We still have a mortar and fifteen shells, Herr Colonel-General—
Very good, he replied.
On 16.1.43, the day that Iraq declared war on the Reich, the daily briefing said: 6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: On the W. and S. fronts the enemy has reestablished pressure on our positions. N. of the Don, enemy advance over the Kagalnik. Attacks on the N.E. and N. fronts were repelled. That was the day that we lost the airstrip at Pitomnik.
A Luftwaffe major came to brief him on the strategic situation of Army Group Don. Paulus replied: Dead men are no longer interested in military history.
On the nineteenth, half choked by the yellow smoke of Russian aerial bombs, he wrote his farewell letter to Coca, keeping it brief for both of their sakes. Within the foldings of the thick Sixth Army stationery he enclosed his wedding ring, signet and military decorations. The prudent soldier leaves his original medals at home, and wears authorized copies to guard against loss or frontline rust. He had not done this. Such behavior on the part of a high-ranking officer might have been construed as timidity. As soon as he had sealed the envelope, he felt better. All he wished for now was that the plane which carried these tokens back to her not get shot down.
On 22.1.43, the last airstrip in Stalingrad fell to the Russians. Paulus again requested permission to surrender. The Führer replied: You must stand fast to the last soldier and the last bullet.
Now they’d split us into two mutually isolated sub-fortresses, with Paulus in the southern pocket, and grey groups of soldiers crawled across the ruins in search of bread and warmth, mimicking the grey squadrons of lice which abandoned the bandages of the dead. The Romanians were worse off, of course; our Germans must be fed first.
General von Hartmann, he was informed, had exposed himself to the enemy until they shot him in the head. General Stempel did the same. He therefore issued an order forbidding suicide.
He took his daily constitutional to the front in company with Colonel Adam, who supported his staggering steps and who whispered in his ear: I can speak Russian if the need arises, sir.—It will not, replied Colonel-General Paulus.
On 24.1.43 he considered visiting the dressing station in the cellar of the former NKVD headquarters, to encourage the wounded, and Major-General Schmidt gave him permission to do so, but on reflection he began to fear that the sight of him might instead enrage them, and he did not want to add to their suffering. So he paced outside for a turn or two, circling the mountain of frozen bandages and amputated limbs around which the snow was rose-pink, like the tunic facings of a Waffen-
antitank unit. Then he returned to headquarters and dictated the following signal to OKW: No basis left on which to carry out mission to hold Stalingrad. Russians already able to pierce individual fronts, entire sectors of which are being lost through men dying. Heroism of officer and men nonetheless unbroken.
On 25.1.43, General von Seydlitz granted his own men freedom of action to surrender. Paulus removed him from command. His replacement was General Heitz, who coined the slogan We fight to the last bullet but one.
The enemy now began to bombard Red Square.
On 27.1.43, when the American Air Force dropped its first bombs on our Reich, more Russian attacks were repelled at Fortress Stalingrad (Paulus in his greatcoat staggering, his head down); and the next day the enemy launched such a powerful artillery barrage that some of his men’s eardrums literally burst. The officers sat smoking cigarettes; they’d found a few more of those.
I once heard Field-Marshal von Manstein declare that he’d never be taken alive by those torturers, said Lieutenant-General Jaenecke.
General Pfieffer, who’d been infected with the defeatist virus for quite awhile now, told them what German captives had faced during the previous war: the wounded lying groaning in Panje wagons, the floggings with a seven-tailed nagaika, the frozen puddles of urine in Siberia, the men dragged away to death. No doubt it would be worse this time, he said.
Major-General Schmidt reminded them all how in ’39, when the Russians had marched in to seize their half of Poland, back in the days when we and they were friends, General Timoshenko had issued a proclamation to the Polish soldiers, calling on them to murder their officers. Imagine what the Reds would do to us, said Major-General Schmidt.
They started looking at each other speculatively.
Paulus for his part remembered an incident which had occurred when Field-Marshal von Reichenau was still alive.
In 7.41, Sixth Army had been stationed at Zhitomir, where the Jew Isaac Babel, while taking notes for his horrific “Red Cavalry” stories, discussed and disputed with his co-religionists about the ethics of the Communist revolution which would shoot him in 1940; it was in Zhitomir at the height of that first summer of apples and cherries and of corpses floating down the Teterev River that by Field-Marshal von Reichenau’s order we hanged a Soviet judge and rendered the Jews harmless, getting the job done in batches because it was just a question of time and manpower, one marksman per Jew, repeated four hundred times; some marksmen proved incompetent, which merely meant that they were nervous virgins, Operation Barbarossa being less than a month old: the Jews either failed to perish instantly or else splattered the firing squad with brains, which happens when one works at overly close range. (I am happy, Babel had written in his diary, large faces, hooked noses, black, grey-streaked beards; I have many thoughts; farewell to you, dead men. The year was 1920.) The following month, our German summer still hot and golden, Sixth Army was in Kiev, and after a few hundred more full-grown Jews and Jewesses had been neutralized, their offspring, numbering about ninety, were left alive for a day or two: squeamishness again. Some of our troops complained, because the children weren’t given any food or water (the cries of the infants were especially upsetting), and finally two military chaplains became involved. Their report actually equated these necessary operations with the atrocities being committed by the enemy. Field Marshal von Reichenau, always exasperated by any interference, wrote a memorandum in triplicate to Army Headquarters, stating: I have ascertained in principle that, once begun, the action was conducted in an appropriate manner. The report in question is incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover, this comment was written in an open communication which passed through many hands. It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all. It was at this juncture precisely that Paulus had flown in from OKW to inspect Sixth Army. He told Coca a little lie; he said that it was the dysentery, “the Russian sickness,” which made him look so ghastly on his return. He’d tried ever since then never to think about the anti-Jewish measures.
But those measures, with which he had had nothing to do—indeed, he’d rescinded them as soon as he took command—might well be blamed on him. It went without saying that the enemy were all Jews. They were bound to be vindictive. He decided that he, too, would never be taken alive.
He sat slowly reading an old issue of Signal which had come in with God knows what mail drop, probably back during the fall. The Russian mortar fire hurt his ears. His forehead was bandaged; both he and Colonel Adam had sustained skull wounds during the last air raid. In a full-page color photograph, a man and a boy, their reddish-blond heads touching, admired a green and red model submarine which sported the swastika flag of our Reich, the man holding the toy in his arms (he wore an Iron Cross, First Class), the boy so dreamily happy, his lips parted. The man was in fact an admiral whom Paulus had met socially several years ago, at a huntsmen’s banquet at Göring’s. Yet somehow his likeness reminded Paulus of himself, and the boy of Ernst. Although Ernst and Friedrich were twins, the father had always felt closer to his namesake than to Ernst, who’d been involved in this or that sordidness at school; he often had to speak to him sharply, saying: You are the son of a German officer!—Despite that or because of it, it was Ernst whom he thought of now. At that moment the tableau in Signal did not seem at all sentimental or false. He believed in it.