The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  On the summit of Mamaev Hill, Lt. Pyotr Deriabin led a company of soldiers into German trenches. Intent on looting, the Soviet troops shot at random into men who raised their hands in surrender, then stripped the bodies of watches and other valuables.

  At the edge of Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pflüger packed a few pieces of bread and sausage while the Russians tiptoed down the cellar stairs. In the corner of the room, three Hiwis dressed in German uniforms crouched nervously. As the Russians began to seize rings and watches, the terrified Hiwis bolted from the basement into the street. The Russians chased them for a block and shot them dead.

  At the NKVD prison, the surrender was orderly. From the catacomb of cells, the Germans poured into the courtyard, ringed with piles of corpses. In the middle of the assembly area, a German cook, incongruously attired in a spotless white apron, stood by a stove. As Russian guards circulated among the prisoners and shared cigarettes with them, the cook continued to ladle out mugs of hot coffee both for his men and their new masters.

  Further north, Cpl. Heinz Neist heard the Russians pounding down into his cellar. One of them confronted him and pointed at the wedding ring on his hand. When Neist used sign language to explain that it was difficult to pull off, the Russian whipped out a knife and made a motion to slice the finger away.

  At that moment, the corporal heard a voice shouting, “All nice young Germans, goddamn Hitler,” and Neist beckoned the speaker over to help him with the irate looter. But the officer just shook his head and said: “Give the ring, give everything you have, save your life.” Struggling frantically with the wedding band, Neist finally loosened it and handed the treasure to the happy Russian who then left him alone.

  That same day, January 31, hundreds of wounded German troops were killed where they lay.

  In his cellar north of Red Square, the desperately ill Hubert Wirkner heard a noise and turned to see a Russian soldier pouring gasoline in through the window. Summoning all his strength, he lunged from his bed and crawled on his deadened arms and legs toward the stairs.

  Behind him the Russian lit a match and tossed it onto the fuel. The cellar exploded in a violent orange cloud and turned fifty men into human torches. As some of the flaming bodies clutched frantically at the window bars the Russians pounded their hands with rifle butts.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Wirkner dumped a pail of water over himself and groped upward toward fresh air. Clouds of smoke choked him and the awful screams of the burning patients followed him as he fell out the door into the snow. On all fours, he crouched like a dog while a Soviet officer came up to him, cocked his pistol and shoved it in Wirkner’s ear. While he waited to die, another voice broke in, “Comrade Stalin wouldn’t like that.” Wirkner’s executioner pulled the pistol away and stalked off. Safe for the moment, Wirkner dragged himself across the street to find another sanctuary.

  On February 1, at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler had not taken the news of surrender calmly.

  Sitting before the huge map of Russia in the main conference room, he spoke with Zeitzler, Keitel, and others about the debacle: “They have surrendered there formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog and shot themselves with their last bullet.…”

  Zeitzler agreed: “I can’t understand it either. I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he [Paulus] is lying there badly wounded.”

  “No, it is true,” Hitler said. “They’ll be brought to Moscow, to the GPU right away, and they’ll blurt out orders for the northern pocket to surrender, too. That Schmidt will sign anything. A man who doesn’t have the courage, in such a time, to take the road that every man has to take sometime, doesn’t have the strength to withstand that sort of thing … He will suffer torture in his soul. In Germany there has been too much emphasis on training the intellect and not enough on strength of character.…”

  The conversation droned on.

  Zeitzler said, “One can’t understand this type of man.”

  Hitler was disgusted: “Don’t say that. I saw a letter.… It was addressed to Below [Nikolaus von Below, Winrich Behr’s close friend]. I can show it to you. An officer in Stalingrad wrote, ‘I have come to the following conclusions about these people—Paulus, question mark; Seydlitz, should be shot; Schmidt, should be shot.’”

  “I have also heard bad reports about Seydlitz,” Zeitzler offered.

