Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Decisions had to be made and quickly. Hitler’s order on the afternoon of the twenty-first that the Sixth Army hold its fronts “despite the danger of temporary encirclement” as well as another similar directive the next morning clearly indicated his intention to hold on to Stalingrad. With this in mind, and in view of the steadily worsening situation, on the morning of 22 November, Paulus and his staff took a fateful decision: the army would form a hedgehog position in order to prepare for a later breakout to the southwest. In view of the number of transport aircraft available and the unpredictable weather conditions, virtually none of the top frontline commanders put any hope in the supply of the army from the air, but, given their tactical position and lack of sufficient fuel reserves to allow an immediate breakout attempt, there was little other choice. The result on the ground was a chaos of uncertainty and confusion as German troops, often separated from their command and transport, had to fight a desperate defensive battle in the open on all sides. With hard, dry, fine snow lashing their faces, Landsers now withdrew along roads littered with discarded weapons, helmets, and equipment. At bridges across the numerous rivers, long traffic jams formed, while periodic panic broke out at reports of Russian tanks. Villages in the area were packed with frightened, exhausted German soldiers seeking food and shelter from the terrible cold. Supply depots were plundered in a wild fashion, then set afire, with vital food supplies often destroyed unnecessarily. Lacking fuel, tanks had to be blown up and artillery abandoned. The worst scenes were in the field hospitals, however, where the wounded, unable to be evacuated, were often simply abandoned to their fate.13

  Even as, amid the swirling chaos, Paulus initiated preparatory steps for the intended breakout, Hitler’s actions revealed a rather different set of ideas. Although Paulus envisioned a breakout for 25–26 November and repeatedly emphasized both the deteriorating state of affairs and the impossibility of adequate supply from the air, his request for “freedom of action” in case the hedgehog did not succeed was brusquely rejected by the Führer. With the seriousness of the situation growing by the hour, Hitler on the evening of the twenty-second decided to leave the Obersalzberg and return to his headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. A few hours before his departure, however, he had discussed the possibility of air supply with General Hans Jeschonnek, the chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff. Although aware of the doubts of Richthofen, among others, Jeschonnek, evidently believing that the encirclement would last for only a few days, indicated that, in principle, such an operation was feasible. After all, he noted, the previous winter the Luftwaffe had supplied 100,000 troops in the Demyansk pocket for several months. The comparison with Demyansk was specious, as Jeschonnek, much to his regret, quickly realized. Not only were three times as many men trapped at Stalingrad, but also, because many of the Ju-52s necessary for an airlift had been transferred to the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe had nowhere near the requisite transport capacity.14

  After all Hitler’s boasts and promises to take and hold the city, however, Jeschonnek’s spontaneous assurance was exactly what the Führer wanted to hear. His attitude was shaped not only by considerations of political prestige and, since the near debacle of the previous winter, the belief that holding on in a crisis was always preferable, but also by a fundamental misjudgment of the changed power relationship between German and Soviet forces. Hitler certainly conceded the dangers in the situation but, given past Wehrmacht superiority, placed unrealistic hopes in the likelihood of a successful relief operation as well as on the feasibility of aerial provisioning. The Sixth Army, after all, had regularly been receiving some of its supplies by air even before the encirclement, so to Hitler air supply did not mark anything fundamentally new, but merely an intensification of the existing state of affairs. Moreover, the trapped forces could not break out without fuel, which would have to be flown in to them in any case. The deeper problem, of course, lay in Hitler’s inability to acknowledge the decisive Soviet superiority. Even then, his decision was not made in a vacuum. Jodl, for example, argued with seeming logic that a breakout should not be attempted and the gains of the summer abandoned without first attempting a relief operation. Although on the twenty-third Zeitzler mistakenly thought that he had secured Hitler’s consent for a breakout, Goering’s assurance that over a limited period the Luftwaffe could fly in the necessary supplies sealed Hitler’s decision. Zeitzler, likely on the twenty-seventh and not on the twenty-fourth, tried one final time to convince Hitler that supply by air was an impossibility, going so far as to accuse Goering to his face of being a liar for his assurances regarding aerial provisioning, but the Führer would have none of it. Manstein would get his attempt at a relief operation, while the Luftwaffe was to keep the Sixth Army supplied.15

