Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Perhaps as a sort of retribution, however, the deeper into the desolate steppe they marched, the more the men of the Sixth Army themselves experienced hunger. As the possibility of feeding themselves or their horses off the land was rapidly reduced, they became increasingly reliant on supplies brought in from the outside, whether by rail or by large cattle drives reminiscent of the American West. By the beginning of October, Landsers were living hand to mouth, dependent on supplies brought over a thousand miles on three single-track rail lines increasingly cut by partisan attacks. “Winter stands threatening before the door,” wrote the chief of staff of the Eleventh Corps at the end of the month, “and fills us with the greatest concern.” Nor was this hyperbole. Because of the vicious fighting in the city, munitions and other war material had been given preference over food in the supply chain. Moreover, so long as the intense combat in Stalingrad continued, the provision of winter clothing or the stockpiling of adequate food supplies was impossible. The conclusion was inescapable: without a retreat to winter quarters, which Hitler forbade, the Sixth Army faced a hunger catastrophe in the coming winter. Even without the Soviet counterattack, then, the troops in Stalingrad had been sentenced by their Führer to starvation. As Rolf-Dieter Müller has noted, once the Soviets had severed the supply artery, the 250,000 “inhabitants” ’ of Stalingrad resembled those similarly trapped almost a thousand miles to the west in the Warsaw ghetto—and, just as the Jews perished at the will of Hitler, so, too, were German troops going to be sacrificed by the same man.24

  Despite Goering’s boastful promises, from the start those involved in the effort to bring supplies in by air doubted that even the minimum daily requirements of ammunition, fuel, and food—some three hundred tons—could be achieved. Even before the encirclement, as we have seen, the Sixth Army was living a hand-to-mouth existence, with barely a week’s worth of supplies laid up, so the loss of a large part of its outlying stores plunged it immediately into a serious crisis. In anticipation of an immediate breakout attempt, munitions and fuel rather than food supplies took initial priority in the airlift. As a result, within a week of its encirclement, food rations were cut in half, and then on 1 December they were cut again. Nor, given the shortage of wood on the steppe, could defensive positions or shelter be constructed, with men left to sleep open in the snow in plunging temperatures. “Mornings and evenings two thin slices of bread,” complained a Landser in a letter on 9 December, “at noon a thin soup, no potatoes. And with that the men day and night have to lie on the naked steppe in snow and storms. . . . Today we get horsemeat—an absolutely great day.” With the failure of the relief offensive, the focus of the airlift shifted, and for four days between 18 and 22 December it looked as if the Luftwaffe might be able to supply the army with sufficient quantities of foodstuffs. Indeed, given the difficulties of assembling transport and other aircraft, the horrendous weather conditions, and the fearsome Soviet antiaircraft fire on the approaches to the airports in the pocket, the fact that from 24 December to 12 January the Luftwaffe managed to deliver a daily average of one hundred tons of supplies was astonishing. Still, preserving the strength of the troops could be achieved only at the expense of reduced supplies of ammunition and fuel, which meant that the forces fighting within the pocket were virtually immobile and could not respond to Soviet attacks. The Luftwaffe, in effect, provided just enough to allow the trapped men to hold on but not enough to assure their survival.25

  On 21 December, the Sixth Army reported its first official death from starvation, and with it the sense of being “betrayed and sold out” grew among many soldiers. By Christmas, even horsemeat had become rare, and, as one soldier groused, “You can’t eat it raw, and there is no firewood in the middle of this tree-less steppe.” The result was a further physical weakening, more deaths from “exhaustion,” and a general lethargy occasioned by hunger, cold, lice, and hopelessness. “We survivors,” noted a corporal on New Year’s Eve, “can barely still walk from hunger and weakness.” A week later, on 6 January 1943, the chief army doctor characterized the previous month as a “large-scale experiment in hunger.” Three days later, rations were cut again, and on 13 January the Sixth Army quartermaster radioed from the Kessel, “We have no more bread, munitions, and fuel.” Nearly mad with hunger, men were seen hacking away at dead horses, smashing open the heads and eating the brains raw. Rumors abounded of cannibalism among German soldiers driven mad with hunger, of cadavers with flesh cut off the thigh, calf, and buttocks. Epidemic diseases such as typhus also added to the “organized mass death” that General Hube complained of in a telephone conversation with Zeitzler. By mid-January, almost a thousand men were dying daily of hunger, anonymous and uncounted, while thousands more, exhausted, with bloodstained bandages about their heads or stomachs, with untreated wounds, with frostbite, sought shelter in ruined cellars. Even as Hitler belatedly authorized Field Marshal Milch to reorganize the airlift it was too late. If the Russians had done nothing, the Sixth Army would have perished of starvation at the latest by the end of February; for Hitler, its soldiers too had become useless eaters. “Supplies all gone,” radioed Paulus from the Kessel on 22 January, adding in a biting tone, “What orders should I give to troops that have no more ammunition?”26

