Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  By Christmas, although they informed him that theViking Division would soon arrive at Salsk, which might to some degree stabilize the defense of the western Don, he decided to cut the bread ration to fifty grams per day. (He did not yet know that as a result of other enemy incursions Field-Marshal von Manstein would be unable to spareViking when it did come.) He remarked to no one: It’s different from fighting in France, I’ll tell you! . . .—But the relieving forces fought their way closer; their forward corps actually came within sight of the gunfire at Stalingrad. Field-Marshal von Manstein called upon him to attack. That would have been impossible, of course.

  On Christmas night, the Russians took the ruins of the Shestakov Bridge, in obedience to one of his aphorisms: The whole thing is a question of time and manpower. The manpower question explained why they were now making Russian girls wash the surgical instruments. He was still hoping to be allowed to commence Operation Thunderclap, even though his enfeebled men might well be decimated in the attempt. But no word came from Wolf’s Lair. First reliefs, then distribution of fuel and ammunition, then breakout; he knew how it should be done. A breakout to the southwest was the theoretically correct solution. Can aircraft still take off safely from Tatsinskaya? Schmidt was loudly dictating to the teleprinter clerk, not the one who had cried, but another one who reminded him a little of his son Friedrich. Paulus wished his staff officers a merry Christmas, and they toasted Sixth Army. That night, his face greyish-white like the element germanium, he went out amidst the skeletons of devoured horses to inspect the positions as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb or exhaust the men with false hopes. The rescue force was retreating now, driven back to the Aksai, then to Kotel’niko. Within the skeleton of an apartment tower, a chaplain was conducting a service on an altar comprised of an ammunition box. The congregation prayed fervently, some of them weeping. Trotting at his side, Major-General Schmidt said: Well, sir, on the positive side, these privations will strengthen our racial hatred.

  18

  Major-General Schmidt had begun to create special units out of our reserves, the Aufgreifkommandos they were called. Their task was shooting deserters.

  Do you approve these measures, sir?

  I prefer to make long-term policy recommendations, Paulus replied.

  Yes, sir. Do you approve these measures?

  To be sure. Every soldier must follow orders. You have authority to act as you see fit—

  Since the tanks were now almost entirely out of fuel, he commanded that they be dug in at the front line, as deeply and permanently as possible, so as to support the infantry in the capacity of pillboxes. If nothing else, the sentries would have a place to shelter from this killing wind, which felt worse than it had last year at Moscow, although naturally it wasn’t; it only seemed that way due to the nutritional deficit.

  A corporal said: I always knew I should have studied Russian! . . .—and Major-General Schmidt personally shot him in the head, one-two. Paulus lit a cigarette.

  Skirting his Germans lurking in their snowy trenches, his Germans babying their siege guns, which were now anti-siege guns, against the cold, he went out to the front line with Colonel Adam. It was very dark. He was halfway hoping to see the muzzle-flashes of our relieving forces, even though he knew that was impossible now. Colonel Adam implored him to turn back, on account of the danger. Suddenly the enemy began to shoot at them. He sat down in the snow so relaxedly that Colonel Adam was sure he must have been hit, but he only smiled and lit them each a cigarette.

  19

  Field-Marshal von Manstein’s messages seemed less urgent now, less encouraging. He was trying to get command of a largish battle group near Millerovo, but the Führer hadn’t yet ruled on that.

  Paulus sent him a radio signal: Army can continue to beat off small-scale attacks for some time yet, always providing that supply improves. Only 70 tons were flown in today. Some of the corps will exhaust bread supplies tomorrow, fats this evening, evening fare tomorrow. Radical measures now urgent.

  Field-Marshal von Manstein, however, hoped to recapture the airfield at Tatsinskaya. He was doing his best to persuade the Führer to allow Sixth Army to break out, although by now, of course, only a few remnants could possibly make it through the enemy ring.

