Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Mamayev Kurgan back in enemy hands, Herr Lieutenant-General!

  Connect me with Air Fleet Four, please.

  By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General!

  He called in another bombing attack, but the bombs didn’t dislodge them. He stared at the map.

  He changed his mind now almost as often as the railroad station changed hands.

  The next day they excitedly told him: Attack, Herr Lieutenant-General! About two divisions, with one or two tank brigades—

  On the Mamayev Kurgan?

  Yes, Herr Lieutenant-General. They’re pushing us back—

  They’re T-60s and T-70s, aren’t they?

  I’ll check, sir.

  No, take me there.

  By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General . . .

  No, we’ll send in armored support, he decided. And please tell Schmidt to report to me immediately.

  Herr Lieutenant-General, what should we tell the men?

  To press on toward the final victory, he replied, putting on his glasses.

  In confidence, a certain Lieutenant-General asked him in a whisper whether he himself remained certain of this final victory.

  So long as the Führer is kept precisely informed, he replied.

  10

  Silhouettes on the dark front struggled with one another in hatred, grief and anguish, while munitions rushed overhead like glowing planets. At 0800 hours on a morning as cold and damp as a trench, the third assault failed. The left side of his face twitched. Some of his officers dared to imply that he should have led the charge, as Field-Marshal von Reichenau would have done; he coldly remarked that the commander of an army can accomplish more with maps than by dancing like a madman in the forefront. (Major-General Schmidt smiled politely but did not laugh.) He’d injected eleven divisions and eighty tanks into the battle; now these were bent and blunted: His running low-bent troops ran no more. His duty at the moment was to restore confidence to the front line. Soon winter would come, and then they would be filling the radiators of their vehicles with alcohol as they had done last year outside Moscow. First Stalingrad, then Baku. They would be shivering; they would be wrapping socks around their woolen gloves. There was no hope for Germany if she failed to continue forward in every direction. No doubt at OKW they were now murmuring in the Führer’s ear: Before he got Sixth Army, he never even commanded a regiment!—But Lieutenant-General Paulus was too well bred to speak ill of anyone, no matter what he might think. In Colonel Heim’s assessment, he was a slender, rather over-tall figure, whose slight stoop seemed somehow to be a gesture of goodwill toward those of lesser stature. This was true, and so was Coca’s eternal characterization: Sweetheart, you’re simply too good for those people.

  He didn’t swim rivers, the way von Reichenau used to in Poland. Perhaps that was why they didn’t respect him.

  They said to him: This defensive mission is contrary to the German soldier’s nature.

  He explained that Sixth Army was still making progress, although, to be sure, that progress had become as slow as a charge through heavy snow. From the east bank of the Volga, enemy artillery kept murdering his troops. The bombers couldn’t do anything about that.

  General von Schwederer sought to argue with his strategy. Paulus relieved him of his command.

  He pointed out to Schmidt that the ammunition situation might soon get urgent. Schmidt replied, reproachfully smiling: I telephone them about it every day, sir, and all they ever say is, when will you fellows take Stalingrad?

  First Beethoven, then a cigarette. He composed another message to the Führer, warning of Sixth Army’s declining infantry strength. The front was now very sparsely manned; he thought it best to consolidate the positions of Army Group B against the human vectors of that Bolshevist ideology which had the power to corrode and decompose everything.

  11

  Thanks to our Führer’s standing orders he could prepare no defense in depth; the front line could never be abandoned, so practically every man had to hold the front line. One enemy breakthrough anywhere, and his forces could be encircled. And such breakthroughs were inevitable. A German general who survived the war and found haven in the apartheid of South Africa has recalled: Practically every Russian attack was preceded by large-scale infiltration, by an “oozing through” of small units and individual men. In this kind of warfare the Russians have not yet found their masters.

  What was he supposed to do? At last he was summoned again to the presence of the Führer, who would surely give him the appropriate operational recommendation.

  12

  In the first and most glorious year of Operation Barbarossa, Paulus, then Deputy Chief of Staff for the Army High Command, found himself flown to Wolf’s Lair, which was then, as it was now and would again be intermittently, the Führer’s headquarters. I have already told you that Wolf’s Lair was a series of clammy concrete bunkers, sometimes four of them, sometimes ten, all half-sunk in the earth of East Prussia, their interiors softened with wooden paneling. Wolf’s Lair smelled of cooking and of boots. With its thirty-odd antiaircraft guns and its arsenal of light machine-guns, antitank guns, smart new flamethrowers of the latest make, Wolf’s Lair was very, very safe; they even had guards at the private cinema. Wolf’s Lair was, in a very real sense, the soul of Germany.

