The Battle of Stalingrad was over.
Twenty-two crack German divisions plus elements of other units were wiped out. It was the greatest military disaster in German history.
According to Soviet reports, the bodies of 147,200 German officers and men were recovered from the battlefield and laid to rest.
Over 91,000 men went into captivity, including 2,500 officers and clerical staff. That figure represented less than a third of the Sixth Army’s original complement of men and around half its officers. Of the thirty-two German generals in the Cauldron, seven had been flown out, one died in battle, one shot himself and one was posted as missing after 2 February 1943; this left twenty-two generals taken prisoner, foremost among them a field marshal.
Four-fifths of the soldiers and half of the officers who went into captivity subsequently died as a result of the trauma they had suffered. Of the twenty-two generals, one succumbed to stomach cancer.
In the spring of 1943, Field Marshal Freiherr von Weichs, C-in-C of the disbanded Army Group ‘B’ (of which the Sixth Army had been part up to November 1942) and his chief of staff, General von Sodenstern, were paying a visit to the Führer’s headquarters. The first letters from the troops captured at Stalingrad had just begun to filter through to Germany. Over lunch, the two officers voiced their opinion that these letters – evidence that many of the men who had fought at Stalingrad were still alive – must have come as a great relief and comfort to their relatives.
Hitler looked up with a glowering expression on his face that dumfounded the two men. Then he said: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’
An Invitation from the Publisher
Endpapers
Afterword
This book is a work of fiction. Any attempt to identify real historical personages in certain of the protagonists (unless, of course, they are well-known figures like Field Marshal Paulus or General von Seydlitz) would be unjust and could potentially do a great disservice both to the dead and to people who are still alive. Yet at the same time, nothing in this book is ‘fabricated’. All the incidents recounted in the action of the novel actually took place sometime and somewhere, either on the snowbound fields outside Stalingrad or in the ruins of the city itself. The author has exercised poetic licence only where certain details of place, time and dramatis personae are concerned. He has taken the subject matter of his book both from the experiences he himself underwent in and around Stalingrad and from accounts given to him by survivors of the battle – soldiers, officers and generals – during the three years he spent in captivity. It is incumbent upon him to thank here all his former comrades for their invaluable assistance and cooperation.
APPENDIX
by Carsten Gansel
I. Seventy years in captivity –
The remarkable story of Heinrich Gerlach’s novel Breakout at Stalingrad
My quest to find the original manuscript of Heinrich Gerlach’s 1957 bestseller about the siege of Stalingrad (Die verratene Armee, translated into English by Richard Graves in 1958 as The Forsaken Army) has a personal preamble that goes back to German reunification in 1989–90 and to the archives in East Berlin that were opened up for the first time during that period. The Aufbau-Verlag, the foremost literary publisher in the German Democratic Republic, had commissioned me to edit a forthcoming work on Johannes R. Becher. In that momentous autumn of change in 1989, Becher – who had been one of the co-founders of Aufbau in August 1945 and was appointed as the GDR’s first minister of culture in January 1954 – was emblematic like no other writer of the ‘rise and fall’ of East Germany and of a part of its literature. What becomes of a state’s ‘poet laureate’ when that state no longer exists? And what remains of his literary output? These were questions that were not just being asked at Aufbau, which held the rights to Becher’s estate and had published an eighteen-volume edition of his works. They were now planning one further volume containing previously unpublished poems and letters of his, together with other documents. I was particularly drawn to this project because researching in the archives would give me an opportunity to fill in certain ‘blind spots’ in my knowledge of the writer. Becher was something of an unknown quantity, and not just to the younger generation, largely because of the way he had been enshrined uncritically in the collective cultural memory of the GDR. His pathos from the pioneering years immediately after the war, his simple stanza forms and rhyme schemes and his outmoded lyricism were clearly at odds with the apprehensive ‘waiting-room feeling’ (Heiner Müller) experienced by people in the GDR in the 1980s and with the increasingly critical questioning that was going on, not just in literary texts. Hans Mayer, one of the most eminent German scholars of the postwar period, who knew Becher personally and thought highly of him, believed that he had been a ‘godsend’ to the GDR as minister of culture, but also pointed out that ‘the contradictions in his life and work … are too many to enumerate’. And it was precisely the contradictions in Becher’s life and work that would be highlighted in the work I was about to edit, since, prior to 1989, all the details that didn’t fit with the image of an exemplary (communist) writer had been hushed up.
So it was that in the spring of 1990 I found myself in a large room in the Central Party Archives of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), poring over the hitherto secret files on Johannes R. Becher. Behind me, I recognized Walter Janka, one of the most popular figures in the GDR during reunification. In the autumn of 1989, his essay ‘Difficulties with the Truth’ had been published by Rowohlt in Hamburg; when Aufbau reprinted it in January 1990, it reached a wide audience in the East and was read out in public, including at universities. Janka, sitting there now hunched up with his wife on a school bench and reading the SED’s secret files on him, which elicited a groan from him now and then, had been head of the Aufbau publishing house in 1956, when he and a number of others – Wolfgang Harich, Gustav Just, Heinz Zöger and Erich Loest – had been sentenced to long prison terms in show trials. ‘Participating in a counter-revolutionary group’ read the charge sheet at the time, an accusation that went unchallenged by such authors as Anna Seghers and Johannes R. Becher – both of whom attended the trial – despite the fact that they knew it was a lie. Walter Janka gave a detailed account of this in his essay, remarking on Becher: ‘If we ever get a chance to examine the state and party archives, scholars of literature will find it hard giving an assessment of so prominent a literary figure.’
At the time when he was writing his memoir, Walter Janka could surely never have imagined that this would actually come to pass, but things moved at a breakneck pace in the autumn of 1989; the state and party archives were indeed opened, and files long kept secret suddenly became accessible! Among the documents on Johannes R. Becher that I had now unearthed I found secret character appraisals by Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht from the time when they were all living in exile in Moscow, along with confidential letters that Becher wrote to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party (KPD) after attempting suicide at the ‘Hotel Lux’, the haunt of exiles in Moscow. Suddenly, I also found myself in possession of the secret ‘Medical Dossier on Comrade Becher’, containing information that I thought would be out of place in any edition of his writings. But I also came across written reports by Becher of fifty-one interviews that he had conducted in June 1943 with German officers of the Sixth Army who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets after the Battle of Stalingrad in January and February of that year and who were being held at POW Camp 160 in Susdal. Like the camps at Krasnogorsk, Yelabuga, Oranki and Voikovo, Susdal was reserved for German officers. In the course of his conversations in June 1943, Becher was forced to conclude that only a handful of the officers were prepared ‘to work for the cause of peace’. Most were unwilling to commit themselves, describing themselves as apolitical and bound by their oath of military allegiance, and fearing that any anti-fascist activity on their part might count against them at the war’s end. From his comments, one got a sense of how disappointed Becher was that no real change of heart had set in, even after Stalingrad. For instance, he noted on one of his conversations: