by Ian Kershaw
Hitler’s decision to air-lift supplies to the 6th Army until relief arrived was taken on 23 November. By then he had heard from Paulus that stores of food and equipment were perilously low and certainly insufficient for a defence of the position. Paulus sought permission to attempt to break out. Weichs, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, and Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler also fully backed this as the only realistic option.313 Zeitzler, evidently acting on the basis of a remarkable misunderstanding, actually informed Weichs at 2a.m. on 24 November that he had ‘persuaded the Führer that a break-out was the only possibility of saving the army’. Within four hours the General Staff had to transmit exactly the opposite decision by Hitler: the 6th Army had to stand fast and would be supplied from the air until relief could arrive.314 The fate of almost quarter of a million men was sealed with this order.
Hitler was not totally isolated in military support for his decision. Field-Marshal von Manstein had arrived that morning, 24 November, at Army Group Β headquarters to take command, as ordered by Hitler three days earlier, of a new Army Group Don (which included the trapped 6th Army). The main objective was to shore up the weakened front south and west of Stalingrad, to secure the lines to Army Group A in the Caucasus. He also took command of General Hoth’s attempt to relieve the 6th Army.315 But in contrast to Paulus, Weichs, and Zeitzler, Manstein did not approve an attempt to break out before reinforcements arrived, and took an optimistic view of the chances of an air-lift. Manstein was one of Hitler’s most trusted generals. His assessment can only have strengthened Hitler’s own judgement.316
By mid-December, Manstein had changed his view diametrically. Richthofen had persuaded him that, in the atrocious weather conditions, an adequate air-lift was impossible. Even if the weather relented, air supplies could not be sustained for any length of time.317 Manstein now pressed on numerous occasions for a decision to allow the 6th Army to break out.318 But by then the chances of a break-out had grossly diminished; in fact, once Hoth’s relief attempt was held up in heavy fighting some fifty kilometres from Stalingrad and some days later finally forced back, they rapidly became non-existent.319 On 19 December, Hitler once more rejected all pleas to consider a break-out. Military information in any case now indicated that the 6th Army, greatly weakened and surrounded by mighty Soviet forces, would be able to advance a maximum of thirty kilometres to the south-west – not far enough to meet up with Hoth’s relief Panzer army.320 On 21 December, Manstein asked Zeitzler for a final decision on whether the 6th Army should attempt to break out as long as it could still link with the 57th Panzer Corps, or whether the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe could guarantee air-supplies over a lengthy period of time. Zeitzler cabled back that Göring was confident that the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army, though Jeschonnek was by now of a different opinion. Hitler allowed an inquiry of the 6th Army Command about the distance it could expect to advance towards the south if the other fronts could be held. The reply came that there was fuel for twenty kilometres, and that it would be unable to hold position for long. Hoth’s army was still fifty-four kilometres away.321 Still no decision was taken. ‘It’s as if the Führer is no longer capable [of taking one],’ noted the OKW’s war-diarist Helmuth Greiner.322
6th Army Command itself described the tactic of a mass break-out without relief from the outside – ‘Operation Thunderclap’ – as ‘a catastrophe-solution’ (‘Katastrophenlösung’) .323 That evening, Hitler dismissed the idea: Paulus only had fuel for a short distance; there was no possibility of breaking out.324 Two days later, on 23 December, Manstein had to remove units from Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army to hold the crumbling left flank of his Army Group. With that, Hoth had to pull back his weakened forces. The attempt to break the siege of Stalingrad had failed.325 The 6th Army was doomed.
Paulus still sought permission to break out. But by Christmas Eve, Manstein had given up trying to persuade Hitler to give approval to what by this time could only be seen as a move of sheer desperation, without hope of success. The main priority was now to hold the left flank to prevent an even worse catastrophe.326 This was essential to enable the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus.327 Zeitzler had put the urgency of this retreat to Hitler on the evening of 27 December. Hitler had reluctantly agreed, then later changed his mind. It was too late. Zeitzler had telephoned through Hitler’s initial approval. The retreat from the Caucasus was under way.328 Stalingrad had become a lesser priority.329
Preoccupied though he was with the eastern front, and in particular with the now inevitable catastrophe in Stalingrad, Hitler could not afford to neglect what was happening in North Africa. And he was increasingly worried about the resolve of his Italian allies.
