Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  6

  Lieutenant-General Paulus was not a cruel man, as may be proved by the fact that the Soviets never charged him with any war crimes. Immediately upon succeeding to command of Sixth Army, he’d canceled our late Field-Marshal von Reichenau’s order of 10.10.41 to proceed with extreme measures against subhumans. Nonetheless, Lieutenant-General Paulus esteemed the effectiveness of terror raids: They broke an enemy population, and thereby ended war, more rapidly than other, supposedly more lenient measures. By the beginning of August he was fully engaged against First and Fourth Soviet Tank Armies on the Don River bend. His advance grew delayed; he found the so-called “annihilation battalions” especially troublesome. He shuffled maps and regiments, the long swastika flag hanging down above his headquarters there at Golubskaya-on-the-Don. The enemy proving superior in numbers if nothing else, our Führer sent Fourth Panzer Army back to Paulus’s aid; they were approaching in good order from Kotel’niko. He drafted a friendly welcome to their commander, Colonel-General Hoth. Meanwhile, the orderly came in and refilled his silver cigarette case. Actually he wasn’t feeling very well; for some weeks now he’d suffered from “the Russian sickness.” No matter; he’d had dysentery in the last war, too. It was better not to inform Coca. At 0430 hours on 15.8.42 he commenced his offensive, shattering Fourth Soviet Tank Army. The Italians were showing a bit of funk; he sent Lieutenant-General Blumentritt over to regroup them. He advised Headquarters of the weakness of his northern flank, but they told him to press on without making demands. This hurt his feelings slightly, but he remembered what Field-Marshal von Bock would have said: The important thing is to keep calm. First Bach, then Mozart. Coca liked Mozart’s operas more then he did; he preferred the instrumental music. On 22.8.42, he enjoyed a light moment with the officers when the radio announced that Brazil had declared war on the Reich; somebody remarked that Field-Marshal von Reichenau had always expressed a desire to visit Rio de Janeiro, and Paulus, wishing to deflect them from thoughts of the dead, whom they surely all missed (von Reichenau had never failed to remember Paulus’s birthday), replied with a pleasant half-smile: Gentlemen, without a doubt the Brazilian campaign will have its compensations!—Major-General Schmidt laughed twice, ha, ha, while the others laughed longer; then the orderly poured Veuve Clicquot all around, in tiny little glasses of Bohemian crystal, after which they all went to bed early, because the next morning would be hectic; the twelve hundred bombers and strafing planes of Fourth Air Corps were scheduled to arrive at Stalingrad; and when they did, they killed forty thousand people, leaving skeletonized apartments in a red mist, oh, yes, as red as Cossack trousers, those corpses on broken plinths of ferroconcrete. The enemy radio was shouting: Vokzal’naia Square, Deomstratsii Square . . . Meanwhile, Sixth Army was already shelling the office of the District Soviet.

  7

  By 31.8.43, the city was nearly encircled. He’d already cut off most of Sixty-second Soviet Army. It was merely a question of time and manpower. General von Wietersheim, however, for some reason advocated withdrawal from Stalingrad. There was no need even to speculate on what the Führer would have said about that. Lighting a cigarette, assuring him that he was sorry, he relieved General von Wietersheim of his command at once, replacing him with Colonel-General Hoth. At the next staff conference his sleek and handsome officers sat reading newspapers together, their caps crisp and new, their sleeves perfectly creased as they awaited his instructions; on the matter of General von Wietersheim they all kept silent, excepting only Major-General Schmidt, who approved of the decision and tried to express his approval publicly and at length, until Paulus said: No doubt he was doing his duty as he saw it, Schmidt. That will be all.—His spearheads breached the enemy’s front in the sector Vertyachii-Peskoravka, with Stukas screaming and bombing just forward of each assault. On 2.9.42, the Führer decreed that upon his entry into this troublesome city, all the males must be liquidated, presumably by shooting, and all females deported. Paulus was not in sympathy with this order. In any event, it could not be carried out immediately. That day a far more pleasant message entered on the silver tray; his old friend Colonel Metz wrote him (belatedly, it seemed, and then the card must have been held up by censorship and routing errors): Let me congratulate you on your Knight’s Cross—and it won’t be long, sir, before the Field-Marshal’s baton follows. On 3.9.42 he crushed the feeble counterattack of Moskalenko’s First Guards Army. He beat them back again on the fifth. Continuing enemy pressure compelled him to divert some of his troops to the northwest, among them his son Ernst, who was acquitting himself well in his tank regiment, he’d heard. He had ground down Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Soviet armies almost to extinction. They said to him: Herr Lieutenant-General, sir, Yeremenko’s digging in to resist us on Line G . . .

