The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  The horrible battlefield shocked Goldstein and he played as he never played before, hour after hour for men who obviously loved his music. And while all German works had been banned by the Soviet government, Goldstein doubted that any commissar would protest on New Year’s Eve. The melodies he created drifted out through loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.

  When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”

  Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach Gavotte.

  At the stroke of midnight, Berlin time, a soldier of the German 24th Panzer Division at the northeastern part of the Kessel raised his machine pistol and fired a magazine full of tracer bullets into the sky. Others in his unit spontaneously followed his salute. The idea flared quickly along the perimeter west to the 16th Panzers, then to the 60th Motorized and on around the curve to the Marinovka “nose,” through the 3rd Motorized and down to the 29th Division, eastward along the southern edge of the pocket, past the 297th and 371st to the Volga, and back to the darkened streets of Stalingrad where men poked rifles and machine guns through slits and blasted an arc of kaleidoscopic fireworks above the brooding bulk of the factories. The rainbow of fire circled the fortress for minutes as German soldiers welcomed a New Year shorn of hope.

  To those standing in the middle of the steppe, around Pitomnik and Gumrak, the pyrotechnics proved only the futility of the German position. The entire horizon was a band of flame from tracer bullets. But they formed a complete circle of fire around Sixth Army.

  On the first day of 1943, Adolph Hitler remembered Paulus at Stalingrad: “To you and your brave army I send, also in the name of the whole German population, my warmest New Year’s wishes. I am aware of the difficulty of your responsibility. The heroic attitude of your troops is appreciated. You and your soldiers should begin the New Year with a strong faith that I and the … German Wehrmacht will use all strength to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad and make their long wait the highest achievement of German war history.…”

  At an officers’ mess inside the Kessel, blond Lt. Hans Oettl was surrounded by men wishing him a happy birthday. Seated in front of his own blue china, from which he had eaten for years, he watched a cook ladle out a huge steaming portion of goulash filled with thick chunks of meat. Astounded and delighted, Oettl began to eat.

  The door suddenly burst open and a military policeman stormed in, demanding to know whether anyone had seen his watchdog. In the sudden silence, Hans Oettl looked at his companions, now staring uncomfortably at the floor, then his gaze returned slowly to the goulash and mountain of meat in front of him.

  While the policeman thundered threats against anyone who might have killed his pet, the lieutenant deliberately raised his fork and chewed a portion of the policeman’s German Shepherd.

  Sgt. Albert Pflüger had waited, patiently for a flight home, but when bad weather closed off most of the shuttle, he suddenly made up his mind to go back to his men in the 297th Division. Still drugged by pills and nearly crazed by the itching of lice under the cast on his arm, he hitched a ride to a railroad siding near Karpovka and boarded the small train that ran for a few miles toward the suburbs of Stalingrad.

  In a freight car, Pflüger found company: two Rumanian enlisted men and six Rumanian officers, who stood menacingly over them. While the train moved along in fitful starts and stops, one officer told Pflüger the soldiers were prisoners who had been condemned to death for stealing food. While they talked, for some reason Pflüger could not fathom, another officer suddenly whipped the two men mercilessly.

  At Peschanka, Pflüger jumped down from this depressing scene, and within hours he found his first sergeant, who greeted him exuberantly and took him to his old unit. In only a few days, six of Pflüger’s men had been wounded or killed. But the survivors welcomed him and the company butcher showered him with hoarded chocolate, cigarettes, and tins of meat.

  Glad to be back with his own people, Pflüger quickly dismissed the memory of missing the flight at Pitomnik.

  In Novocherkassk, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein greeted the New Year in a somber mood. His attempt to save Paulus was a failure, and he knew that the fate of the Sixth Army was sealed.