  “One could say that it would have been better to leave Hube in there and bring out the others,” Hitler added. “But since the value of men is not immaterial, and since we need men in the entire war, I am definitely of the opinion that it was right to bring Hube out. In peacetime, in Germany, about eighteen or twenty thousand people a year chose to commit suicide, even without being in such a position. Here is a man [Paulus], who sees fifty or sixty thousand of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end. How can he surrender himself to the Bolshevists? … That is something one can’t understand at all.”

  “But I had my doubts before,” Hitler continued. “That was at the moment when I received the report that he was asking me what he should do [about the Russian ultimatum to surrender]. How could he ever ask about such a thing?…”

  “There is no excuse,” declared Zeitzler. “When his nerves threaten to break down, then he must kill himself.”

  Hitler nodded, “When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself.…” Hitler stared at Zeitzler, who replied: “I still think they may have done that and that the Russians are only claiming to have captured them all.”

  “No …” said the Führer vehemently. “In this war, no more field marshals will be made.… I won’t go on counting my chickens before they are hatched.…”

  Zeitzler shrugged: “We were so completely sure how it would end, that granting him a final satisfaction.…”

  “We had to assume that it would end heroically.”

  Zeitzler agreed, “How could one imagine anything else?…”

  Hitler sounded depressed: “This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling.…”

  In the northern part of Stalingrad, Eleventh Corps commander, General Strecker, held out for another forty-eight hours in a futile gesture of defiance.

  On the morning of February 2, all the Russian artillery concentrated on this area, and for two hours, shells rained down on the pitiful survivors of the Sixth Army. Then the barrage was over and thousands of Russian troops rushed the cellars while German machine-gunners fired their last belts of ammunition. Enraged at the fanatic resistance, the Russians pulled prisoners out of foxholes and beat them savagely. With clubs and fists they pummeled the die-hards, cursing the “Nazi swine” who continued the bloodshed long after Paulus had quit the field and stopped the killing.

  Suddenly white flags popped out of windows up and down the side streets across from the factories. The stronghold began to collapse.

  While Hans Oettl paused to urinate outside his building, a Russian sergeant poked a gun in his back and demanded in broken German that he call everyone out of the cellar to surrender. Oettl refused and stared into the silver-toothed grin of his captor, who made a motion with his weapon as if to kill him. When Oettl still refused, the sergeant shouted “Raus!” into the stairwell and Oettl’s companions streamed into the brilliant sunlight with their hands over their heads.

  Across the main road from Oettl’s basement, the Russians poured into the tractor factory assembly rooms where hundreds of wounded lay on shelves against the walls. Other Germans dangled grotesquely from belts hooked onto stanchions. Unwilling to endure captivity, they had taken their own lives during the hours before dawn. Just before the Eleventh Corps command post was overrun, General Strecker issued a last message to the Fatherland: “Eleventh Corps and its divisions have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”

  At 12:35 P.M. tha
t afternoon, Army Group Don at Taganrog logged the final words from Sixth Army at Stalingrad when a weather team filed its daily report: “Cloud base fifteen thousand feet, visibility seven miles, clear sky, occasional scattered nimbus clouds, temperature minus thirty-one degrees centigrade, over Stalingrad fog and red haze. Meteorological station now closing down. Greetings to the homeland.”

  Reacting to Soviet proclamations about their stupendous triumph, the Nazi government reluctantly told the German people of the loss of the entire Sixth Army. For an unprecedented three days, all radio broadcasts were suspended. Funeral music droned into thousands of homes across the Third Reich. Restaurants, theaters, cinemas, all places of entertainment were shut down, and the trauma of defeat gripped the population.

  In Berlin, Goebbels began to draft a speech calling for a realization that Germany must prepare for “total war.”

  * Though badly wounded in the escape attempt, his son survived.

  * The honor of capturing Paulus caused bitter rivalry among Red Army officers. In postwar reminiscences, several lesser generals and colonels claimed that they had received Paulus’s surrender in the Univermag cellar. In almost all these accounts, Lt. Fyodor Yelchenko’s role was dismissed.

