In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  ‘Did I have any doubts at that point about the outcome? I don't think so. We were very optimistic. Our tanks and armaments were, at first at least, much better than those of the British. Germany wanted to conquer Egypt and reach the Suez Canal from the other side as well, by way of the Caucasus and Turkey. But when we realised how dependent we were on our overseas supply lines, and when we saw how those were being cut off by the British submarines, that is actually when we started to worry.

  ‘Rommel scavenged for his own supplies by attacking British fuel dumps. We got away with that a few times, but of course you can't run a campaign on that basis. Even that early in the proceedings we started wondering out loud among ourselves whether this would all turn out all right in the longer term. I still clearly remember crowding around a short-wave receiver in the middle of the desert at 5 a.m. and hearing that German troops had crossed the Russian border. “This is the end of our successes,” I said to the soldiers around me. “This is a decisive day. Now we are getting into a war on two fronts again, and, just like Napoleon, we will get caught in it.” I said that out loud, and no one contradicted me. Everyone was thinking the same thing: the Führer has gone mad. That was on 22 June, 1941.

  ‘After that our Afrika Korps began running into trouble. The British had received reinforcements, they had a brilliant new commander, Montgomery, and they had new tanks: American Shermans. During a reconnaissance mission we were taken by surprise by the first column of Shermans we had ever seen, and we barely got out of there alive. We were hit badly. I had some shrapnel in my chest, so I was taken back to a German hospital. Once I'd been patched up again, I went back to Potsdam for further military training.

  ‘In Berlin, I saw Jews walking around wearing stars. But I had absolutely no idea how bad the situation was for them. As young, up-and-coming officers, everyone wined and dined us, including the diplomats. But we never heard a thing about the mass murder of the Jews, which by that time was already going on in the East. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself, but, unlike many other officers, I had not personally attended mass executions on the Eastern Front. Those kinds of things were not going on in Africa. And when I got to Stalingrad later there were almost no civilians left, never mind Jews. Don't forget, staff officers like us lived in a fairly isolated world of our own. None of us belonged to the Nazi Party, we weren't even allowed to.

  ‘I spent almost a year in Berlin. I went through training, there were lots of parties, I met my future wife. But in October 1942 that was all over. I was ordered to join the staff of General Paulus, the commander-in-chief of the 6th Army at Stalingrad. I was in charge of updating the maps that showed our positions and those of the enemy. I knew exactly how the supplies were running, how many tons had been flown in, how many tons were dropped, etc. The person who is in charge of that is one of the best-informed officers in the whole army. That's why they chose me to tell Hitler the truth.

  ‘When I arrived at Stalingrad I was given a detailed briefing by the person in charge of enemy-troop reconnaissance, a man by the name of Niemeyer, a very pleasant fellow. He showed me his maps, they were covered with red lines. “Take a good look,” he said. “We're in big trouble. That's what we tell headquarters every day, but no one up there wants to listen. Look here: 2,000 Russian vehicles, with their lights on, have been sighted over here, and over there we've spotted hundreds of tanks, all moving in the same direction. The only possible conclusion is that the Russians will be attacking soon from over here, and that they are going to grind us to a pulp.” That was in early October 1942.

  ‘Meanwhile, our superiors were assuming that the Russians were done for, that their reserves had been exhausted, and that the winter would be a quiet one for us. The good Lord himself must have struck them blind. In actual fact, the Russians had 2,000 tanks at Stalingrad, T-34s, while we had no more than 80. And even those only had enough fuel to run for a hundred kilometres. I remember thinking even then: have they all gone mad? But it was clearly a matter of keeping up appearances. No one was interested in the facts any more.

  ‘The Russian attack started on 19 November. Our command bunker was about ten kilometres from the front, in the middle of an area that had been surrounded by the Russians. I drove all over the place, staying in contact with the troops who were doing the fighting. Paulus wanted me to keep him up to date on how his men were doing, no matter how bad the news. The cold was infamous, but the strong winds were actually what finished us off. There were about thirty centimetres of snow on the ground, with this hard crust of ice that you broke through at every step. Maybe you can imagine how that was for those infantrymen, running away from the enemy across a field of crusty snow like that, carrying a machine gun. People kept talking about how we should break through the enemy lines, but it was almost impossible – physically too – to take the offensive, let alone break through Russian positions that had been set up all around us.

