The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  That January Joachim Stempel visited his father, the general commanding the 371st Infantry Division (and a professional soldier before the war), who was fighting in a different section of the Stalingrad encirclement. The encounter would turn out to be one of the defining moments of Joachim Stempel’s life: ‘I drove to his command centre in a jeep and talked to him about the situation, about which as a divisional commander he knew more than I did as a small platoon leader. And so I realized how bad the situation really was. And my father said, very realistically, “We are being sacrificed in order to save others.” And then the door opened and Paulus entered the bunker. My father reported to him and immediately said, “Should my son be sent out?” Paulus said no, that he might as well stay and listen to this. And then they discussed the situation. And Paulus finished by saying this: “My proud 6th Army is meeting a fate it does not deserve. For us, Stempel [he meant my father], the last road we have to take calls for strength, which we also have to ask of our men. As a German general, you know what is required of you at the end. My men and I will defend our position in the bunker until the Russians storm us, and then the bunker will be blown sky-high with us inside. I wish you all the best for your last stand.” And he shook hands with both of us and disappeared.’

  After Paulus left, Joachim Stempel and his father sat discussing what they had just heard. Its meaning seemed clear: ‘My father too said that none of the generals would be taken prisoner – it’s impossible, as the commander had said. “You try,” he said. “You’re still young. You try to get out of this cauldron, somehow to get through . . . But I will shoot myself. I don’t want to be a burden to my staff officers in their attempt to break through. I’m fifty years old, I can’t be a burden to them. So I’ll take care of it here. I will do it when the Russians are outside my bunker, here in this room in which you’re standing . . . I will act like a captain of a sinking ship. A captain doesn’t get into the lifeboat, a captain goes down with his ship. And my men die here for their country, and will never see their homes again, and I won’t see my home again either. I will stay here with my men.”’

  Joachim Stempel had one last conversation with his father: ‘I thanked him for the way I had been raised and trained. For my schooling, the good home I’d had, the care I’d been given, and the opportunity to follow a career of my choice that I’d had. And I wished him all the best. And he said, as I saluted him with military honours, he said, “We’ll see each other again soon, up there, where all brave soldiers meet again. Take care, my son.” I saluted . . . and walked out to my friends.’

  On 10 January 1943 the Red Army mounted Operation Ring to squeeze the noose tighter on the 6th Army, and by 26 January forward Soviet units had linked up with Chuikov’s 62nd Army on the Volga. As January came to an end, so did the German resistance. ‘One day three Red Army soldiers approached our little foxhole,’ says Bernhard Bechler. ‘We were living in there, my adjutant – a young lieutenant – and me. The regiment’s command post was only a few metres away. Suddenly these Red Army soldiers were coming towards us. And we both thought in a flash, we don’t have any ammunition, this is the end. They’re either going to shoot us or they’ll take us prisoner. What shall we do? At that point I saw my adjutant pull a photo from the pocket of his uniform jacket. I looked at it, and it was a photo of his young wife with two very young children. He glanced at the photo, tore it to pieces, pulled his handgun, shot himself in the head and was dead. I experienced it there and then, but one can’t imagine what it’s like when a person is suddenly lying there dying. The following moment the Red Army soldier was upon me. He held his pistol to my chest, but he didn’t pull the trigger, and at that point, when I realized he wasn’t going to shoot me, my second life began.’

  As the German defence crumbled, Gerhard Münch, who only a few weeks before had counselled his junior officers not to commit suicide but to stay with their men as long as they were needed, received unexpected orders from a colonel at 51st Corps Headquarters. ‘You are flying out, today,’ he was told. Münch had been selected as one of the last ‘special envoys’ to carry documents out of Stalingrad. At the makeshift airfield desperate German soldiers milled around as Münch clambered aboard the plane. ‘Then Russian artillery started to shoot at us and, as the pilot took off, soldiers who had not been able to get into the plane clung to the bottom of it. He tried to shake them off and they actually fell down. You can hardly describe it: you had to have seen it – all the hopes that these people had to get out of there.’