  On 9.9.42, when the Führer forced Field-Marshal List to resign command of Army Group A for having gone over to the defensive, Lieutenant-General Paulus was perfecting the details of his all-out attack. At 0630 hours on 13.9.42, the assault on Stalingrad began: First Line O, the outermost defense perimeter; next, in concentric succession, Lines K, S and G, which was the innermost, the final bastion. His orderly kept wondering when Signal magazine would send their photographer; but there’d already been a nice spread on our resolute young Panzergrenadieren in their grey-green, holding up endless necklaces of bullets for the camera.

  He intercepted requests from Sixty-second Soviet Army to withdraw to Line G.

  First our Panzers penetrate the enemy’s front; then they wheel round to encircle him. (He was almost entirely recovered from “the Russian sickness.”) Next we strengthen the ring with infantry. We Germans have coined the perfect noun for this formation: a Kessel, a cauldron in which the enemy now begins to boil. If need be, which is to say, if the enemy retains any capability for breakout, we’ll construct an inner ring out of more soldiers whose guns and ideology point ever inward. Bereft of supply, our victim must begin to perish now. Since every cook knows that meat stews faster in smaller chunks, we now inject spearheads of Panzers and infantry to subdivide the Kessel into mutually isolated zones, houses sliced open to reveal the people’s soul. Each such concentric attack, successful or not, further wounds the enemy. His men are starving; his ammunition’s almost gone. We slice him right down into tidbits, which we’ll then devour. This comprised the working basis of Operation Heron.

  Although the arrows of his advance were as shiny-perfect as the rivers of tank ammunition which still flowed from Germany’s conveyor belts, it did not go quite as easily as usual, perhaps because the Führer had sent Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland away to the Westfront. That must have been why it took days instead of hours to wipe out the Red remnants who kept resisting in that grain elevator. Major-General Schmidt wondered aloud whether General von Wietersheim had spread defeatism among our troops before he’d been relieved. Paulus told him, perhaps a little sharply: You’d do better to worry about our supply situation. In an hour I’ll expect your report. —If he could only disrupt their ferry system, that would be the end! They made their crossings at night, unfortunately, which put Air Fleet Four to far too much trouble. But anyway, what was night in Stalingrad, where the sky was black without surcease, the sun gone like last year’s summer, black sun, black rain, moonlessly black sky of day and night, everyone coughing, the red gleam of reflected fire on the Volga as planes swooped down on the ferries at midnight, Russians screaming, Germans cursing, sirens sobbing, machine-guns marking time just as the broadcast metronome did in besieged Leningrad, long cattails of black smoke hanging as soft and fluffy as an opera diva’s boa?

  Fremde Heere Ost, Gruppe I, Army Group B intercepted another of Premier Stalin’s midnight directives: Stalingrad was to be held at all costs. (Stalingrad was already smashed, of course, just like Leningrad’s Warsaw Station.)

  First air attack, then ground attack. Our Air Force supported him with heavy strikes on the south-central sector. He’d reduced Sixty-second Soviet Army to one percent of strength. But n
ew enemy troops kept coming from Kotel’niko.

  By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General, if we break through right here at Pavlovsk-Serafimovich—

  Yes, he explained to them, but unfortunately, they have a hundred and sixty thousand men over there. That’s two armies, gentlemen!

