Forster lowered his voice and began to speak more slowly, not daring to stop completely. Hitler coughed and, without turning his head, asked, “Are you aware that Stalin is there, by the Volga?”
“We have no information to that effect, my Führer.”
“No information?”
Only the previous day, Forster had imagined that the order to take Stalingrad on 25 August was born from precise calculation and a careful analysis of the military situation. He had imagined the Führer taking into account the panzers’ fuel reserves, the mobility of the support columns, and the quantitative and qualitative superiority enjoyed by the German air force. He had imagined that the Führer had a precise grasp of the dynamic force encapsulated in each infantry division, of the speed with which ammunition and reserves could be brought up to the front, of the efficiency of the liaison and signals sections. He had imagined the Führer as having at his command an almost infinite amount of information. He had thought that when the Führer said, “Stalingrad muss fallen!” he was taking into account the effect of meteorological conditions on the state of the roads in the Don steppe, the sinking of British convoys attempting the voyage to Murmansk, the fall of Singapore and Rommel’s impending attack on Alexandria.
Now, though, Forster realized that the words “Stalingrad muss fallen” had nothing to do with the reality of the war. They were simply an expression of Hitler’s wish.
Forster had been afraid that Hitler would interrupt him, that he would ask a great many questions. He had heard about Hitler’s impatience, his way of posing seemingly random questions that made one lose the thread of one’s thoughts. When the Führer was particularly irritable, speakers had sometimes been thrown into total confusion, with no idea how they were meant to reply. But now Hitler was saying nothing at all.
Forster did not understand that he was seeing the Führer at a moment when no one else’s opinion was of the least interest to him. Hitler did not at such moments read bulletins or radio messages. His thoughts were not determined by the movements of armies; on the contrary, Hitler believed it was his thoughts—and his thoughts alone—that determined both the general course of events and their precise timing.
Something made Forster think that it was best to talk to the Führer about aspects of the military situation that did not depend on him, that lay outside his control. And so he spoke about the size of the Soviet forces deployed in the south-east, about the reserves recently discovered by reconnaissance aircraft, about the infantry and tank units moving at night towards Saratov, about the measures the Red Army was most likely to adopt for the defence of Stalingrad, and about the possibility of a Soviet counter-attack from the north-west, against the 6th Army’s left flank; there had, he said, been a few barely noticeable signs that the Soviets might be planning something of this nature. Wanting to get the Führer’s attention, Forster exaggerated his concerns, which he didn’t really see as at all important. He thought he was showing great diplomatic skill, but everything he said merely irritated Hitler.
Unexpectedly, Hitler gave him a questioning look.
“Are you fond of flowers, Colonel?”
Never having had the least interest in flowers, Forster was taken aback. Still, he answered without hesitation, “Yes, my Führer, I’m very fond of flowers indeed.”
“I thought so,” said Hitler. “Colonel General Halder is also a passionate botanist.”38
Was Hitler suggesting that it was best for old veterans to find other occupations for themselves? Was he saying that Forster was a man of limited vision and that he should retire from active service?
“The issue of Stalingrad has been resolved. I shall not alter the schedule I have laid down,” said Hitler. Now for the first time Forster heard in his voice the grating, metallic tones he had so often heard during radio broadcasts. “What the Russians have decided is of no interest to me. Let them know what I have decided!”
It became clear to Forster that Hitler was not going to listen to the most important thing of all: the impending breach of the Soviet inner defensive ring through which German troops would advance to the banks of the Volga. Forster considered this plan perfectly judged and eminently practicable. Hitler just replied irritably, “Paulus is a competent general, but he does not understand that time is important. Every day, every hour is important to me. Unfortunately, it is not only my generals who fail to understand this.” He went over to his desk, looked with disgust at some papers, pushed them to one side with his little finger, then tapped them several times with a pencil, repeating, “Flowers, flowers, music among the pines! Fraudsters—all of them!”