  Münch had left his men behind in the encirclement – he had not even been allowed to telephone his own regiment to say that he was leaving them: ‘It took me a long time, internally, to cope with it, the fact that I had not personally kept to the principle by which I had been brought up and educated – to stand by your men. It was very, very tough to cope with. It took me years . . . the soldiers believed in me and there was a relationship of trust, which is key for any soldiers’ relationship. And then, in the last consequence, I am flown out.’

  As the fate of the 6th Army became inevitable even to Hitler, he promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal. No German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner. The message was clear – Paulus was expected to kill himself.

  On 30 January, as Soviet troops closed in on Paulus’s headquarters at the Univermag store on Heroes of the Revolution Square, Gerhard Hindenlang, one of his battalion commanders, received a radio message containing news of this promotion. Hindenlang was told to take the news to Paulus – along with the intelligence assessment that the Red Army was about to overwhelm the last German resistance: ‘I went over and reported to the general and told him that on the radio we had heard about his promotion to field marshal. But I also had to say that at the same time I would have to ask him to capitulate because the Russians had positioned themselves around this store [his command post] and further defence was pointless. And he said to me, approximately, “Hindenlang, I am the youngest field marshal of the German Army and I have to become a prisoner of war.” And I was a bit surprised – stunned even – to hear that, and he saw the surprise on my face and he said, “What do you think of suicide?” And I said, “Field Marshal, I lead troops and I will do so right until the last moment. I will go and become a prisoner of war if needs be, but you – you haven’t got any forces any more.” And he said, “Hindenlang, I’m a Christian. I refuse to commit suicide.”’

  The next day Paulus was captured alive by the Red Army. The minutes of Hitler’s midday situation conference of 1 February 1943 survive, and demonstrate the combination of rage and bewilderment with which the Führer greeted the news: ‘What hurts me so much,’ he said, ‘is that the heroism of so many soldiers is cancelled out by one single characterless weakling . . . What is “life”? . . . the individual must die anyway. It is the nation which lives on after the individual. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment which sets him free from this vale of misery, unless the call of duty keeps him in this vale of tears!’ Still later in the conference Hitler repeated his main theme. ‘What hurts me the most personally is that I went on and promoted him to field marshal . . . That’s the last field marshal I promote in this war. One must not count one’s chickens before they are hatched . . . I just don’t understand it . . . He could have got out of this vale of tears and into eternity and been immortalized by the nation, and he’d rather go to Moscow. How can he even think of that as an alternative? It’s crazy.’ The transcript reveals a man almost in shock – less at the failure to hold Stalingrad than at the actions of Paulus.4

  For Günther von Below, who was Paulus’s chief of operations and who went into captivity along with him, the field marshal’s decision not to commit suicide is easy to explain. ‘He [Paulus] said, “As a human being, and above all as a Christian, I do not have the right to take my own life.” And my attitude was the same . . . It wasn’t cowardice. It was quite simply our duty to go into captivity with our soldiers. And if I had taken my own life there, that would have been
cowardice. That is my conviction.’

  But the idea that Paulus, by not taking his own life, was able to ‘go into captivity’ with his men is dismissed by Joachim Stempel: ‘It’s just a joke, because minutes later the general was no longer with his troops – he was in a heated fast train, with white linen on the bed and table, on his way to the generals’ camp in Moscow.’ Paulus was indeed separated from his men – and photographs in an album still kept in the secret archive of the Russian Security Service show the relative comfort of the field marshal’s captivity. The conditions of his imprisonment were, if not luxurious, certainly far superior to the degradation that awaited his men in the Soviet camps. (Just over 90,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner at Stalingrad; of these, 95 per cent of the non-commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers died, along with 55 per cent of the junior officers but only 5 per cent of senior officers.)5

  ‘I was disappointed,’ says Joachim Stempel of his reaction to the news that Paulus had decided to allow himself to be captured. ‘And I mistrusted everything. Because I thought, well, what is the word of a superior officer worth?’ As far as Stempel was concerned, the conversation he had witnessed between Paulus and his father had been unequivocal – Paulus was calling on his senior officers to commit suicide. ‘If my father had been uncertain in any way, he might have thought, well, OK, if Paulus, as commander-in-chief, survives and is taken prisoner, why should I, a divisional commander, not be taken captive as well?’

