Information about the supply problems, which affected morale, particularly interested me. Everyone knew, without speaking about it, that the Soviet prisoners in our Stalag, whom we had virtually stopped feeding for some time, had sunk into cannibalism. “It’s their true nature that’s being revealed,” Thomas had snapped at me when I tried to discuss it with him. It was understood, though, that the German Landser, when in distress, would keep his dignity. So the shock caused by a report on a case of cannibalism in a German company posted at the western edge of the Kessel was all the keener in high places. The circumstances made the affair particularly atrocious. When famine made them resolve on this course, the soldiers in the company, still concerned with the Weltanschauung, had debated the following point: Should they eat a Russian or a German? The ideological problem posed was about the legitimacy of eating a Slav, a Bolshevik Untermensch. Couldn’t that sort of meat corrupt their German stomachs? But eating a dead comrade would be dishonorable; even if they couldn’t bury them anymore, they still had respect for those who had fallen for the Vaterland. Finally they agreed to eat one of their Hiwis, an entirely reasonable compromise, given the terms of the debate. They killed him and an Obergefreiter, a former butcher from Mannheim, proceeded to dismember him. The surviving Hiwis panicked: three of them were killed trying to desert, but another managed to reach the regiment’s HQ, where he had told the story to an officer. No one had believed him; after an investigation, they had been forced to face the facts, since the company hadn’t been able to dispose of the victim’s remains, and they had found his entire rib cage and some of the bits deemed unsuitable for consumption. The soldiers, when they were arrested, had confessed everything; the meat, according to them, tasted like pork, and was every bit as good as horse. They had discreetly shot the butcher and four ringleaders, then hushed up the affair, but it had created a stir in the various headquarters. Möritz asked me to write a general report on the nutritional situation of the troops since the Kessel had been sealed off; he had the numbers from the AOK 6, but suspected them of being mostly theoretical. I thought of going to see Hohenegg.
This time, I prepared my expedition a little better. I had already gone out with Thomas, to visit some division Ic/AOs; after my Croatian escapade, Möritz had ordered me, if I wanted to go out alone, to fill out an itinerary first. I made a phone call to Pitomnik, to the office of Generalstabsarzt Dr. Renoldi, the chief medical officer of AOK 6, where I was told that Hohenegg was based in the main campaign hospital in Gumrak; there I was told that he was traveling around within the Kessel, to make observations; I finally located him in Rakotino, a stanitsa in the southern part of the pocket, in the sector of the 376th Division. I then had to call the different HQs to organize liaisons. The trip would take half a day, and I would definitely have to spend the night either in Rakotino itself, or in Gumrak; but Möritz agreed to the expedition. There were still a few days left before the New Year; it had been twenty-five below zero since Christmas, and I decided to get out my shuba, despite the risk that lice would nest in it. I was already covered with them in any case—my vigilant hunt through the seams every night didn’t do any good: my belly, my armpits, the inside of my legs were red with bites, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching till I drew blood. I was also suffering from diarrhea, probably because of the bad water and irregular food, a mixture, depending on the day, of tinned ham or French pâté and Wassersuppe with horse. At HQ it was all right, the officers’ latrines were revolting but at least accessible, but on the move it could soon become problematic.