  Although on the night of 23–24 November Seydlitz, the commander of the Fifty-first Corps, tried to force Paulus into attempting a breakout by withdrawing his troops on the northern flank farther than ordered, the latter, despite his equally grim assessment of the situation, could not bring himself to act on his own responsibility. Beyond the instinctive caution of a staff officer who could not countenance a risky operation without its first being properly prepared and supplied, Paulus was also deferring to Manstein, a man of towering reputation who seemed the one person with the skill and ability to reverse the situation. Having been appointed commander of the newly created Army Group Don, the field marshal arrived on 24 November at Army Group B headquarters, where Weichs pressed the urgency of an immediate breakout. Despite the fact that the Red Army was hourly consolidating its position and that the weather was steadily worsening, Manstein nonetheless considered a breakout only “a last resort.” Confident that the army could be supplied by air—and, admittedly, he was little interested in logistics—Manstein thought the best option to be a relief operation that would open a corridor to the beleaguered Sixth Army and allow supplies to be funneled into Stalingrad. Only in the event that such an operation failed would he urge a breakout of the Sixth Army. Whatever the basis of his decision, Manstein’s assessment came as a devastating blow to the generals advocating a breakout and as an equally large boost to Hitler. With his decision seemingly given the imprimatur of the general of the hour, the Führer now became even more intolerant of dissenting opinions, reducing the OKH, in Richthofen’s devastating phrase, to the status of “highly paid NCOs.”16

  Although Manstein was forced to revise his initially optimistic assessment after a talk with Richthofen on the twenty-seventh, at which he was informed that the Luftwaffe could not supply even the minimum of three hundred tons a day, the brief window of opportunity for a breakout had already closed. In truth, while higher commanders had favored a breakout, such an operation seemed far less palatable to regimental and battalion commanders in the infantry. After all, most of their troops were already exhausted, fought out, and nearly immobile because of the lack of fuel. None relished the prospect of abandoning their positions and equipment to march out into the desolate, snowy steppe, where they would be exposed to Russian attack in the open. Moreover, most believed the slogan coined by General Schmidt, the chief of staff of the Sixth Army, “Just hold out, the Führer will get us out,” a testament to the power of the Führer myth. Hitler, however, never intended to get them out; the relief operation was to enable them to stay. As Richthofen noted in his diary on the twenty-fifth, “The Führer heard everything we had to say, but decides against [withdrawal] because he believes the army can hold on and he does not think we could reach Stalingrad again.” Within a few weeks, this sentiment had hardened to a firm conviction. At a conference with Zeitzler on 12 December, Hitler emphasized:

  We must not give it up now under any circumstances. We won’t win it back again. . . . Things would have been quicker if we hadn’t hung about Voronezh so long. . . . But to imagine that one can do it a second time . . . , that’s ridiculous. . . . We can’t possibly replace the stuff we have inside. If we give that up, we surrender the whole meaning of this campaign. To imagine that I
shall come here another time is madness. . . . We are not coming back here a second time. That is why we must not leave here. Besides, too much blood has been shed for that.17

  The original purpose of the campaign, however, had been to seize the oil of the Caucasus, not take Stalingrad. Although his decision to stay in Stalingrad was not self-evidently wrong, Hitler’s observation had the ring of desperation, of a man who knew the game was up but hoped for one last winner that might retrieve the situation.

