Stalingrad
Page 49
During this period we were giving the Germans daily reports through the megaphone, the latest bulletins from Informburo. Usually they stopped shooting, though they would open fire again at the end of our talk. There was an increase in the number of men who surrendered or came over to our side. Our propaganda was getting better by the day. I can tell you this: On the night of January 10–11, I went to the front line with Quartermaster-Technician Gershman, a translator from the 116th Division, to speak about Paulus’s refusal to surrender. It was morning, around 6:00 A.M. We arrived at the front line. Since we were advancing, we were some way away from the Germans, about two hundred meters. You can’t talk to the Germans at two hundred meters. The two of us went past our forward line into no-man’s land, eighty to one hundred meters from our trenches, and we started talking. The Germans were sending up flares around then, and we could see a group of German soldiers listening to us about fifty to sixty meters away. It was scary, to be honest. Be we said our bit once, then again, and the Germans didn’t shoot, even though they could see us. After we’d been through it twice we ran back. They didn’t shoot at us then, even though it would have been easy to kill us.
A Soviet soldier megaphones a German translation of the newscast Final Hour to the enemy. Photographer: Leonidov
Sending back prisoners was a particularly effective method. This method was in wide use from mid-December. Usually after capturing them we’d take them directly to the battalion or regimental command post, feed them, and then send them back just like that. Just go tell the truth about how you were captured. That had a strong effect, since the German propaganda had them all convinced that the Russians would gouge out their eyes, cut off their ears, and so on.
I remember a Private 1st Class Werner, who was captured at the end of December. He was a musician and composer, and a member of the Nazi party since 1928. I questioned him in a bunker and then brought him to another bunker where the prisoners were. He was limping from a small wound in his leg. It was slippery. We were going uphill. I held him by the arm to help him. I said: “Do you know who I am? I’m a commissar.” I’m not sure what was wrong with him, but he immediately backed away from me.
As I was leading him to the bunker with the Germans we were sending back to the front line that night, I told him about life in Russian captivity. I introduced the others to Werner and had them tell him what they’d seen. That evening when I went into the bunker, Werner had a favor to ask: “Captain, would you allow me to tell my comrades what I’ve seen here today?” And Werner got in front of the microphone that night and spoke to the men two hundred meters away in the same trenches he’d been in the night before.
But our propaganda did, of course, owe most of its success to the fact that our military victories had put the Germans in a very difficult position.
We used two means of communication to talk to the Germans. Once a cat came into one of the bunkers of the 149th Brigade, and he’d come all the way from a German bunker about sixty meters away. The cat came because the Germans had nothing for him to eat. We used this cat in our work to demoralize the enemy troops. First we tied a leaflet to his tail and sent him to the Germans. After a while the cat returned. We did this a few times, and then we made him an apron that could hold about a hundred leaflets. For two weeks he would go over to the Germans and come back empty, until the Germans shot him in the back legs, and he arrived, dying, at our bunker.194
The Germans regularly listened to our broadcasts and read our leaflets. There are numerous reports of this from prisoner statements. One day after the surrender I wanted to see how effective our propaganda had been, so I stopped a group of about five hundred prisoners in Dubovka. After telling them about the situation on the front—we had just taken Rostov—I asked how many of them had read our leaflets and listened to our radio shows. All but a few of them raised their hands.
In the final days before the surrender, at the time of the assault on the Tractor factory, we used a radio with a powerful loudspeaker to provide the Germans with more information about the military situation, and to relay the “Final Hour”195 program. All this could be heard throughout the grounds of the Tractor factory.
A few words on heroism. It’s no exaggeration to say that throughout the fighting at Stalingrad, the men and officers—with a few exceptions, of course—showed great heroism. I was often on the front line with them, and the men never stopped asking me questions: How long are we stuck here for? When are we going to attack?
One negative aspect of this heroism—if you can put it that way—is its rash, senseless aspect, and a readiness to take what is at times completely unnecessary risks. Here’s the kind of thing that happens during the day on the front line: “Vanya, give me a smoke,” and Vanya gets up and runs straight over to his comrade. Or people are walking as if everything is quite normal in places where they really need to crawl, and they die one after the other.