  But another crisis, of even greater magnitude, was at hand. Four hundred miles south of Stalingrad, Army Group A, comprising the First Panzer and Seventeenth armies, stood alone and vulnerable in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Unless Manstein brought these armies north, safely through the bottleneck city of Rostov, the Russian High Command could effect the “super-Stalingrad Kessel” that Stalin sought.

  Ever since Manstein had pulled Hermann Hoth’s panzers back from the relief effort toward Stalingrad, he had phoned daily demands to East Prussia for the prompt withdrawal of the Germans in the Caucasus. And only on December 29 had Adolf Hitler authorized the retreat of the First Panzer Army.

  Now, on New Year’s Day, they finally turned their vehicles around and bolted for safety. As their Mark IIIs and IVs drummed northward, the tankers were praying that Manstein would hold Rostov open long enough to save their lives.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  From the beginning of the encirclement, German military censors outside the Kessel had kept careful watch on the mail flown from Pitomnik to Germany. At first, the monitors estimated that more than 90 percent of the letter writers exuded both complete confidence in their leaders and in their own ability to endure hardships caused by temporary reliance on the airlift. Also, because they had been involved in other temporary “cauldrons” in the lightning-fast panzer actions of past years, German troops had had little difficulty relating those “defeats turned to victory” to the predicament they faced at Stalingrad. Had not General Seydlitz-Kurzbach himself been involved in the rescue of a hundred thousand Germans at Demyansk in Central Russia the past winter? Thus the initial avalanche of mail to the Reich reflected an apparently unshakable conviction that the Wehrmacht was still invincible.

  That conviction had held until Christmas. Between that day and the end of the year, however, censors noted a sharp decline in morale. Men began to demand better mail delivery and a speedup of parcels from home to supplement dwindling rations. They also complained openly about the cold, averaging twenty degrees below zero, and bemoaned the incessant snowfall, the lice, fleas, and rats.

  Still, the majority of the Germans in the Kessel seemed to retain a spirit of defiance and hope, or so they told their loved ones. One man wrote: “Our weapons and our command are the best in the world.” Another boasted: “… we gladly make every sacrifice for our country in hopes that our people will see better times than we do.” A third said: “Of course we will always be the stronger ones, there can be no doubt about that.”

  Two enlisted men breathed both defiance and a rigid belief in the regime that had led them to the Kessel: On December 30, one, a corporal, APO No. 36 025 had written:

  Don’t get any false ideas. The victor can only be Germany. Any battle requires sacrifices, and you should be proud to know that your son is in the very center of the decision. How pleased I will be to stand before you some day with all my medals. And to prove my valor to Uncle Willi, who always told us boys that our first goal was to become a man during combat. I remember those words all the time. We know what is at stake as far as our country is concerned. We love our country now more than ever before. Germany shall live even though we may have to die.

  On December 31, the other, a private first class, APO No. 24 836 B wrote:

  The Russians are flooding us with leaflets. When I come home I shall show you some of the nonsense that they are writing. They want us to surrender. Do they really believe we are puppets for them? We will fight to the last man and the last bullet. We will never capitulate. We are in a difficult position in Stal
ingrad, but we are not forsaken. Our Führer will not leave us in the lurch.… We will receive help and we shall endure.… If we have a little less to eat, and if we have to do without many other things, it does not matter. We shall endure.

  In their mail analysis, censors flashed a warning signal to higher authorities about what to expect when January came: “it must be expected that there will be a decline in morale as hope for relief … wanes.…” The censors’ prediction proved alarmingly accurate. An abrupt, fatal change in mood occurred, and the number of farewell letters increased dramatically.

  The tone of these messages reflected the sudden awareness that events were narrowing each man’s prospects of survival to infinitesimal percentages. When last wills and testaments multiplied, censors tried to be delicate in their excisions of material. Using pens or pencils to match that used by the sender they smudged over words or made them illegible, as though the writer himself had made the errors.

  One discouraged officer told his family, “… You can’t starve those swine.… They have absolute air superiority here, day and night, nothing but those rapacious birds. I cannot imagine an end to this and that is what really gets you down.”