  As Paulus was captured by the Red Army, elsewhere in Stalingrad Valentina Krutova and her brother and sister lay huddled in bed – by now too weak to scavenge for food: ‘My brother was lying on one side of the bed, I was lying on the other side and my young sister was between us. The only thought we had was where to find something to eat. We were so hungry. I can’t imagine now myself what I lived through . . . We simply stayed in bed and were lying all day silently; clinging to each other, hugging each other. Trying to keep our sister warm. We would turn our faces to her and press ourselves to her body.’ Then, one day, they heard knocking at their door: ‘And we could hear somebody shouting [in Russian], “Why are you knocking on the door? Don’t knock. Maybe there are Germans inside, they’ll shoot us. Throw the grenade.” But one soldier did open the door, and to start with they couldn’t make out who was inside. But we began to scream, “Don’t kill us! We’re Russians!” The soldier who was first to come in shouted, “There are children here.” When they came in and saw us, they burst out crying.’

  For the Red Army, the victory in Stalingrad was more than just a military triumph: it marked a spiritual watershed. ‘I drank a toast,’ says Suren Mirzoyan, ‘and said after Stalingrad I am no longer afraid.’ For Anatoly Mereshko, the victory gave him ‘a supernatural, extraordinary feeling – that I won’t be killed in the war. When I saw the surrendering Germans, and when I realized they hadn’t killed me in Stalingrad, I felt I would live to see the victory. I felt confident. It was a real certainty that I would not die.’

  But Stalingrad was not the single decisive moment of the war on the Eastern Front that is sometimes claimed. The Germans did not give up after this defeat, and the continued resistance of the 6th Army enabled the Germans to extricate Army Group A safely from the Kalmyk steppes and the Caucasus to the south, and thus avoid another encirclement. But the defeat at Stalingrad was none the less hugely significant. Never again would the German Army cast their eyes on the Volga.

  While these dramatic actions were taking place on the front line, hundreds of miles away a crime was being committed by which the Nazis would, for all time, be defined – the mechanised extermination of the Jewish people.

  8

  THE ROAD TO TREBLINKA

  IMAGES OF AUSCHWITZ are among the most familiar on the planet: the row upon row of huts, the emaciated corpses staring out at us from old newsreels. Film exists of Auschwitz because it was a work camp as well as an extermination centre, and this also partly accounts for why there are many more survivors of this camp than the others. But Auschwitz, though a place of nightmares, is not the quintessential example of Nazi horror. The Nazis created other hell-like places that were killing factories – pure and simple – designed to produce nothing but corpses. These places, far from German soil, achieved their devilish purpose and were destroyed by the Nazis before the end of the war to hide the enormity of their crime. Such a place was Treblinka. If you visit the site of Treblinka camp today, deep in the isolated Polish countryside, you will stand in a forest and hear only birds. Yet you still stand on a spot that marks one of the lowest points to which human beings have ever descended. The memorial stone at what was the camp boundary is inscribed with the words ‘Never Again’. It should also bear another word, written in letters of fire – ‘Remember’.

  Samuel Willenberg, whom the Germans had caught in a round-up of Jews in Opatów, southern Poland, was in a train rattling towards Treblinka in 1942. Now, crammed into a cattle truck, he heard Polish children shout as they passed different stations, ‘Jews! You’ll be turned into soap!’ As the train snaked through the countryside, Samuel heard other Jews in the cattle truck whisper, ‘It’s bad. We are going to Treblinka.’ Yet still nobody in the truck wanted to accept that a place could exist simply for the elimination of innocent human beings. ‘It was hard to believe,’ says Samuel Willenberg. ‘I was here and still I could not believe it at first.’