  ‘On 20 December I went to the field hospital. I'd been having problems with a wisdom tooth and the dentist was going to help me. I stepped in out of the cold and was struck by this enormous heat, mixed with a pestilential stench. I saw a big, long barrack and about thirty doctors, covered in blood like workers in a slaughterhouse, sawing off feet and fingers. That's all they did, all day long, just amputate frozen limbs.

  ‘When I left from Pitomnik airfield on 13 January, 1943, I was one of the last ones out, they were lying … you know how they stack wood in the forest? Well, there were stacks of frozen bodies like that everywhere, the bodies of the sick and wounded who had been dragged to the airfield and then died anyway. Thousands of them lying there like that, the ground was too hard to bury anyone. By that time the airfield was already under constant artillery attack. It was complete chaos. You heard people crying and screaming everywhere. The Feldgendarmerie showed me to one of the last planes, a Heinkel 111. I was the only passenger who wasn't badly wounded. Hundreds of others tried to board the plane, some of them crawling, it was their only chance of escape. They had to be held at bay with sub-machine guns. For three days after that, planes left from the airstrip at Gumrak. Then the air connection was cut off for good.

  ‘I had some amazingly good luck. They sent me to Hitler, but first they wanted me to inform Field Marshal Manstein, at his headquarters on the Sea of Azov, of the hopelessness of the situation. He said: “Here we see it the same way you do over there. But go to the Führer yourself. It's bound to make more of an impression if he hears it from you, instead of from some overly ambitious general.”

  ‘That's how I arrived the next evening at Hitler's headquarters, the Wolfsschanze. When I saw all those prim officers sitting around in their tidy uniforms, my mood became grim, almost communist. Those headquarters weren't really all that posh, but when you've just come back from the bitterest misery you get angry at anyone who sleeps well at night. I was brought in right away. Hitler welcomed me, then we went to the big war room. In the middle there was this table that must have been two metres wide and ten metres long, showing the various theatres of war, all these little flags everywhere. Those were the armies and divisions. To my amazement, I saw that there were little flags all around Stalingrad as well, even though I'd seen with my own eyes that only a few units were left of all those divisions. The rest had been wiped out.

  ‘I knew that Hitler was not fond of receiving bad news, and that he often twisted such conversations to fit one of his endless theories. That's precisely what he did this time too. He quickly began thanking me for my visit, asked me to extend his regards to General Paulus and wish him lots of luck, etc. So I mustered all my courage and told him that I couldn't leave while there was any risk of a misunderstanding, that General Paulus had given me explicit orders to inform him of the real situation at Stalingrad. And he actually let me tell my story; he listened carefully, asked a couple of good questions and didn't interrupt me.

  ‘But the generals did: “Listen, there's an SS armoured corps headed for Stalingrad to help you break free, isn't that r
ight?” But I knew that that SS army was not only far too small, but that it had already been torn apart by Russian T-34s close to Charkhov anyway. What Hitler and his generals were completely unwilling to see was the change the Russians had undergone. They had observed the Germans carefully, they had quickly switched to wartime industry, they had built enormous tank factories 1,000 kilometres back from the Volga, and were now beating us with our own weapons and tactics. At that moment I realised that Hitler lived only in a fantasy world of maps and little flags. It was then that I knew for certain that we would lose the war.

  ‘So did my plain speaking, at the age of twenty-three, actually change anything? I believe it did. But the difference it made was not at all what I had been expecting. No reinforcements or other help came. But, two days later, the tone of the propaganda changed. They no longer talked about “victories”, but about the “heroic battle at Stalingrad” and the “twilight of the gods in the face of Russian communism” … well, anyone with ears to hear knew enough then.