I went without Ivan: I didn’t need him in the Kessel; anyway, seats in the liaison vehicles were strictly limited. The first car brought me to Gumrak, another to Pitomnik; there I had to wait several hours for a liaison to Rakotino. It wasn’t snowing, but the sky remained a milky, somber gray, and the planes, which were now taking off from Salsk, arrived irregularly. On the runway an even more horrible chaos reigned than the week before; there was a stampede for each plane, wounded men fell and were crushed by the others, the Feldgendarmen had to fire volleys in the air to force the horde of desperate men to fall back. I exchanged a few words with a Heinkel 111 pilot who had gotten out of his plane to smoke; he was livid, and watched the scene with a bewildered look, murmuring: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible…. You know,” he finally said to me before he walked off, “every night, when I get back to Salsk alive, I cry like a child.” This simple sentence made my head swim; turning my back on the pilot and the desperate mob, I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people. Behind me, the wounded howled like men possessed, mad dogs, almost drowning out the throb of the engines with their cries. At least this Heinkel took off smoothly; that wasn’t the case for the next Junker. Some shells were beginning to fall again, they must have botched the refueling, or maybe one of the engines was defective, because of the cold: a few seconds after the wheels had left the ground, the left engine stalled; the aircraft, which hadn’t worked up enough speed yet, lurched to the side; the pilot tried to straighten it, but the plane was already too unbalanced and suddenly it toppled onto one wing and crashed a few hundred meters beyond the runway, in a giant ball of fire that lit up the steppe for an instant. I had taken refuge in a bunker because of the shelling but still saw everything, again my eyes filled with tears, but I managed to control myself. Finally they came to get me for the liaison, but not before an artillery shell had fallen on one of the tents of wounded near the runway, sending limbs and scraps of flesh flying over the whole unloading area. Since I was nearby, I had to help clear away the bloody debris, to look for survivors; as I caught myself studying the entrails spilled out of the belly of a young soldier on the reddened snow, to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them, I told myself that everything here was indeed taking on the look of an agonizing farce. I remained shaken, I smoked cigarette after cigarette, despite my limited supply, and every fifteen minutes had to run to the latrines to let out a thin stream of liquid shit; ten minutes after the car started, I had to make it stop to rush behind a snowdrift; my coat got in my way and I soiled it. I tried to clean it with some snow, but managed only to freeze my fingers; back in the car, I huddled against the door and closed my eyes to try to forget it all. I shuffled through the images of my past as through a worn pack of cards, trying to find one that could come to life before me for a few minutes: but they fled, dissolved, or remained dead. Even the image of my sister, my last recourse, seemed like a wooden figure. Only the presence of the other officers kept me from weeping again.
By the time we got to our destination, the snow had started up again, and snowflakes danced in the gray air, joyful and light; and for a brief moment one might have thought that the immense, empty, white steppe actually was a country of crystalline fairies, joyful and light like the snowflakes, whose laughter burst gently in the murmuring wind; but the knowledge that it was polluted by men and their unhappiness and sordid fear ruined the illusion. In Rakotino, I finally found Hohenegg in a wretched little isba half buried beneath the snow, banging away on a portable typewriter in the light of a candle stuck into a PAK cartridge casing. He raised his head but showed no surprise: “Look at that. The Hauptsturmführer. What good wind brings you here?”—“You.” He passed his hand over his bald skull: “I didn’t know I was so desirable. But I warn you: if you’re sick, you’ve come in vain. I only deal in those for whom it’s too late.” I made an effort to get a grip on myself to come up with a repartee: “Doctor, I suffer from only one disease, sexually transmissible and irremediably fatal: life.” He made a face: “Not only do I find you a little pale, but you’re sinking into clichés. I’ve known you in better form. The state of siege doesn’t agree with you.” I took off my shuba, hung it on a nail, and then, without being invited, sat down on a coarsely carved bench, my back to the wall. The room
was barely heated, just enough to cut the cold a little; Hohenegg’s fingers looked blue. “How is your work going, Doktor?” He shrugged his shoulders: “All right. General Renoldi didn’t welcome me very politely; apparently he thought this whole mission was useless. I didn’t take offense, but I would have preferred it if he had expressed his opinion when I was still in Novocherkassk. That said, he’s wrong: I’m not done yet, but my preliminary results are already extraordinary.”—“That’s just what I came to discuss with you.”—“The SD is interested in nutrition, now?”—“The SD is interested in everything, Doktor.”—“So let me finish my report. Then I’ll go look for some so-called soup in the so-called mess, and we can talk while we pretend to eat.” He patted his round belly: “For now, it’s a health cure for me. But it better not last.”—“You have some reserves, at least.”—“That doesn’t mean anything. Nervous thin men like you seem to last much longer than the fat and the strong. Let me work. You’re not in too much of a hurry?” I raised my hands: “You know, Doktor, given the critical importance of what I’m doing for the future of Germany and of the Sixth Army…”—“That’s just what I was thinking. In that case, you’ll spend the night here and we’ll go back together to Gumrak tomorrow morning.”
