The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  On January 28, the Russians divided the city into three sectors: the Eleventh Corps was isolated around the tractor plant; the Eighth and Fifty-first corps around an engineering school west of Mamaev Hill; the remainders of the Fourteenth and Fourth corps were in the downtown area around the Univermag.

  At the Schnellhefter Block across from the tractor plant, Dr. Ottmar Kohler had run out of morphine. Wallowing in filth and blood, he operated under flickering lights and in incredible cold. Outside the building, lines of soldiers crowded the entrance, looking for a place to sleep. An officer went to the door and begged them to go away because there was no room, but they said they would wait until morning.

  At sunrise, the visitors were still there, huddled together against the below-zero temperature. During the night they had all died from exposure.

  At the central military garrison post, now a hospital a mile north of the Univermag, three thousand wounded lay under a merciless wind that whipped through the building’s shattered walls. Without enough medicine to care for everyone, doctors placed gravely ill soldiers at the edge of the crowd so they would die first from the cold.

  Ringing the huge building on four sides was a stack of bodies six feet high. When soldiers stopped at the garrison to ask for food, they earned it by arranging corpses in neat piles, like railroad ties. After stacking their quota of bodies, cooks splashed soup into their outstretched mess tins and they shuffled away from the cordwood cemetery.

  Batteries of Russian mortars zeroed in on the Central garrison and set it afire. While medics screamed for the wounded to get up and run, flames fanned by the gale winds raced through the cavernous hallways. In the courtyard, onlookers saw the building billow into a fire that flashed out of every opening on the upper floors. When fiery bodies hurtled out of the inferno, they sizzled in the snow for minutes.

  The hospital walls turned cherry red in color and became almost transparent. Finally they bulged outward and whole sections crumpled into the streets. Through the breaks, horrified witnesses saw patients tearing at burning bandages in frantic dervish dances.

  After the ceilings crashed down and the violent whoosh of flames subsided, rescuers pushed in to save as many as they could. They found every stairway clogged by a chain of corpses.

  With the last hours at hand, wounded German soldiers in countless cellars asked for pistols, placed them to their temples and fired. The lice that had lived on them for weeks quickly left the cooling bodies and moved like gray blankets to other beds.

  At the bottom of a ravine west of Mamaev Hill, General Seydlitz-Kurzbach debated suicide with his companions. Once again, the chameleon-like general had changed his attitude toward Paulus and Hitler. Only a short time before he had told his comrades they were plotting treason; he now spent hours cursing the Nazis and Hitler’s insanity, and openly advocated a revolt of the masses against the Third Reich.

  His companions tended to agree with him. White-haired General Pfeiffer goaded Seydlitz-Kurzbach on, shouting that he owed no subservience to “a Bohemian corporal skunk.” General Otto Korfes vacillated between calling for a Gotterdammerung and cursing the leaders of the Nazi regime. Colonel Crome withdrew into a careful reading of the Bible; General Heitz ignored the seditious talk around him. Totally loyal to Paulus, he mounted guns at the entrance to the bunker and said, “I will shoot the first man who deserts.”

  While Seydlitz-Kurbach openly discussed taking his own life, his orderly, an elderly man, blew himself up with a hand grenade.

  At the Univermag, Arthur Schmidt had intercepted a colonel named Steidle who wanted to plead with Paulus to capitulate. Raging at the man, Schmidt threatened him with the firing squad.

  In public Schmidt showed a tenacious will to resist to the final bullet but in secret, he was having conversations with two officers, one a Colonel Beaulieu, who had spent some years in Russia in the twenties and the other, Capt. Boris von Neidhardt, a Balt and former czarist officer. Both men spoke fluent Russian and were knowledgeable about life in the Soviet Union. Schmidt spent hours with each man, asking probing questions about their experiences.

  Col. Wilhelm Adam, Paulus’s adjutant, intercepted Beaulieu after one of these talks and asked what was going on behind Schmidt’s closed door. Beaulieu was candid, “Schmidt asked me to tell him about the Red Army. He was particularly interested to learn what one had to expect of their soldiers and officers. I didn’t know that your chief of staff could be so friendly.”

