The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  If he had so chosen, the doctor could have stayed at home. It would have been easy for him to make an excuse, to feign illness, until too late to return. But Kohler always knew he would go back; he could not live with himself otherwise.

  When he stood again in the doorway of the hospital, some of the wounded wept on seeing him, and Kohler immediately plunged back to work, trying to handle a staggering number of patients, many of whom just lay on their cots and died without a struggle. Convinced that he knew the underlying cause of their deaths, Kohler went to an autopsy to prove his case.

  He joined other doctors around an operating table on which the body of a thirty-year-old lieutenant lay stripped. There was no mark on the painfully thin corpse, but it was so frozen that attendants brought in strong lights and portable heaters to thaw it sufficiently for examination. Finally the pathologist moved to the cadaver and with swift strokes made a modified Y incision, cutting from each clavicle inward to the sternum and then straight down the torso to the pubis.

  With a pair of surgical shears, the pathologist proceeded to open the rib cage. The loud snap of severed bones and cartilage accompanied his dry commentary: “Thoracic cavity, complete absence of subcutaneous fat.” When he excised the heart and held it up for all to see, a murmur of surprise went around the room. The organ was shrunken to the size of a baby’s fist.

  The autopsy continued, the pathologist’s voice droned on: “Duodenum, complete absence of subcutaneous fat; peritoneal cavity, small amount of fluid, complete absence of subcutaneous fat.…” To Kohler, the verdict already was obvious. He listened intently as the dissector finally straightened up and announced his diagnosis: “I cannot find any valid reason why this man is dead.”

  Stunned, Kohler shouted: “Shouldn’t we at least offer an opinion among ourselves? The man’s heart has shrunk to that of a child. There’s not a bit of fat in him. He has starved to death.”

  His remarks were met by deadly silence, and Kohler realized that no one was about to side with him against Sixth Army Headquarters, which had banned all mention of starvation as a factor contributing to death. Disgusted with his peers, Kohler stormed from the room.

  Lt. Heinrich Klotz, leader of the oldest company of men in Sixth Army, would have seconded Dr. Kohler’s cry of outrage. During the past weeks, he had watched his soldiers disintegrate physically. When a doctor examined the unit, he shook his head, exclaiming: “I must say, the condition of your people is even worse than that of the Rumanians.”

  The men of Klotz’s company died quietly. One night a forty-year-old man went to sleep and never woke up. Two other soldiers walking back from a trench-digging detail just stumbled and fell down. When the lieutenant reported their deaths, a superior demanded they be listed as “killed in action.” Klotz did as he was told.

  While increasing numbers of Sixth Army troops toppled into the snow from the effects of malnutrition, the distance between them and their comrades who had tried to rescue them widened perceptibly. Now, more than eighty miles southwest of the Kessel, General “Papa” Hoth’s original relief expedition was slowly being forced backward by Russian divisions pressing in close pursuit.

  Acting under Manstein’s order to protect the city of Rostov as long as possible, Hoth was conducting a masterful delaying action as he feinted, ambushed, and kept the Soviet units off balance. Hoth’s tactics exasperated not only the Red Army, but also Hitler, who began to complain to Manstein about this strategy of “elastic” withdrawal. When the Fuhrer finally insisted that Hoth stop and hold every foot of ground, on January 5, Manstein abruptly offered his resignation in a curt telegram to Rastenburg: “Should … this headquarters continue to be tied down … I cannot see that any useful purpose will be served by my continuing as commander of Don Army Group.”

  Faced with such an outburst from Manstein, Hitler backed down and allowed General Hoth to retreat as planned.