Montgomery had forced Rommel’s Afrika Corps into headlong retreat, and would drive the German and Italian army out of Libya altogether during January 1943.330 Encouraged by Göring, Hitler was now convinced that Rommel had lost his nerve.331 But at least the 50,000 German and 18,000 Italian troops rushed to Tunis in November and December had seriously held up the Allies, preventing their rapid domination of North Africa and ruling out an early assault on the European continent itself.332 Even so, Hitler knew the Italians were wobbling. Göring’s visit to Rome at the end of November had confirmed that.333 Their commitment to the war was by now in serious doubt.334 And when Ciano and Marshal Count Ugo Cavalero, the head of the Italian armed forces, arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on 18 December for three days of talks, it was in the immediate wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army, overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive on the middle stretches of the Don. Hitler concealed his fury and dismay at what he saw as the military weakness of his Axis partner, alluding only in a single sentence to the Italian setbacks. His chief interest in the talks was in pressing upon the Italians the urgent need to intensify efforts – through greater sacrifices from the civilian population – to ensure sufficient transport for vital supplies to the forces in North Africa, emphasizing that this was ‘decisive for the war’. From the Italian point of view, the central concern was to suggest to Hitler that the time had come to end the war in the east and seek a settlement with the Soviet Union.335
It was the first time a summit with the Italians had taken place in East Prussia. Ciano referred to ‘the sadness of that damp forest and boredom of collective living in the Command barracks’. ‘There isn’t a spot of colour,’ he continued, ‘not one vivid note. Waiting-rooms filled with people smoking, eating, chatting. Kitchen odour, smell of uniforms, of boots.’336 The talks produced little that was constructive for either side. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more.337 The Italian guests were non-committal towards Hitler’s exhortations to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North Africa.338
For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. A radio broadcast linking troops on all the fighting fronts, including Stalingrad, brought tears to the eyes of many a family gathered around the Christmas tree back home, as the men at the ‘front on the Volga’ joined their comrades in singing ‘Silent Night’. The listeners at home did not know the link-up was a fake.339 Nor did they know that 1,280 German soldiers died at Stalingrad on that Christmas Day in 1942.340 They were, however, aware by then of an ominous fate hanging over the 6th Army.
The triumphalist propaganda of September and October, suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-offensive to little more than ominous silence. Indications of hard fighting were sufficient, however, to make plain that things were not going to plan. Rumours of the encirclement of the 6th Army – passed on through despairing letters from the soldiers entrapp
ed there – swiftly spread.341 It soon became evident that the rumours were no less than the truth. As the sombre mood at home deepened by the day, the terrible struggle in the streets of Stalingrad headed towards its inexorable dénouement.
Last letters home confirmed the worst fears. ‘Please don’t be sad and weep for me, when you receive this, my last letter,’ wrote one captain to his wife in mid-January. ‘I’m standing here in an icy storm in a hopeless position in the city of fate, Stalingrad. Encircled for months, we will tomorrow begin the last fight, man against man.’342 Another soldier compared the miserable reality of death in Stalingrad with the imagery of heroism: ‘They’re falling like flies, and no one bothers and buries them. Without arms and legs and without eyes, with stomachs ripped open, they lie around everywhere.’343 ‘We’re completely alone, without help from outside,’ ran another last letter home. ‘Hitler has left us in the lurch. This letter is going off while the airfield is still in our possession. We’re in the north of the city. The men of my battery guess it, too, but don’t know it as certainly as I do. This, then, is what the end looks like.’344 Some clutched vainly, even now, to final strands of belief in Hitler. ‘The Führer solidly promised to get us out of here. That’s been read out to us and we firmly believed it. I still believe it today, because I have to believe in something… I have believed my entire life, or at least eight years of it, always in the Führer and his word. It’s horrible how they’re in doubt here, and shameful to hear words spoken that you can’t contradict because they’re in line with the facts.’345 Such sentiments were by this time rare indeed among those fighting, suffering, and dying in the hell-hole of Stalingrad. Far more typical was the wretchedness expressed in the last letter of another despairing soldier: ‘I love you, and you love me, and so you should know the truth. It is in this letter. The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and horrible dying… I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery than to die for such point-lessness, not to say crime… Don’t be so quick to forget me.’346
A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once commenting inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’.347 Below had the impression that Hitler realized by this time that victory in a two-front war against the Russians and the Americans could not be won. But Hitler betrayed no outward sign of weakening. He felt obliged to maintain the charade, even in his inner circle, that the war would be won – and he was able still to convey his optimism to those around him. What he really thought, no one knew.348
After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy – though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.349
By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’.350 After Goebbels had visited the Wolf’s Lair on 22 January, and obtained Hitler’s backing for a radicalization of the home front in a drive for ‘total war’, the press was immediately instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’. This was now to be brought into the direct context of mobilizing the population for ‘total war’.351
Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to Goebbels at their meeting. There was scarcely a hope of rescuing the troops. It was a ‘heroic drama of German history’.352 News came in as they talked, outlining the rapidly deteriorating situation. Hitler was said by Goebbels to have been ‘deeply shaken’.353 But he did not consider attaching any blame to himself. He complained bitterly about the Luftwaffe, which had not kept its promises about levels of supplies.354 Schmundt separately told Goebbels that these had been illusory. Göring’s staff had given him the optimistic picture they presumed he wanted, and he had passed this on to the Führer.355 It was a problem that afflicted the entire dictatorship – up to and including Hitler himself. Only positive messages were acceptable. Pessimism (which usually meant realism) was a sign of failure. Distortions of the truth were built into the communications system of the Third Reich at every level – most of all in the top echelons of the regime.