  The suspicious Adam checked with Neidhardt and found that Schmidt had quizzed him on the same topics.

  On the evening of January 29, Adam received further proof that Schmidt had no intention of fighting to the last breath. Schmidt’s orderly suddenly pulled Adam into the chief of staff’s room, and pointing to a suitcase in the corner, whispered, “To all his subordinates he says ‘you must hold out, there will be no capitulation,’ but he himself gets ready for captivity.”

  Seething with hatred, Adam went back to his cot and brooded.

  From his basement window just off Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger looked past his machine gun at a water fountain on the intersection. For days it had been the focal point of firefights, and Pflüger had killed a number of Russians trying to reach it. There was also a line of dead Germans around it, cut down as they crawled across the ice with empty canteens.

  With his war now reduced to fighting for a sip of water, Pflüger was ready to surrender. But first he wanted to hear a speech being given by Adolf Hitler on January 30, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Third Reich. At noon, he stood with others beside the radio and waited for the Führer’s voice to flood into the cellar. It did not. The announcer said that Hermann Goering would speak instead, and the Reichsmarshal was his bombastic self:

  … What herculean labors our Führer has performed … out of this pulp, this human pulp … to forge a nation as hard as steel. The enemy is tough, but the German soldier has grown tougher.… We have taken away the Russians’ coal and iron, and without that they can no longer make armaments on a large scale.… Rising above all these gigantic battles like a mighty monument is Stalingrad.… One day this will be recognized as the greatest battle in our history, a battle of heroes.… We have a mighty epic of an incomparable struggle, the struggle of the Nibelungs. They, too, stood to the last.…

  In Pflüger’s cellar, men groaned and someone cursed the “fat man” in Berlin.

  Goering continued “… My soldiers, thousands of years have passed, and thousands of years ago in a tiny pass in Greece stood a tremendously brave and bold man with three hundred soldiers, Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans.… Then the last man fell … and now only the inscription stands: ‘Wanderer, if you should come to Sparta, go tell the Spartans you found us lying here as the law bade us.’… Someday men will read: ‘If you come to Germany, go tell the Germans you saw us lying in Stalingrad, as the law bade us.…’”

  It was suddenly clear to Pflüger and thousands of Germans standing by shortwave radios that Hitler already considered them dead.

  After Goering’s speech ended, the German national anthem was played, and Pflüger joined hands with his comrades to sing: “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.” He sobbed unashamedly at the beautiful words. When the anthem was followed by “Horst Wessel,” the Nazi party song, someone in the room lashed out with his gun butt and broke the radio to pieces.

  To the last, however, Paulus publicly worshipped at the feet of the Führer:

  January 30th:

  On the tenth anniversary of your assumption of power, the Sixth Army hails its “Führer.” The swastika flag is still flying above Stalingrad. May our battle be an example to the present and coming generations, that they must never capitulate even in a hopeless situation, for then Germany will come out victorious.

  Hail my Führer

  Paulus, Generaloberst

  At a railroad embankment near the engineering school, Gen. Carl Rodenburg sighted his rifle and carefully squeezed off a shot. Then he tu
rned and asked his aide to find another target. The monocled general had come to the “range” as he called it, to have a last crack at the enemy. He fired for over an hour while the aide, newly promoted to captain, chose his targets. As the general turned once more to speak to the young officer, a Russian bullet tore into the man’s head, killing him instantly. The sorrowful Rodenburg left the body in the snow and went back to his bunker to await the end. It was some consolation to him that at least the captain’s family in Germany would get a bigger pension because of his new rank.

  Inside the NKVD prison, several hundred German officers and men waited for the confrontation with Russian soldiers. Some drank heavily, and in an upstairs room, one officer enjoyed pancakes cooked for him by a pleasant Russian woman, who had magically appeared in anticipation of victory.

  Other soldiers prepared by dressing in clothing taken from corpses: extra underwear, two shirts, double socks, sweaters—anything they could find to ward off the cold weather they knew awaited them on the march to internment.