Forster felt ever more terrified—the man striding about the room, who now seemed to have forgotten all about him—was alien and incomprehensible. One moment he was walking away from Forster; next he was striding swiftly towards him. Forster stood there, head bowed: What if Hitler suddenly remembered about him? What if he suddenly started to yell and stamp his feet? The seconds went by in silence.
Hitler stopped and said, “I’ve heard your daughter is in poor health. Give her my greetings. Is she doing well at art school? I’d love to do some painting, if I only had time. Time . . . Time . . . I’m flying back to the front today. I too am only a guest in Berlin.”
Hitler smiled, his lips strangely grey. He held out a cold damp hand to Forster, saying he regretted that it was impossible for him to pursue this conversation.
•
Forster walked to the corner of the street, where his car was waiting. He had, it seemed, sensed the power of the Führer; it had made him tremble. “Give her my greetings, give her my greetings!” he repeated to himself. As he got into the car, he for some reason remembered how, yesterday afternoon, as they were flying over a pine forest and some sandy wasteland to the east of Warsaw, warning rockets had forced the pilot into an abrupt change of course. Forster had glimpsed a thread-like single-track railway, running between two walls of pine trees to a construction site where hundreds of men were swarming about amid boards, bricks and lime. Something of strategic importance was evidently being built there.
The navigator had bent down towards Forster and, addressing a senior passenger in the free and easy manner of an airman in his own element, had pointed down to the forest and whispered, “Himmler’s building a temple down there for the Warsaw Jews. He’s afraid that we may tell the world too soon about the joyful surprise he’s preparing for them.”
Forster sensed that in his quest for world domination the Führer had lost touch with all ordinary human understanding. At such icy heights good and evil no longer existed. Suffering meant nothing. There could be no mercy, no pricks of conscience.
But such unaccustomed thoughts were arduous and difficult to assimilate. After a few seconds Forster allowed himself to be distracted. He began to look at the smartly dressed people in cars, at the children standing in line with their milk cans, at the crowds emerging from the darkness of the U-Bahn or going down into it, at the faces of women of all ages going about their daily tasks, carrying paper bags, briefcases or handbags.
He needed to decide in advance which of his feelings and observations he could talk about at the General Staff, which to his acquaintances, and which only to close friends. And at night, in their bedroom, he would tell his wife in a whisper about how frightened he had felt. He would tell her how different Hitler looked from his image in photographs; he would tell her how he stooped, how grey he looked, how he had dark bags under his eyes.
In his mind he went through every sentence of his report, all his replies to Hitler’s questions, and he was startled by something terribly simple. Nearly everything he had said—about how well he felt, about Paulus and Richthofen, about his love of flowers—nearly everything he had said, he realized, had been a lie. From beginning to end he had been play-acting. His words, his tone of voice, his facial expressions had all been equally false. He felt that some vast incomprehensible force had compelled him to lie. Why? He could not understand it.
Forster would recall later how, when no one was thinking about such things, he had warned Hitler about the danger of a Soviet counter-attack. He was genuinely taken aback by the clarity of his own foresight. But he no less genuinely forgot that, at the time, he himself had not taken what he said seriously. He had not believed in this danger; he had merely been trying to get the Führer’s attention at a moment when nothing in the world, other than his own thoughts and decisions, seemed to mean anything to him.
28
THE CAPTURE of Stalingrad would mean the achievement of certain strategic ends: the rupture of communications between the north and south of Russia, and between the central provinces and the Caucasus. The capture of Stalingrad would allow German armies to make broad advances both to the north-east, bypassing Moscow, and to the south, thus achieving the ultimate goal of the geographical expansion of the Third Reich.
To Hitler, however, the capture of Stalingrad meant more than this. It was of crucial importance to his foreign policy, since it was likely to bring about significant changes to German relations with both Japan and Turkey. And it was no less important to his domestic policy; as a foretaste of the final victory, it would reinforce his position within his own country. The capture of Stalingrad would redeem the failure of the blitzkrieg intended to bring about a German victory within eight weeks; it would compensate for the defeats outside Moscow, Rostov and Tikhvin and for the sacrifices of the past winter that had so shaken the German people. The capture of Stalingrad would strengthen Germany’s power over its satellites; it would silence the voices of disbelief and criticism.