Much has been said and written about the heroes of Stalingrad. I have something to say about one army heroine, Marusya Kukharskaya,196 who carried out 440 wounded soldiers. I saw her on the battlefield. She is indeed fearless. She was sitting in a bunker and doing some counting: “Well,” she said, “another sixty and I’ll be a Hero of the Soviet Union.” Then there was Captain Abukhov,197 a battalion commander in the 1153rd Regiment, 343rd Division, whose battalion held off several dozen tank counterattacks, even though he was down to thirty men. In mid-January he was accidentally killed by an exploding mortar shell. And there were the artillerymen of the 803rd Artillery Regiment, 226th Division, who dragged their guns themselves throughout our entire advance from the steppe ravine at Yablonevaya, where they had initially taken up position, to the Stalingrad Tractor factory. Because of the snowdrifts the horses were useless, and the men themselves didn’t really grasp what a heroic act they were performing. They didn’t see anything special about it, and it became part of their normal life.
I want to talk about the strength of the Germans’ mechanical discipline. Despite the recognized success of our propaganda and the demoralization of the encircled units, the fact remains that the general mass of soldiers followed their officers’ commands without question. This increased the difficulties we faced while eliminating this group. And it shows us the power of this mechanical discipline. It’s clear enough, if you talk to individual German soldiers, that none of them really want to fight. Nevertheless, all it takes is one sergeant yelling “Fall in!” and they form up in ranks and stay there. I’ve seen this myself. On the night of February 2–3, there were a number of regiments that had surrendered and were being taken prisoner, and they concentrated in the area of the Stalingrad state farm, a few kilometers from the Tractor factory. We took them there, counted them up, gave them 250 grams of bread each, assigned them an escort, and sent them on to Dubovka. That night was extremely cold. I remember going to one of the regiments, about a thousand men. They were standing around, all disorganized. I ordered them to fall in and yelled: “Sergeants, over here!” I said we had to get them in groups of ten, which were to get two loaves of bread each. Then they would wait for their escort. They ended up waiting for several hours. At times you could hear an inhuman wail. That was the ones who were freezing. They fell, and they died, but the men stayed in formation. They’ll line up as soon as you get a sergeant in there. The strength of that mechanical discipline was very rightly noted by Ehrenburg.198
During the surrender there were a lot of amusing and interesting things. For example, there was General von Lenski’s farewell speech to his officers in the 24th Panzer Division. They were already at the 343rd Division’s command post, and he asked the divisional commander, General Usenko, for permission to say good-bye to his officers. One of his division’s regimental commanders, Colonel von Below, had the officers line up, reported to von Lenski, and then stood on the right side. Von Lenski walked up to his officers and gave the following speech: “Gentlemen, I thank you for always precisely following my orders during our time fighting together. You
did your duty to the end. I wish you all a safe journey.” This speech, in the spirit of Napoleon’s Farewell to the Old Guard, had a strong effect on his officers. Many of them cried.
Then we put the officers in vehicles and sent them off. I approached one of the German staff officers. It was a colonel sitting there. I said: “Colonel, I need to put a few officers in here with you.”
He told me in broken Russian that there was a lot of stuff in there, and he doubted there’d be enough room. He smiled. I asked him: “How do you know Russian?”
“Well,” he said, “this is the second time I’ve made this trip. I was captured in 1915 and spent three years in Krasnoyarsk. It seems I’m headed in the same direction.”
On January 22, under pressure from our forces, the Germans started falling back to Stalingrad. I was there on the 23rd and 24th, when we saw the endless flow of vehicles moving toward the Stalingrad Tractor factory. A very large number of Germans were concentrating there. We thought that there were three thousand of them, but then, as everyone knows, we took around five thousand prisoners.