Even more than he felt let down by his own Luftwaffe, Hitler voiced utter contempt for the failure of the German allies to hold the line against the Soviet counter-attack. The Romanians were bad, the Italians worse, and worst of all were the Hungarians.356 The catastrophe would not have occurred had the entire eastern front been controlled by German units, as he had wanted. The German bakers’ and baggage-formations, he fumed, had performed better than the élite Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian divisions. But he did not think the Axis partners were ready to desert. Italy would ‘like to dance out of line’; though as long as Mussolini was there, this could be ruled out. The Duce was clever enough to know that it would mean the end of Fascism, and his own end. Romania was essential to Germany for its oil, Hitler said. He had made it plain to the Romanians what would come their way should they attempt anything stupid.357
Hitler still hoped – at least that is what he told Goebbels – that parts of the 6th Army could hold out until they could be relieved.358 In fact, he knew better than anyone that there was not the slightest chance of it. The 6th Army was on its last legs. On 22 January, the very day that Goebbels had had his talks with Hitler at FHQ, Paulus had requested permission to surrender. Hitler rejected it. He then rejected a similar plea from Manstein to allow the 6th Army’s surrender. As a point of honour, he stated, there could be no question of capitulation. In the evening, he telegraphed the 6th Army to say that through its struggle it had made an historic contribution in the greatest struggle in German history.359 The army was to stand fast ‘to the last soldier and the last bullet’.360
Since 23 January the 6th Army had been beginning to break up. It was split in two as Soviet troops cutting through from the south and the west of the city joined forces. By 26 January the division of the 6th Army was complete.361 One section raised the white flag on the 29th. The same day, Paulus sent Hitler a telegram of congratulations on the tenth anniversary of his takeover of power on the 30th.362
The ‘celebrations’ in Germany for the anniversary of Hitler’s day of triumph in January 1933 were in a low key. All bunting was banned.363 Hitler did not give his usual speech. He remained in his headquarters and left it to Goebbels to read out his proclamation.364 A single sentence referred to Stalingrad: ‘The heroic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a warning for everybody to do the utmost for the struggle for Germany’s freedom and the future of our people, and thus in a wider sense for the maintenance of our entire continent.’365 In Stalingrad itself, the end was approaching. Feelers were put out by the remnants of the 6th Army to the Soviets that very evening, 30 January 1943, for a surrender. Negotiations took place next day.366 On that day, the announcement was made that Paulus had been promoted to Field
-Marshal.367 He was expected to end the struggle with a hero’s death. In the evening, he surrendered.368 Two days later, on 2 February, the northern sector of the surrounded troops also gave in. The battle of Stalingrad was over. Around 100,000 men from twenty-one German and two Romanian divisions had fallen in battle. A further 113,000 German and Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner. Only a few thousand would survive their captivity.369
VIII
Hitler made no mention of the human tragedy when he met his military leaders at the midday conference on 1 February. What concerned him was the prestige lost through Paulus’s surrender. He found it impossible to comprehend, and impossible to forgive. ‘Here a man can look on while 50-60,000 of his soldiers die and defend themselves bravely to the last. How can he give himself up to the Bolsheviks?’ he asked, nearly speechless with anger at what he saw as a betrayal.370 He could have no respect for an officer who chose captivity to shooting himself.371 ‘How easy it is to do something like that. The pistol – that’s simple. What sort of cowardice does it take to pull back from it?’372 ‘No one else is being made field-marshal in this war,’ he avowed (though he did not keep to his word).373 He was certain – it proved an accurate presumption – that, in Soviet hands, Paulus and the other captured generals would within no time be promoting anti-German propaganda. Drawing on horror-stories of tortures in Russian prisons that had circulated in the völkisch press since the early 1920s, he said: ‘They’ll lock them up in the rat-cellar, and two days later they’ll have them so softened-up (mürbe) that they’ll talk straight away… They’ll now come into the Lubljanka, and there they’ll be eaten by rats. How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others. He could release himself from all misery and enter eternity, national immortality, and he prefers to go to Moscow. How can there be a choice? That’s crazy.’374