Enemy at the Gates

by William Craig

  Wohlfahrt left the body and ran ahead with his company, as Russian snipers picked off single men diving in and out of cover. Exhausted, Wohlfahrt leaned against a wall to catch his breath and a Russian climbed out of a cellar to sneak up behind him. Just as he put his rifle to Wohlfahrt’s ear, a German soldier came along, shoved his gun in the assailant’s back, and led him away.

  Wohlfahrt stopped for the night in a vacant cellar, where he carefully arranged several wooden crates around his sleeping bag and lay down. A Soviet biplane, dubbed the “sewing machine” by the Germans because of its motor pitch, droned overhead and dropped a bomb squarely on top of his hiding place. The room disintegrated and the sergeant found himself lying twenty feet away from his bed, but unhurt. The wooden crates had saved his life.

  Heinz Neist had an equally sinister introduction to the factories. The thirty-one-year-old veteran had never expected to be fighting. He had plotted diligently to avoid duty in the Wehrmacht, and for years his plan had succeeded when a friendly employer placed him on the indispensable list, subject to call only in a dire emergency. But the call finally came with the invasion of Russia, and Neist went off to basic training. Until he went into action, however, he maintained a reputation as one of the least ambitious soldiers in the army.

  In combat, Neist’s attitude changed. He fought hard all the way across the steppe, because it had become a matter of survival, and he won the Infantry Assault Badge. Promoted to radio specialist with Combat Group Engelke, he entered the maelstrom between the Barrikady and the tractor factory and ran through a bombed-out workers’ district. With ten men he plunged into the ground floor of what had once been an industrial shop. While setting up his wireless, word filtered in that some Russians had been trapped on an upper floor. The Germans threw satchel charges up the stairs but the Russians hurled them back down, wounding several Germans. Neist and his comrades were so exhausted they decided to leave the enemy alone for awhile. That night they slept two at a time, while the rest stood watch at windows, doors, and at the staircase. Upstairs, the Russians made no sound.

  In the morning the battle began again. Two Russians crept down the stairs and fired bursts from tommy guns, then retreated. The Germans tried to figure out a way to retaliate; some thought of using a freight elevator in the corner, but ruled that out as too noisy. All were afraid to go up the stairway.

  When Neist tried to radio headquarters, the iron girders in the room interfered with reception. Finally he managed to get through on a walkie-talkie: “This is Sea Rose,” he kept repeating, and the command post broke in to acknowledge. Neist told them, “We are in the third white house… and we need reinforcements urgently.”

  The squad waited twenty-four hours before the new men came. In the meantime the Russians upstairs had been quiet. A runner brought hot coffee to Neist and his men and promised more food later in the day. From across the street, German snipers with telescopic sights tracked the Russians through the windows. Single shots rang out and Neist heard screams from above, then silence. After a few hours, the Germans cautiously moved up the dark stairwell. Outside the door, they paused. Their breath came heavily as they counted slowly and then smashed the door in. Seven Russians lay on the floor, shot to death.

  Neist went down to the cellar and fell asleep. Around him the dreadful noise of battle continued without letup.

  On October 24, Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser of the 100th Division celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. While he sat in a chair, a Russian tank fired a shell that went between his legs and on into the next room. Unhurt, Kreiser stayed low the rest of the day.

  The following morning, he went into action against the Barrikady where the main line of resistance was along a railway embankment. Kreiser directed his platoons into their jumping-off sections and waited for the Stukas to prepare the way. When they arrived, their bombs fell only two hundred yards ahead and Kreiser had to fire recognition flares several times to keep the Stukas from attacking his people. Despite the pinpoint bombing, the attack failed.

  After dinner, Kreiser received orders for another attack and, at 10:00 A.M. on October 26, thousands of German guns laid down a drumfire on the Russian positions. Kreiser had never heard or seen anything like it. The shelling lasted for half an hour. When it stopped, silence prevailed and in the stillness German soldiers jumped up and ran across the railroad tracks and onto the cliff. Kreiser saw tracer bullets arching up from the shore and knew his men had reached their final destination, the Volga itself. The lieutenant felt the war was over, the Russians finished at last. He miscalculated badly.