  A surgeon writing to his wife was brutally frank with her about life in the Kessel. He described how he had just taken off a man’s leg at the thigh with a pair of scissors, and how the patient endured the hideous surgery without anesthesia.

  A corporal mirrored a growing sentiment; “To tell you the truth, I would rather meet with sudden death than pine away gradually.…”

  Quartermaster Karl Binder wrote his twenty-sixth letter from the Russian front. It was another poignant attempt to prepare his family for death:

  My dearest wife,

  I am still alive and alright [sic]. Today—Sunday—I attended the funeral of several soldiers of my bakery company. It is cruel what you witness in the cemeteries. Should I ever return home, I will never forget what I have seen. It is an epic second to none. I am sorry that I have not received any letters from you since December 5. I would be so happy to read a word of love from you for one does not know what the next hour, the next day will have in store. My dearest wife, come what may, I am prepared for everything. When the time comes I shall die a soldier … God is with us every hour—these were the words of the Protestant minister at the cemetery, which is overflowing. It increases in dimension like an avalanche. But the brutal enemy is still kept under control. He will not succeed in overwhelming us, as long as I have one hand that can hold a weapon.

  Time is now so short that I must concern myself about the end of everything. I have lived my life—not always a pious one—and life has always handled me roughly. There have been times when a spark of carelessness or passion controlled my heart. But I have always endeavored to be decent, a comrade, a soldier. I also tried to be a good husband to you and a good father to the children. I don’t know if I was successful. Probably I was too harsh, but I had only one thing in mind: your happiness. It is too late to change anything, apart from the fact that I don’t know what I could change, but I love all of you more than ever. Bring up the children for their benefit. Life has not provided me with much sunshine. Most of it came from you and the children so let me thank you here and now.…

  With us, Death is a daily guest. He has lost all his horrors for me.… In case I fall, move to Schwäbisch Gmünd as soon as possible. Life is cheaper there. There are 1,900 reichsmark on my account at the post office savings bank. My belongings are in a small suitcase, a big handbag, a boot-bag and perhaps a small wooden suitcase.

  I don’t know if you will get these things.… The garrison liquidation office and the maintenance board in Stuttgart will give you information about your pension.

  Throw away my uniforms. The rest is yours, … I wish you and the children all the best for the future. Let us hope that we shall be reunited in the other world. Don’t be sad, the worst may not happen. But I feel urged to set everything in order. God’s will be done. So never say die. I won’t either, in spite of everything.

  All my love and affectionate kisses to you. I shall love you unto death.

  Karl

  My love and kisses to the dear children.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In the first days of January, German observation posts along the southern and western sides of the Kessel phoned in alarming reports of a massive Russian buildup. Observers counted hundreds of T-34 tanks churning through the snow, plus troop-carrying trucks that brazenly roared past German outposts to hidden points of concentration just over the horizon. Then there were the heavy guns, thousands of them wheeling by, from the multibarreled Kaytusha rocket launchers to 210-millimeter siege howitzers.

  In their cramped holes, the Germans were powerless to interfere. Ammunition had to be saved for an actual attack.

  Knowing their enemy was impotent, Russian soldiers set up huge field kitchens, from which the aroma of hot food wafted toward Sixth Army foxholes. This sensual torture was worse for the Germans than seeing the tanks and guns that spelled imminent disaster.

  Joseph Stalin had finally put his generals in motion to crush Paulus. Artillery genius Nikolai Nikolaevich Voronov appeared at the edge of the Kessel to lend his authority to plans for the final offensive. On a line seven miles long, he proposed the installation of seven thousand guns, more than enough to burst through the German perimeter.

  Another key part in the new Soviet offensive was delegated to Vassili Chuikov in the city of Stalingrad. Aware that Paulus still kept seven divisions along the Volga despite manpower shortages elsewhere on his flanks, STAVKA assigned his Sixty-second Army a significant tactical role in the final liquidation of the pocket.