  The winter days dwindled behind Sixth Army as steadily as the frozen horse-legs stuck in the snow for road markers. Paulus was almost out of cigarettes. Christmas, naturally, was not very happy, he wrote to Coca. In times like these, it is better to avoid celebrations. First the screaming of the enemy’s Katyusha rockets, much shriller than the sirens of Wolf’s Lair; then the explosions, followed after an interval by the crystal-clear cracklings of frozen rubble shivering to fragments, the cries of the survivors, each cry utterly sincere and wrapped up in itself, as if its own pain were the first pain which had ever come into this world; it always surprised him how many of his soldiers called for their mothers at the end. First assault, then defense, each time at the price of a further weakened perimeter; first Stalingrad, then everything. He talked with officers of all ranks, hoping to establish the working basis of a real plan. Sixth Army needed to be echeloned in depth, he explained. He didn’t bring any pressure at all to bear upon them; they voluntarily accepted his proposals, smiling vacantly, probably as a result of hunger. His friend Karl Hollidt at XVII Corps continued to believe in him. And Major-General Schmidt still thought it entirely possible that the Russians might surrender. When Paulus asked him on what considerations he based this opinion, Major-General Schmidt replied: We can live without the Jew. In fact, we’ll be better off. But he can’t survive without us. He’s a parasite.

  Lieutenant-General Jaenecke proposed a breakout yet again.

  To where? asked Paulus.

  To Voronezh. That’s the real fortress—

  And then?

  It’s for the Führer to decide.

  But he’s decided that we’re to hold fast right here. You know that.

  Herr Colonel-General, if we broke out to the southwest—

  That’s an extreme solution, said Paulus disapprovingly.

  In 1928, a certain Count Hermann Keyserling wrote an essay entitled Das Spektrum Europas. Nowadays such endeavors as his would be decidedly out of fashion, for this European mirror endeavors to reflect, chapter by chapter, the lineaments of national character; moreover, our Count adheres to a sternly abstract style whose pretensions to rigor sit uneasily on this reader. Nonetheless, Das Spektrum Europas makes many interesting observations about Germans, of which the following may perhaps apply to Colonel-General Paulus: To regard the fulfillment of duty rather than personal responsibility as the highest virtue, indicates a primal need for yielding oneself up.

  20

  After New Year’s, not so many of the unshaven, straw-shod members of Sixth Army believed in final victory. They didn’t even long for OKW’s operational reserves to come and save them. All that had become as far away as Kharkov’s snow and wrecked machines. Somewhere in Kharkov there were sheds of blankets and sheds of food, sheds filled with the yellow ointment for frostbite; and there were sheds heaped with ammunition, and sheds full of “Spandau” machine-guns, and sheds of petrol, sheds of chocolate, sheds of fur coats confiscated from Jewesses who wouldn’t need them anymore, sheds of submissive U-girls and R-maidens to comfort the doomed, sheds of warmth, sheds of life; but as for the reserves, there would never be any more soldiers to save Sixth Army.

  But why not? In June they’d called up the class of ’23. What if they . . . ?

  What about our Hiwis?

  They won’t let the Germans down!

  But they’re Slavs!

  So what? If the Reds break in here, all Hiwis will wind up in the very first ditch! They know that—

  But maybe they’ll—

  Schmidt says—

  Shoot them is what I say. We can’t feed ourselves, let alone that Russian trash.

  That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Maybe, to forestall a revolt, we’d better take measur
es.

  Don’t we have other worries? They’re no more dangerous than cockroaches; they’re only Hiwis!

  I could eat a cockroach right now.

  Zeitzler’s put himself on Stalingrad rations. He wants the Führer to see how desperate our case is . . .

  Where does he get his two hundred grams per day of horsemeat? murmured General von Hartmann with a poisonous smile. Probably kills a horse every day just to make the point, or some Jew does it for him. Those rear echelon bastards . . .

  Somewhere, in the world where our Führer lived, there would always be more reserves, and these reserves now came out of their boxes so that the fighter squadrons all in a line now loaded themselves with new men already sitting in the cockpits, a swastika on every Messerschmitt’s tail, a triangle and a white-oulined black cross on each Messerschmitt’s thorax, all the propellers pointing precisely up; and the telephone said: A severe but just punishment . . . and steel began to move, ever more rapidly, the reserves shooting forward toward Stalingrad, accelerating faster than any Russian shell. Paulus knew that if he could only be shown in to Wolf’s Lair one more time, Wolf’s Lair at the hub of its railroad spiderweb, Wolf’s Lair with its four outer checkpoints and one inner checkpoint to serve the purpose of airlocks between this rapidly Russifying Europe and the Reich, the real Reich where everything was still possible, Wolf’s Lair, Wolf’s Lair where there was good coffee and he could change into white gloves and the military typists complained of feeling “too warm,” if he could stand again outside the welded steel door to the room where the Führer was expecting him, then, if he could assert and express himself properly, it would all be over because the Führer knew the deep picture; he could see deep down into the earth. That was how everybody in Sixth Army felt. Operation Thunderclap wouldn’t have been called off if that had happened. Just as our flatcarloads of Russian prisoners shelter themselves from the wind behind walls of their own dead, so Paulus’s soldiers hid behind their belief in the Führer as long as they could, pulling mortars on sleighs, their eye-sockets as white as winterstruck shellholes. Jealous of the lush-furred Russian mitts, for they themselves were warmed now only by the hellish orange winds of enemy flamethrowers which leaped across wrecked buildings, they washed their frostbitten hands in alcohol pilfered from the radiators of their useless tanks. The squat black helmets, modeled after medieval German armor, froze miserably upon their heads.

  The compiler-biographer Goerlitz believes that the order to issue rations only to the healthy fighters was given not by Paulus, who suffered whenever his men did, but by General Roske, the final commander of Seventy-first Division. If this is so, then it would seem that Paulus had lost touch with his own subordinates—a palpably absurd idea, given that we know he kept doing his duty, peering blankly at his maps, mechanically opening the lid of his empty cigarette case, searching for the magic disposition of forces which would allow him to take the offensive against these Red Army criminals, isolating and destroying them in detail, after which it might still be possible to master the Caspian basin. Therefore, I for my part prefer to believe that the order in question was never issued, that nothing incorrect was done; for to hold any other opinion is to slander this very intelligent, thorough man: Paulus the Logician.

  On New Year’s Eve he is reported to have said to Zitzewitz (who was haunted by these words forever after): Everything has occurred exactly as I foretold. It’s all in writing in that safe.—Heim had long since seen in him the face of a martyr.

  21

  His men had begun to resemble concentration camp Jews. When would they be permitted to join hands with Field-Marshal von Manstein’s troops? Their heroism moved him almost to tears. Now more than ever he revered the memory of his mother, who’d never complained about her many illnesses. On one of nights when everyone at headquarters sat listening to the whines of the Ju-52s, wondering what they’d bring (the temperature must have been twenty to thirty degrees of frost), he lectured Colonel Adam, who also still believed in him: That dirty secret, the superiority of the T-34 tanks to our own Panzers, helps to explain the failure of our operations here. You see, Adam, since tank production is dependent on electro-steel, it would help us to prepare a more realistic operational plan for the spring if we knew the figures on Russian steel production . . .—At 0200 hours, he and Major-General Schmidt were playing war-games on sheets of Sixth Army stationery. Major-General Schmidt was the Red Army and Paulus was the Wehrmacht. Over his white gloves he wore Russian fur gloves, and so did Major-General Schmidt, because headquarters was heatless; Paulus had ordered that in the interest of simple fairness, until we had petrol to warm the men on the front line, the gas heaters here must not be activated. After twenty-seven turns, he’d maneuvered Major-General Schmidt into abandoning Moscow to our forces, although not without high casualties; all this was provided that Paulus enjoyed centralized control of operations. (He could not help but remember a certain assessment of our Führer’s gamesmanship, which General Warlimont had literally whispered into his ear: Strategically he does not comprehend the principle of concentrating forces at the decisive point.) After the twenty-ninth round, Major-General Schmidt resigned the game, saying: You certainly haven’t lost your touch, sir!—And he lit his commander’s cigarette. No, they still weren’t quite out of cigarettes; there were always reserves.

  Paulus and Colonel Adam walked out to the front line, stepping over the grey tussocks of German corpses. It was all quiet.