  The Russian divisions stalking Hoth were under the control of Andrei Yeremenko, who was still smarting over his recent demotion in favor of Rokossovsky. Intent on restoring his position with STAVKA and the premier, the general was pushing hard to seize Rostov and foil German Army Group A’s withdrawal from the Caucasus. To that end he had already taken Kotelnikovo, fifty-two miles northeast of Rostov, and there his troops had been embraced by thousands of ecstatic Russian civilians, who blurted out a torrent of stories about Nazi oppression: three hundred boys and girls deported as slave laborers to Germany; four people shot for harboring a Russian officer. One man sorrowfully told how “… they burned down the public library.” Another described, “a lot of rape …” The litany of crimes shouted out by the citizens of Kotelnikovo infuriated their rescuers.

  Southwest of Kotelnikovo, Sgt. Alexei Petrov spurred his gun crew on toward Rostov. The squat artilleryman had lost count of the times he had crossed and recrossed the twisting loops of the lower Don, but he ignored his exhaustion as he pursued an enemy who had held his family in bondage for more than a year.

  In the midst of this offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a steppe village, the inhabitants—men and women—ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.

  The Kazakhs screamed insults and shouted: “We don’t want any Russians here!” while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: “Destroy them all.”

  In the general bombardment that followed, Petrov fired high-explosive shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off anyone who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.

  Gazing at the crackling flames, Petrov suddenly wondered why these people had such hatred for the state. What was it about Communism that made them turn on their brothers? He was plagued by a terrible guilt for killing his own brethren.

  “Eins, zwei, drei, vier! Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The harsh cadence rang across the steppe as German officers inside the Kessel trained recruits for the infantry. Clerks, cooks, telephone operators, orderlies, men under company punishment for crimes—they all marched up and down the balkas in close-order drill. The man who taught them, Lt. Herman Kästle, did not enjoy his job. Some of the troops had been his friends for years, and he knew he was sending them to a sure death.

  The soldiers he hurriedly prepared for combat were in a state of shock. Few had ever dreamed they would have to face the Russians across no-man’s-land. Most had enjoyed soft assignments; almost none of them had come out of their warm bunkers during the winter.

  As Kästle issued final instructions before sending them off to battle, one soldier broke down completely. Sobbing hysterically, he clutched at the lieutenant and begged to be spared. Kästle talked urgently to him, trying to quiet his fears. The man listened and then, while the column started to march off, he wiped his tears away and ran to take his place in formation.

  Kästle watched him out of sight.

  Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert was already at the main line of resistance. Ever since he had de-trained from Germany, he had walked back and forth across the steppe: standing guard duty, lining up for inspections, sitting on buses which never broke out of the Kessel. Now he was merely two hundred meters away from the burned out hulk of a Soviet tank whose driver, charred to a “black tailor’s dummy,” seemed to stare back at him every day.

  When he first saw the body, Brunnert had felt a brief spasm of compassion. The man must have suffered indescribable tortures trying to escape the flames. Still, Brunnert reasoned, the same thing had happened countless times to Germans in the war and that thought helped him forget the gruesome sight in front of his foxhole.

  His life followed a strict pattern. He stood watch every four hours and at 5:00 P.M. every day, he crawled back to the comp
any kitchen for rations. Otherwise he read and reread Soviet propaganda leaflets that showered down from the sky. Brunnert never once thought of defecting, but the pictures on the literature haunted him: a beautiful Christmas tree, beneath which a woman buried her face in a handkerchief. Beside her a little child sobbed her grief as they both stared at their present, the body of a soldier father. In another leaflet, a woman sang carols with her children while the figure of the dead father hovered over them like a ghost.

  For over a week, Brunnert and his friend Gunter Gehlert had shared a bunker and adjusted to the presence of the enemy nearby. On January 7, just as Gunter came to relieve Brunnert at the machine gun, a shell burst only yards away. Brunnert screamed and fell face down into the trench. He stared dumbly at one of his fingers, split open like a blossoming rosebud.

  His legs were hit, too, and he lay in a spreading pool of blood but remained conscious while Gunter brought a medic. In shock, Brunnert watched wordlessly as they frantically fashioned a dressing. When darkness came, Gunter put Brunnert on a sled, pressed money into his hand and asked him to give it to his own parents when he got home.

