Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  That louse!

  Doubtless you know him better than I, he said.

  Anyhow, you still haven’t explained why your so-called “Führer” abandoned you.

  It’s the tradition in our army, he patiently explained, for the officer in command to share the fate of his troops.

  Well, we appreciate that inspiring lesson, Herr Field-Marshal! And you deserve our gratitude on another score, too. Thanks to you, we now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga; rest assured we’ll put it to use!

  Realizing that they mocked him (which indeed was no less than he had expected), he kept silent.

  They instructed him to order the remainder of his army to surrender.

  Calmly he replied: That would be unworthy of a soldier!

  They laughed their ugly Russian laughs, and one of them, a particularly nasty Slav who looked as if he were ready to spit in Paulus’s face, grinned and grinned, his teeth stained brownish-yellow like a Jewish corpse, and then this Slav demanded: How can it be possible to claim that saving the lives of your subordinates is unworthy of a soldier, when you yourself have surrendered?

  I did not surrender, he corrected them. I was caught by surprise.

  Well, well. Anyhow, we are speaking of a humanitarian act.

  Even if I did sign any such order, they would ignore it, since by surrendering I have automatically ceased to be their commander.

  Such logic, Herr General Field-Marshal!

  They were exactly as his nightmares had depicted them: insolent, menacing, unswayed by argument. (We’ll find a way to deal with him, said Comrade Stalin.) One of them, a rather woebegone little lad, seemed dreamily familiar. Just as the German face is thinner and more expressive than the Slavic, more sensitive, so Paulus could not help but let his soul shine through, his inner anxiety, the desire to maintain a decent appearance which he’d always had. And he understood all too well that as of this instant forever afterwards he must hide his pain away, out of loyalty to himself; that in place of his white gloves he could only don a stony look; he’d freeze; he’d harden himself; he’d show them nothing. Wishing that he had fulfilled the Führer’s final expectation, Paulus told them: I must reiterate my refusal.

  And I in turn must inform you, Herr General Field-Marshal, that by your refusal to save your own soldiers’ lives you are incurring a grave responsibility toward the German people and the future of Germany.

  Turning his face back to the wall, he once again became as silent and stiff as a corpse caught in electrified wire.

  The hold-outs in the northern pocket (Eleventh Corps) surrendered anyhow, of course, on 2.2.43; and we next see them in their frostbitten hordes, stonefaced, despairing or shyly smiling at the Soviet supermen in white who hurried them on to Siberia, shooting stragglers on either side. For years, long dark double lines of them remained at work in Stalingrad’s ruined squares. They learned to be very good at burying corpses. Almost all would perish from exposure, starvation, typhus, neglect and cruelty. (I’ve lost track of what happened to a certain Schmundt, who’d kept advising him: We must become more fanatical, sir. Major-General Schmidt, however, remained loyal to our Führer to the very end, which is why he got twenty-five years in a labor camp.) If they had anything at all to look forward to, it would have been the brisk, commanding, yet not entirely compassionless behavior of the Slavic female, especially of the woman official. Even Paulus clicked his heels, kissed the woman doctor’s hand. (Socialism would obliterate all such national traits, but of course that would take time.) A few of them, the strong, technically inclined workers already preconditioned to obedience, did rather well as foremen in the Arctic construction battalions.

  Paulus, weary and thin, joined the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Why not? The Führer had already said: That’s the last Field-Marshal I shall appoint in this war.36—Gazing down at the brass pen-stand in his interrogator’soffice, trying not to think of what Field-Marshal von Manstein would say, he joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. They were correct with him, for they respected his talents. Some of them even congratulated him on having once bested General Timoshenko at Kharkov. Clicking his heels, he bowed, smiling woodenly. They were very gentle with the former Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus. He wondered how he ever could have believed that anybody might defeat the Soviet Union, which stood for the people. (Two months after his surrender, the Stalingrad Tractor Works had already been reconstructed sufficiently to commence tank repair operations.) Soon he’d become a committed Marxist-Leninist. He now saw that national questions, if indeed they were not entirely spurious, should always be subordinated to more general social questions.

  They paraded him for more journalists. The London Sunday Times correspondent A. Werth wrote: Paulus looked pale and sick, and had a nervous twitch in his left cheek. He had more natural dignity than the others, and wore only one or two decorations.