  Stunned by the bombardment, Soviet soldiers had burrowed into cellars and holes and waited for the enemy to pass by. The Germans, standing on the Volga cliff, now had Russians behind them.

  Kreiser moved forward with several platoons to help his men trapped on the riverbank. He came to a battered schoolhouse, put his men around it on three sides and called for artillery. But the antipersonnel shells merely bounced off the thick walls. Highexplosive rounds were not available.

  Assuming that headquarters would send more troops past him to the Volga, Kreiser dove into a potato cellar to set up a command post. No support came. Night fell and the Germans trapped at the Volga stood their ground, firing at shadowy figures closing in on them. Only a few lived to crawl back to their own lines.

  The front froze, immobile; neither side had the strength left to win.

  Quartermaster Karl Binder came to the Barrikady that day, too. He had just returned from the grain silo, where he had taken out some of the precious wheat for which so many had died in September. On his way back, he noticed how much of the city had been destroyed. Almost all the smaller houses and mud cottages had been smashed. He saw Russian civilians dragging bodies into shell holes and covering them over, and Binder sensed it was going to get worse.

  At the Barrikady he peered from an observation post and saw the chaos of iron rods and semifinished gun barrels lying about the railroad yards. While he stared in fascination, a German combat group advanced across open ground to take one of the factory halls. They crawled up to the doors and the windows, threw hand grenades and ran inside. Binder waited to see what would happen, but no one came out.

  When he got back to his own sector he met Lieutenant Colonel Codre, who asked him his opinion of the situation at Stalingrad.

  “The same as yours,” Binder grunted. He now knew, as Codre had for weeks, that what was going on in Stalingrad was totally futile.

  Hersch Gurewicz would have agreed. Finally released from the 1 hospital after his awful experience on the road to Sety in August, he had walked into Stalingrad on a footbridge and gone directly into a trench south of the tractor plant. Almost immediately the lieutenant was ordered to mount an attack, and as he ran across an open stretch of ground, a German loomed in front of him with a bayonetted rifle. Gurewicz shoved his pistol in the man’s face and fired. Mortally wounded, the German fell forward and imbedded the bayonet in the palm of Gurewicz’s left hand.

  After what seemed a long time, the German slid to the ground and died. Gurewicz pulled his hand off the bayonet and walked off to a field hospital for more surgery. While he recuperated there, he met a nurse, fell in love and slept with her frequently. Returned to his own company, Gurewicz met her whenever she made rounds on the battlefield. Their fragile relationship made life bearable for both of them.

  He had not seen her for several days when he received an urgent summons to go to an aid station at the edge of the Volga. The nurse had been hurt and was asking for him. Gurewicz scrambled out of his trench and ran to the river.

  She had stepped on a land mine and lay before him, swathed in bandages. He stared at the cot, wanting to scream but unable to make a sound. She was just a torso. Both of her arms and legs had been blown away and she was dying. For long minutes Gurewicz looked at the mummified thing he had embraced and loved. Then he turned and stumbled back to his hole near the tractor factory.

  Unlike Hersch Gurewicz, some Russians i
n Stalingrad never paused to reflect on the daily slaughter. They regarded the appalling butchery as a punitive crusade, a purgative.

  Commando captain Ignacy Changar, a curly-haired, longnosed twenty-one-year-old, had come into the city to do the job he knew best, killing Germans. Changar was an expert guerrilla fighter and preferred to work with a knife—a technique he had perfected in the forests of the Ukraine, where he spent months during the first year of the war. There he had seen the Germans at their worst and the experience affected him deeply.

  Once, at the edge of a village, he watched from a tree line while two German soldiers accosted a woman, pushed her and demanded she give up her cow. When she said that other Germans had already taken it, they shoved her again. She continued to protest and the soldiers picked up her baby, grabbed a leg each and ripped the child apart.