The village of Rakotino remained strangely silent. We were less than a kilometer from the front, but since I arrived I had heard just a few gunshots. The clacking of the typewriter resounded in this silence and made it even more nerve-wracking. At least my runs had calmed down. Finally, Hohenegg stowed his papers into a briefcase, got up, and stuck a scruffy shapka onto his round skull. “Give me your paybook,” he said, “I’m going to look for some soup. You’ll find a little wood next to the stove: start it up again, but use as little as possible. We have to keep till tomorrow with that.” He went out; I busied myself next to the stove. The wood supply was indeed meager: a few wet fence pickets, with bits of barbed wire attached. I finally managed to light a piece after cutting it up. Hohenegg returned with a mess tin of soup and a thick slice of Kommissbrot. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but they refuse to give you a ration without a written order from the HQ of the Panzer Corps. We’ll share.”—“Don’t worry,” I replied, “I anticipated that.” I went over to my coat and took from the pockets a piece of bread, some dry biscuits, and some tinned meat. “Magnificent!” he exclaimed. “Keep the tin for tonight, I have an onion: it’ll be a feast. For lunch, I have this.” He took a piece of bacon wrapped in a Soviet newspaper out of his bag. With a pocket knife, he cut the bread into slices and also cut two thick slices of bacon; he placed all of it directly on the stove, with the mess tin of soup. “Sorry, but I don’t have a saucepan.” While the bacon sizzled, he stored his typewriter away and spread the newspaper out on the table. We ate the bacon on the warmed slices of black bread: the slightly melted fat seeped into the thick bread, and it was delicious. Hohenegg offered me his soup; I refused, pointing to my stomach. He raised his eyebrows: “The Flux?” I nodded. “Be careful with that. Normally one gets over it, but here, it can carry men away in a few days. They become dehydrated and die.” He explained the hygienic procedures I should follow. “That can be a little complicated here,” I pointed out.—“Yes, that’s true,” he acknowledged sadly. While we were finishing our bacon toast, he talked to me about lice and typhus. “We already have a few cases, which we isolate as well as we can,” he explained. “But inevitably, an epidemic will break out. And then it will be catastrophic. The men will fall like flies.”—“In my opinion, they’re dying fast enough as is.”—“Do you know what our tovarishchi are doing now on the front of the division? They’re playing a recording with a clock going tick, tock, tick, tock, very loud, then a sepulchral voice announcing in German: ‘Every seven seconds, a German dies in Russia!’ Then the tick, tock again. They put that on for hours. It’s quite striking.” For men devoured by cold and hunger, gnawed by vermin, crouching at the bottom of their bunkers of snow and frozen earth, I could see how it must have been terrifying, even if the calculation (as we have seen at the beginning of this memoir) was a little excessive. I responded by telling Hohenegg the story of the Solomonic cannibals. His only commentary was: “Judging from the Hiwis I’ve examined, they must not have had a very satisfying feast.” That brought us to the object of my mission. “I haven’t finished the tour of all the divisions,” he explained, “and there are differences for which I haven’t yet found any explanation. But I’ve already conducted about thirty autopsies and the results are irrefutable: more than half present symptoms of acute malnutrition. To put it simply, almost no adipose tissue left under the skin or surrounding the internal organs; gelatinous fluid in the mesentery; congested liver; pale, anemic organs; red and yellow marrow replaced by a vitreous substance; cardiac muscle atrophied, but with an enlargement of the right ventricle and the right auricle. In ordinary language, their body, lacking anything to sustain its vital functions, devours itself to find the necessary calories; when there’s nothing left, everything stops, like a car that’s run out of gas. It’s a well-known phenomenon: but the curious thing here is that despite the dramatic reduction in rations, it’s still much too soon to have so many cases. All the officers assure me that the food supplies are centralized by the AOK and that the soldiers are indeed receiving the official ration. Which, for now, is just under a thousand calories per day. That’s far too little, but it’s still something; the men should be weak, more vulnerable to diseases and opportunistic infections, but they shouldn’t be dying of hunger yet. That’s why my colleagues are looking for another explanation: they talk of exhaustion, stress, physical shock. But that’s all vague and not very convincing. My autopsies don’t lie.”—“What do you think, then?”