That was when the teleprinter began to chatter. It was 30.1.43. A bluefaced shock troop leader staggered over to see what it might command. Then he stared and stared.
Our Führer had promoted Paulus to Field-Marshal.
This then was the climax, the personal victory which Coca had always wanted for him. She’d never asked for very much of him; after all, any soldier’s wife knows that she’ll very likely be a widow whether her husband gets killed or not. She had loved him, helped him, bearing his absences without reproach. Now they were getting old, and in the thirty-one years since their marriage how many nights had she slept at his side? And all that she had ever wanted in return for her loyalty was a few tokens of success, public honor, for her to be proud of. In a sense, everything he’d done in Russia he’d done for her. To be sure, he could have stayed at home with her, but would she have wanted that of him? When he pulled on his fresh white gloves, lit a cigarette and bent over a map, that was when he could give his best; and the fact that he was far away from her, while regrettable, could not occlude his perfect love for her. He wondered whether she had been informed. He could see her there in the living room, gazing at the mantelpiece where his Field-Marshal’s baton would go. Without a doubt it would go right beside the silver-framed photograph of him bending attentively over Colonel-General von Reichenau, who was not yet Field-Marshal on 28.5.40, as the King of Belgium’s surrender was accepted; pan-Germanism had won the victory at last. Then there was a replica of his Iron Crosses from the previous war, first and second class; then the small photograph, also framed in silver, of himself with Coca and the children when they were all much younger, everybody in focus except Ernst, who typically enough was fidgeting and looking away; why had Coca framed that picture? Something about it must have pleased her, and, after all, it never did to argue with Coca. Oh, but she’d been so very, very beautiful then! She was still beautiful, of course, but the young lady he’d married in 1912 had been perfect beyond description, her warmly white face shining out upon the world beneath her coils of hair, a slightly exotic fashion which she had renounced after Friedrich and Ernst were born. The instant that her brothers had introduced him to her, she’d shone upon him with a brilliant light. He would literally have set the world on fire for her. This photograph had been taken in 1920, shortly after the Kapp Putsch, which he’d supported so passionately at the time and which no one even remembered now. And all three children were grown and gone. These days Coca must dye her hair, although he’d never caught her at it. That dusty golden summer of theirs, where had it gone?
He presented himself to receive the congratulatory murmurs of his bandaged, frostbitten men. And now, like someone limping, a thought crept slowly into his skull—was it even a thought? It was merely what people always said: No German Field-Marshal has ever in history fallen alive in enemy hands.
Was the price of his triumph really that he must become another one of those corpses whose flesh was as perfectly white as the walls of Chemnitz barracks?
Pulling on his fresh white gloves, he thought: One might as well be a professional to the end.
In German the compound word for suicide may be disassembled into “free death.”
Were he captured after all this, it would naturally be a great disappointment to the Reich.
And to Coca, too, of course…
She was the wife of a German officer, so she would not flinch; the worse the situation of Stalingrad became, the prouder he grew of her and of himself. Bit by bit he was overcoming his awe of her, which had never come oppressively between them; he’d worshiped his votive goddess for all these years, offering up the best of himself to gain her loving pride in him, which lay upon him as sweetly as her hair across his face when they lay in each other’s arms; but now his suffering and that of this army whose soldiers he’d always felt, as any good general must, to be his own extension, had grown so undeniable to all parties, including the enemy, that his fortitude shone undeniably, too; and each day that he held the perimeter was as much of an achievement as his victory at Kharkov; that was why he now possessed more pride and satisfaction in himself than ever before. He knew that he could hold on until death. He’d always been brave; he’d endured many discomforts; but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father’s dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He’d won the prize! And now he’d grown beyond that. He loved her even more than before, but as an equal at last, as a woman with whom he shared a deep understanding, a person who could be imperfect, even childish at times, as childish as their children; whose various frailties he could now admit, support and even love, because he was not frail anymore. No one could say he hadn’t done his duty, even though the Russian mortars boomed on and on. He wished he’d been more strict with Olga and Friedrich, less strict with Ernst. Well, all that was past now.
On 29.1.43, a signal rushed to Berlin: To the Führer! The Sixth Army greets their Führer on the anniversary of your seizure of power. The swastika yet flies over Stalingrad. Heil mein Führer! PAULUS.
On 30.1.43 the daily briefing said: 6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks against the N. and S. fronts of the southern pocket. 3 enemy tanks destroyed by shooting.
In the official Soviet accounts, he was captured by Sixty-fourth Army, under General M. S. Shumylov. He surrendered on 31.1.43, the day after the Führer had promoted him to Field-Marshal. (To General Pfieffer he is alleged to have treasonously said: I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.) Then he withdrew into a private room while his underlings negotiated the surrender. When that was completed, he ascended the stairs, flanked by a line of grinning Slavic boys in hooded white jackets. A German eyewitness writes: Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes. Outside, the Allied press was ready, and photographed Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus in his greatcoat plodding neatly through the snow. Major-General Schmidt was whispering in his ear: Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.—He didn’t have to go very far. They directed him to his own staff car, which carried him to headquarters, after which the car, a Mercedes just like his daughter Olga’s, was confiscated in the name of the people. Gunshots popped as gaily as champagne corks; they were shooting his Hiwis as they found them. In the Pioneer barracks they were already incinerating the wounded.
Paulus was now a slender, grey-stubbled cipher, his hat low over his downcast eyes.