Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  In retrospect we can’t really say that he was as brave and inspiring as Field-Marshal Model, nor that he stopped the Russians as had Field-Marshal von Küchler, that he enjoyed the combination of decisiveness and luck which Field-Marshal Rommel for a time possessed; that he was as cruel as Field-Marshal Schoerner, as zealously officious as fat old Field-Marshal Keitel, as effective as Field-Marshal von Reichenau (who was lucky to die before the Allies could hang him), as treasonously decent as Field-Marshal von Witzleben (whom our Führer hanged for being so), as aloof as Field-Marshal von Leeb, as competent in defensive operations as Field-Marshal von Kleist. What was he, then? I see him as the central figure of a parable, and therefore apathetic in spite of himself; in his long leather trenchcoat, his gloves and collar perfectly white even now, his loyalty gleaming, he was brought into the story of our Reich to illustrate a principle, to carry out a function, to think and suffer while things were done to him. (What’s your operational strength? he asked General von Hartmann, who replied: Sir, just count the crosses at Gumrak!) We National Socialists know that the best defense is counterattack; but Colonel-General Paulus was not allowed the forces and mobility to do that. He was nothing but a playing-card soldier, a character in a book. He sat very still in his tent and listened to Beethoven on the gramophone; his gloves were already soiled again. Did he have an inkling yet what he would be forced to suffer? Probably, since by then more than one man heard him say: History has already passed its verdict on me . . .—Stalingrad would be called “the turning point.” After Stalingrad, and as a result of Stalingrad, the mastery of central Europe would pass from Germany to Russia. And all because of him! If he had only . . .—or if the Red Army had accidentally . . .—The downfall of our Reich can therefore be blamed on Colonel-General Paulus. After all, it would never have happened, had everything been left up to the sunblown, tousleheaded, adorable Luftwaffe boys in Signal magazine.

  We still have a mortar and fifteen shells, Herr Colonel-General—

  Very good, he replied.

  On 16.1.43, the day that Iraq declared war on the Reich, the daily briefing said: 6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: On the W. and S. fronts the enemy has reestablished pressure on our positions. N. of the Don, enemy advance over the Kagalnik. Attacks on the N.E. and N. fronts were repelled. That was the day that we lost the airstrip at Pitomnik.

  A Luftwaffe major came to brief him on the strategic situation of Army Group Don. Paulus replied: Dead men are no longer interested in military history.

  On the nineteenth, half choked by the yellow smoke of Russian aerial bombs, he wrote his farewell letter to Coca, keeping it brief for both of their sakes. Within the foldings of the thick Sixth Army stationery he enclosed his wedding ring, signet and military decorations. The prudent soldier leaves his original medals at home, and wears authorized copies to guard against loss or frontline rust. He had not done this. Such behavior on the part of a high-ranking officer might have been construed as timidity. As soon as he had sealed the envelope, he felt better. All he wished for now was that the plane which carried these tokens back to her not get shot down.

  On 22.1.43, the last airstrip in Stalingrad fell to the Russians. Paulus again requested permission to surrender. The Führer replied: You must stand fast to the last soldier and the last bullet.

  23

  Now they’d split us into two mutually isolated sub-fortresses, with Paulus in the southern pocket, and grey groups of soldiers crawled across the ruins in search of bread and warmth, mimicking the grey squadrons of lice which abandoned the bandages of the dead. The Romanians were worse off, of course; our Germans must be fed first.

  General von Hartmann, he was informed, had exposed himself to the enemy until they shot him in the head. General Stempel did the same. He therefore issued an order forbidding suicide.

  He took his daily constitutional to the front in company with Colonel Adam, who supported his staggering steps and who whispered in his ear: I can speak Russian if the need arises, sir.—It will not, replied Colonel-General Paulus.

  On 24.1.43 he considered visiting the dressing station in the cellar of the former NKVD headquarters, to encourage the wounded, and Major-General Schmidt gave him permission to do so, but on reflection he began to fear that the sight of him might instead enrage them, and he did not want to add to their suffering. So he paced outside for a turn or two, circling the mountain of frozen bandages and amputated limbs around which the snow was rose-pink, like the tunic facings of a Waffen-antitank unit. Then he returned to headquarters and dictated the following signal to OKW: No basis left on which to carry out mission to hold Stalingrad. Russians already able to pierce individual fronts, entire sectors of which are being lost through men dying. Heroism of officer and men nonetheless unbroken.

  On 25.1.43, General von Seydlitz granted his own men freedom of action to surrender. Paulus removed him from command. His replacement was General Heitz, who coined the slogan We fight to the last bullet but one.

  The enemy now began to bombard Red Square.

  24

  On 27.1.43, when the American Air Force dropped its first bombs on our Reich, more Russian attacks were repelled at Fortress Stalingrad (Paulus in his greatcoat staggering, his head down); and the next day the enemy launched such a powerful artillery barrage that some of his men’s eardrums literally burst. The officers sat smoking cigarettes; they’d found a few more of those.

