Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  With winter fast approaching and German combat strength wasting away at an alarming rate, the Sixth Army headquarters knew that there was no time to waste and, thus, even before the southern and central sectors of the city had fallen prepared for the knockout blow in the industrial areas of the north. Although the struggle for Mamayev Kurgan continued, the focal point of the second phase of fighting would be the mammoth industrial complexes of the north: the Lazur chemical works, the Krasny Oktyabr metal plant, the Barrikady gun factory, and the Dzerzhinsky tractor works. Once more, a massive aerial barrage on the morning of 27 September preceded the infantry assault, with the fighting repeating that of the first phase as well. After some initial success, Soviet counterattacks again threw the enemy off the summit of Mamayev Hill, while German assault forces slowly ground their way through the tangle of ruined buildings and wrecked machinery of the factory complexes. On the thirtieth, hoping to speed the attack, Paulus threw two divisions from the southern sector into the battle, which raged amid appalling destruction for the next week. As German troops smashed through one building after another, the hard-pressed Chuikov’s position hung by a thread.94

  Evidently buoyed by this progress, Hitler returned to Berlin to give a speech on 30 September at the Sportpalast for the beginning of the annual Winter Relief campaign. Whether unaware of the extent of German losses or, as his adjutant, Below, believed, now a prisoner of self-deception, he surprised the skeptical Goebbels with his upbeat assessment of the situation at Stalingrad. The propaganda minister, worried by growing public anxiety and impatience about the battle on the Volga, which was coming to be regarded by many as the key turning point of the war, had sought to keep reckless predictions of imminent victory out of the German media. He had been greatly annoyed when Dietrich, the Reich press chief, had announced in mid-September that the battle was nearing “its successful conclusion,” not least because of his fear that any extended fighting would cause home-front morale to plummet.95

  That night, however, the Führer treated his audience to a splendid performance, at once promising, threatening, mocking, and boastful. The worst hardships and perils of the war, he assured his listeners, were behind them as the imminent victory in the east would soon allow economic benefits to flow to the German people, thus elevating their living standards. But the speech was most noticeable for two predictions. For the third time in a speech that year, and in the most menacing and open language to date, the Führer again referred to the Jews. “The Jews used to laugh . . . about my prophecies,” he noted. “I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.” In references to Stalingrad, Hitler also assumed a triumphal posture. In mocking, sarcastic tones, the Führer ridiculed the British for their string of failures, including the recent Dieppe raid. “Obviously we cannot even begin to compare our own modest successes with them!” he jeered to the approving crowd. “If we advance to the Don, finally reach the Volga, overrun Stalingrad, and capture it . . . in their eyes this is all nothing.” “You can be sure,” he added in a boast that was soon to ring hollow, “that nobody will get us away from this place again!”96

  The next afternoon, in a speech to the Gauleiter, his most faithful party comrades, Hitler, according to Goebbels, assumed that the capture of Stalingrad was an accomplished fact and that, with it, the oil of the Caucasus would soon be secured for Germany. He even expressed the belief that “the war was practically lost for the opposing side.” Such outlandish optimism, however, hardly corresponded to the situation on the ground. By this time, virtually all his top military advisers favored a withdrawal from the city, which by now had been thoroughly destroyed as an armaments and communications center. Any further sacrifice of lives could no longer be justified on those grounds. Nor could holding on to the city as winter quarters be warranted; living off the land was out of the question in the sparse steppe, while the German logistic system could not possibly supply the stocks of food, fuel, coal, wood, and ammunition that the Sixth Army would need to survive. Not only was the Stalingrad area serviced by only three single-track rail lines, but even these were now being regularly interrupted by Soviet air attacks and sabotage by partisans. Already in October (i.e., before the onset of winter), the Sixth Army was on average receiving less than half its required daily trainloads of supplies, a situation that would only worsen as the weather deteriorated. Motor transport offered little promise of relieving the logistic bottleneck since roads were limited, trucks worn out, and fuel scarce. Moreover, not even horse transport could fill the gap since most of the surviving horses had been herded to the rear for winter quarters. Given the enormous pressures on the troops and the tremendous expenditure of ammunition in the bitter house-to-house fighting, the Sixth Army could not satisfy the day-to-day needs of the forces, let alone engage in any long-term stocking of supplies. Little wonder that German commanders were worried. The growing discrepancy between the demands made on the troops and the nutrition they received resulted in a noticeable reduction in the physical strength of the combat forces as well as in their morale. The final shock was an October report that showed that, although the ration strength of the Sixth Army was roughly 334,000 men, only 66,569 were combat troops. Even if the Sixth Army had managed to seize all of the city, German logistic failures meant that Paulus’s troops faced a hunger catastrophe and likely could not have held on to Stalingrad in any case.97

