awaiting punishment. Only when Marshal Keitel interceded for him with Hitler was Heim released. He now lives in the city of Ulm, West Germany.

Gen. Hermann Hoth. In postwar comments, “Papa” Hoth stated that Paulus should have broken out of the Kessel in December 1942 and reached the oncoming German relief column. Ailing for years, the 85-year-old panzer leader is now confined to his home in Goslar, West Germany.

Dr. Ottmar Kohler. Packed to leave prison in Russia in 1949, the doctor listened in amazement while a Soviet NKVD officer sentenced him to a further twenty-five years in jail for espionage. Finally repatriated in 1955 with the last contingent of Stalingrad prisoners, Kohler received a hero’s welcome in West Germany. The Bonn government decorated him for his extraordinary labors on behalf of fellow captives and he became known as “The Angel of Stalingrad.” He is now a practicing surgeon in the town of Idar-Oberstein, West Germany.

Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser. Wounded in the potato cellar he had occupied near the Barrikady Gun Factory, Kreiser gained a reprieve from death when a Heinkel transport landed next to him on a snowfield and carried him away to safety. The lieutenant’s home is in Ulm, West Germany.

Political Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev eventually assumed ultimate power of the Communist state. Deposed in 1964, he revealed later in his memoirs what no Soviet official had ever admitted: that at Stalingrad, large numbers of German prisoners had been shot to death by Russian guards.

Gen. Nikolai Krylov. Chuikov’s chief of staff during the darkest days at Stalingrad later rose swiftly in the Red Army hierarchy. In the 1960s, the marshal commanded all Soviet strategic missile forces. He died in 1972.

Col. Ivan Lyudnikov. The defender of the pie-shaped slice of land behind the Barrikady Gun Factory was acclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union for his tenacious resistance. In 1968, the retired general returned to the site of his victory as an honored guest of the city of Stalingrad.

Gen. Rodion Malinovsky. When Khrushchev became premier, he appointed the beefy Malinovsky as defense minister. In May 1960, at a press conference in Paris, the two men boisterously denounced President Eisenhower for Francis Gary Powers’s ill-fated U-2 flight; the pending summit meeting never took place. Malinovsky died in 1967.

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Foiled in his attempt to rescue the Sixth Army, Manstein performed a miracle by holding the port city of Rostov open until mid-February 1943, allowing most of German Army Group A in the Caucasus to escape entrapment. Sacked by Hitler in 1944 for differences of opinion on grand strategy, Manstein faced war-crimes charges for permitting Einsatzgruppen to exterminate Jews within his territorial command. Exonerated, he wrote a controversial memoir in which he blamed Paulus for not breaking out of the Kessel in December 1942. However, Manstein ignored the fact that he never issued the code word “Thunderclap,” which Paulus had been told was a prerequisite for launching the operation.

Lt. Emil Metzger. With the bullet from Stalingrad still imbedded in his right heel more than twenty years later, Emil and his wife, Kaethe, live in Frankfurt on a government pension. A constant visitor to their apartment is the son of the officer who took Emil’s place in the furlough rotation so that he could get married. The man died in a Siberian prison camp and never saw his child, now a lawyer.

Capt. Gerhard Meunch. After serving as a general staff officer in the German Armed Forces High Command, Meunch spent many postwar years in school and business. Returning to the newly created West German army, the Bundeswehr, in 1956, he now holds the rank of general.

Lt. Hans Oettl. Released to his home in 1949, Oettl married and resumed his post with the city administration in Munich, where he continues to live.

Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus. Except for a brief visit to Nuremburg to testify against the Nazi leaders, Paulus spent the rest of his life behind the Iron Curtain. He lived in Russia until 1952, then went to Dresden, in the Communist East Zone of Germany. He never saw his wife Coca again. Because he had lent his name to the “anti-Fascist” officers group in Soviet prisons, the Gestapo imprisoned her. Rescued from an Alpine detention center by American soldiers, she died at Baden-Baden in 1949. Paulus’s final years were bitter ones. Reviled by some critics for his subservience to Hitler, stung by histories and memoirs that accused him of timidity, he wrote copious rebuttals to these charges. His son Ernst visited him several times; his other son, Alexander, had been killed at Anzio in 1944. Paulus believed that communism was the best hope for postwar Europe, and Ernst noted sadly that his father “had gone over to the other side.” The field marshal died in 1957 after a lingering illness. In 1970, his son Ernst committed suicide. He was fifty-two, his father’s age when he surrendered his Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

Sgt. Jacob Pavlov. A Hero of the Soviet Union for his fiftyeight- day defense of the apartment building at Solechnaya Street, Pavlov fought on to Berlin. To this day he is known to countless admirers as the “Houseowner” for his incredible achievement.

Sgt. Alexei Petrov. In the spring of 1943, Petrov finally heard dreadful news about his family. A sister-in-law wrote that his entire family had been reported killed by Nazi occupation troops. The information was correct; Petrov never found any trace of his relatives.