  ‘After that, Goebbels began skilfully developing his theatre of heroics. General Paulus’ promotion to field marshal should be seen in that light: he was to go down fighting at the head of his troops, banner in hand, the quintessential hero's death. But Paulus didn't seem to understand his role very well. He let himself be taken prisoner, appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, then spent the rest of his days in a villa close to Moscow, playing cards and writing his memoirs. He didn't die until 1957, in the DDR, in Dresden, in bed.

  ‘Today there are historians who say that any general but Paulus would have tried to break through the Russian lines; who claim that doing that would probably have saved 100,000 men. I wonder about that. While it was still possible, to have done that would have been in violation of all of Hitler and Manstein's orders. So it would have been outright insubordination. The rest of the Eastern Front would probably have collapsed.

  ‘Secondly, the eighty tanks we still had were almost out of fuel. Our artillery couldn't move up or pull back, the soldiers had eaten most of the horses. And we were facing 2,000 Russian T-34 tanks.

  ‘Thirdly, almost all our troops had to move on foot, because there was no other transport. And they had to drag their own equipment along through that icy wind. It would have been as much a debacle as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

  ‘I wanted to go back to Stalingrad, to my comrades. But when I got to Taganrog three days later, the airfield commander there said I was not allowed to fly on to Stalingrad. Instead I was detached to Field Marshal Erhard Milch's staff, as special liaison officer for Stalingrad. Looking back on it, I thank the good Lord that I was kept from flying out.

  ‘As it was, I was the one who received that famous last report, in the early morning of 31 January, 1943: “Russians at the door. We are going to break the connection.” A few seconds later they sent another transmission: “We are breaking.” After that, nothing more.

  ‘By the end of the war I had served under three field marshals: Rommel, who committed suicide on Hitler's orders, Kluge, who killed himself as well, and Model, who shot himself just before Germany capitulated.

  ‘The messenger bearing news of my death never came to my parents’ door in Berlin. At the end, though, the war still dealt my father a severe blow. When the Russians entered the city, a feisty old gentleman in their neighbourhood was foolhardy enough to fire his shotgun at them, one last time. By way of retaliation, the Russian commander had all the men in the surrounding area brought out, lined up and blindfolded. My father didn't need a blindfold, of course. Then the commander chose a firing squad, counted to two, and on three he said: “Russian soldiers don't shoot old men.” That left my father a broken man.

  ‘Of my hundred classmates in Munich – I was from the class of 1937 – seventy-five did not live through the war. Of the twenty-five who did, ten were too traumatised afterwards to lead a normal existence. Fifteen of the hundred actually made it through in one piece.’

  Only the river has remained the same. The slow river flowing endlessly past this stretch of city, this river broad as a lake in which city children bob around like corks, and across which great paddle steamers move day and night, from town to town.

  In the centre of Volgograd, one of those ships is now waiting at the quay. Girls are walking along the waterfront, on the top deck a few women in bikinis are lying in the evening sun, grandmothers sit at the railings with their knitting, the final passengers drag their suitcases up the gangplank, the ship's horn blasts, everyone clambers on board and off it goes, across this endless, glistening water.

  Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, has something grim about it, and at the same time something lethargic. You can cross the street here while carrying on a conversation, for the only traffic is the occasional black car. At the airport, the worn wooden check-in desks are deserted. Sparrows fly around in the big departure hall, twittering and chirping. Luggage is piled up beside the loading platform: here, baggage handling is apparently self-service.

  There is only one recreational vessel on the Volga this evening, for the rest every boat has its Rhyme and Reason. For the first time since the start of my trip, my mobile blacks out: GSM has not arrived in Volgograd. There is almost no advertising to be seen. The city is full of encouraging slogans and portraits, as though nothing has changed in the last few decades.

  Volgograd is the ideological bulwark of communism, the fortress of the old order amid advancing decadence. Here the party leaders are still firmly in the saddle. The red flags wave, the parks and lawns are immaculate, black marketeers get around by bike. Every evening Comrade Lenin rises up on the Volga, in gigantic neon letters. Like cawing phantoms, hundreds of crows skim the treetops of the big memorial park.