  The sled rocked gently through the snow and except for his freezing feet, Brunnert enjoyed the ride to Gumrak Airfield hospital. In an operating room suffused with bright lights, he relaxed as his clothing, that filth-caked armor, was taken off. After receiving a local anesthetic, he began to dream of good food and sleep without worrying about Russians creeping up on him during the night. That thought brought back the image of poor Gunter alone at the bunker, watching now for the enemy until his eyes watered and he saw mirages on the snow. Brunnert suddenly felt very sorry for his comrade.

  Still on the operating table, he turned his head. Only a few feet away, on another table, he saw the convoluted windings of a man’s brain. Fascinated, he carefully examined the various folds, some pink, others grayish blue, while doctors probed his own body for pieces of metal. Shortly afterward, Ekkehart Brunnert left the Kessel on a plane bound for home.

  “Every seven seconds, a German dies in Russia. Stalingrad is a mass grave. Every seven seconds, a German dies.…”

  The loudspeaker’s words assaulted Gunter Gehlert, alone now in his bunker without Brunnert. They assailed Gottlieb Slotta and Hubert Wirkner as they crouched in their icy holes on the steppe. The message twanged taut the nerves of two hundred thousand men trapped on the steppe. Hour by hour, the politrook bombarded the Germans with announcements, threats, inducements, and prophecies. In some sectors, Russian speakers even called out the names of company and battalion commanders.

  Capt. Gerhard Meunch learned this when a commissar engaged him in a personal war. Near the Red October Plant, the loudspeakers blared over and over: “German soldiers, drop your weapons. It makes no sense to continue. Your Captain Meunch will also realize one day what is going on. What this ‘super-Fascist’ tells you isn’t right anyway. He will recognize it. One day we’ll seize him.”

  Every time the enemy mentioned his name, Meunch immediately went out and spent time with his troops. Joking about the personal comments, he watched closely for any adverse reactions from the men. But though the tactic was meant to be unnerving, they never seemed intimidated by the Russian ploy.

  Less than two miles southwest of Meunch’s outpost in the Red October Plant, Ignacy Changar gulped down a full ration of vodka and wondered where he could find another. The commando captain had been relying more and more on liquor to forget the daily nightmare in which he lived. His awful memories of the past had not faded and with dynamite, rifle, and knife he had blown up, shot, or stabbed more than two hundred of the enemy. Still he was not satisfied.

  As a result, his one-man war had taken its toll on him. His face was drawn, the eyes haunted. His hands trembled. His only relief from inner tension was alcohol and, after finishing his vodka ration on the night of January 7, he led his men up the eastern slope of Mamaev Hill, carefully threading a path through Russian trenches and minefields to the final rolls of barbed wire. Crawling into no-man’s-land, Changar tried to gauge whether the Germans sensed his approach, but the crown of Mamaev Hill remained tranquil. Reaching an open stretch where shellbursts had blown away the snow, he stood up and waited for his unit to gather around him.

  Several brilliant white flares quickly popped overhead. As he screamed, “Drop!” a German shell exploded a few feet away. Changar felt a terrible pain in the right side of his head, then crumpled to the ground. His men carried him back down the slope to an aid station, where doctors worked carefully to extract the metal fragment lodged against the brain. Evacuated quickly for further surgery, the still unconscious Changar was not expected to live.

  West of Mamaev Hill, at Gumrak Airfield, Paulus learned that three Red Army representatives planned to enter German lines with an ultimatum for Sixth Army. The Russians proposed a rendezvous at 10:00 A.M. Moscow time, on January 8. Though Paulus ignored the request, at the appointed hour the Russian parliamentarians walked under a white flag into German lines and delivered Marshal Rokossovsky’s offer to an astonished but polite Captain Willig.