  This time, however, the Wehrmacht lacked the means to pull victory from defeat. The success of the planned relief operation, Wintergewitter (Winter Storm), depended on the rapid assembly of a powerful striking force, but precisely this was now beyond its abilities. Strapped by commitments elsewhere, both on the eastern front and in North Africa, the army could not possibly gather in time the forces necessary for the attack originally envisioned by Manstein. That operation, aimed at restoring the German position, projected a dual advance, with one force striking northeast toward Kalach and Karpovka from the bridgehead at Verkhne-Chirsky, only thirty miles from the Sixth Army’s western front, and the Fifty-seventh Panzer Corps moving from the Kotelnikovo area northeast toward Stalingrad. Citing the nature of the terrain and insufficient German forces, however, Hoth, commanding the Fourth Panzer Army, objected to the offensive from the Don-Chir bridgehead, even though it was the shortest distance to Stalingrad. Instead, he pleaded for a single thrust from Kotelnikovo, over twice the distance to the city. Despite his misgivings that such an operation could crack the enemy formations facing the Sixth Army’s southwestern front, Manstein yielded to Hoth’s entreaties. Himself beset by increasing doubts that this operation could restore the situation, Manstein cautiously suggested the necessity of an attack by the Sixth Army to the southwest to link up with Hoth’s approaching forces, with the likelihood that the Stalingrad area would be abandoned. On 3 December, however, Hitler once again rejected any suggestion of leaving Stalingrad: the attack was to allow supplies to be sent in to the Sixth Army, not to allow it to be funneled out.18

  Despite Hitler’s optimism about the success of the looming relief operation, Manstein’s and Hoth’s fears about the inadequacy of German forces proved accurate. In the event, the basic prerequisites of a successful operation—the maintenance of the Sixth Army’s fighting power, the assembly of a powerful German strike force, and the wearing down of enemy forces—all were lacking. Even as the Luftwaffe struggled to get its air bridge functioning, the Soviet command, anticipating just such a German ground operation, moved both to increase its forces in the area and to launch a series of spoiling attacks, principally in the Don-Chir triangle. Not only did these problems force the Germans to delay the attack beyond its original date of 8 December, but also, when it finally came on the twelfth, Hoth could strike the “decisive” blow with only two armored units, the Sixth and the Twenty-third Panzer Divisions. While the Sixth, newly transferred from France and superbly equipped with 160 long-barreled Pz IVs, was fully battleworthy, the battered Twenty-third was considered only “conditionally suitable” for offensive action. It could muster only 101 largely obsolete Pz IIIs and 32 Pz IVs, although a battalion of the new Tiger tanks with their eighty-eight-millimeter guns had been sent to the Fifty-seventh Panzer Corps. Of the rest of the twenty divisions originally promised, two barely battleworthy Rumanian divisions took part in the attack, while the others either were in transit, were tied down by the fighting in the Don-Chir sector, or had been withdrawn to fight elsewhere. The anticipated air support also failed to materialize, with demands on other sectors forcing the withdrawal of air units; when the attack came, only two-thirds of the originally envisioned air units were available. In the Kessel, meanwhile, the Sixth Army could muster for its part of the operation only some eight battalions and eighty tanks, with only enough fuel for twenty to twenty-five miles. Amazingly, only 25,000 of the over 250,000 troops trapped in the Stalingrad pocket were infantry. Little wonder, then, that Paulus regarded any breakout attempt as a “catastrophic solution.” From the outset, Winter Storm was doomed to failure, “more like a demonstration that all had been done” to help the trapped Sixth Army than an operation with a realistic chance to succeed.19

  During the first three days, however, the attack went more or less according to plan. By the fifteenth, both the Sixth and the Twenty-third Panzer Divisions were north of the Aksay River, over twenty miles from the start line, but their progress had slowed considerably in the face of a substantially reinforced enemy. On that day, in fact, Manstein stressed to the OKH that he saw no realistic chance of the operation succeeding unless he received further reinforcements. Although Hitler had agreed a few days earlier to release the Seventeenth Panzer Division, its arrival on 17 December failed to have any decisive impact, its entry into the battle more than offset by the withdrawal a day earlier of additional air units. Moreover, any further ground reinforcements were out of the question for fear that the Rumanian front would collapse. Thus unable to concentrate their forces, the Germans’ piecemeal attack to relieve an encircled army proved just as ineffective as similar Soviet ones had a year earlier. Even as Hoth’s forces continued to struggle forward, reaching the Myshkova River, thirty miles short of the pocket on the nineteenth, it had become clear that, without a breakout attempt by the Sixth Army, any linkup was impossible. Hitler on the eighteenth and again the next evening rejected just such an attempt, arguing that, if, as the army reported, it had sufficient fuel for only some twenty miles, it could not break out anyway. Although a successful relief action had been improbable from the outset, this decision confirmed, as Richthofen had remarked bitterly in his diary a few days earlier, “the writing off of the 6th Army and its murder.”20