  In Moscow there were photographs of Stalin and Beria in the interrogation room, Bokhara rugs on the floor. They gave him a whole pack of cigarettes. He sat at the little table screwed to the floor in his cell in the Lubyanka and earnestly thought through the best way to do as he had been told. For this reason, and because of his value as a captured chessman, he never had to discover very much about the Kolyma gold mines, the quarries where German prisoners got worked to death, the three ration categories, the pleasures of logging fir-trees in exchange for squares of dirty bread. They put him and twenty of his generals on a special train which carried them to a very soft camp in Krasnogorsk. This train, well, it wasn’t quite as nice as the Führer’s, which is completely composed of welded steel; on the other hand, it was warm. For the time being, he even got to keep his silver cigarette case. Later he was sent to Susdal, then to Voykovo Camp Forty-eight. A wise old convict said: Even a miserable life is better than death—but nobody ever said that to the last Field-Marshal, who was treated even better than a high status urka criminal. (Our Führer promised to court-martial him after the war, because he hadn’t shot himself. Our Führer said: What hurts me the most personally is that I went on and promoted him Field-Marshal. Our Führer said: So many men have to die and then a man like this comes along and at the last moment besmirches the heroism of so many others.)

  Had he been anybody else, they would have torn up Coca’s photograph in one of the searches; and had he protested, a guard would have chucklingly twisted his ear and said: Nice-looking woman! Don’t worry. Russians have already had her.—As it was, he got to keep her likeness until the very end, although it’s true that he never saw her again. They informed him that the Gestapo had invited her to divorce him and change her name; but she’d remained true to him; she’d chosen the concentration camp. (No doubt they’d hinted at the other choice she should have taken, the one which would have pleased the Führer, who always admired our proud German women to whom honor remains more important than existence. Anyhow, she was only a Romanian.) The NKVD officers expressed satisfaction that Coca had followed the correct line. They had no information as to whether she was still alive.

  They photographed him shaking hands with a Siberian ballerina who’d flown parachute troops behind his lines at Stalingrad. This is my fate, he said to himself. They photographed him addressing the Union of German Officers, whose members are now as irrelevant as those eighteenth century German princes with curled and powdered hair.

  In February 1946 we find him sullen-eyed and pale, pretending with convict’s craft to gaze as openly as in the days before his ruin, when really his stare is pacing within the prison of his own skull, circumnavigating itself as he hunches there in the witness box at Nuremberg, gripping the headphones tight against his shriveled temples. The Russian prosecutors laughingly called him their secret weapon, so much did his sudden appearance astonish the court. (The others called him the Ghost of Stalingrad.)

  Lieutenant-General Roman Rudenko demanded of him which of his former comrades (now glaring at him from the dock) had been activ
e participants in initiating the war of imperialist aggression against the USSR (or, as his former employer would have called it, the Jewish-Asiatic Power). Calmly, unhesitatingly, Paulus named them all.

  (I always took his side with the Führer, whispered “the nodding ass,” Field-Marshal Keitel, who was soon to be hanged.—What a shame for Paulus to be testifying against us!)

  Rudenko next inquired, eager-eyed: Have I rightly concluded from your testimony that long before 22 June 1941 the Hitlerite government and the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces were planning an aggressive war against the Soviet Union?

  Paulus stared at Rudenko’s two rows of shining buttons. He replied: That is beyond doubt according to all the developments as I described them and also in connection with all the directives issued.

  In the back of the courtroom, his son Ernst, who looked very thin, was staring at him shyly and wretchedly.

  The defense attorney, remembering Göring’s instructions (Ask that dirty pig if he’s a traitor! Ask him if he’s taken out Russian citizenship papers . . . ), cleared his throat and inquired: What about you, Field-Marshal Paulus? If the aggressive nature of this war was beyond doubt, why did you participate?

  Folding his head down against his chest, drawing in his shoulders like the wings of a bird at evening, the last Field-Marshal replied: I didn’t come to a full understanding of this issue until after Stalingrad, because, like most German officers, I saw nothing unusual in basing the fate of a people and a nation on power politics. As I conceived it, I was doing my duty to the Fatherland . . .

  They escorted him out, and he pretended to gaze straight ahead but once again inturned his sight so as not to see those doomed defendants in the double-rowed dock, walled in by rigid, white-helmeted agents of victors’ justice. Had he won the battle of Stalingrad, he would have been sitting there, too; for any war against our Soviet Union must be a lost war. (That man is finished, remarked the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop. He has disgraced himself. —Of course, said General Jodl, who had once yawned during one of Paulus’s presentations at Wolf’s Lair. Coca had advised her husband to cut him dead.—He is all washed up, continued Jodl, but I can hardly blame him; he needs to save his neck.—Both defendants lost theirs.) Past the wavy, roofless facades of destroyed German houses, past the fragments of the city wall he floated, back to his Russian prison.

  First Hitler, then Stalin. He remained honest to the working class which had forgiven and adopted him. After Stalin died in ’53, they let him go to Dresden, which was just beginning to establish its prestige in the electrical and optical industries.