  Chuikov learned of this when a distinguished visitor, Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky, came across the Volga to his cliffside bunker. Sitting on an earthen bench, the front commander gave Chuikov the details. While simultaneous attacks were being mounted from west, north, and south, Sixty-second Army had to “… attract more enemy forces in its direction, preventing them from reaching the Volga if they try to break out of encirclement.…”

  When Rokossovsky asked whether the Sixty-second Army could contain any such desperate enemy maneuver, General Krylov, Chuikov’s chief aide, answered for his superior: “If in the summer and autumn all Paulus’s forces were unable to drive us into the Volga, then the hungry and frozen Germans won’t even move six steps eastward.”

  Each day, Sixty-second Army shock troops continued to intimidate these hungry and frozen Germans, who gave ground slowly as they scurried from cellar to cellar. Firefights erupted endlessly in workshops, apartment houses, and workers’ homes, all mere shells by now but filled with desperate human beings, at bay and dangerous.

  Trapped for more than three months in their concrete barn behind German lines, Natasha Kornilov and her mother lay under a blanket on the icy floor and listened to a sudden flurry of grenade explosions and staccato bursts from machine guns. The eleven-year-old girl had just come back from her daily trip to garbage heaps on the streets. Once again she had failed to find any food. Since the beginning of the encirclement, Natasha had come home empty-handed most of the time and by now, she was finding it extremely difficult to gather enough strength to walk out the door. But she always did, for otherwise she knew her mother would die of starvation.

  Beside her under the blanket, Mrs. Kornilov had watched her eleven-year-old daughter waste away. The child’s eyes bugged out from a hollowed face. Her dress hung limply on a skeletal frame. The girl’s arms were like broomsticks. Though neither dared to voice her fears to the other, each wondered how long they could go on. Each prayed that the other would not die and leave the survivor alone in the concrete barn.

  Gunfire outside rose to a crescendo, bullets pinged off the walls. The door flew open and a soldier trained his rifle on the figures under the covers. Natasha heard him say something in a guttural voice, then hands reached down and someone was gruffly telling her that everything was all right. Natasha smile
d weakly into the bearded face of a Russian infantryman.

  Twenty-five miles to the west, Pitomnik Airport was rapidly deteriorating into a living hell. At the two main medical stations, German doctors had been overwhelmed by an influx of wounded. Patients begged for medication to stop their pain, but with drugs in short supply, medics were forced to issue them only to the worst cases. Outside the hospitals, countless bodies lay unburied. So far, however, the corpses were being stacked in neat rows for future interment.

  A few of the passengers on outgoing planes looked remarkably healthy. Specialists and administrators, they had been ordered to leave the pocket to form the nucleus of new divisions. Some benefited from General Seydlitz’s abortive attempt to force a retreat in November: The staff of the 94th Division boarded Junkers and embarked on a mission to rebuild that “ghost” organization.

  Their division veterinarian, Herbert Rentsch, stayed behind to dispose of his livestock. His camels had just been slaughtered and now Rentsch processed the last of his twelve hundred horses for food. But he still refused to send his own horse, Lore, to the knife. Though she had lost most of her strength, when Rentsch looked at her he could not order her destruction. He rationalized his decision by thinking that one more dead horse would make little difference to the outcome of the battle.

  Lt. Hans Oettl had no such problem. When he found his goat Maedi eating the documents in his files, he knew she was doomed to starvation. Bringing out his small library of books, he fed them to Maedi page by page, then handed her to the company butcher and walked away.

  On the northern perimeter of the Kessel, some lucky German soldiers were actually having a feast. Their bonus was the gift of a grateful Dr. Ottmar Kohler who, on returning as promised from his furlough in Germany, had loaded thirty geese in the back of a Heinkel bomber as a gesture of thanks to those who had given him a brief moment with his family during the holidays.