  I once heard Field-Marshal von Manstein declare that he’d never be taken alive by those torturers, said Lieutenant-General Jaenecke.

  General Pfieffer, who’d been infected with the defeatist virus for quite awhile now, told them what German captives had faced during the previous war: the wounded lying groaning in Panje wagons, the floggings with a seven-tailed nagaika, the frozen puddles of urine in Siberia, the men dragged away to death. No doubt it would be worse this time, he said.

  Major-General Schmidt reminded them all how in ’39, when the Russians had marched in to seize their half of Poland, back in the days when we and they were friends, General Timoshenko had issued a proclamation to the Polish soldiers, calling on them to murder their officers. Imagine what the Reds would do to us, said Major-General Schmidt.

  They started looking at each other speculatively.

  Paulus for his part remembered an incident which had occurred when Field-Marshal von Reichenau was still alive.

  In 7.41, Sixth Army had been stationed at Zhitomir, where the Jew Isaac Babel, while taking notes for his horrific “Red Cavalry” stories, discussed and disputed with his co-religionists about the ethics of the Communist revolution which would shoot him in 1940; it was in Zhitomir at the height of that first summer of apples and cherries and of corpses floating down the Teterev River that by Field-Marshal von Reichenau’s order we hanged a Soviet judge and rendered the Jews harmless, getting the job done in batches because it was just a question of time and manpower, one marksman per Jew, repeated four hundred times; some marksmen proved incompetent, which merely meant that they were nervous virgins, Operation Barbarossa being less than a month old: the Jews either failed to perish instantly or else splattered the firing squad with brains, which happens when one works at overly close range. (I am happy, Babel had written in his diary, large faces, hooked noses, black, grey-streaked beards; I have many thoughts; farewell to you, dead men. The year was 1920.) The following month, our German summer still hot and golden, Sixth Army was in Kiev, and after a few hundred more full-grown Jews and Jewesses had been neutralized, their offspring, numbering about ninety, were left alive for a day or two: squeamishness again. Some of our troops complained, because the children weren’t given any food or water (the cries of the infants were especially upsetting), and finally two military chaplains became involved. Their report actually equated these necessary operations with the atrocities being committed by the enemy. Field Marshal von Reichenau, always exasperated by any interference, wrote a memorandum in triplicate to Army Headquarters, stating: I have ascertained in principle that, once b
egun, the action was conducted in an appropriate manner. The report in question is incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover, this comment was written in an open communication which passed through many hands. It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all. It was at this juncture precisely that Paulus had flown in from OKW to inspect Sixth Army. He told Coca a little lie; he said that it was the dysentery, “the Russian sickness,” which made him look so ghastly on his return. He’d tried ever since then never to think about the anti-Jewish measures.

  But those measures, with which he had had nothing to do—indeed, he’d rescinded them as soon as he took command—might well be blamed on him. It went without saying that the enemy were all Jews. They were bound to be vindictive. He decided that he, too, would never be taken alive.

  25

  He sat slowly reading an old issue of Signal which had come in with God knows what mail drop, probably back during the fall. The Russian mortar fire hurt his ears. His forehead was bandaged; both he and Colonel Adam had sustained skull wounds during the last air raid. In a full-page color photograph, a man and a boy, their reddish-blond heads touching, admired a green and red model submarine which sported the swastika flag of our Reich, the man holding the toy in his arms (he wore an Iron Cross, First Class), the boy so dreamily happy, his lips parted. The man was in fact an admiral whom Paulus had met socially several years ago, at a huntsmen’s banquet at Göring’s. Yet somehow his likeness reminded Paulus of himself, and the boy of Ernst. Although Ernst and Friedrich were twins, the father had always felt closer to his namesake than to Ernst, who’d been involved in this or that sordidness at school; he often had to speak to him sharply, saying: You are the son of a German officer!—Despite that or because of it, it was Ernst whom he thought of now. At that moment the tableau in Signal did not seem at all sentimental or false. He believed in it.

  That was when the teleprinter began to chatter. It was 30.1.43. A bluefaced shock troop leader staggered over to see what it might command. Then he stared and stared.

  Our Führer had promoted Paulus to Field-Marshal.