  22

  On 4.1.43 the daily briefing to the Führer, which encompassed the entire world situation on a single page, allotted this paragraph to Stalingrad: 6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: Powerful enemy tank attack against N.W. front repelled after temporary break-in. On the army’s S.W. front, strengthening enemy artillery fire. Schmidt carried out that operation; he was the one who saved our northwestern front. Colonel-General Paulus was sitting in the basement, turning the leaves of a book he’d found in a shellhole, and he was still sitting there on the following day, which marked the first anniversary of his appointment to full command of Sixth Army; it was a very yellowed nineteenth-century volume, all in Cyrillic, of course, which he could transliterate but not interpret; and it opened naturally to an engraving of a sad-eyed bearded man who wore a squarish wool cap: ΠУҐАЧЄВь, which was to say Pugachev, the illiterate Don Cossack and pretender to the throne who abolished serfdom, attacked Orenburg, burned Kazan, took Saratov, and besieged Tsaritsyn, which is to say, Stalingrad, where Suvorov’s army defeated him; he was transported to Moscow and executed there in 1775. Paulus had studied his rebellion many years ago, back at Staff College. The Russian soldiers of Pugachev’s epoch had worn Iron Crosses as we do nowadays, although theirs sported striped ribbons, it seemed. They kept staring at him as he ranged at will through picturebook Russia, forgetting cowardice, “conscience,” Jewish trade unions, and all the other filth of so-called “civilization”; now he found himself on a single-sailed boat on a wide, calm river which could have been the Don or the Volga, low mountains all around, grasping trees, sunbeams gushing strangely through the aquatinted sky; and the pallid, moody immensity of Russia hypnotized him; aside from the fact that he couldn’t stop shivering, he might have been on holiday with Coca at Baden-Baden, sitting beside her in the sand, rereading War and Peace; he’d just reached the section about Napoleon’s retreat, which as a result of his own research he could confirm had been very accurately written; it was all foregone, deliciously perilous as Coca held his hand, sunning herself in the bathing-chair, while Ernst built a sand-castle with Friedrich and Olga went to try on her new swimming-suit, and he luxuriated in the German summer, lighting another cigarette. He turned the page, but the book sprang back open to Pugachev.

  On 9.1.43, in accordance with our Führer’s instructions, he rejected the enemy’s demand for capitulation. (After all, said our Führer to Field-Marshal von Manstein, there’s no point in surrender. What do you think would happen to them? The Russians never keep any agreements.)

  O
n 10.1.43, the Russians commenced Operation Ring. Our Marinovka salient began to collapse. Paulus awarded the Iron Cross for bravery to all his soldiers. He urged them to exert themselves toward the final victory.

  On 13.1.43, Fortress Voronezh, which was our last remaining strongpoint in the vicinity of Stalingrad, came under attack; and it would fall soon; that was beyond any doubt. How could there be any relief now? Field-Marshal von Manstein had hinted to him that even if Sixth Army’s position might possibly be, in the long run, hopeless, Sixth Army still had a world-historical task: to tie up the Red Army as long as possible, which might buy Army Group South sufficient time to consolidate its defenses in southeast Russia. He was no longer optimistic about Operation Thunderclap.

  On 15.1.43, when news came that the enemy had broken through our pincers at faraway Leningrad, Paulus fell silent. With his adjutant, Colonel Adam, he ventured out of his headquarters, and together they trod Red Square’s wide sweep of rubble, Paulus turning back from time to time to gaze at the place they’d just come from, where the swastika flag still flew from the charred balcony’s outcurve and the sentry on duty (One Hundred and Ninety-fourth Grenadiers) stood shivering.—Are you well, Herr Colonel-General? —Paulus did not reply. They clambered as high as it was safe to go within the skeleton of a certain half-shattered apartment building (had we or they destroyed it?), and here Paulus raised his field-glasses to his eyes, surveying his southwestern front, which was quiet. Three soldiers he didn’t recognize were shoveling snow on the runway.—So it’s over at Leningrad, after nine hundred days of sustained effort. You know, Adam, in a way that clears my mind.—Yes, Herr Colonel-General . . .—Paulus made an impatient gesture, and they returned unspeaking to the Univermag Department Store. That very same day in his own sector, the Russians utterly shattered Hungarian Second Army. His staff officers, as if for the first time, whispered that Sixth Army really ought to fight its way out . . .—Paulus rose, his face ghastly, and said to them all: I expect you as soldiers to carry out the orders of your superior officers. In the same manner the Führer, as my superior, can and must expect that I shall obey his orders.