  On several occasions, Paulus had met with General Warlimont and Colonel von Lossberg to plan what should be seized after the capture of Moscow. It was generally agreed that the bulk of our armed forces could then be withdrawn from the Ostfront, for deployment in Africa or England. Afterwards, he’d been invited for an evening of listening to records in the tea-house car, the Führer calling: “Siegfried,” first act! He’d seemed to enjoy almost everything in those days; it wasn’t just all the not yet undone victories, but he hadn’t yet suppressed the Austrian in him, the charming compliments, the hand-kissing of women, etcetera. Paulus, expecting another uncomfortable evening of being slighted, had fallen in love with the man’s self-confidence, which Field-Marshal von Reichenau had also possessed, to be sure, but in a lesser allotment; for when the Führer began speaking about the future, whatever he described seemed to come close and embody itself into something far more alluring than our sweetest fantasy; Moscow would be captured; we had both the will and the superiority; therefore, Moscow was nearly, in effect, captured. Only through the Führer could any of this come into being.

  But now he’d begun to be afraid, and so he relied all the more upon the Führer to set him right, to help him see how in fact these conquests could still be accomplished. Without the Führer, it was hard to imagine that we would ever, for instance, take Moscow.

  This time there was noescort; instead, they gave him a day pass, and a single S.D. man led him around the casino to make a right turn at Martin Bormann’s bunker (whose blinds writhed slightly as he passed; he saw an eye staring angrily at him out of darkness), but then it turned out that the S.D. man had made a mistake; our Führer expected him at the communications center. There’d just been a practice gas alert, which hadn’t gone well; the gong failed to ring on time.

  They permitted him to freshen up in the bathhouse, where he met Field-Marshal von Manstein. With the water-pressure as loud upon the concrete as an artillery barrage, the other man whispered in his ear: Paulus, it’s hopeless here, unfortunately. Don’t expect to find any real discussion. He no longer shakes anyone’s hand . . .

  Terrified, Paulus replied: And he won’t permit me to withdraw! If I’d at least receive the reserves I’ve been promised!

  Ah, whispered Field-Marshal von Manstein with a compassionate smile, this policy of covering everything and surrendering nothing usually leads to the defeat of the weaker party.

  But don’t most strategies lead to the defeat of the weaker party?

  If that were true, strategy would be no science. There’s the soap.

  Now for the bowing and the clicking of heels, the gaggle of generals waiting to see the Führer—first greetings, then lies.

&
nbsp; All of us who survived the winter of ’41 learned the hard way that any caliber smaller than a hundred and fifty millimeters is ineffective, because snow will absorb all the shell fragments!

  And then I made them stand at attention all night! I said to them, look me in the eye, you cowards! I told them that next time they’d better stand fast! I . . .

  ... in a ghetto now, at least in Warsaw. We’ll soon find it necessary to . . .

  Fortunately, our V-weapons are nearly ready for deployment.

  As he spoke with them about his own situation, Paulus found himself striving to imitate the grey dignity and half-shut eye of Field-Marshal von Manstein.

  Let’s turn to the cardinal problem, gentlemen. After the USSR is defeated . . .

  Halder had been replaced by Zeitzler, who was pontificating and puffing himself up: Once we’ve erased Leningrad and Moscow from the map, and seized all the oil reserves of the Caucasus, the Führer intends if possible to construct a gigantic line of defense and let the eastern campaign rest there.

  Warlimont rolled his eyes. Taking Paulus aside, he murmured that he was very concerned about the way that the Führer had dispersed Sixth Army’s forces.

  We must accept that risk to the full, said Lieutenant-General Paulus.

  First Warlimont, then Bormann; first another identification check, then another conference with the Führer, whose eyes were now as sinister as the black crosses on our airplanes’ wings.

  Paulus, I’ll never forget that time back in ’21 when the Communists tried to break up my speech at the Hofbräuhaus! I made it clear to my Brownshirts that today they’d have to show their loyalty to the bitter end. I said that not a man of us would leave that hall unless we got carried out dead! I warned them that if I saw anybody play the coward, I myself would rip off his armband . . .