  Canned partisan anthems bray from the loudspeakers. But, a little further along, the Pepsi Cola café fights back with music of its own. A girl is being chased around by a few boys there, they catch her, drag her to the fountain, a little later I see her walk away, dripping, laughing bravely, a girlfriend in her wake. The house music throbs across the rippling water – this, too, is Volgograd.

  For this city the war began one unexceptional Sunday in summer. Dozens of families were picnicking on the Mamayev Kurgan, the huge Tartar burial mound by the river, where the war memorial now stands. The air-raid sirens sounded, but almost no one paid any attention; they had sounded so often before, and for no good reason. It was only when the anti-aircraft guns began to rattle that the picnickers became startled. And once the Luftwaffe had begun its attack, there was nowhere for them to go.

  The bombardment of Stalingrad on Sunday, 23 August, 1942 was one of the severest in the Second World War. The Heinkels laid a carpet of bombs across the whole city. The factories and wooden houses along the western edge went up like torches; the tanks at the oil depot exploded into huge pillars of fire; the modern white apartment complexes, the pride of the city, were blown apart. Anyone who was not in a bomb shelter did not survive. Around 40,000 men, women and children were burned alive, suffocated or buried beneath the rubble.

  Meanwhile, the 16th Armoured Division of General Paulus’ 6th Army moved almost unchallenged across the surrounding steppe. The photos and film clips speak for themselves: blond and tanned soldiers, laughing faces, flashy sunglasses as though on a holiday outing, commanders standing straight as ramrods in the turrets of their tanks, their troops impatiently waving their arms onward.‘As far as the eye can see, armoured cars and tracked vehicles are rolling across the steppe,’ an eyewitness wrote of that summertime advance. ‘Pennants wave in the dusky evening light.’

  The landscape through which the German soldiers moved was of unmatched rustic charm: white houses with straw roofs, little cherry orchards, horses at pasture. In every village they could glean an armful of chickens, ducks or geese. Every kitchen garden and every house they passed was plundered. ‘I have never eaten as much as I have here,’ a company commander wrote. ‘We eat honey by the spoonful, until we are sick of it, and in the eve
ning we have boiled ham.’

  By the end of the afternoon on 23 August the advance guard had reached Rynok, a northern suburb of Stalingrad. The soldiers could barely believe their eyes: suddenly they were standing at the Volga. They photographed each other on their armoured cars, in the background the river and Stalingrad in flames. They took out the last of the Russian anti-aircraft positions, sank a few ships on the river – not knowing they were full of fleeing civilians – and then they dug in amid the vineyards, the oleander and the fruit trees. The headquarters of the army engineers was tucked away beneath a huge pear tree, the soldiers ate of the fruit till they grew nauseous. This little paradise had become the Reich's new eastern border.

  That Sunday was a historical moment for the Soviets as well: from now on, they realised, this war was going to be a life-or-death struggle. They had never imagined that Paulus’ troops would be able to break through so quickly and reach the Volga so easily. Enraged, Stalin gave the order to defend ‘his’ city – which had been named after him back in 1925 – at any price. He forbade the undermining of factories or any other activities ‘that could be seen as a sign that Stalingrad is being surrendered’. His Ukrainian confidant Nikita Khrushchev was given command over the underground headquarters.

  For Hitler, too, this battle was largely one of prestige. The original objectives of the German march on Stalingrad – to destroy the arms industry and block all traffic on the Volga – had already been achieved in late August, but Hitler suddenly decided that, despite the risk of over-extending his supply lines, the city was also to be taken and held.

  Stalin's determination was shared by the people of Stalingrad. The majority of the city's population reported for duty. Schoolgirls were put to work as medics – to bring back the wounded they often had to crawl under heavy fire to the front lines. An eighteen-year-old girl medical student was put in charge of an entire hospital company. A whole female bomber-support squadron was set up, led by the young and lovely Marina Raskova.