Mamayev Kurgan back in enemy hands, Herr Lieutenant-General!
Connect me with Air Fleet Four, please.
By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General!
He called in another bombing attack, but the bombs didn’t dislodge them. He stared at the map.
He changed his mind now almost as often as the railroad station changed hands.
The next day they excitedly told him: Attack, Herr Lieutenant-General! About two divisions, with one or two tank brigades—
On the Mamayev Kurgan?
Yes, Herr Lieutenant-General. They’re pushing us back—
They’re T-60s and T-70s, aren’t they?
I’ll check, sir.
No, take me there.
By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General…
No, we’ll send in armored support, he decided. And please tell Schmidt to report to me immediately.
Herr Lieutenant-General, what should we tell the men?
To press on toward the final victory, he replied, putting on his glasses.
In confidence, a certain Lieutenant-General asked him in a whisper whether he himself remained certain of this final victory.
So long as the Führer is kept precisely informed, he replied.
Silhouettes on the dark front struggled with one another in hatred, grief and anguish, while munitions rushed overhead like glowing planets. At 0800 hours on a morning as cold and damp as a trench, the third assault failed. The left side of his face twitched. Some of his officers dared to imply that he should have led the charge, as Field-Marshal von Reichenau would have done; he coldly remarked that the commander of an army can accomplish more with maps than by dancing like a madman in the forefront. (Major-General Schmidt smiled politely but did not laugh.) He’d injected eleven divisions and eighty tanks into the battle; now these were bent and blunted: His running low-bent troops ran no more. His duty at the moment was to restore confidence to the front line. Soon winter would come, and then they would be filling the radiators of their vehicles with alcohol as they had done last year outside Moscow. First Stalingrad, then Baku. They would be shivering; they would be wrapping socks around their woolen gloves. There was no hope for Germany if she failed to continue forward in every direction. No doubt at OKW they were now murmuring in the Führer’s ear: Before he got Sixth Army, he never even commanded a regiment!—But Lieutenant-General Paulus was too well bred to speak ill of anyone, no matter what he might think. In Colonel Heim’s assessment, he was a slender, rather over-tall figure, whose slight stoop seemed somehow to be a gesture of goodwill toward those of lesser stature. This was true, and so was Coca’s eternal characterization: Sweetheart, you’re simply too good for those people.
He didn’t swim rivers, the way von Reichenau used to in Poland. Perhaps that was why they didn’t respect him.
They said to him: This defensive mission is contrary to the German soldier’s nature.
He explained that Sixth Army was still making progress, although, to be sure, that progress had become as slow as a charge through heavy snow. From the east bank of the Volga, enemy artillery kept murdering his troops. The bombers couldn’t do anything about that.
General von Schwederer sought to argue with his strategy. Paulus relieved him of his command.
He pointed out to Schmidt that the ammunition situation might soon get urgent. Schmidt replied, reproachfully smiling: I telephone them about it every day, sir, and all they ever say is, when will you fellows take Stalingrad?
First Beethoven, then a cigarette. He composed another message to the Führer, warning of Sixth Army’s declining infantry strength. The front was now very sparsely manned; he thought it best to consolidate the positions of Army Group B against the human vectors of that Bolshevist ideology which had the power to corrode and decompose everything.
Thanks to our Führer’s standing orders he could prepare no defense in depth; the front line could never be abandoned, so practically every man had to hold the front line. One enemy breakthrough anywhere, and his forces could be encircled. And such breakthroughs were inevitable. A German general who survived the war and found haven in the apartheid of South Africa has recalled: Practically every Russian attack was preceded by large-scale infiltration, by an “oozing through” of small units and individual men. In this kind of warfare the Russians have not yet found their masters.
What was he supposed to do? At last he was summoned again to the presence of the Führer, who would surely give him the appropriate operational recommendation.
In the first and most glorious year of Operation Barbarossa, Paulus, then Deputy Chief of Staff for the Army High Command, found himself flown to Wolf’s Lair, which was then, as it was now and would again be intermittently, the Führer’s headquarters. I have already told you that Wolf’s Lair was a series of clammy concrete bunkers, sometimes four of them, sometimes ten, all half-sunk in the earth of East Prussia, their interiors softened with wooden paneling. Wolf’s Lair smelled of cooking and of boots. With its thirty-odd antiaircraft guns and its arsenal of light machine-guns, antitank guns, smart new flamethrowers of the latest make, Wolf’s Lair was very, very safe; they even had guards at the private cinema. Wolf’s Lair was, in a very real sense, the soul of Germany.
On several occasions, Paulus had met with General Warlimont and Colonel von Lossberg to plan what should be seized after the capture of Moscow. It was generally agreed that the bulk of our armed forces could then be withdrawn from the Ostfront, for deployment in Africa or England. Afterwards, he’d been invited for an evening of listening to records in the tea-house car, the Führer calling: “Siegfried,” first act! He’d seemed to enjoy almost everything in those days; it wasn’t just all the not yet undone victories, but he hadn’t yet suppressed the Austrian in him, the charming compliments, the hand-kissing of women, etcetera. Paulus, expecting another uncomfortable evening of being slighted, had fallen in love with the man’s self-confidence, which Field-Marshal von Reichenau had also possessed, to be sure, but in a lesser allotment; for when the Führer began speaking about the future, whatever he described seemed to come close and embody itself into something far more alluring than our sweetest fantasy; Moscow would be captured; we had both the will and the superiority; therefore, Moscow was nearly, in effect, captured. Only through the Führer could any of this come into being.