  Shots rang out in one of the cells and several soldiers rushed to the open door to find a sergeant standing over three officers sprawled in death. Behind the sergeant, a blond lieutenant sat at a table and stared intently at a girl’s picture, framed by the light of two candles. The lieutenant seemed completely oblivious to the scene around him.

  Hearing the commotion at the door, the sergeant whirled on the spectators and shouted; “Goddamn you, go away or you’ll get the next one!”

  As they retreated from the doorway, the sounds of two more shots rocketed off the walls and when they looked in again, the blond lieutenant had fallen face down on the floor. His head was a mass of blood.

  The sergeant was there, too, with a self-inflicted bullet wound in the mouth. He had carried out the suicide pact exactly as ordered.

  At the southeastern side of Red Square, Col. Gunter Ludwig held the cellar of an office building beside the Gorki Theater. His post was also the last defense line the Germans manned in front of the Univermag. On the evening of the thirtieth, a military policeman arrived and told the colonel that General Schmidt wanted to see him. Ludwig was suddenly fearful, for during the day he had been talking to Russian officers about surrender. Knowing Schmidt’s threats of a firing squad for those who quit the battle, he walked to the department store feeling like a condemned man.

  Schmidt greeted him sternly and asked about his position on the lower part of the square. After Ludwig told him his men were still deployed there, Schmidt offered him a seat and said, “Listen, I just heard that you negotiated with the Russians today.”

  Ludwig admitted he had, and justified his actions by describing the woeful condition of his troops. As he spoke, Ludwig watched Schmidt carefully, trying to gauge his reaction. The general paced the room, then whirled, “You mean you just went to the Russians and negotiated capitulation, and no one even thinks of coming to us, to army headquarters?”

  The stunned colonel had trouble getting the point: Schmidt, the martinet, also wanted to surrender! Then he recovered enough to say: “If that is all you want, sir, I believe I can promise you that a parliamentarian will report here in front of the basement tomorrow morning at about 0900 hours.”

  Schmidt was suddenly gentle, “All right, Ludwig, you see to that—good night now.”

  Minutes later, the 71st Division commander, General Roske, went to Paulus and said, “The division is no longer capable of rendering resistance. Russian tanks are approaching the department store building. The end has come.”

  Paulus smiled at his aide, “Thank you for everything, Roske. Convey my gratitude also to your officers and men. Schmidt has already asked Ludwig to take up negotiations with the Red Army.”

  Paulus went back to his cot where Colonel Adam sat across from him. A small candle flickered between them; neither spoke for a while. Finally Adam said, “Sir, you must go to sleep now. Otherwise you will not be able to stand up to tomorrow’s trials. It will cost us the rest of our nervous strength.”

  Shortly after midnight, Paulus stretched out to nap, and Adam went to Roske and asked if there were any new developments. Roske gave him a cigarette, lit one for himself, and said: “A Red tank is standing quite close in a side street, its guns aimed at us. I immediately reported to Schmidt on the matter. He said the tank must be prevented from firing at all costs.… The interpreter should go to the tank commander with a white flag and offer negotiations.…”

  Adam went back to his own cot from where he stared across the room at his sleeping commander. His relationship with Paulus had become almost worshipful and Adam could no longer see the flaws in Paulus’s character: his failure to comprehend the destructive alliance that existed between Hitler’s ambitions and the Wehrmacht’s apolitical generals, or Paulus’s unwillingness to shoulder the burden of independent command. What a handsome man, Adam thought as he pondered the events that had overwhelmed such a brilliant military career. Decent and honorable, Paulus had subordinated himself completely to Hitler’s demands and in so doing, had lost control of his destiny.

  While the commander in chief of the Sixth Army rested, the Führer employed one last device to salvage something from the disaster. He ordered a shower of promotions on Sixth Army’s senior officers, most notably one that made Paulus a field marshal. Knowing that no German field marshal had ever surrended, Hitler hoped that Paulus would take the hint and commit suicide.

  Paulus did not. Before dawn, his interpreter, Boris von Neidhardt, went out through the darkened square to the Russian tank, where a young Soviet lieutenant, Fyodor Yelchenko, stood in the turret. When Neidhardt waved to him, Yelchenko jumped down and Neidhardt said, “Our big chief wants to talk to your big chief.”