  On his first day of liberty there, he was walking with his now pronounced stoop, and he came to a concert in a bombed-out hall whose sooty and dismembered rococo nymphs clung to the walls as faithfully as corpses frozen into Russian roadways; and here, in a huddle of black dress suits, the musicians were playing a string quartet by a certain D. D. Shostakovich, said to have been a great favorite of the late Comrade Stalin’s. The last Field-Marshal stood politely smiling as he listened. He hated the dissonant harmonies, which reminded him less of melody than they did of war. The scores gleamed all the whiter against the players’ dark attire, like Alpine snowfields interrupted by rock-silhouettes; but the audience around them were grey and feeble, and across the street a dog’s carcass stank in a burned house. Eight years since the firestorm it had been, but in our Deutsche Demokratische Republik time passes more slowly, change being released in controlled and minuscule doses for the sake of our delicate personalities soon to be protected by the Berlin Wall. Every now and then, the rebuilders still came across relics which resembled Berlin’s time-blackened statues of Silesian sandstone. Over the musicians hung a sign adorned by a red star: LANG LEBE STALIN ! and now the authorities dared neither to remove nor retain it; they must wait on Comrade Khruschev’s word.

  They gave him a villa and allowed him to serve the people as a middle-ranking police inspector. To the extent that the postwar situation permitted, he bore out Colonel Heim’s characterization of him from the lost days: Well groomed and with slender hands, always beautifully turned out, with gleaming white collar and immaculately polished field-boots. About his villa, which at his preference and theirs was set apart in the Platteleite district on a hill above town, I can tell you (for I’ve seen it) that from its windows and verandas one can look down deep into the sumacs, and, beyond them, still deeper down into a mysterious gulf of trees: the central European forest. When health and leisure permitted, the old man descended sunken steps, then passed through a concrete arch to the lower lookout, comforted by the balconies, round turrets, porches and decks which overhung him. An old reddish-haired lady was gathering flowers in the weeds. Coca would have loved it here; she’d died back in ’47, in Baden-Baden, they told him. His son Ernst was allowed to visit him from time to time, probably because the Nazis had put him in a concentration camp for awhile, which made him an anti-Fascist. The other twin, Friedrich, dwelled farther away now: killed in action in Anzio in ’44. As for Olga, she never came; Ernst said that she was well, although that Baron of hers had lost a great deal of money during the war; he didn’t know why she refused to write. With palsied fingers, the father wrote her a note of congratulations upon her forty-second birthday. Ernst promised to carry it back to the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was a very loyal son, really. I’ve heard (although this cannot be verified) that in his bedroom, in that revanchist puppet state called West Germany, he kept, in defiance of “denazification,” a photograph in a silver frame of that Poltava conference back in ’42 when Operation Blau began: There was Heusinger with his fist on the edge of the map table, and Ernst’s tall, handsome father stood between Heusinger and our Führer, somewhat to the rear of them both, with his hands locked behind him; while von Weichs of Second Army gazed genially down into the white winter of the map-world, whose border the Führer was gripping with both hands, as if he were about to rip it apart. Ernst could never decide whether or not to have his father’s likeness isolated and enlarged.—The two men lit cigarettes and gazed down into Europe. It was very humid that afternoon; they had to contend with the sagging summer clouds of Saxony. Ernst’s wound, his souvenir of Stalingrad he called it, annoyed him at night sometimes, he said. He seemed to be letting himself go. He was flabby now, and he shaved imperfectly, and there were always dark circles under his eyes. Once he said: You’ll never know how happy I was, father, when I heard about your Iron Cross. I saw you from a distance once, during the fighting at Kharkov . . .—You may have it if you like, said Paulus with a little smile. I sent it to your mother in a letter, just before we lost the Stalingradsky airstrip. She would have kept it to the end, without a doubt. I also . . .—Oh, so that’s why you no longer wear your wedding ring, said Ernst with indescribable bitterness. Mama never received any such letter.—Paulus sat rigid, the left side of his face twitching like a heartbeat. On another occasion, perhaps to torment him, or so he suspected, Ernst brought him, he couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten it in these times, a copy of the Führer’s testament, after which they sat there in that villa behind closed doors, the last Field-Marshal and the ex-Captain, smoking cigarettes and gazing at the wall, with Beethoven on the gramophone, while the document lay between them: . . . and therefore to choose death of my own free will . . . After Ernst departed for West Germany, he tore it to shreds and burned it. May it be one day a part of the code of honor of the German officer, as it already is in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or a town is impossible, and that in this respect the Leader above all should give a shining example of faithful performance of duty unto death. He’d become very fond of the white and purple clover which came out every spring. First the clover, then the smell of trees and leaves; the heavily jeweled sumacs were July’s trees; from the balcony of his ship-breasted house he kept track of each summer’s progress down there in the dark gorge. In winter he listened to Beethoven on the gramophone, not Shostakovich. Nobody ever asked his address; if anyone had, he’d
