Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘So it went badly for him …’

‘It went badly for him, but not immediately. He was able to cause terrible military disasters. He had prepared on the grand scale. Do you know how many men he sent to the Russian front? Three million, I mean three million soldiers, with three thousand tanks and three thousand planes. No small matter.’

‘And how many Italians were there in the ARMIR?’

‘Nearly sixty thousand, commanded by General Messe. At that time it was still known as the CSIR, or “Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia”. But Messe left because he disagreed with Mussolini’s decision to send in six more divisions. And I think he was right. He was replaced by General Italo Gariboldo and the Expeditionary Corps became the ARMIR, or Italian Army in Russia.’

‘“They were three hundred, Young and strong, And they are dead,”’ quoted Amara.

‘Many more than that, sadly. There are also some letters from Italian soldiers in this book. I’ll read you one if you like. Very few were saved. Nothing more was ever heard about most of the men, not even whether they lived or died.’

‘And then?’

‘In the first months Hitler’s method of aggression and burned earth, of running ahead of everything and everybody, of hitting hard and using surprise, brought success, as it had elsewhere. His orders were strict: keep captured soldiers alive only so long as they can be used as forced labour, otherwise kill them! Which was against all the rules of war. But Nazi thinking was basic and lethal: the Russian NCOs came from barbarous and inferior races, so they must be instantly eliminated, regardless of whether they fought or surrendered. This was the order. And show no respect for civilians: strip them of everything; feel free to plunder and kill anyone getting in the way, including women, children and the old. That was Hitler’s philosophy of war. And it clearly created panic. The population hid and fled; they were terrified. But with Moscow threatened and Leningrad on the point of collapse, something snapped in the Russian people and they decided to resist to the last drop of blood, regardless of the cost. And they were truly extraordinary. We must give them credit for that. If they’d let the Nazis occupy Moscow and destroy Leningrad and Stalingrad, I don’t believe you and I would be here talking like this in this peaceful library in Vienna.’

Amara watches him attentively. This man with his passion for history astonishes her. What lies behind his prodigious memory? And how does he manage to remember so many languages and read them as if each was his mother tongue?

Meanwhile the Old Testament prophet has come close and is regarding them with an air of disapproval. Why are they sitting on the floor with an open book in their hands? But he doesn’t question them or otherwise disturb them. Perhaps he too has been infected by Hans’s passion and Amara’s curiosity and eagerness to learn. He watches them and listens with increasing attention.

‘Well?’

Amara knows more or less how things went, but she loves listening as the excited yet serene voice of Hans explains, remembers and considers, extracting from his extraordinary memory dates, statistics and descriptions.

‘From the Russian point of view, by autumn 1941 the war seemed to have been lost. The Baltic states, Belarus, the northern Crimea and a good part of the Ukraine had been occupied by Hitler. One and a half million members of the Red Army ended up as prisoners in Nazi camps, or working in German factories.’

‘But what could have changed the fortunes of war? How could Hitler’s method of speed and aggression, betrayal and murder, surprise and burned earth, ever fail when it had worked so well till then in Poland and Holland and even in France?’

‘There are probably many reasons. In July 1942 the Nazi Sixth Army attacked on the line of the Don, about a hundred kilometres from Stalingrad. The idea was that once the city had fallen, they would have free hands in the south of the Soviet Union, and from there could join up with the Japanese army which had meanwhile occupied Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore and Burma. The tactic was always the same: surprise, brutality, rapid aggression and the systematic assassination of enemies, particulary military ones, and particularly the most senior of them, without hesitation or pity. On the other hand the Red Army had a fine commander in Marshal Zhukov. And Zhukov decided the tactic of defence and waiting was mistaken, rather it was essential to attack and hit hard.’

‘But how was Zhukov able to pass from defence to attack, I mean, how was he able to convince Stalin who was controlling everything from above?’

‘The first thing was to stop leaving all choices of time and place to the Nazis. Zhukov knew his only chance of winning was to take the initiative himself, and for him to decide times and places and thus be able to work out manoeuvres of encirclement. It seemed impossible but in the end it worked. Meanwhile Hitler, aware that his troops were not advancing as he expected them to, sent in three more divisions: the Seventeenth and Eleventh Infantry, plus the Fourth Panzer Army. Zhukov, faced with such an array of forces, was forced to retreat. But slowly and methodically he continued the encirclement, preventing the Nazis from advancing more than two kilometres a day. In a month they only managed to gain sixty kilometres.’

‘But winter was approaching, as the history books tell us about Napoleon. Do you think Hitler was aware of that?’

‘He was certainly aware that Russia in autumn would be treacherous. He knew how it had been for Napoleon. So he began to press harder. But he got stuck, unable either to advance or retreat. The people of Stalingrad knew the outcome of the war now depended entirely on them and they fought to the last gasp. Boys, old men, women, everyone, made themselves available to help the soldiers against the Germans, joining the 62nd and 64th armies or helping as porters and postmen. It is said that more than sixty thousand civilians, including men over fifty and boys of thirteen and fourteen years of age, took up arms to defend the city.’

‘But meanwhile people were still dying.’

‘The Germans died in huge numbers. The situation took them by surprise, they were so used to winning. They lost twenty-four thousand men outside Stalingrad, and five hundred tanks as well.’

‘Then finally winter came.’

‘It was on 17 November 1942, according to reports, that it began to snow, making things even more difficult for the German armies. Facing them was a city up in arms on all sides. Snipers were firing on them from roofs and windows, while hand grenades were blowing up tanks. The first unit to yield was the Romanian Kletskaya Army, which enabled Zhukov to close the circle and imprison the Germans in a vice. General von Paulus had no idea what to do. He had repeatedly begged Hitler to let him withdraw from the quagmire so as to gain time and reorganise, but the only answer he received was “A German soldier must continue to stand where he has planted his foot.”’

‘Couldn’t he disobey Hitler?’

‘Of course. But he was too used to obedience. An honourable man who had given his word. In fact, a whole series of considerations made him powerless in the face of the Red Army which had caught him in a noose, squeezing his shoulders and sides.’

‘Was he killed?’

‘On 8 January 1943 the Russian command suggested to the Germans, by now surrounded and deprived of supplies, that they should surrender with honour. That meant leaving them in uniform, respecting the code of war and treating those they took prisoner, both officers and men, with consideration. They had two days to decide. Von Paulus communicated the terms to Hitler. Hitler, proud and stupid as always, turned them down, inflicting a terrible price on his forces. According to his twisted logic all that was left to them was to ‘conquer or die’, when it was already clear that victory was impossible so that he was in effect sending them all to be slaughtered.’