  The Soviets had hoped to reduce the pocket quickly in order to free forces to trap Army Group A and, from the outset, had launched persistent assaults on the enemy in the Kessel. Despite their hardships and misery, however, the morale and fighting spirit of the trapped Germans remained remarkably high. Their fierce resistance, in fact, both amazed and frustrated the Soviets. Not until 10 January, following Paulus’s rejection of a surrender offer and accompanied by an unparalleled artillery barrage, did 280,000 men, supported by 250 tanks and 10,000 artillery pieces, of Rokossovsky’s Don Front launch Operation Ring, the long-awaited final assault on the Kessel. Although Paulus had cobbled together battle groups out of fought-out units, he had barely 25,000 functioning frontline troops, with only 95 operational tanks, 33 assault guns, and 310 heavy and medium antitank guns at their disposal, most of which because of lack of fuel could not be moved or maneuvered. Once again, given their physical and material weakness, the Germans put up astonishing resistance. During the first three days of the attack, the Don Front lost over half its tank force and suffered 26,000 casualties. Still, the final result was never in doubt, especially when the Soviets seized Pitomnik, the principal German airfield in the pocket, on the morning of 16 January. From this point, Luftwaffe air crews were forced either to land at Gumrak, which was clearly inadequate for an airlift, or simply to throw supplies out of their planes. In the latter case, German troops were usually unable, because of exhaustion, to reach the supply canisters, or, if they did get to them, lack of fuel prevented their retrieval.27

  The final act of the Sixth Army’s agony began on 22 January, with Hitler brusquely rejecting Paulus’s suggestion that he should enter negotiations with the Soviet commander. The next day, the Red Army ripped the German defensive front to shreds and, on the twenty-sixth, effectively split the Sixth Army in half. Even though the Luftwaffe was frantically dropping supplies, on a few days even reaching one hundred tons, its effort was now completely irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. From the twenty-eighth, amid appalling conditions, with food no longer being handed out, and with Dantesque scenes of horror in the cellars—where starving, freezing, wounded, sick, and unarmed men sought shelter—the fighting dissolved into individual actions. The next day, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power, Paulus sent a signal of congratulation: “To the Führer! The 6th Army greet their Führer on the anniversary of your taking power. May our struggle be an example to present and future generations never to surrender in hopeless situations so that Germany will be victorious in the end.”28