  Yelchenko shook his head and answered: “Look here, our big chief has other things to do. He isn’t available. You’ll just have to deal with me.” Suddenly apprehensive because of nearby shelling and the presence of the enemy, Yelchenko called for reinforcements and fourteen Russian soldiers appeared with their guns ready.

  Neidhardt was disgusted. “No, no, our chief asks that only one or two of you come in.”

  “Nuts to that,” Yelchenko said. “I am not going by myself.” The lieutenant with the turned-up nose and boyish smile had no intention of going alone into the enemy camp. After agreeing on three Russian representatives, the group went into the cellar of the Univermag where hundreds of Germans had gathered. Yelchenko had a difficult time deciding who was in command. Though Roske spoke to him and then Arthur Schmidt, he did not see Paulus.

  After Roske explained that he and Schmidt were empowered to speak for the commander and negotiate a surrender, Schmidt asked as a special favor that the Russians treat Paulus as a private person and escort him away in an automobile to protect him from vengeful Red Army soldiers. Laughing gaily, Yelchenko agreed. “Okay,” he said, and then they took him down the corridor to a green-curtained cubicle. Yelchenko stepped in and confronted Friedrich von Paulus, unshaved, but immaculate in his full-dress uniform.

  Yelchenko wasted no time on formalities. “Well, that finishes it,” he offered in greeting. The forlorn field marshal looked into his eyes and nodded miserably.

  A short time later, after conversations with more Soviet officers, Paulus and Schmidt walked out of the fetid depths of the Univermag and stepped into a Russian staff car. It took them south over the Tsaritsa Gorge, past the grain elevator, through the ruins of Dar Gova, and on to the suburb of Beketovka where, in a wooden farmhouse, they were ushered into the presence of Gen. Mikhail Shumilov, commander of the Soviet Sixty-fourth Army. Surrounded by cameramen, Shumilov greeted his guests correctly and asked for identification. When Paulus produced his paybook, the Russian pretended to read German and grunted his acceptance.

  The Russians offered the Germans food from a tremendous buffet but Paulus balked, insisting that he first receive a guarantee that his men be given proper rations and medical care. Reassured on that point by Shumilov, Paulus and Schmidt finally picked l
ightly at the feast spread before them.

  The primary antagonists of the battle for Stalingrad never got to meet. Deprived by jealous commanders of the chance to capture Paulus himself, Vassili Chuikov had to content himself with lesser fry.* Dressed in a fur jacket, Chuikov sat behind a big desk in his Volga bunker, and glared at the first German to come through the door.

  “Are you Seydlitz?” he asked. The officer was Lt. Philip Humbert, Seydlitz’s aide. To cover his error, the flustered Russian interpreter introduced Humbert as a lieutenant colonel, and then brought the rest of the Germans into Chuikov’s presence.

  Chuikov was suddenly expansive. “Be glad, general,” he said to Seydlitz, “that you are with us. Stalin will have his parade in Berlin on the first of May. We shall then make peace, and we shall work together with you.”

  His questions then came fast. “Why do you look so bad? Why did they not fly you out?” General Krylov broke in to say that he had been flown out of Sevastopol when that city was doomed.

  At this point, General Korfes became a talkative spokesman for the German officer corps. “It is the tragic point of world history that the two greatest men of our times, Hitler and Stalin … have been unable to find common grounds so as to beat the mutual enemy, the capitalist world.”

  Even Chuikov seemed startled by this declaration. Seydlitz grabbed Korfes’s arm and cried: “Why don’t you stop talking?”

  Korfes could not be stilled. “After all, I feel entitled to say this because it is the truth.”

  Seydlitz-Kurzbach and General Pfeiffer lapsed into a fretful silence, marred by each man’s occasional weeping. Chuikov tried to make his prisoners more comfortable by ordering food and tea, which they gratefully accepted. After more polite conversation, the Germans were escorted to the Volga shore and a battered Ford which took them across the ice to captivity. Behind them, their German troops faced a mixed reception from the Russian captors.