  Although Hitler firmly resisted any withdrawal of German troops from Stalingrad, by 19 December he was no longer a free actor. Three days earlier, on the sixteenth, the Soviets responded to the anticipated German relief attack with Little Saturn, an offensive designed to smash through the Italian Eighth Army into the rear of Army Group Don. Originally intended to seize Rostov and trap Army Group A in the Caucasus (Saturn), this lesser plan, Zhukov and Vasilevsky had convinced Stalin, offered the best means by which to blunt the German drive to relieve Stalingrad. Although the Soviet attack initially got off to a bad start, with units blundering into minefields and meeting unexpectedly strong resistance, by the nineteenth the Italians were in full flight, the front had been torn open over a length of one hundred miles, and the Germans had no reserve ready to counterattack. The problem for Manstein now was not how to relieve the Sixth Army but how to prevent his Army Group Don from suffering the same fate. Compelled to protect its crumbling left flank, with his tank force on the Myshkova receiving a heavy battering, and with the fate of the entire southern wing of the eastern front hanging in the balance, on the evening of 23 December Hoth’s forces received the order to pull back. Saving Army Group Don had now taken priority over rescuing the Sixth Army, which itself now had a new function: tie down as many enemy formations as possible for as long as possible.21

  On Christmas Eve 1942, then, any remaining illusions about saving the Sixth Army had evaporated. Three days later, Zeitzler arrived unannounced at the Führer’s private headquarters, informing him in stark terms that, if German forces were not withdrawn from the Caucasus, not only would they be trapped in an even worse Stalingrad, but Manstein’s efforts to rebuild the southern flank would also be doomed. Struck by the force of his OKH chief’s arguments, Hitler quietly told Zeitzler, “Go ahead and issue the orders.” The latter, correctly worried that Hitler would change his mind, used the phone in the anteroom to pass on the order immediately. As soon as he arrived back at his quarters, Zeitzler was informed that the Führer had rung; when he called back, Hitler told Zeitzler to cancel the withdrawal, to which the chief of staff replied, “It is too late. I dispatched the order from your headquarters . . . and the withdrawal has begun.” Although clearly annoyed, Hitler grudgingly acquiesced. The next day, 28 Dece
mber, he issued Operational Order No. 2 formally authorizing the withdrawal of Army Group A from the Caucasus and the combination of both army groups under Manstein’s command. By the beginning of the new year, the Germans would be back at roughly the same positions they had occupied before the start of the ill-fated summer campaign.22

  The men trapped at Stalingrad were the victims of an odd sort of historical vengeance, although few at the time would have appreciated it. From the beginning, as we have seen, the National Socialist leadership envisioned the war in the east as a war for Lebensraum, for the foodstuffs that would guarantee that the German Volk would not starve, as they had in World War I. To ensure that the German masses would literally enjoy the fruits of the victory, and to enable the Ostheer to feed itself off the land, Nazi planners devised a deliberate hunger policy, whereby countless millions of Soviet citizens were to perish as useless eaters. At the same time, in order to accelerate the process of the Germanization of the east, SS planners further designed a grandiose scheme, Generalplan Ost, that, if fully implemented, would have resulted in the deaths of well over 30 million people. The instrument, the enabler, of this economic and racial war of annihilation was the Wehrmacht, and, as one of its spearheads, the men of the Sixth Army had both participated in and witnessed the consequences of this war for Lebensraum: the death marches of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war; the starvation, decreed by the German leadership, of citizens of cities such as Kiev and Kharkov; the forcible seizure of people for compulsory labor in the Reich; the murder of those incapable of work. Nor were the inhabitants of Stalingrad to be treated any differently. In anticipation of the capture of the city, Hitler had in September considered shooting all male civilians who fell into German hands. Dissuaded from this idea, he instead ordered that all those captured, whether civilians or Red Army soldiers, were to be brought out of the city to a camp on the Don at Belaja Kalitva, where, in a macabre imitation of the process at Auschwitz, those suitable for work would be selected and dispatched to Germany and the rest sent off into the steppe to die of hunger.23