  Chapter Thirty

  Two days after organized resistance ended, on February 4, A. S. Chuyanov of the City Soviet Committee phoned across the Volga to a foreman from the tractor factory. “It’s time to come back,” he said, and the workers who had waited months for that message packed their equipment and started home. They drove across the ice, past traffic masters directing long lines of Germans out of the city, and the jubilant Russians snickered at the wretched state of their enemies, many of them wrapped in shawls and women’s clothing to ward off the cold.

  In five months of fighting and bombings, 99 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble. More than forty-one thousand homes, three hundred factories, 113 hospitals and schools had been destroyed. A quick census revealed that out of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of the previous summer, only 1,515 civilians remained. Most of them had either died in the first days or left the city for temporary homes in Siberia and Asia. No one knew how many had been killed, but the estimates were staggering.

  In Dar Gova, the Fillipovs remained to mourn the irreparable loss of their cobbler son, Sacha. And behind General Rodimtsev’s grain mill headquarters on the Volga bank, Mrs. Karmanova and her son, Genn, celebrated their freedom after months of hiding in trenches and snowholes. On Red Square, two little girls, separated since September, hopped over corpses to meet in a joyful embrace. Their innocent laughter, carrying far in the still air, brought smiles to Russian soldiers, who were tossing dead Germans onto a roaring bonfire.

  The Russian Sixty-second Army began to leave the city for a well-earned rest on the eastern side of the Volga. Within weeks, the rejuvenated troops would follow Vassili Chuikov to other battlefields. But behind them, in hospitals across Russia, they left thousands of comrades from the darkest days in Stalingrad who would be fighting another kind of war, the struggle toward physical and mental recovery.

  In a hospital bed at Tashkent, the tiny blond sniper Tania Chernova, was slowly recuperating from the stomach wound that had nearly taken her life. She had borne well the news that the operation she had endured would prevent her from ever bearing a child. She had obeyed the doctors’ orders to the letter and looked forward to a speedy release from confinement. But when she received a letter from a friend in the Sixty-second Army, her world fell apart.

  The friend wrote that her lover, Vassili Zaitsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, had died in an explosion during the final weeks of fighting around the Red October Plant. The news drove Tania into acute depression. As days passed, her physical strength improved greatly but doctors noticed that she rarely exhibited interest in anything around her. Instead she just stared for hours into space as though trying to recapture a lost moment.

  At another hospital, Lt. Hersch Gurewicz clumped about on his artificial leg and tried to get a new assignment in the Red Army. Told that he would have to be discharged for medical reasons, Gurewicz wrote directly to Stalin, begging for reconsideration. The letter won a reprieve and Gurewicz found himself a mail censor with a Polish contingent heading west toward the Ukraine. Gleefully, the lieutenant packed an extra wooden leg and headed back to war.

  Several hundred miles to the north, guards at a railroad station in the Ural city of Novosibirsk gently wrapped their arms around the bandaged figure of Commando Capt. Ignacy Changar as he stood singing on the station platform. Transferred from a hospital in Moscow, Changar had gotten so drunk on the train ride that he had no idea where he was supposed to be.

  Admitted to a military hospital, Changar began to flirt with the nurses, particularly one young girl who came from Kiev. When he asked repeatedly for her, she went to him wondering why such an old man would be interested in her. She had no idea that Ignacy was just twenty-one, because he now had snow-white hair.

  What of the German Sixth Army? Swallowed up on the steppe, it had disappeared into the wastes of Russia and no one in the German High Command had witnessed its going. In the last days of the battle, Paulus had allowed several squads of men to make a break toward the west. But they all had been captured or killed by alert Red Army units.

  Other Germans had also left on their own. Quartermaster Karl Binder took a group with him as far as Karpovka, thirty miles west of Stalingrad before the enemy surrounded him and forced his surrender.

  Lt. Emil Metzger hid in a bunker in the vain hope that the Russians would leave the area and allow him to slip off at night toward the Don. But the Russians fired bullets down a ventilation pipe and wounded Emil in the right heel. Finally driven into the open by grenades, he walked off to prison camp with blood sloshing around in his boot.