On the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 26th, our units approached the factory from the west. On the north side we took up position right at the edge of the factory grounds. One battalion from the 149th Rifle Brigade was located in the so-called Boots—the factory grounds. There was a brick factory there. We’d taken a pit and a few shacks on the hillside. Everything else belonged to the Germans. From the 25th to the 26th our forces approached the factory from the west. We had nearly surrounded the Tractor factory. Moreover, our units to the south had divided the southern and northern parts of the factory.
The assault on the Tractor factory began on January 27. On the night of the 26th I was told by a member of the Military Council and the head of the political department to go make contact with the Germans and ask for their surrender. The Germans were in possession of the Tractor factory, and there were several small ravines running toward it—the area called New Park. They held those ravines. Our bunkers were on the other side of Mokraya Mechetka,199 which was where the German bunkers were. I went there knowing the name of the German battalion commander. That was the 274th Regiment, and its commander was Kannengiesser. Under international law I could only speak to someone of equal rank. It was about fifty meters to their bunkers. I started to say that I was Zayonchkovsky, an officer of the Red Army, speaking on behalf of the army commander. I invited Captain Kannengiesser to negotiate. I was in a trench, and I’d emerged just a little so I could speak through the megaphone. Nothing. I tried again. A machine gun started shooting at me. I started to egg him on: “You’re a German officer, obviously a brave man, so how is it that you’re too afraid to answer?” They shot again. Then I turned to the soldiers. I didn’t want to talk to that sonofabitch when he was captured six days later, so I just sent the translator. He claimed that he hadn’t heard me, that he was at his command post. He was lying. I had asked the Germans to shoot three times in the air, but they didn’t shoot. He said that he couldn’t possibly shoot at the Captain! So we got nowhere.
The assault on the Tractor factory was set for January 27. We had very few men. On the night of January 26–27 the Germans left the ravines and fell back all the way to the Tractor factory. Here’s how we found out. I was talking to them all night long. At 6:00 A.M. I returned to the command post and lay down in a bunker. An hour later the company commander woke me to say: “Listen, captain, you did well—here are some captured deserters.” They happened to be three Romanians. These Romanians said that the Germans were gone. We didn’t believe them. But an hour later this German showed up, another deserter—and, he made out, “a former Komsomol member.” His name was Otto, and he had a large stash of pornographic cards and various other items necessary for love.200 He confirmed that they were all gone. I said: “Okay, you go on ahead, and we’ll follow. Keep in mind that if you’re lying, we going to put a bullet in your head.” The place was empty when we arrived. They really had left.
The assault on the Tractor factory began at noon or one o’clock. I was on the northern side. We went down the Mokraya Mechetka ravine and managed to take a number of small buildings that were on the slopes. They put up a strong resistance. We were taking extremely heavy fire from a machine gun and everything else. We had almost no artillery shells, but we had a lot of rifle and machine-gun cartridges.
Something terrible took place there. You couldn’t imagine how many of our planes were there, thirty to thirty-five of them coming in wave after wave. I’d never seen so much artillery in my life. They were really piling up the cannons, and all of them were shooting at the Germans. Everything was there, even rockets, absolutely everything. This was not the wisdom of our commanders, but of comrade Stalin himself. It was brutal. We had no men, ten per battalion, couldn’t we get some reinforcements? We had no one. But this assault was really an air and artillery assault. If we’d had ten thousand infantrymen we wouldn’t have needed them.
You can’t really talk about a fight for the Tractor factory itself because there no longer was a Tractor factory, just a few individual buildings. The force of the artillery fire and aerial bombardment left all the basements packed with wounded soldiers. In those final days the Germans had no communication between the regiments. All their communication lines were severed by artillery fire, and this contributed to their surrender. The Germans were astonished, they kept asking where our infantry was. The Germans were in different buildings, shooting. There was no front line as such, but their firepower was still substantial. They kept on firing for all they were worth.