  The train arrived at Treblinka station, the cattle truck doors crashed open and suddenly there was shouting, ‘Schnell, schnell!’ Ukrainians in black SS uniforms herded the Jews off the platform and through a gate into the lower part of the camp. Men were pushed to the right, women to the left. A young Jewish man carrying pieces of string and wearing a red armband approached the men and told them to take off their shoes and tie them together. The young man looked familiar to Samuel. ‘I asked him, “Listen, where are you from?” He told me and asked me where I was from. I said, “Czestochowa, Opatów, Warsaw.” “From Czestochowa?” “Yes.” “What’s your name?” “Samuel Willenberg.” “Say you are a bricklayer,” and he left.’ That chance meeting and those five words of advice saved Samuel’s life. He told the guards he was a bricklayer and so became one of the tiny handful of Jews selected to help in the camp, not for immediate death.

  Some 800,000 people (other estimates say more than one million) were exterminated in Treblinka camp over a period of thirteen months between July 1942 and August 1943. It took just 50 Germans, 150 Ukrainians and just over 1000 Jews forced to work with them to accomplish it all. Standing in the clearing where the camp used to be, what strikes one first is its size – a mere 600 by 400 metres. It is a profoundly upsetting moment when one realizes that if people are to be murdered there is no need of space.

  The layout of the camp could scarcely have been simpler. The victims arrived on train trucks and were then herded from the station to a central courtyard in the camp where the men were ordered to undress. On one side of the yard was a barracks where the women undressed and where their hair was shaved. ‘At that point,’ says Samuel, ‘the women gained hope, for if they are going to have their hair cut, it means there is going to be some life after, for hygiene is necessary in a camp.’ The women did not know, of course, that the Germans wanted to stuff mattresses with their hair. The nakedness of the victims also worked in the Germans’ favour. ‘A man who takes his shoes off and then is ordered “Strip!” and is naked – that man is no longer a human being, no longer a master of himself,’ says Samuel. ‘He covers certain parts of his body, he is embarrassed. Suddenly, he has a thousand problems of which he has not been aware in his normal life, which he did not have as he was never forced to walk about naked – except perhaps as a child – among people, among friends. Suddenly everyone is naked! And the Germans, you see, took advantage of that. And on top of that, the lashing, “Quick! Schnell, schnell!” At that point one wanted to run somewhere as fast as one could, run somewhere, no matter where.’ The men, women and children were harried down a path (the Germans
called it ‘The Path to Heaven’) less than a hundred metres to the gas chambers where they were murdered. Once dead, their bodies were thrown into pits next to the gas chambers.

  The whole process, from the arrival of the train to the remains being hurled into the pit, took less than two hours. Most of the victims were never certain where they were or what was happening to them until the last moment. Every effort was made to try and deceive them about their fate. Treblinka station was decorated like a real station with a clock and timetables. The victims were told they had arrived at a transit camp where they would have to take a shower. High barbed-wire fences, in which branches were entwined, wound through the camp so that no one could see what was about to happen to them next.

  After the murder of the victims, Treblinka became a vast sorting area. In a huge yard on the east side of the camp Jewish workers, such as Samuel Willenberg, had to sort out belongings which, until moments previously, had been someone’s treasured possessions. ‘It looked like a Persian bazaar,’ says Samuel, ‘open suitcases, spread-out sheets, and on each sheet lay different things. Trousers separately from shirts, from woollen things, it all had to be sorted. The gold lay separate in the bags . . . Each of us had a sheet spread out next to him where we put photos, documents, diplomas.’ Samuel worked under the eyes of a sadist, an SS guard they called ‘Doll’. He had a St Bernard dog called Barry, which he had trained to tear out human flesh, to bite at a man’s genitals, on the command ‘Man bite dog’. (As the verdict at ‘Doll’s’ later trial stated: ‘By the word “man” he meant Barry: the word “dog” referred to the prisoner.’)1 Every moment of the time that Samuel worked in Treblinka until his escape into the surrounding forest seven months later, he risked being killed in an instant, on a whim.