  Yes, my Führer.

  The Russians are finished.

  Paulus went whiter than a German tank.

  13

  Swiveling arrows on the military map led his aspirations this way and that. Sixth Army’s three assaults had failed to seal off the enemy forces; that was beyond a doubt. Meanwhile, trapped and concentrated in the ruined city, his troops continued to suffer terribly as a result of direct fire from massed enemy guns. The attrition shocked him. The enemy had now begun to challenge his Romanian flank troops; by 4.10.42, while he was still trying to crush Sixty-second Soviet Army once and for all, they’d already seized ground along the axis of the lakes Barmantsak-Tsatsa-Sarpa. Worse yet, those Romanians had permitted their artillery to be captured! As much as it humiliated him, there was nothing for it now but to ask the Führer for new operational and tactical reserves—an innovation for which we must credit Julius Caesar; so Paulus had learned at the General Staff Academy. But where were the reserves? Couldn’t he at least get a few-troops to stiffen the line? (He shared Field-Marshal von Manstein’s high regard for the march discipline of the Death’s Head Division.) Oh, the outcome now seemed as inky as the smoke from burning oil as his young Germans in their wide-flaring helmets peered ever more anxiously around the broken walls. The main thing was to press on. He really had to lean on Schmidt now to keep things rolling; nor did the other officers seem to appreciate how bad it was. Peering anxiously through his field-glasses, he spied a silhouetted swirl of Russian greatcoats and rifles as their infantry ran to the attack; and then, precisely at his signal, our machine-guns and flamethrowers obliterated them. First defense, then counterattack: Here we came, running low, crouching over ridges in the smoky ruins, aiming into the smoke at the half-obscured bones of the city where enemy vermin also waited; his son Ernst never knew that Lieutenant-General Paulus was following the progress of his tank through his field-glasses; a certain corporal whose hobby was committing Bach’s cantatas to memory had confided that Ernst was one of the bravest soldiers he’d ever seen.—For him it’s a question of honor, the corporal said.—That night he wrote down those words in a letter to Coca. Persons unafflicted with his knowledge of the finitude of the triangular flags still shiny and unworn in their boxes in the OKH reserves—and among those unafflicted persons he counted Major-General Schmidt—might well assume, on the basis of, say, the Nuremberg rally back in 11.9.38, when the Führer spoke to a hundred and twenty thousand Storm Troopers, whose tombstone shoulders and metal mushroom necks dwindled symmetrically and forever all the way to the concrete island on which our faraway Führer stood, with three titanic swastika banners at his back, towering much higher than the trees, that more men and more men could eternally be found; but so many men lay dead now! We needed the shaveheaded Cossacks on our side; we had some of them but we needed all the rest, and every Ukrainian male sixteen years and older; all the females had better dig ditches; we needed to take our reserves where we could find them, but unfortunately the Führer said . . . Paulus remembered how the medieval streets of Nuremberg had been literally paved with marching helmeted men for the rally of ’36; he’d been there; Coca had been at his side, dressed in velvet; he’d pride-fully heard the horns and watched the upraised rifles of that perfect column ten abreast whose steel-shod footfalls clinked as melodiously as Wagner’s Siegfried forging his sword; he remembered the grand cavalry parade of ’35, and where were those men now? First Warsaw, then Moscow; first the Black Sea, then the Caspian; first Rostov in the summer, then the snowy filth and lunar ice of Mamayev Hill; first mechanized columns in perfect order, then broken men and broken engines, tanks with red flags on them, snow-gushes of explosions; and Lieutenant-General Paulus sat gazing downward, his gloved hands folded in his lap.

  A million Volga Germans had been deported last August by none other than Comrade Stalin, in order to prevent them from aiding us. If only they were here now! (Where were they? Siberia, he believed, and maybe Kazakhstan ...)

  Major-General Schmidt advised him to place more trust in Sixth Army’s will to victory.—Unfortunately, he replied coldly, I cannot act as you suggest.

