The Great Soviet Encyclopedia informs us that the city of Stalingrad, formerly Tsaritsyn, was founded on an island sometime in the sixteenth century, and this fairytale isolation and encirclement could not be more fitting. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we learn, Tsaritsyn was a major center of the struggle of the people against feudal exploitation. So far so good; and it gets better, for during the Civil War the defense of this place devolved on, among others, Comrade Stalin himself, and in the natural course of things his role there became retrospectively magnified, which is why it got named after him.—The forces of Adolf Hitler, having in the meantime destroyed two more Russian armies, now drew near the City of Stalin. Therefore, what was about to happen had to happen.
Lieutenant-General Paulus was not a cruel man, as may be proved by the fact that the Soviets never charged him with any war crimes. Immediately upon succeeding to command of Sixth Army, he’d canceled our late Field-Marshal von Reichenau’s order of 10.10.41 to proceed with extreme measures against subhumans. Nonetheless, Lieutenant-General Paulus esteemed the effectiveness of terror raids: They broke an enemy population, and thereby ended war, more rapidly than other, supposedly more lenient measures. By the beginning of August he was fully engaged against First and Fourth Soviet Tank Armies on the Don River bend. His advance grew delayed; he found the so-called “annihilation battalions” especially troublesome. He shuffled maps and regiments, the long swastika flag hanging down above his headquarters there at Golubskaya-on-the-Don. The enemy proving superior in numbers if nothing else, our Führer sent Fourth Panzer Army back to Paulus’s aid; they were approaching in good order from Kotel’niko. He drafted a friendly welcome to their commander, Colonel-General Hoth. Meanwhile, the orderly came in and refilled his silver cigarette case. Actually he wasn’t feeling very well; for some weeks now he’d suffered from “the Russian sickness.” No matter; he’d had dysentery in the last war, too. It was better not to inform Coca. At 0430 hours on 15.8.42 he commenced his offensive, shattering Fourth Soviet Tank Army. The Italians were showing a bit of funk; he sent Lieutenant-General Blumentritt over to regroup them. He advised Headquarters of the weakness of his northern flank, but they told him to press on without making demands. This hurt his feelings slightly, but he remembered what Field-Marshal von Bock would have said: The important thing is to keep calm. First Bach, then Mozart. Coca liked Mozart’s operas more then he did; he preferred the instrumental music. On 22.8.42, he enjoyed a light moment with the officers when the radio announced that Brazil had declared war on the Reich; somebody remarked that Field-Marshal von Reichenau had always expressed a desire to visit Rio de Janeiro, and Paulus, wishing to deflect them from thoughts of the dead, whom they surely all missed (von Reichenau had never failed to remember Paulus’s birthday), replied with a pleasant half-smile: Gentlemen, without a doubt the Brazilian campaign will have its compensations!—Major-General Schmidt laughed twice, ha, ha, while the others laughed longer; then the orderly poured Veuve Clicquot all around, in tiny little glasses of Bohemian crystal, after which they all went to bed early, because the next morning would be hectic; the twelve hundred bombers and strafing planes of Fourth Air Corps were scheduled to arrive at Stalingrad; and when they did, they killed forty thousand people, leaving skeletonized apartments in a red mist, oh, yes, as red as Cossack trousers, those corpses on broken plinths of ferroconcrete. The enemy radio was shouting: Vokzal’naia Square, Deomstratsii Square… Meanwhile, Sixth Army was already shelling the office of the District Soviet.
By 31.8.43, the city was nearly encircled. He’d already cut off most of Sixty-second Soviet Army. It was merely a question of time and manpower. General von Wietersheim, however, for some reason advocated withdrawal from Stalingrad. There was no need even to speculate on what the Führer would have said about that. Lighting a cigarette, assuring him that he was sorry, he relieved General von Wietersheim of his command at once, replacing him with Colonel-General Hoth. At the next staff conference his sleek and handsome officers sat reading newspapers together, their caps crisp and new, their sleeves perfectly creased as they awaited his instructions; on the matter of General von Wietersheim they all kept silent, excepting only Major-General Schmidt, who approved of the decision and tried to express his approval publicly and at length, until Paulus said: No doubt he was doing his duty as he saw it, Schmidt. That will be all.—His spearheads breached the enemy’s front in the sector Vertyachii-Peskoravka, with Stukas screaming and bombing just forward of each assault. On 2.9.42, the Führer decreed that upon his entry into this troublesome city, all the males must be liquidated, presumably by shooting, and all females deported. Paulus was not in sympathy with this order. In any event, it could not be carried out immediately. That day a far more pleasant message entered on the silver tray; his old friend Colonel Metz wrote him (belatedly, it seemed, and then the card must have been held up by censorship and routing errors): Let me congratulate you on your Knight’s Cross—and it won’t be long, sir, before the Field-Marshal’s baton follows. On 3.9.42 he crushed the feeble counterattack of Moskalenko’s First Guards Army. He beat them back again on the fifth. Continuing enemy pressure compelled him to divert some of his troops to the northwest, among them his son Ernst, who was acquitting himself well in his tank regiment, he’d heard. He had ground down Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Soviet armies almost to extinction. They said to him: Herr Lieutenant-General, sir, Yeremenko’s digging in to resist us on Line G…