  Herr Lieutenant-General, said Schmidt, I believe that between Kletskaya and Verkno-Kurmoyarskaya—

  Unlike Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, who enjoyed dressing in a colonel’s uniform for a lark, Paulus guarded his dignity. He didn’t always reply to their suggestions. Just as we take a street in the daytime and the Russians take it back at night, so the forward zone of his own consciousness alternated between confidence and disappointment. The exhilaration of power which he never could have known in peacetime, the power to compose a few lines and ring for the orderly to take them away on the silver tray, or, if the case was urgent, to utter a dozen words into the field telephone, and then to lift his binoculars and see those words incarnated into bullets and bombs, what he felt then he hardly even could have confided to Coca, although as soon as they were together again she’d know; they shared everything. Meanwhile, he found himself in complete agreement with the aphorism of Field-Marshal von Manstein that the safety of a tank formation operating in the enemy’s rear largely depends on its ability to keep moving. They could not keep moving in Stalingrad.

  In fact, this urban fighting might well be considered a misuse both of his own abilities and of the army he commanded. To Paulus, who could not help but feel apprehension as well as resentment about the way the summer was spending itself, it would have been a comfort, to say the least, to leave these ruins behind him and rush again east or southeast across the golden steppes (whose most common herb seemed to be Artemisia pauciflora), liquidating enemy troop concentrations in fair and open combat. And to think he could have gone to Africa instead! (Keep your fingers out of that pie, Coca had said with the look he dreaded.) Personally, he preferred to tread a fine line between Field-Marshal von Kluge, who liked to keep his Panzer corps on a short leash so that they could liquidate any encircled concentrations, and General Guderian, who would rather send them ahead to shatter Russian fronts into morsels for our infantry, for our blond, tanned boys to eat for breakfast.

  Lighting a cigarette, he broke the seal of the enemy situation report. Ten meters away lay, God alone knows why, the corpse of a Ukrainian official in old-style velvet trousers. First Beethoven, then Bach. Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B advised him that while an assault against his deep flank could not be ruled out, or perhaps the odd attack on our allies’ weakly held bridgeheads, the Russians’ winter offensive would occur, if it occurred at all, far to the north, in Army Group Center’s zone—most likely in the vicinity of Moscow. This information had been confirmed by the Abwehr, whose Max Organization in Sofia had full access to enemy signals. He didn’t believe it or disbelieve it.

  On 12.9.42, accompanied by General Weichs, he fully expressed his worries regarding the narrowness of his front to the Führer himself, who’d now moved headquarters eastward from Wolf’s Lair to Werewolf, just north of Vinnitsa on the Berdichev road. Unfortunately, he could hardly ask to be given priority just now, not only because, as he knew quite well, he was liked rather than loved by the Führer, but also because the entire Eastern campaign had become, as Warlimont whispered, stalemated. He didn’t want to give anybody, neither his subordinates nor the Führer, the impression that he took matters too seriously, because that would only weaken the esteem in which he was held; nonetheless, Operation Northern Lights, as probably even Field-Marshal Keitel must admit, had failed to subdue Leningrad, which we’d besieged for a year now; and the results of his own effort, Operation Heron, remained inconclusive; finally, Operation Edelweiss had stalled in the Caucasus. The greatest victory of that offensive thus far, namely the conquest of Maikop, had melted away in our mouths because when Army Group A rolled and clattered into that city, they’d found its refineries utterly wrecked by the retreating Jewish Bolsheviks. The Führer was said to have been seriously disappointed, given our growing petroleum requirements. Still, the enemy must be worse off than we; they’d now lost eighty percent of their oil. First disruption, then dispossession; that was the program of Operation Blau.

  Like all of us, Lieutenant-General Paulus retained a certain basic confidence in his own acumen. Back in December 1940 his war-games had predicted our exact troop dispositions around Moscow in October 1941. He’d been complimented for his accuracy by Field-Marshal von Reichenau personally. Surely this counted for something. Then there was his Iron Cross, both First Class and Second, from the previous world war, his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from Kharkov and his position as commanding officer of Sixth Army. In December 1940 he had also predicted that Operation Barbarossa might last longer than a single summer. The Führer had flown into a rage and shouted: There is not going to be a winter campaign!—So that was a sore point between them. Paulus could never mention winter campaigns now.