  Rokossovsky offered guarantees of safety to all who “ceased to resist,” plus their return at the end of the war to Germany. He also assured Paulus that all personnel might retain their “belongings and valuables, and in the case of high-ranking officers, their swords.” The general went on to offer a most tempting argument to soldiers about to starve to death, “All officers … and men who surrender will immediately receive normal rations … [the] wounded, sick or frostbitten will be given medical treatment.” The Red Army ultimatum demanded an affirmative answer within twenty-four hours, or else the Germans would suffer total “destruction.”

  Friedrich von Paulus submitted the proposal to Hitler and asked for “freedom of action.”

  Rokossovsky’s offer of good treatment and guarantees of safety had been voiced earlier in January by the Soviet government. In a document extraordinary for its seeming compassion during a brutal war, guidelines were laid down for the proper care of enemy captives.

  TREATMENT OF POW IN THE SOVIET UNION: ORDER OF THE PEOPLES COMMISSARIAT FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE USSR

  January 2, 1943

  No. 001

  Moscow

  The manner of return-conveyance and security of POW on the front and on the way to the collection camp shows a number of serious shortcomings:

  The POW remain too long inside the units of the Red Army. From the time of capture to the loading the prisoners have to cover 200–300 km on foot. Often they receive no food. Therefore they arrive quite exhausted and sick.…

  In order to energetically discontinue such shortcomings while taking care of POW and to make them available as work forces … the following order [is issued]… to the commanders at the front:

  … according to POW regulations, give timely medical attention to wounded or sick POW.…

  Categorically discontinue sending on a march wounded, sick, exhausted or frozen prisoners … such prisoners are to be attended to in a field hospital and forwarded when transportation is available … also sick prisoners are to be fed according to regulations for these.…

  … Limit the daily marching time to 25–30 km. Install stopping places for overnight stays. Give out warm food and water to the POW, and have ready a heating facility.

  … Leave the POW their clothes, shoes, underwear, bedding and eating utensils. If a prisoner lacks any of these, it is a duty to replace the missing objects from loot, or from effects of killed or dead enemy soldiers or officers.…

  To the chief of sanitary inspection of the Red Army: … at check points have a control station for marching POW and give medical attention to the sick … such POW who cannot continue the march due to illness are to be taken out of the column and sent to a field hospital close by.…

  Forbid that POW be forwarded in cars not suitable for human transport.…

  Sent on to Russian commanders by telegram, the document was ignored. The reasons were twofold: Hobbled
by acute shortages of rail cars, medical supplies, and food, Russian officials could not cope with the enormous influx of Axis prisoners during December and January. Furthermore, the prison personnel allowed their hatred for the invaders to influence their actions. Thus, as the POWs walked and rode to internment, many Red Army officers responsible for their well-being tacitly condoned their deaths.

  “Vodi! Vodi!” The plaintive cry for water irritated Felice Bracci as some of the thirty-five men riding in his freight car shouted their desperate plea. Bracci had no idea of their destination and, after listening to this pitiful lament for three days, he was beginning to lose his temper. Conditions were frightful enough for everyone without the constant whining from the weak.

  Bracci and his fellow officers were barely alive. Twenty-four slept in shifts on the ice-covered floor, where they curled up in embraces to draw heat from each other. To pass the time, some men whispered stories of previous days and future dreams. Martini, Branco, and Giordano agreed to set up a restaurant in Rome with their savings. Franco Fusco wanted to go into business. Fasanotti talked about continuing his career as a public prosecutor.

  One officer refused to talk of what might be. Instead, he announced that the trip was merely an exquisite torture conceived by the Russians, who would keep the train going endlessly until all its passengers died. It seemed that way. Just once a day, guards pulled the door open to give them a hunk of black bread and a bucket of water.

  While the thirstiest howled for more than their share, Bracci and his friends carefully watched a soldier whittle the frozen bread into equal portions. The men never took their eyes off the knife as it shaved and jabbed the rock-like meal. Carefully handed out to groups of five, the bread was consumed immediately and then, in the dim light that seeped through cracks, the Italians rocked along in contemplative silence.