  When the second phase of the fighting broke off in early October, then, army leaders pleaded for a withdrawal of the Sixth Army to defensible winter lines. Hitler, however, would have none of it, for the first time stressing that the capture of the city was necessary to deliver a crushing blow, not just militarily, but psychologically as well. Ever sensitive to internal upheavals on the home front, Hitler the politician now seemed to be reacting to a perceived decline of the Führer myth, itself vital to the stability of the regime. Moreover, he needed a spectacular victory of German arms, not only to boost domestic morale, but also for the sake of his allies and “the world public,” especially important neutrals such as Sweden and Turkey. Ever more contemptuous of his fainthearted generals and military advisers, and convinced more than ever of the value of will over resources, he refused to entertain any suggestions of retreat. Although his stand-fast order of the previous winter had possessed some tactical merit, this time his decision flew in the face of all military reason. “Will Stalingrad turn into a second Verdun?” Helmuth Groscurth had written anxiously to his brother on 4 October, just days after the Sportpalast speech. With his decision two days later, the Führer ensured that it would. Hitler the politician was now holding Hitler the military leader hostage; for prestige considerations, he had to take the city.98

  Paulus, too, felt the tremendous pressure to finish the job. Dismayed by the appalling losses suffered by his troops, he had developed an increasingly noticeable facial tic that betrayed his anxieties. Although pressed by Führer Headquarters to continue the battle, on 6 October he had to suspend offensive operations. As he put it to Weichs, his units were so depleted that “even breaking out of individual blocks of houses can only be accomplished after lengthy regroupings to bring together the few combat-worthy assault elements that can still be found.” The Führer, however, insisted that Stalingrad be taken even though it was now broken well beyond the point that it could be of any use to the Soviets. Accordingly, after assembling all available forces of the Fifty-first Corps and the Fourteenth Armored Corps, Paulus resumed the attack on 14 October, aiming finally to subdue Soviet resistance in the northern industrial district.99

  Focused on a narrow front, using every available Stuka, and with all artillery and flak guns roaring, the fighting, in the words of one of Chuikov’s officers, “assumed monstrous proportions.” Amid appalling conditions and terrible fighting “in ruins, cellars, and factory sewers,” as an officer in the Fou
rteenth Panzer Division recorded, the Germans slowly pushed the stubborn Russians back through mounds of rubble, wrecked machinery, and shattered tanks. The nervous strain of the close-quarter fighting threatened to shatter the remaining strength of the Germans. “Fighting has been going on continuously for four days, with unprecedented ferocity,” noted Wilhelm Hoffmann on 17 October of the merciless struggle for the Barrikady gun factory. “The Russian firing is causing us heavy losses. Men and officers alike have become bitter and silent.” Five days later, he wrote bitingly, “Our regiment has failed to break into the factory. We have lost many men; every time you move you have to jump over bodies. . . . [Our] soldiers are calling Stalingrad the mass grave of the Wehrmacht.” On the twenty-seventh, Hoffmann noted the capture of all of the Barrikady factory, but there was more fear than jubilation in his words: “The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures; they never get tired and are not afraid of fire.” The next day he admitted, “Every soldier sees himself as a condemned man. The only hope is to be wounded and taken back to the rear.” Two days later, the inner destruction was complete: “Stalingrad has turned us into beings without feelings—we are tired, exhausted, bitter.” By the end of October, the Germans had taken most of the factory area and had squeezed the Russians into a narrow strip along the Volga, yet still they refused to give up. “It is,” wrote a Stuka pilot in his diary, “incomprehensible to me how people can continue to live in that hell, but the Russians are firmly established in the wreckage, in ravines, cellars, and in a chaos of twisted steel skeletons of the factories.” By the end of the month, the German offensive had petered out, a victim of exhaustion—of both men and ammunition.100

  At the beginning of October, Richthofen had grumbled, “We simply can’t go on fumbling around everywhere at once with . . . weak forces.” By the end of the month, his worst fears had been realized: the time-consuming mopping up of the factories, the hemorrhaging of strength in the endless scenario of attack-counterattack, the diminished penetrating power as the rubble battle negated German strengths, the shortage of infantry and ammunition, and the inability to keep the Russians from bringing nightly reinforcements across the Volga all pointed to looming disaster. Even the impossibility of letting Paulus have a few more regiments to finish his task pointed to the disastrous state in which the Germans now found themselves. With growing evidence of a menacing enemy buildup on their flanks, the time had come to pull out of the ruined city.101

  But, as Bernd Wegner has put it, Hitler the politician now robbed Hitler the military leader of his last option. En route from Berlin to Munich in order to give his traditional address marking the anniversary of the 1923 putsch attempt, the Führer found his special train halted early on 8 November so that he could receive a dramatic message from the Foreign Office: Allied troops were landing in North Africa. Already reeling from Rommel’s precipitous retreat at El Alamein on 2 November, he was caught off guard by this first commitment of American ground troops in Europe. Although he immediately ordered the defense of Tunis, he had to have realized that his time had run out; Axis forces in North Africa could be reinforced only at the expense of German troops in Russia. Even a limited second front would strain German resources to the breaking point. But, when Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who had joined the train at Bamberg, pleaded with him to be allowed to put out peace feelers to Stalin via the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, the Führer brusquely rejected the suggestion. “A moment of weakness,” he said, “[was] not the right time for negotiations with the enemy.”102