  Werewolf, that long, perfect rectangle oriented southeast, was subdivided by inner fences into three controlled zones. He doubted that they’d had time to lay thousands of mines around it, as they’d done at Wolf’s Lair; anyhow this was not something which one asked. So many of these secret headquarters he’d visited now—the steep high roofs of Wolf’s Gorge in Belgium, the damp bunkers of Tannenberg in the Black Forest, then Wolf’s Lair, Werewolf, and how many more? Everything was concrete and welded steel plate, the curtains of the rare windows always drawn. At his side, General Weichs swallowed nervously. There was a barber shop here at Werewolf and a sauna, he’d heard; he’d hoped to have time to refresh himself there before meeting with the Führer; he tried to learn from the S.D. man in the front seat how much time he might have, but the latter smilingly replied: They tell me nothing, Herr Lieutenant-General! And perhaps it’s better that way; the less I know, the less I can fail!—Paulus laughed a little, but didn’t care for the man’s cynicism. The central zone, the one deepest inward, now swallowed up the car; and General Weichs was led off to obey a surprise summons from the nodding ass, while Paulus left his dagger and pistol with the S.D. man, following hisconductors through the barbed wire to the second checkpoint, and then they led him between the trees to the teahouse, where he was coolly greeted by Martin Bormann. Everything possessed an oily gleam, like the leather saddles of our cavalry.—If the General would kindly wait a moment, said Bormann, the stenographers have almost completed their change of shift. You’re welcome to gamble in the casino.

  I don’t gamble, returned Lieutenant-General Paulus.

  I might have known, said Bormann. By the way, when the Führer’s finished with you I’ll need to ask you a few questions about your wife Elena, Coca I believe you call her . . .

  He requested permission to use the lavatory. There he quickly checked the fineness of his shave and pulled on fresh white gloves. The 1:300,000-scale map of the enemy railroad system, stamped Geheim, with annotations in his own hand (written very largely, for our Führer’s ageing eyes), was still where it should be, in the outermost pocket of his briefcase, which he unlatched so as to get at it more easily when the Führer’s eyes would be on him; thinking better of this, he closed the briefcase again, for the sake of a smarter appearance. As always when he was about to enter our Führer’s presence, he felt so nervous that he nearly vomited. He really wished that General Weichs were here. Bormann’s mention of Coca, which was the sort of ploy that man was infamous for—what could he have against her? she was Romanian; our Romanian allies were received practically as equals!—had further unnerved him; he scarcely knew what was appropriate in such circumstances, not being a political general. Had he not been surprised in that way, he would definitely have replied with something biting. A protective rage began to rise up within him, and he resolved to ignore Bormann’s demand. This made him feel better. (What precisely was the difficulty? Was it that she was Greek Orthodox?) Now that he’d turned Bormann’s words over and over, h
e’d fully realized that there was nothing to fear from this brute, who would never have dared to be so rude to Field-Marshal von Reichenau—why, he would have gotten throttled! Paulus smiled palely. The-man was waiting in the corridor outside. He must assert himself; he’d do his utmost to make the Führer realize—

  Do come in, Paulus, said the Führer, rising to shake his hand. Have you eaten?

  Not yet, my Führer.—He bowed and clicked his heels.

  Well, don’t worry; they’ll lay a place for you. It’ll be vegetarian, I’m afraid. Is this your first time in Vinnitsa?

  Once, before the war, my wife and I—

  Well, it’s a filthy city, said the Führer, his voice rising.—The Ukrainians, yes, a thin Germanic layer, and below that, dreadful material. The Jews: the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns choked in dirt—oh, I’ve learned quite a bit in these few weeks! If Slavs had ruled for a decade or two over the Old Reich, everything would be lice-infested and decayed . . .

  Without a doubt, said white-gloved Paulus.

  They’re holding Vlasov over there, the Führer went on. You know Vlasov, don’t you?

  Yes, in fact I fought against him at—

  Right over there, on the other side of town! And they tell me I have to make use of him! Can you believe it?

  No, my Führer, I hadn’t heard.