  Two Germans actually reached friendly lines. In late February, a Corporal Neiwig staggered into a command post of Army Group Don nearly 150 miles west of the Kessel. The sole survivor of a twenty-man group of escapees who had succumbed to the freezing cold, Neiwig knew little about the fate of the rest of his army. Within hours, as he tried to regain his strength from the trip, a Soviet mortar shell landed nearby and blew him to bits.

  On March 1, Pvt. Michael Horvath walked into German positions near Voronezh, far to the west of Stalingrad. Captured on January 31, he had been shipped off to another front as an interpreter for Russian intelligence officers. Therefore, Horvath could add little information to what was known about the Sixth Army since the day of its capitulation. The German High Command and the German people were unable to tell how Paulus and his troops were faring in Russian hands.

  The field marshal and his generals were, at that moment, living in relatively comfortable quarters near Moscow. But the men Paulus believed would be guaranteed food and medical care were dying in great numbers on the icy steppes.

  Thirty miles northwest of Stalingrad, at Kotluban, a group of Russian nurses heard the German prisoners coming long before they saw them. They listened in astonishment to the mournful groaning as lines of soldiers crept over the horizon and shuffled through snowdrifts toward them. Lowing like cattle, the Germans were a procession of rags and dilapidated earmuffs, blanket-wrapped feet, and faces blackened by beard and frost. Almost all of them were crying, and the nurses felt an instinctive wave of sympathy for them. Then the Russian guards hoisted rifles and fired indiscriminately into the columns. As the victims fell down and died, the rest of the Germans plodded along, at a half mile an hour, and the nurses shook their fists in outrage at their own soldiers.

  Quartermaster Karl Binder was in another of these processions. Marching toward Vertaichy on the Don he flinched at every shot, and at each dull whack of a rifle butt crashing down on a skull. Hundreds of bodies lay beside the trail, freshly killed Germans, Russian women and children dead for weeks, Soviet and German troops mutilated in months-old battles.

  At villages along the march, civilians broke into the lines to rob the pri
soners of lighters, fountain pens, and fieldpacks. His hands blue from the cold, Binder plunged on and tried to distract himself by thinking of his family safe at home in Germany.

  Emil Metzger had already walked more than a hundred miles to a train that took him to the foothills of the Urals in Siberia. Besides the bullet still in his heel, Metzger had fallen victim to typhus and, by the time he reached a straw cot in a primitive barracks, was close to death. Handing his pictures of Kaethe to a chaplain he said: “Give these to my wife if you get back.” Then he lay down to die.

  In the morning, Emil woke to an unreal silence. Nearly everyone in his barracks had perished during the night. Suddenly ashamed of his own willingness to give up the struggle, the lieutenant vowed he would survive. From that moment on, he ignored his fever and ate anything the Russians offered, though the food “was like eating his own gall.”

  The German Sixth Army was scattered to more than twenty camps stretching from the Arctic Circle to the southern deserts.

  One train carried thousands of Germans from the Volga to Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. Inside each car, stuffed with one hundred or more prisoners, a macabre death struggle ensued as the Germans killed each other for bits of food tossed to them every two days. Those closest to the door were set upon by ravenous soldiers in the rear; only the strongest men survived the weeks-long trip. By the time the train reached the Pamir Mountains, almost half its passengers were dead.

  Other Germans remained in Stalingrad to help reconstruct the city they had devastated. Typhus swept their ranks and in March, the Russians dug a ditch at Beketovka and dumped nearly forty thousand German bodies into a mass grave.

  Cpl. Franz Deifel, who had thought of killing himself in January, survived the plague and now picked up the bricks of Stalingrad. In March, Deifel heard a whistle from the tractor factory as the Russians ran the first train around that massive plant’s convoluted rail system. Later that month, Deifel also saw his first butterfly of the spring. A blaze of yellow and orange, it flitted nervously from ruin to ruin in the glorious sunlight of a cloudless day.