Lieutenant-General Jaenecke proposed a breakout yet again.
To where? asked Paulus.
To Voronezh. That’s the real fortress—
And then?
It’s for the Führer to decide.
But he’s decided that we’re to hold fast right here. You know that.
Herr Colonel-General, if we broke out to the southwest—
That’s an extreme solution, said Paulus disapprovingly.
In 1928, a certain Count Hermann Keyserling wrote an essay entitled Das Spektrum Europas. Nowadays such endeavors as his would be decidedly out of fashion, for this European mirror endeavors to reflect, chapter by chapter, the lineaments of national character; moreover, our Count adheres to a sternly abstract style whose pretensions to rigor sit uneasily on this reader. Nonetheless, Das Spektrum Europas makes many interesting observations about Germans, of which the following may perhaps apply to Colonel-General Paulus: To regard the fulfillment of duty rather than personal responsibility as the highest virtue, indicates a primal need for yielding oneself up.
After New Year’s, not so many of the unshaven, straw-shod members of Sixth Army believed in final victory. They didn’t even long for OKW’s operational reserves to come and save them. All that had become as far away as Kharkov’s snow and wrecked machines. Somewhere in Kharkov there were sheds of blankets and sheds of food, sheds filled with the yellow ointment for frostbite; and there were sheds heaped with ammunition, and sheds full of “Spandau” machine-guns, and sheds of petrol, sheds of chocolate, sheds of fur coats confiscated from Jewesses who wouldn’t need them anymore, sheds of submissive U-girls and R-maidens to comfort the doomed, sheds of warmth, sheds of life; but as for the reserves, there would never be any more soldiers to save Sixth Army.
But why not? In June they’d called up the class of ’23. What if they…?
What about our Hiwis?
They won’t let the Germans down!
But they’re Slavs!
So what? If the Reds break in here, all Hiwis will wind up in the very first ditch! They know that—
But maybe they’ll—
Schmidt says—
Shoot them is what I say. We can’t feed ourselves, let alone that Russian trash.
That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Maybe, to forestall a revolt, we’d better take measures.
Don’t we have other worries? They’re no more dangerous than cockroaches; they’re only Hiwis!
I could eat a cockroach right now.
Zeitzler’s put himself on Stalingrad rations. He wants the Führer to see how desperate our case is…
Where does he get his two hundred grams per day of horsemeat? murmured General von Hartmann with a poisonous smile. Probably kills a horse every day just to make the point, or some Jew does it for him. Those rear echelon bastards…
Somewhere, in the world where our Führer lived, there would always be more reserves, and these reserves now came out of their boxes so that the fighter squadrons all in a line now loaded themselves with new men already sitting in the cockpits, a swastika on every Messerschmitt’s tail, a triangle and a white-oulined black cross on each Messerschmitt’s thorax, all the propellers pointing precisely up; and the telephone said: A severe but just punishment… and steel began to move, ever more rapidly, the reserves shooting forward toward Stalingrad, accelerating faster than any Russian shell. Paulus knew that if he could only be shown in to Wolf’s Lair one more time, Wolf’s Lair at the hub of its railroad spiderweb, Wolf’s Lair with its four outer checkpoints and one inner checkpoint to serve the purpose of airlocks between this rapidly Russifying Europe and the Reich, the real Reich where everything was still possible, Wolf’s Lair, Wolf’s Lair where there was good coffee and he could change into white gloves and the military typists complained of feeling “too warm,” if he could stand again outside the welded steel door to the room where the Führer was expecting him, then, if he could assert and express himself properly, it would all be over because the Führer knew the deep picture; he could see deep down into the earth. That was how everybody in Sixth Army felt. Operation Thunderclap wouldn’t have been called off if that had happened. Just as our flatcarloads of Russian prisoners shelter themselves from the wind behind walls of their own dead, so Paulus’s soldiers hid behind their belief in the Führer as long as they could, pulling mortars on sleighs, their eye-sockets as white as winterstruck shellholes. Jealous of the lush-furred Russian mitts, for they themselves were warmed now only by the hellish orange winds of enemy flamethrowers which leaped across wrecked buildings, they washed their frostbitten hands in alcohol pilfered from the radiators of their useless tanks. The squat black helmets, modeled after medieval German armor, froze miserably upon their heads.
The compiler-biographer Goerlitz believes that the order to issue rations only to the healthy fighters was given not by Paulus, who suffered whenever his men did, but by General Roske, the final commander of Seventy-first Division. If this is so, then it would seem that Paulus had lost touch with his own subordinates—a palpably absurd idea, given that we know he kept doing his duty, peering blankly at his maps, mechanically opening the lid of his empty cigarette case, searching for the magic disposition of forces which would allow him to take the offensive against these Red Army criminals, isolating and destroying them in detail, after which it might still be possible to master the Caspian basin. Therefore, I for my part prefer to believe that the order in question was never issued, that nothing incorrect was done; for to hold any other opinion is to slander this very intelligent, thorough man: Paulus the Logician.
On New Year’s Eve he is reported to have said to Zitzewitz (who was haunted by these words forever after): Everything has occurred exactly as I foretold. It’s all in writing in that safe.—Heim had long since seen in him the face of a martyr.
His men had begun to resemble concentration camp Jews. When would they be permitted to join hands with Field-Marshal von Manstein’s troops? Their heroism moved him almost to tears. Now more than ever he revered the memory of his mother, who’d never complained about her many illnesses. On one of nights when everyone at headquarters sat listening to the whines of the Ju-52s, wondering what they’d bring (the temperature must have been twenty to thirty degrees of frost), he lectured Colonel Adam, who also still believed in him: That dirty secret, the superiority of the T-34 tanks to our own Panzers, helps to explain the failure of our operations here. You see, Adam, since tank production is dependent on electro-steel, it would help us to prepare a more realistic operational plan for the spring if we knew the figures on Russian steel production…—At 0200 hours, he and Major-General Schmidt were playing war-games on sheets of Sixth Army stationery. Major-General Schmidt was the Red Army and Paulus was the Wehrmacht. Over his white gloves he wore Russian fur gloves, and so did Major-General Schmidt, because headquarters was heatless; Paulus had ordered that in the interest of simple fairness, until we had petrol to warm the men on the front line, the gas heaters here must not be activated. After twenty-seven turns, he’d maneuvered Major-General Schmidt into abandoning Moscow to our forces, although not without high casualties; all this was provided that Paulus enjoyed centralized control of operations. (He could not help but remember a certain assessment of our Führer’s gamesmanship, which General Warlimont had literally whispered into his ear: Strategically he does not comprehend the principle of concentrating forces at the decisive point.) After the twenty-ninth round, Major-General Schmidt resigned the game, saying: You certainly haven’t lost your touch, sir!—And he lit his commander’s cigarette. No, they still weren’t quite out of cigarettes; there were always reserves.