On the morning of February 2, when the surrender was already under way, our tanks moved right up to them, and they started to surrender in an organized manner. Our infantry, between you and me, had all been killed. Did we still have fifteen thousand men left? Yes, if we include those in the rear, we certainly did. Each division still had four thousand, but that’s because of the artillery, and they barely had any casualties. There were mortar men, communications companies, and medical battalions—but as for combat soldiers, there were almost none left. Eventually the 149th Brigade held the line at the Boots. The front there was roughly two hundred meters long. There were perhaps thirty men left. The Tractor factory was taken primarily through the actions of our artillery and air force, not by our infantry.
The infantry was unable to advance, but the powerful artillery fire that fell on the Tractor factory made it impossible for the Germans to keep resisting. The Tractor factory was a red-hot cauldron into which so much steel and iron kept flying that it was impossible to withstand. [ . . . ]
The NKVD chief for the Tractor factory district really is a fearless man. I don’t know his name. First of all, he never evacuated but stayed the whole time in Spartakovka and Rynok. When the Germans entered Rynok for half a day, none of the residents knew where he was. Starting in January, or even in December, he lived in Spartakovka, right here, some two hundred meters from the Tractor factory, and he ran an intelligence network of residents from the factory district. Every day we got reports on the number of Germans being sent in. We received an unexpected telegram from the political department of the 49th Division saying that a woman and a lieutenant had been sent in. It turned out that the NKVD chief had been telling us this every day from the Tractor factory. He lived there, he helped get the leaflets and his female agents carried them. This man really was there all the time. Rynok and Spartakovka were part of his district. There may not have been anyone living there, but that was his district. He did his work on the front line as an NKVD man. He kept in touch, made contact with the army, and was always with the brigade’s commander and commissar. But he only kept in touch—he never interfered with our assignments. Before the war he received the Order of Lenin.
I saw the director of the Tractor factory at a battalion command post. This was during the assault, before the surrender. He had come back to Spartakovka, and so had a few other men. People were already getting ready to rebuild.
4
/> THE GERMANS SPEAK
German prisoners of war in Stalingrad, January 1943
GERMAN PRISONERS IN FEBRUARY 1943
General Field Marshal Paulus was taken prisoner by the Soviets on January 31, 1943. The same day German soldiers in the southern pocket laid down their weapons. Two days later the northern pocket, commanded by Karl Strecker,1 finally surrendered. As tens of thousands of Germans soldiers were marched off to captivity, the Soviet intelligence service got to work. On February 5 Captain Zayonchkovsky and his colleagues, Majors Koltynin and Lerenman, began to interrogate soldiers and officers captured in the northern pocket. After the war, Zayonchkovsky submitted the reports of the interrogations, along with other documents of his activities on the Stalingrad front, to Isaak Mints’s Historical Commission. Besides tying in almost seamlessly with events in the department store basement and in the military staff of General Shumilov, the reports are a thrilling read. The statements of named German prisoners immediately after their capture reveal their state of mind and show how the Soviets treated the prisoners and what information they sought from them.
Shortly after the battle of Stalingrad ended, Zayonchkovsky, by then a major, delivered a lecture to military intelligence staff about the purpose of “political interrogation of prisoners of war.”2 As head instructor, Zayonchkovsky was responsible for training the new intelligence staff added in February and March 1943 to cope with the growing tide of prisoners. The primary task of the interrogating officer, he stressed to the audience, consisted in identifying the “political-moral” state of the Wehrmacht soldiers. What did the prisoners think about the war? Did they still believe in German victory? How disciplined were the troops? To what extent was fascist ideology anchored in the Wehrmacht? The political officers of the Red Army believed that the enemy troops, like their own soldiers, were guided by ideological convictions that fostered strong military morale. The aim of political interrogation was to uncover the cracks in the soldiers’ loyalty to National Socialism, cracks that the military intelligence then had to exploit on the battlefield to bring down the political and moral scaffolding of the enemy. Because Zayonchkovsky and his staff specialized in enemy propaganda, the interrogations also had to contain detailed questions about the influence of Soviet messages on German soldiers. The Soviets wanted to learn which techniques worked and which needed to be improved. (Several soldiers told them that the initial leaflets dropped by the Red Army came off as primitive and caused much amusement. One soldier said he did not understand why the Soviets called the Germans “fascists.”)