  Hitler arrived in Munich, then, in a highly charged atmosphere of military crisis: the landing in North Africa raised serious concerns, while the situation in the east had not yet been resolved. According to Goebbels, the Old Fighters in attendance at Hitler’s evening speech at the Löwenbräukeller fully understood that Germany stood “at a turning point of the war.” The Führer had little to offer, however, other than uncompromising determination to fight on and unyielding hatred of his enemies; any notion of how to achieve even a limited victory was conspicuously absent. He specifically ruled out any prospect of a negotiated peace with his foreign adversaries. In a war for the very existence of Germany, there could be no compromise: “From now on there will be no more offers of peace.” As to the Jews, the “eternal enemy,” Hitler claimed that they had wanted destruction and now had it. For the fourth and final time that year, he invoked his murderous prophecy, again noting how the Jews had mocked him, then sneered, “Of those who laughed then, countless ones are no longer laughing today. And those who are still laughing will also perhaps not be doing so before long.” On the issue of most pressing concern to Germans, however, he could hold out only the promise of imminent victory. “I wanted to reach the Volga, at a particular spot, at a particular city,” he boasted. “By coincidence, it is blessed with the name of Stalin himself, but don’t think we marched there for that reason. . . . There you can cut off thirty million tons of river transport, including almost nine million tons of oil. . . . That is why I wanted to take it and, you know, we are modest: we have it. There are only a few more tiny pockets. Now some may say: ‘Then why don’t you fight faster?’ Because I don’t want a second Verdun. . . . Time is of no importance. Not a single ship comes up the Volga any more, and that’s the main thing.” If Hitler had hoped to reassure his wider audience with this speech, he failed dismally. The gap between boastful rhetoric and painful reality had become too large. Invoking Verdun before a public weary of a never-ending war, of soaring death tolls, and of increasingly destructive air raids and against the backdrop of the Allied landing in North Africa could only intensify concern that the regime had lost control of events.103 Moreover, in emphasizing economic goals and admitting the slow pace of the battle, Hitler had implicitly criticized his own handling of the operation. Taking the city itself was irrelevant, and time, as he was about to discover, was important.

  Already in mid-September, the nights on the steppe had turned bitingly cold, but it was not until early November that the real winter arrived, with temperatures plunging to near zero. Ironically, this provided the Germans one last chance; as ice floes began to make the Volga unnavigable, it would be impossible, as Chuikov knew, to bring reinforcements across the river. On 11 November, Paulus launched his final offensive, a carefully prepared assault by specially trained pioneer battalions; not infantry as such, these were men expert in the art of demolition and the use of explosives. Their task was to blaze a trail that would be exploited by any able-bodied infantry that could be scrounged. With ruthless efficiency, the pioneers blasted and demolished buildings in their path and managed to carve a small corridor into the Lazur chemical works, but the Germans lacked the infantry to pass into the breach and exploit this last opportunity. On the night of 15 November, a Soviet counterattack forced the commander of the Fifty-first Corps, Seydlitz, to use his last reserves. Once again, the Germans had achieved meager gains at the cost of enormous casualties.104

  On the seventeenth, even Hitler seemed to have recognized the futility of it all. “I am aware of the difficulties of the fighting in Stalingrad,” he acknowledged in his order of the day, to be read to all the troops, “and of the decline in combat strengths.” All he could offer, however, was the hollow assertion that “the difficulties of the Russians are even worse” while urging his troops to make one last effort to secure the factory district and break through to the Volga. Time was up, however; the Sixth Army now judged that almost half its battalions, with company strengths under fifty men, were “fought out,” while all available units in the east were being dispatched to North Africa to deal with that crisis. The Sixth Army had taken virtually all of Stalingrad but had largely destroyed itself in the process; two days later, the Russians would seal its fate. In truth, even as the Germans limped into Stalingrad, they had reached their limits. Not only had the stubborn Soviet resistance in the peripheral battles of the summer as well as Hitler’s ill-judged splitting of the German offensive eroded the strength of th
e Wehrmacht and ensured that the campaign goals of 1942 could not be attained; they had even inverted those aims. Lost in Hitler’s belated determination to seize Stalingrad, for reasons of prestige and to stabilize his regime, was the original target of the summer offensive, the oil fields of the Caucasus. The second, and final, culmination point had been passed; once again, Hitler had lost his race against time. But, as Robert Citino has soberly reminded us, “the most shocking aspect of 1942 . . . is how absurdly close the Wehrmacht came to taking not one but all of its objectives.”105

  7

  Total War

  Despite repeated Soviet efforts in 1942 to relieve Leningrad and eliminate the German salient at Rzhev, the northern and central sectors of the front had remained stable, so German victories in the south had produced a huge bulge, which seemed to invite an enemy counterattack in the direction of Rostov. When it came at dawn on 19 November, it was as if the whole weight of the front came pushing down on the weak Don sector, threatening to cave in the entire overextended edifice. As some in the German command had feared and Hitler had predicted, the Soviets aimed not just to cut off the Sixth Army in Stalingrad but to seize Rostov in order to trap both Army Group A and Army Group B, with the ultimate goal nothing less than the destruction of the entire southern sector of the front.