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 Turla.
“Come quickly, Father,” he begged. “They want to eat my cousin!”
The startled Turla 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 Turla 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 Turla went inside to the dying soldier and heard his last confession. When the boy begged the priest to save him from the cannibals, Turla 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.
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.
Epilogue: Among the Survivors
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 Swäbisch-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.
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 Halder. 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.
The World War II Chronicles Page 76