Lastly, the capture of Stalingrad would be Hitler’s triumph over the scepticism of Brauchitsch, Halder and Rundstedt, over Göring’s hidden arrogance, over Mussolini’s doubts as to his ally’s superior intelligence.
For all these reasons, Hitler irritably rejected all talk of postponement—at stake were the outcome of the war, the future of the Third Reich and the prestige of the Führer himself.
But Hitler’s peculiar logic and the reality of events at the front had nothing to do with each other; neither was of any relevance to the other.
29
ON A HOT August morning Lieutenant Pieter Bach, a slim, tanned thirty-year-old commander of a German motor infantry company, was lying in the grass on the east bank of the Don and looking up at a cloudless sky. After a long advance across the steppe and the difficulties of a night-time river crossing, Bach had bathed and put on clean underwear. He at once felt a sense of peace. He was, of course, used to abrupt changes in his sense of himself and the world; there had been more than one occasion during the last year when, worn out by the heat and the roar of engines, longing for a drink of water—even from a filthy swamp—he had suddenly been transported into a world of cool cleanliness, a world where he could bathe, enjoy the smell of flowers and drink cold milk. He was no less accustomed to the reverse, to exchanging the peace of a village garden for the iron stress of war.
Accustomed as he was to such changes, Bach was still able to enjoy this moment. He was able to think calmly, without any of his usual irritation, about the nitpicking criticisms that Preifi, his battalion commander, had made during a recent inspection, and about his difficult relations with Lenard, the SS officer who had recently joined their regiment. None of this troubled him; it was as if he were remembering the past rather than thinking about what would determine his life today and tomorrow. He knew from experience that the capture of a bridgehead was always followed by a halt of three or four days, while more forces were brought over the river and preparations were made for the next attack. This impending period of rest seemed blissfully long. He did not want to think about his soldiers, about his still unwritten report, about their lack of ammunition, about the worn tyres of his company’s trucks, and the fact that he might be killed by the Russians.
His thoughts turned to his recent period of leave. He had failed to make the most of it and it would be a long time before he was allowed home again. In spite of this, he felt no regrets. Back in Berlin, he had felt a strange mixture of pity and contempt for other people—even for close friends, even for his own mother. He was irritated by their excessive concern over everyday hardships, even though he understood that their lives were not easy and that it was entirely natural for them to want to talk about such matters as air raids, ration cards, worn-out shoes and the shortage of coal.
Soon after returning to Berlin, he had gone to a concert with his mother. He had barely listened to the music at all; instead, he had studied the audience. There were a great many old people and hardly anyone young—just one skinny boy with very large ears and an ugly seventeen-year-old girl. The sight of the men’s shiny jackets and the wrinkled necks of the old women had been depressing; it was as if the concert hall smelled of mothballs.
During the interval, he had greeted a few people he knew. He had spoken to Ernst, a well-known theatre critic; his son, a former schoolmate of Bach’s, had died in a concentration camp. Ernst’s hands were shaking and his eyes watering; and he had a sclerotic blue vein bulging out on his neck. He was evidently having to do his own cooking; he was like an old peasant woman, his fingers brown from peeling potatoes.
He spoke with Lena Bischof—the ugly, grey-haired wife of Arnold, one of his gymnasium comrades. She looked slovenly; there was a wart with a coiled hair on her chin and she was wearing a crumpled dress with a ridiculous bow tied at the waist. Lena told him in a whisper that she had pretended to separate from Arnold, since his grandfather was a Dutch Jew—not that this had ever been of any significance to him. Until the start of the Russian campaign, Arnold had lived in Berlin, but in November he had been sent to work in the east, first to Poznan and then to Lublin. Since then Lena had not had a single letter from him. She did not even know if he was alive—he had high blood pressure, and sudden changes of climate could be the end of him.