  In a speech on the thirtieth marking the tenth anniversary of the Nazi assumption of power, one broadcast by radio to the beleaguered city, Goering attempted to stylize Stalingrad as a German Ther
mopylae, a sacrifice that would ensure its place in history. The trapped men, however, were hardly cheered by their role as the sacrificial victims. Nor was Paulus much comforted by the news on the thirty-first that he had been promoted to the rank of field marshal—Hitler’s none-too-subtle invitation for him to commit suicide since no German field marshal had ever surrendered. At 6:15 that same morning, the Sixth Army radioed from its headquarters in the basement of the Univermag department store, “Russians at the entrance. We are preparing to destroy [the radio equipment].” An hour later came the final message, “We are destroying [the equipment],” a sign that the end was near. Paulus, his faith in Hitler shattered, refused to play his assigned role in the Führer’s tragedy, but neither could he bring himself to surrender. Like many of his colleagues, he had so internalized the anti-Bolshevik nature of the struggle that formal capitulation was unthinkable, so he simply let himself be taken prisoner. Even that was too much for Hitler, who received the news with a mixture of disgust, outrage, and puzzlement. By his action, Paulus had tarnished the myth of Stalingrad before it could even be created. “This hurts me because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling,” Hitler complained the next day. “What is Life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway.” For days he kept coming back to it. “How can he give himself up to the Bolsheviks?” he asked, enraged by what he saw as Paulus’s betrayal. “How easy it is to do something like that [shoot oneself]. The pistol—that’s simple. What sort of cowardice does it take to pull back from it?” While Hitler fumed, the thirty-three thousand men under General Strecker fought on amid the wreckage of the tractor works in the northern part of the city, not surrendering until 2 February. At 8:30 that morning, Army Group Don received the last message from Strecker, which concluded defiantly, “Long live the Führer.” A Luftwaffe reconnaissance plane flying over the city at noon sent back the message, “No more sign of fighting in Stalingrad.”29

  Paulus, deeply depressed and suffering from dysentery, was one of the 24 generals, 2,500 officers, and over 90,000 German troops marched off to captivity by the Soviets. He, however, was among the fortunate. By May 1943, barely 15,000 of the 90,000 prisoners were still alive, a staggering rate of attrition occasioned not only by Soviet mistreatment but also by the condition of the Landsers when they were captured. While some 90 percent of ordinary soldiers died in captivity, the death rate among junior officers dropped to 50 percent, while that of senior officers was only 5 percent. Of those 15,000 survivors, only 5,000 eventually made it back to Germany, the last in the late summer of 1955. Little certainty exists on the total number of Germans killed at Stalingrad. Soviet accounts claim 147,000 German dead at the time and 91,000 prisoners, of whom 86,000 died in captivity, making a total of 233,000. While Rüdiger Overmans suggests that somewhat fewer than 200,000 Germans had been trapped, Manfred Kehrig estimates a total closer to 232,000, with perhaps 12,000 Rumanians and anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 “Hiwis,” or Hilfswilligers, Russian auxiliaries pressed into service by the Germans, also in the pocket. Both are agreed that some 25,000 wounded and specialists were flown out of the Kessel and that close to 60,000 had been killed between 22 November and the surrender, leaving between 115,000 and 147,000 German troops, of whom, again, only 5,000 survived captivity. With perhaps 50,000 killed in the fighting for the city before encirclement, the total German dead in the Stalingrad campaign was likely anywhere between 220,000 and 250,000. While the exact figures on deaths will never be known, it was by any reckoning a disaster. For the Germans, who at the beginning had feared a Verdun on the Volga, the words of Soviet propaganda rang true: Stalingrad really was a Massengrab (mass grave). Soviet losses, too, had been staggering, with “permanent losses,” that is, killed, missing, and taken prisoner, for the entire Stalingrad campaign estimated at almost 500,000 men.30

  For both sides, the unthinkable had occurred. Not only had Hitler insisted on the capture of Stalingrad, in itself unnecessary, and then reacted to both the threatening situation on the flanks of the Sixth Army and the Soviet offensive in an equivocal manner, but also in all of this he never seemed seriously to consider the possibility that the Soviets might actually win the decisive battle he sought. Now faced with the delicate task of explaining to the German people the truth of a catastrophe when they had been led to expect a definitive triumph, Goebbels proclaimed on 3 February that, despite being overwhelmed by the Bolshevik hordes, the “sacrifice of the 6th Army was not in vain. As the bulwark of our historic European mission, it has held out against the onslaught of six Soviet armies. . . . They died so that Germany might live.” The disaster at Stalingrad had altered the mission in the east significantly. No longer was it an expansive one of attaining living space for the German people; now it was framed as protecting Germany, and Europe, from the Bolshevik threat. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, morale soared as many people for the first time genuinely believed that it might be possible to defeat the Nazis, an unthinkable, unimaginable notion just a few months earlier.31