  In the woods, the stunned Changar had cursed and raised his rifle, but a companion knocked it down and warned him not to reveal their position. During the next months, as Changar retreated across Russia, the tormented cries of that bereaved woman followed him and, by October of 1942, he was killing Germans for the sheer pleasure of it.

  For ten days now he had been involved in a bizarre contest. Ordered to occupy a half-demolished building west of the Barrikady Plant, he had led fifty men into it only to find a sizable German force entrenched in a large room across a ten-foot-wide hallway.

  The corridor was impassable. No one on either side dared mount a rush, and Changar tried to estimate the size of the opposition. From the babble of voices, he judged it sufficient to hold him in check.

  Days went by. Food and ammunition were passed in through the windows. Changar assumed the Germans were doing the same so he ordered special equipment: spades, shovels, and 170 pounds of dynamite.

  The Russians broke through the concrete floor and started a tunnel. Digging two at a time, they slowly worked a passageway under the corridor. To mask the noise of the tools, they sang songs at the top of their voices. The Germans also burst into song from time to time, and Changar immediately figured the enemy was planning to blow him up, too.

  On the eleventh day, Changar ordered a halt to further excavation. After carefully placing the dynamite at the end of the tunnel, he cut and lined a fuse along the dirt passage up into the main room.

  The Germans were singing again, and someone on the other side of the hall had added a harmonica as accompaniment. While his men sang a last lusty ballad, Captain Changar lit the fuse and hollered to the two men still in the hole to “run like hell.”

  With the fuse sputtering, everyone tumbled out the low windows and scattered hastily across the yard, but the explosion came too quickly. It picked them up and hurled them down again with stunning force. The shaken Changar looked back to see the strongpoint rising slowly into the air. It expanded outward, then broke into hundreds of pieces. A huge ball of fire catapulted up from the debris.

  He rose and called for his men. Only two had failed to get clear, the men who had been in the hole. Changar realized he had cut the fuse too short and he worried about the error until the next day, when he went back to examine his handiwork. He counted three hundred sixty legs before he lost interest and left, satisfied that the 180 dead Germans were a partial payment for his error.

  Further south near the Red October Plant, sniper Vassili Zaitsev stalked the front lines. By now he had killed nearly a hundred Germans and had been decorated with the Order of Lenin. His fame was spreading to all parts of the Soviet Union.

  Furthermore, his students had amassed a formidable number of victims. Men like Viktor Medvedev and Anatoli Chekhov made the Germans afraid to lift their heads during daylight hours. And sharpshooter Tania Chernova now fired a rifle with unerring accuracy. Almost forty Germans had died in her sights, victims she continued to refer to as “sticks.” But Tania still had much to learn.

  In the top story of a building, she settled down behind piles of bricks to monitor enemy traffic. Several other student snipers joined her as she waited for hours, tracking Germans who scurried back and forth between trenches. Tania and her squad followed each one with scopes zeroed in on heads and hearts. But no one fired, because Zaitsev had told them to wait for his approval before revealing their position.

  Tania seethed at the order. Filled with disgust at having lost so many “sticks,” she fidgeted at the window and cursed the delay. When a column of German infantrymen suddenly burst into the open, she screamed: “Shoot!” and the room blazed with gunfire. Tania pumped shot after shot into the gray green uniforms and counted seventeen dead men sprawled on the pavement. Exultant, she sat back and exchanged congratulations with her friends.

  But they had missed some Germans, who crawled back to their lines with exact coordinates of Tania’s ambush. In minutes, a succession of shellbursts blew the building in on the Russians. Tania left the dead and ran out to tell Vassili Zaitsev what had happened.

  When he heard the distraught girl’s story, Zaitsev slapped her across the face with all his strength, berated her for her stupidity, and told her that she alone was responsible for the deaths of her friends. Stricken with guilt and afraid of Zaitsev’s wrath, Tania cried for hours.