After the concert was over, the audience quietly went their separate ways. There were no cars waiting outside on the street. The old men and women just shuffled hurriedly away in the dark.
The following day he saw Lunz, a friend from his student days with a withered arm. He and Lunz had once wanted to start a journal together, intended for people of culture: professors, writers and artists. Lunz was exhaustingly verbose, but he did not ask Bach a single question about the war and Russia; it was as if there were nothing more important in the world than the fact that, as a member of the elite, Lunz was entitled to superior rations and was living well.
Bach turned the conversation to more general topics—and Lunz replied reluctantly, in a whisper. Either there were now few things that interested him or he no longer trusted Bach. To Bach it seemed that people who had once been strong, intelligent and interesting now emanated an aura of quiet horror, as if they had been stacked away in a storeroom to gather dust and cobwebs. Their knowledge was now outmoded and their moral principles and scrupulous honesty were no longer of any use to anyone. They had no future and they had been left behind on the shore. And it had seemed all too likely to Bach that, when the war was over, he too would become one of these “former people.”39 It might have been better to end his days in a camp—instead of becoming one of the living dead, he’d have died with a sense of exaltation, knowing he had stayed true to the struggle.
He had seen Maria Forster every day. There was a similar sense of unease in her home; there too the air was full of discontent and resentment. Bach had not seen her father, who was working until late at night in the General Staff, but he had thought to himself that, were he a Gestapo officer, he would have no trouble divining the man’s secret thoughts; his family were constantly making fun of army ways, laughing at the ignorance of newly appointed field marshals and prominent generals and telling jokes about their wives—and there could be no doubt about who had first told them these stories.
Maria’s mother, who had studied literature as a young woman, said that Frau Rommel and Frau Model were grossly uneducated. They spoke incorrect German; they ca
me out with the crudest of slang; they were rude, boastful and ignorant, and it would be utterly inconceivable to let them loose at an official reception. They ate like the wives of petty shopkeepers. They had grown fat; they didn’t take part in any sporting activities and had almost forgotten how to walk. As for their children, they too were rude and spoilt; they were doing badly at school and all they really cared about was alcohol, boxing and pornography. In short, Frau Forster was full of rage and contempt. Nevertheless, Bach had a feeling that, should a field marshal’s wife want to become friends with her, Frau Forster would gladly forgive her her ignorance, her large, fat hands, and even her incorrect pronunciation.
Maria was no less discontented. She thought that art in Germany had fallen into decay—actors had forgotten how to act and singers had forgotten how to sing. Books and plays were a semi-literate mixture of bad taste, sentimentality and Nazi bloodlust. The subjects were always identical and, when she picked up a new book, she felt she was reading for the hundredth time something she had first read in 1933. The art school where she both taught and studied was in thrall to deadly boredom, ignorance and conceit. The most talented people were not allowed to work. German physics had lost its greatest genius, Albert Einstein, but much the same had happened, if to a lesser degree, in every other realm of art and science.
Once, when he and Lunz were drinking together, Lunz had said to him, “Obedience, blind stupidity and the ability to change one’s spots—these are the civic virtues now required of a Berliner. Only the Führer has the right to think, not that he has any great love of thinking—he prefers what he calls intuition. Free scientific thought has been trashed. The titans of German philosophy are forgotten. We have abandoned all shared categories; we have renounced universal truth, morality and humanity. All art, science and philosophy now begin and end with the Reich. There is no place in Germany for bold minds and free spirits. Either they have been neutered, like Hauptmann, or they have fallen silent, like Kellermann.40 The most powerful of all, like Einstein and Planck, have simply soared into the air and flown away.41 It is only people like me who have remained stuck in the swamp, in the reeds.” At this point Lunz had stumbled. “Only please forget all this. Don’t tell anyone, not even your own mother, what I’ve just been saying. Do you hear? You probably can’t even begin to imagine the vast, invisible net that envelops us all. It catches everything in its mesh—the most casual words, thoughts, moods, dreams and looks. A gossamer net woven by iron fingers.”
Stalingrad Page 62