prepared the answer: Lausitzer Street. First right, then left—left straight on to the end. When Hilde Benjamin, nicknamed “the Red Guillotine,” became Minister of Justice, she made the correct decision, preserving and even promoting him, for Friedrich Paulus was a painstakingly accurate subordinate.—One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web, the Führer used to say, staring and glaring into Paulus’s face, searching for something evil.—Thank God I’ve always had a pretty good nose for everything. I can smell things out before they happen . . .—The Red Guillotine had much the same nose. She was a greyhaired troll with pouches under her eyes—not much of a looker, opined her male colleagues, but if this were ’45 she could still have served the turn of a dozen Russian boys. Inspector Paulus, of course, never joked in any such fashion. Nor did the other policemen make remarks in his presence; they felt uncomfortable around him; it wasn’t that they didn’t trust him (he’d been neutralized long since, rendered harmless), but they didn’t know how to take him. Why, for instance, did he punctiliously attend not only military parades, which one would have expected, but every other event, too, right down to the most tediously insignificant celebrations of the working class, which made even Stasi operatives yawn? There he stood, all alone, watching them march beneath Dresden’s half-wrecked, green-bronzed domes and cupola’d towers. He lacked what a far abler Field-Marshal (I mean of course von Manstein, who was presently serving time in a British jail) practically embodied; modestly calling it the “Prussian tradition,” as if it were just a procedure which he followed without especial credit to him; von Manstein, in short, was an officer who knew how to be close to his men. Did this Inspector Paulus think that he was too good for his colleagues? No matter. Sometimes without notice the Red Guillotine visited Dresden in her shiny black car, and on those occasions she invariably entered Paulus’s neat little office, where portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin hung all on a level, and she’d look at him, just look at him, as if he had a spot on his collar, at which he’d raise his head from his papers and gaze back at her without defiance or even blankness; he was ready for anything. Then she drove back to Berlin. It was as if he fascinated her. She often praised the clarity and completeness of his reports, and why not? He’d certainly worked everything out thoroughly; his logic was as rigorous as the solution to some problem of crystal chemistry. That must have been why he never got into trouble for his prewar associations with Coca’s aristocratic friends: Count Zubov, Baroness Hoyningen-Huene, the exiled prince and princess . . . Unlike poor dead Coca, the Red Guillotine enjoyed full access to his prewar service reports, one of which read: Modest, perhaps too modest; amiable, with extremely courteous manners, and a good comrade. (Many citizens, all too many, discovered something in her eyes like the light of a burning gasoline depot, but Paulus never saw it; she smiled upon him.) According to her own assessment, which has been preserved forever in the Stasi archives, Inspector Paulus was an innocuous representative of the former military-professional caste. Until more specialists rise up from the ranks of the people, we should make use of him. He is cautious, discreet, industrious, punctual, intelligent and lacking in all personal ambition. Sometimes, it’s true, he gave lectures at the military college, but these presentations, which he invariably cleared with the Stasi beforehand, were nothing more dangerous than an old man’s self-justifications. Their topic: Stalingrad. The theme: I predicted the outcome, but the Fascist High Command didn’t listen. These lectures were permitted because they offered still another example of how Hitlerism, which is essentially monopoly capitalism, misleads the people. I’m told that even the Red Guillotine attended one or two of these events, smiling rather ironically at him from the very back row. When he saw her, his heart leaped up thrillingly in his chest; he couldn’t have said why; it was almost as if he’d received a visitation from Coca. The left side of his face twitched, but he continued: At the same time, particular attention was invited to Sixth Army’s inadequate stock of supplies . . .—Other than this hobbyhorse of his, and Ernst’s intermittent visits (they now reminisced quite pleasurably together about Stalingrad; Ernst had encouraged him to expand his typewritten notes), he caused no trouble at all. Lighting one cigarette after the next (he’d developed a taste for Russian mahorka), he remained faithfully at his desk while the June Uprising got put down by the tanks of the people’s armed forces; he could hear them outside, ranging through the tight-cobblestoned streets, old T-34s by the sound of them. As the great Moltke used to say, Genius is diligence. First investigation, then conviction and its sequel in the cellars of the yellow-ocher castles. In a magnificent victory for the working class, they liquidated the Gehlen Organization. He remembered Major-General Gehlen very well. It was above Gehlen’s signature that those reports used to come, those misleadingly optimistic daily enemy situation reports of Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B. Ernst, who seemed to be rather well connected nowadays, told him that Gehlen was now boasting: My department predicted ten days in advance precisely where the blow would fall at Stalingrad! The show trial came off perfectly, although Gehlen wasn’t in the dock; we couldn’t get to him in his lair in West Berlin. No matter: five hundred and forty-six spies arrested! As he used to say in the old days, it’s just a matter of time and manpower. On Münchner Platz, where the electric guillotine used to cut off Jews’ and defeatists’ heads at an optimum rate of one per two minutes, we were now guillotining drunks for singing Nazi songs.