—“I don’t know. There must be a number of reasons, hard to separate in these conditions. I suspect that the capacity of certain organisms to break down food properly, to digest it, is altered by other factors such as tension or lack of sleep. There are of course quite obvious cases: men with diarrhea that’s so severe that the little they absorb doesn’t stay in their stomach long enough and comes out almost as is; that’s especially the case for the ones eating almost exclusively this Wassersuppe. Some of the food they distribute to the troops is even harmful; for example, canned meat like yours, very rich, sometimes kills men who haven’t eaten anything except bread and soup for weeks; their organism can’t bear the shock, the heart pumps too quickly and suddenly gives out. There’s also the butter, which keeps arriving: it’s delivered in frozen blocks, and out in the steppe, the Landsers don’t have anything to make fires with, so they break it up with an axe and suck on the pieces. That provokes horrible diarrhea that soon finishes them off. If you want to know the truth, many of the bodies I receive have their pants still full of shit, frozen fortunately: in the end, they’re too weak to drop their pants. And note that these are bodies picked up at the front lines, not in the hospitals. In short, to return to my theory, it will be hard to demonstrate, but it seems plausible to me. The metabolism itself is affected by the cold and fatigue, and can no longer function properly.”—“And fear?”—“Fear too, of course. We saw it during the Great War: under some particularly intense bombardments, the heart fails; we find young, healthy, well-fed men dead without the slightest wound. But here I’d say rather that it’s an aggravating factor, not a primary cause. Once again, I have to continue my investigations. It won’t be much use for the Sixth Army, I’m sure, but I flatter myself that it will serve science, and that’s what helps me get up in the morning; that, and the inevitable salyut of our friends across the lines. This Kessel, in fact, is a giant laboratory. A genuine researcher’s paradise. I have as many bodies at my disposal as I could wish for, perfectly preserved, even if it’s sometimes a little hard to defrost them. I have to force my poor assistants to spend the night with them near the stove, turning them over regularly. The other day, in Baburkin, one of them fell asleep; the next morning, I found my subject frozen on one side and roasted on the other. Come along now, it’ll soon be time.”
—“Time? Time for what?”—“You’ll see.” Hohenegg gathered up his briefcase and his typewriter and put on his coat; before going out, he snuffed the candle. Outside, it was dark. I followed him to a balka behind the village, where he slithered, feet first, into a bunker that was almost invisible beneath the snow. Three officers were sitting on little stools around a candle. “Good evening, meine Herren,” Hohenegg said. “Let me introduce Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue, who has very kindly come to visit us.” I shook hands with the officers and, since there was no other stool, sat down on the frozen ground, pulling my coattails under me. Despite the fleece lining, I felt the cold. “The Soviet commander opposite us is a man of remarkable punctuality,” Hohenegg explained to me. “Every day, since the middle of the month, he has sprayed this sector three times a day, at 05:30, 11:00, and 16:00 sharp. In the meantime, nothing, aside from a few mortar shells. It’s very practical for my work.” Indeed, three minutes later, I heard the piercing screech, followed by a close series of enormous explosions, of a volley of “Stalin organs.” The whole bunker shook, snow came down and half filled the entryway, clumps of earth rained from the ceiling. The frail light of the candle flickered, projecting monstrous shadows on the exhausted, badly shaved faces of the officers. Other volleys followed, punctuated by the staccato detonations of tank or artillery shells. The noise had become a mad, insane thing, living its own life, occupying the air and pressing against the partly obstructed entrance of the bunker. I was seized with terror at the idea of being buried alive; I would almost have fled, but I got control of myself. After ten minutes the pounding abruptly stopped. But the noise, its presence and pressure, took longer to withdraw and dissipate. The acrid smell of cordite stung the nose and eyes. One of the officers cleared away the bunker’s entrance by hand. We went crawling out. Above the balka, the village looked crushed, swept as if by a storm; isbas were burning, but I soon saw that only a few houses had been struck: the bulk of the shells must have been aimed at the trenches. “The only problem,” Hohenegg commented as he brushed earth and snow off his cloak, “is that they never aim at quite the same spot. That would be much more practical. Let’s go see if our humble refuge has survived.” The hut was still standing; the stove was even giving off a little warmth. “Would you like to come over for some tea?” offered one of the officers who had accompanied us. We followed him to another isba, divided in half by a partition; the first room, where the two others already sat, was also equipped with a stove. “Here, in