  26

  This then was the climax, the personal victory which Coca had always wanted for him. She’d never asked for very much of him; after all, any soldier’s wife knows that she’ll very likely be a widow whether her husband gets killed or not. She had loved him, helped him, bearing his absences without reproach. Now they were getting old, and in the thirty-one years since their marriage how many nights had she slept at his side? And all that she had ever wanted in return for her loyalty was a few tokens of success, public honor, for her to be proud of. In a sense, everything he’d done in Russia he’d done for her. To be sure, he could have stayed at home with her, but would she have wanted that of him? When he pulled on his fresh white gloves, lit a cigarette and bent over a map, that was when he could give his best; and the fact that he was far away from her, while regrettable, could not occlude his perfect love for her. He wondered whether she had been informed. He could see her there in the living room, gazing at the mantelpiece where his Field-Marshal’s baton would go. Without a doubt it would go right beside the silver-framed photograph of him bending attentively over Colonel-General von Reichenau, who was not yet Field-Marshal on 28.5.40, as the King of Belgium’s surrender was accepted; pan-Germanism had won the victory at last. Then there was a replica of his Iron Crosses from the previous war, first and second class; then the small photograph, also framed in silver, of himself with Coca and the children when they were all much younger, everybody in focus except Ernst, who typically enough was fidgeting and looking away; why had Coca framed that picture? Something about it must have pleased her, and, after all, it never did to argue with Coca. Oh, but she’d been so very, very beautiful then! She was still beautiful, of course, but the young lady he’d married in 1912 had been perfect beyond description, her warmly white face shining out upon the world beneath her coils of hair, a slightly exotic fashion which she had renounced after Friedrich and Ernst were born. The instant that her brothers had introduced him to her, she’d shone upon him with a brilliant light. He would literally have set the world on fire for her. This photograph had been taken in 1920, shortly after the Kapp Putsch, which he’d supported so passionately at the time and which no one even remembered now. And all three children were grown and gone. These days Coca must dye her hair, although he’d never caught her at it. That dusty golden summer of theirs, where had it gone?

  He presented himself to receive the congratulatory murmurs of his bandaged, frostbitten men. And now, like someone limping, a thought crept slowly into his skull—was it even a thought? It was merely what people always said: No German Field-Marshal has ever in history fallen alive in enemy hands.

  27

  Was the price of his triumph really that he must become another one of those corpses whose flesh was as perfectly white as the walls of Chemnitz barracks?

  Pulling on his fresh white gloves, he thought: One might as well be a professional to the end.

  In German the compound word for suicide may be disassembled into “free death.”

  Were he captured after all this, it would naturally be a great disappointment to the Reich.

  And to Coca, too, of course . . .

  28

  She was the wife of a German officer, so she would not flinch; the worse the situation of Stalingrad became, the prouder he grew of her and of himself. Bit by bit he was overcoming his awe of her, which had never come oppressively between them; he’d worshiped his votive goddess for all these years, offering up the best of himself to gain her loving pride in him, which lay upon him as sweetly as her hair across his face when they lay in each other’s arms; but now his suffering and that of this army whose soldiers he’d always felt, as any good general must, to be his own extension, had grown so undeniable to all parties, including the enemy, that his fortitude shone undeniably, too; and each day that he held the perimeter was as much of an achievement as his victory at Kharkov; that was why he now possessed more pride and satisfaction in himself than ever before. He knew that he could hold on until death. He’d always been brave; he’d endured many discomforts; but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father’s dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He’d won the prize! And now he’d grown beyond that. He loved her even more than before, but as an equal at last, as a woman with whom he shared a deep understanding, a person who could be imperfect, even childish at times, as childish as their children; whose various frailties he could now admit, support and even love, because he was not frail anymore. No one could say he hadn’t done his duty, even though the Russian mortars boomed on and on. He wished he’d been more strict with Olga and Friedrich, less strict with Ernst. Well, all that was past now.

  29

  On 29.1.43, a signal rushed to Berlin: To the Führer! The Sixth Army greets their Führer on the anniversary of your seizure of power. The swastika yet flies over Stalingrad. Heil mein Führer! PAULUS.

  On 30.1.43 the daily briefing said: 6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks against the N. and S. fronts of the southern pocket. 3 enemy tanks destroyed by shooting.

  In the official Soviet accounts, he was captured by Sixty-fourth Army, under General M. S. Shumylov. He surrendered on 31.1.43, the day after the Führer had promoted him to Field-Marshal. (To General Pfieffer he is alleged to have treasonously said: I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.) Then he withdrew into a private room while his underlings negotiated the surrender. When that was completed, he ascended the stairs, flanked by a line of grinning Slavic boys in hood
ed white jackets. A German eyewitness writes: Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes. Outside, the Allied press was ready, and photographed Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus in his greatcoat plodding neatly through the snow. Major-General Schmidt was whispering in his ear: Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.—He didn’t have to go very far. They directed him to his own staff car, which carried him to headquarters, after which the car, a Mercedes just like his daughter Olga’s, was confiscated in the name of the people. Gunshots popped as gaily as champagne corks; they were shooting his Hiwis as they found them. In the Pioneer barracks they were already incinerating the wounded.

  Paulus was now a slender, grey-stubbled cipher, his hat low over his downcast eyes.

  He found himself in a peasant house. There was a warm fire. The enemy generals inspected him with self-congratulatory curiosity while he bowed and clicked his heels. In the doorway, a big bald Russian was filming him with a movie camera. The Russian’s jacket was filthy, oil-stained from the look of it. For some reason, this was particularly horrible to him. On the other hand, his own gloves were dirty. He stared at the wall.

  First they demanded to know why Hitler hadn’t flown him out. They said that none of them would ever have been left to an enemy’s mercies.

  I believe you’ve forgotten General Vlasov, he told them. He’s been working with us since last July.