  Such a triumph, however, was still a long way distant, as events in the first months of 1943 demonstrated. Although the dying Sixth Army had at least performed the valuable service of tying down several hundred thousand Soviet troops, allowing Army Group A to escape possible entrapment in the Caucasus, Hitler’s original hope of forming a front to the east of Rostov proved unrealistic. From the outset of the retreat, in fact, Manstein and other commanders pushed for the withdrawal of as many forces as possible beyond Rostov to the Mius in order to stabilize the position of Army Group Don. Still, having lost the Caucasus and any hope of attaining the oil fields that his economic advisers had considered vital to a continuation of the war, Hitler insisted that Manstein hold on to the Donets industrial basin. Without its coal and steel production, he feared that the ambitious armaments program just launched, especially that aimed at increasing tank production, would not be realizable and that, without that program, any chance of a satisfactory conclusion of the war in the east would be lost.32

  Despite these real economic arguments, however, the weight of renewed Soviet attacks, begun at the end of January, forced Manstein’s hand. By early February, in fact, the Russians appeared well on the way not merely to regaining lost territory but to collapsing the entire southern sector of the eastern front. In pursuit of a “super-Stalingrad,” the Soviet leadership even envisioned a plan, similar to Manstein’s 1940 Sichelschnitt operation, in which Soviet armored units would penetrate to the Sea of Azov, thus trapping Army Group South in a vast pocket. Huge gaps in the line allowed the Soviet attackers, who in the meantime had learned from the enemy to flow around the islandlike German strongpoints, to stream to the west, recapturing Voronezh, Kursk, and Belgorod, and threatening to retake the key industrial city of Kharkov. Although, for both economic and prestige reasons, Hitler categorically forbade its loss, the SS Armored Corps attempting to hold it found itself in a helpless position and on 16 February abandoned the city. The fall of Kharkov, the most shattering German defeat since Stalingrad, appeared to confirm the German collapse and embolden Soviet hopes to “entomb an estimated seventy-five German divisions in the Ukraine.” Stalin’s goal, as a year earlier, was not just an operational victory but a decisive, war-winning strategic success.33

  The Russian position, however, was not as grand as it seemed since the Red Army was, after a long advance, approaching its logistic and combat limits and Stalin once again seriously underestimated the Wehrmacht’s ability to recover. German forces, reorganized by Manstein, were poised for an ambitious counterstrike. Although at a meeting with Manstein at the latter’s headquarters near Zaporozhye from 17 to 19 February Hitler clung to a linear notion of defense, a breakthrough by Soviet spearheads that forced an abrupt end to the gathering occasioned an uncommon concession from him. Granted a rare freedom of action by the Führer, and with SS armored formations recently arrived from France to augment those of Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, Manstein aimed to strike against the expose
d southern flank of the enemy, whose offensive had now passed the culmination point, not so much to retake Kharkov as to destroy the formations of the Soviet Southwestern Front. Compounding the problem for the Soviets was the fact that they completely misread German intentions, interpreting troop movements as an impending sign of further withdrawals rather than preparations for a counterattack. When it came on 20 February, the German assault caught the Soviets off guard, with SS units making swift progress over the next week against an increasingly disintegrating enemy. The success of the attack so revived Hitler’s spirits, in fact, that he now demanded that the advance be continued beyond Kharkov to the southern wing of Army Group Center.34

  Faced with deteriorating conditions owing to the imminent start of the rasputitsa, however, Manstein abandoned his original bold plan of crossing the Don downstream of Kharkov in order to wheel and take the city from the east. Instead, he opted to strike past the Ukrainian metropolis on the west, thus threatening the enemy’s southern flank and forcing him to abandon the city. Favored by a renewed drop in temperatures that aided German mobility, Hoth ordered Hausser’s SS Panzer Corps (with the powerful Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich Divisions, along with parts of Totenkopf and Grossdeutschland) to seize Kharkov from the north, then advance on Belgorod. The former was reconquered on 14 March, with the latter falling a few days later. With that, the Soviet offensives begun at Stalingrad had run their course, while the front line at the end of March 1943, when the onset of the rasputitsa gave the Germans a much-needed respite, roughly resembled that at the beginning of the 1942 summer campaign.35