  In downtown Stalingrad, the static war continued, and outside Jacob Pavlov’s stronghold, decomposing bodies attested to his ferocious defense of the apartment house he had entered a month earlier. The Germans left him alone for short periods but they always came back, so in between battles, he set up an artillery spotting post on the fourth floor, protecting it with snipers who worked during daylight hours to keep the Germans down and nervous. On all battle maps at Sixty-second Army Headquarters, the house in no-man’s-land was now referred to as “Dom Pavlov” (“Pavlov’s House”), and it had become both an integral fortification and a rallying point. Troops verified observations by saying that the Germans were seen moving two hundred yards west of Pavlov’s House; German tanks were reported one hundred yards north of Pavlov’s House. At General Rodimtsev’s command post in a battered grain mill, one hundred yards from the Volga, his staff watched the nightly tracer duels erupting around that outpost and felt a surge of satisfaction.

  Underground tunnels had been dug from several directions into the house and Pavlov, the stocky, simple peasant, felt more and more like a division commander as he radioed back information. Given the code name “Lighthouse” by Rodimtsev, he reveled in his new-found importance.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On October 27, at 376th Division Headquarters on the left flank of the Sixth Army, generals Paulus and Schmidt sat listening to an intense, nervous intelligence officer. They paid rapt attention, for the young lieutenant, Karl Ostarhild, was warning them of imminent disaster.

  Though awed by the presence of such illustrious superiors, Ostarhild briefed them with the confidence born of a complete grasp of his subject. He had spent weeks assembling his data from snooper planes, prisoners, visual observations, and radio intercept and had no doubts about his information.

  “We have seen a large number of men and material concentrated in the region of Kletskaya,” Ostarhild said, outlining the danger to the north. “Our order to make reconnaissance of this concentration was fulfilled…. This is an attack army, armed to the teeth, and of considerable size. We have information about the units… their armaments, where they come from, up to the names of their commanders. We also know their attack plans, which extend to the Black Sea.”

  Seemingly unmoved, Paulus brusquely asked for supporting documents. When he finished reading them, he asked: “Is this information known to my intelligence?” Advised by Schmidt that it was, though in less detail, Paulus told his worried advisers he would ask for more reserves to strengthen the defense.

  After Paulus departed, the frustrated Ostarhild went back to his maps. He had done everything he could to alert the “brains” of the Sixth Army, but he wondered whether they had really grasped the enormity of the danger.

  Back at Golubinka, General Paulus issued an unusual proclama
tion to his troops:

  1. The summer and fall offensive is successfully terminated after taking Stalingrad…the Sixth Army has played a significant role and held the Russians in check. The actions of the leadership and the troops during the offensive will enter into history as an especially glorious page.

  2. Winter is upon us… the Russians will take advantage of it.

  3. It is unlikely that the Russians will fight with the same strength as last winter….

  Having heard Ostarhild’s briefing, Friedrich von Paulus seemed to be whistling his way past the graveyard. Actually, he was dismayed at the bloodbath his soldiers had endured, and disgusted at himself for not having taken all of Stalingrad in September, but he continued to keep a death-grip on the ruins along the Volga, while trusting Hitler to guard his flanks.

  On November 1, however, he endured another punishing attack by the Luftwaffe’s self-appointed “devil’s advocate” when air force general, Freiherr von Richthofen, confronted him again at Golubinka. Richthofen complained that the infantry was not taking advantage of the support given them by the Stukas and Junker bombers, and the harried Paulus argued back that he was hobbled by lack of men and ammunition.

  The Luftwaffe general dismissed the rebuttal, saying he personally would use his influence to get any needed supplies, and continued with a lecture: “The real explanation is to be found in the weariness of both the troops and command and in that rigid Army conservatism, which still accepts without demur one thousand men in the front line out of a ration strength of twelve thousand, and which leads to the generals being content to merely issue orders….”