the village, it’s all right,” the officer said. “We find some wood after each bombardment. But the men on the line don’t have anything. At the slightest little wound, they die of shock and frostbite caused by the loss of blood. We rarely have time to evacuate them to a hospital.” Another officer was preparing the “tea,” some Schlüter ersatz. All three of them were Leutnants or Oberleutnants, very young; they moved and spoke slowly, almost apathetically. The one who was making the tea was wearing the Iron Cross. I offered them some cigarettes: this produced the same effect on them as it had with the Croatian officer. One of them took out a greasy pack of cards: “Do you play?” I made a sign that I didn’t, but Hohenegg agreed, and he dealt the cards for a game of skat. “Cards, cigarettes, tea…” joked the third one, who hadn’t said anything yet. “Just like home…”—“Before,” the first one explained to me, “we played chess. But we don’t have the strength for that anymore.” The officer with the Iron Cross served the tea in dented cups. “I’m sorry, there’s no milk. No sugar, either.” We drank, and they started playing. A noncom came in and began talking in a low voice with the officer with the Iron Cross. “In the village,” he announced angrily, “four dead, thirteen wounded. The Second and Third companies were hit too.” He turned to me with a look that was both enraged and helpless: “You’re in charge of intelligence, Herr Hauptsturmführer, can you explain something to me? Where do they get all these weapons, cannons, and shells from? We’ve been chasing and pursuing them for a year and a half now. We’ve hunted them from the Bug to the Volga, we’ve destroyed their cities, wrecked their factories…. So where are they getting all these fucking tanks and cannons from?” He was almost on the verge of tears. “I’m not in charge of that kind of intelligence,” I explained calmly. “Enemy military potential is the business of the Abwehr and the Fremde Heere Ost. In my opinion, it was underestimated from the start. And also, they managed to evacuate a lot of factories. Their production capacity in the Urals seems considerable.” The officer appeared to want to continue the conversation, but was obviously too tired. He went back to playing cards in silence. A little later, I asked them about the Russian defeatist propaganda. The one who had invited us got up, passed behind the partition, and returned with some pieces of paper. “They send us this.” One of them was a simple poem written in German, entitled “Think About Your Child!” and signed by a certain Erich Weinert; the other ended with a quotation: If German soldiers or officers surrender, the Red Army must take them prisoner and spare their lives (Order No. 55 of the People’s Commissar for Defense J. Stalin). The work was quite sophisticated; the language and typography were excellent. “And is it working?” I asked. The officers looked at each other. “Unfortunately, yes,” the third finally said.—“Impossible to prevent the men from reading them,” the one with the Iron Cross said.—“Recently,” the third one went on, “during an attack, an entire platoon surrendered without firing a shot. Fortunately, another platoon was able to intervene and block the attack. Finally we pushed the Reds back, and they didn’t take their prisoners with them. A lot of them had been killed during the fighting; we shot the others.” The Leutnant with the Iron Cross gave him a black look and he fell silent. “Can I keep this?” I asked, pointing to the papers. “If you like. We keep them for another purpose.” I folded them and put them away in my jacket pocket. Hohenegg was finishing the game and got up: “Shall we go?” We thanked the three officers and returned to Hohenegg’s isba, where I prepared a small meal with my tinned meat and some slices of grilled onion. “I’m sorry, Hauptsturmführer, but I left my Cognac in Gumrak.”—“Oh, that can be for another time.” We talked about the officers; Hohenegg told me about the strange obsessions that seized some of them, like the Oberstleutnant from the Forty-fourth Division who had demolished an entire isba where a dozen of his men were sheltering, to heat water for a bath, and then who, after soaking for a long time and shaving himself, had put his uniform back on and shot himself in the mouth. “But Doktor,” I pointed out, “you must know that in Latin ‘to besiege’ is obsidere. Stalingrad is an obsessed city.”—“Yes. Let’s go to bed. The morning wake-up is a little brutal.” Hohenegg had a mattress and a sleeping bag; he found two blankets for me and I rolled up in my fleece-lined coat. “You should see my quarters in Gumrak,” he said as he lay down. “I have a bunker with wooden walls, heated, and clean sheets. Luxury.” Clean sheets: that, I said to myself, was something to dream about. A hot bath and clean sheets. Was it possible that I would die without ever taking another bath? Yes, it was possible, and seen from Hohenegg’s isba, it seemed even probable. Once again, an immense desire to weep overwhelmed me. That seized me often nowadays.
The Kindly Ones Page 45