  On 3.11.42, right when Field-Marshal Rommel communicated to OKW that superior enemy forces were driving him out of El Alamein, Lieutenant-General Paulus uneasily realized that the enemy seemed to be fortifying villages to the south and west, as if for protracted defense. But one grows accustomed to everything. It had become normal for him first to be conquering cities and armies in France, and then to be fighting in Stalingrad, endlessly. Coca was still waiting for him to bring home his Field-Marshal’s baton. (No one had been made Field-Marshal since the elevation of von Manstein back in July.) He was now under such great strain that he tried not to think of anything but the next attack, the next diminishment of Sixth Army’s men, and just as we all spend moments and years counting ourselves wise in the spending of them and hopeful almost to certainty that today’s temporary difficulties will be stabilized tomorrow and then there will come no new misfortunes, not ever, so he believed, and avoided weighing that belief, that after he’d dispatched to their deaths a few thousand more of Sixth Army’s men, Stalingrad would be won. In truth, the management of Sixth Army’s affairs now fascinated him less than he had expected. Well, after all, he wasn’t so young now; it would really be delightful to take a long rest with Coca. His letters to her became more ardent and sensual than ever before. Although he knew that the censors read them, a fact of life which used to inhibit him, he didn’t care about that so much now; he often fell asleep imagining himself at home with her: first dinner, then Coca in bed, and then they’d drowse away the night until that beam of morning sunlight sped in like a tracer bullet to strike the white volumes across the room; Coca’s slip would be hanging on the chair and she would be sleeping with her face turned so lightly and gently in against his shoulder.

  On 8.11.42, when the Anglo-Jewish coalition landed in French Morocco and Algeria, he knew that Rommel was finished. He lit a cigarette. All around him, Stalingrad was quiet. Beyond their lines came the eternal Russian accordion-songs and those purposeless, barbaric gunshots; couldn’t their commanders enforce any sort of discipline? Whenever we took them pr
isoner, they were always unshaven and smelly—perfect Slavs. What were they doing? A thousand hypothetical cases unfolded behind his eyelids. They continued to enforce radio silence. Schmidt advised him not to worry; Schmidt said that he was looking extremely tired.

  On 11.11.42, Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B reported that the Red Army had created a new Don Front. The signals reconnaissance report warned him of increasing night traffic along the railroad axis Urbakh- Baskunchak-Akhtuba. This probably meant nothing more than defensive enemy behavior. The prisoner-of-war interrogation reports contained nothing but empty pleas for mercy.-Einsatzgruppeführer Weiss brought him documents seized from the person of a Jewish Bolshevist whose purport indicated large scale entrainments along the Stalingrad axis; unfortunately, this Jew, whom Paulus wished to question further, had already been “sent to the rear”—that is, neutralized. Paulus rose in silence and bowed a trifle, smiling pleasantly at the Einsatzgruppeführer, who after all had only been doing his job. Then he held a little exchange of views with his officers, none of whom seemed to be nervous about the future, provided that Sixth Army was brought back up to strength. He was compelled to inform them that as a result of certain developments, their “provided that” could not be relied upon. They sat silent. (Perhaps he wasn’t at his best. Ernst had been wounded quite badly in the thigh; technically speaking, his case was not too serious for a frontline hospital, but he sent the boy back to the Reich to convalesce, not for his sake but for Coca’s, a decision which ultimately saved his son’s life.) Assembling them around the map, he pointed to the Soviet bridgehead which now menaced Romanian Third Army. That, he explained, was a symptom of our weakness; nobody could neutralize it. They stared back at him, most of them unshaven and grim, and he told them that he was strongly considering informing OKW that he wished to withdraw to the Don and the Chir before winter locked them in. They replied to him with silent contempt. He said: Gentlemen, if you disagree with me, you must express yourselves more clearly. We all want to lay Stalingrad at our Führer’s feet . . .—Then they expressed themselves; they most certainly did. Not one of them wanted to go on record as saying that Sixth Army lacked sufficient fanaticism to finish the job. Major-General Schmidt brightly said: Well, sir, it seems to be unanimous!—Paulus, smiling compassionately, said that in that case he would defer his recommendation of withdrawal for the present. The next day’s signals intelligence report confirmed that there seemed to be abnormal railroad activity approaching Stalingrad. He queried Führer Headquarters, but received no answer. (Somebody there ought to be sent before a military tribunal.) Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B reassured him that the new enemy troop concentrations remained much too weak for far-reaching operations.