He found himself in a peasant house. There was a warm fire. The enemy generals inspected him with self-congratulatory curiosity while he bowed and clicked his heels. In the doorway, a big bald Russian was filming him with a movie camera. The Russian’s jacket was filthy, oil-stained from the look of it. For some reason, this was particularly horrible to him. On the other hand, his own gloves were dirty. He stared at the wall.
First they demanded to know why Hitler hadn’t flown him out. They said that none of them would ever have been left to an enemy’s mercies.
I believe you’ve forgotten General Vlasov, he told them. He’s been working with us since last July.
That louse!
Doubtless you know him better than I, he said.
Anyhow, you still haven’t explained why your so-called “Führer” abandoned you.
It’s the tradition in our army, he patiently explained, for the officer in command to share the fate of his troops.
Well, we appreciate that inspiring lesson, Herr Field-Marshal! And you deserve our gratitude on another score, too. Thanks to you, we now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga; rest assured we’ll put it to use!
Realizing that they mocked him (which indeed was no less than he had expected), he kept silent.
They instructed him to order the remainder of his army to surrender.
Calmly he replied: That would be unworthy of a soldier!
They laughed their ugly Russian laughs, and one of them, a particularly nasty Slav who looked as if he were ready to spit in Paulus’s face, grinned and grinned, his teeth stained brownish-yellow like a Jewish corpse, and then this Slav demanded: How can it be possible to claim that saving the lives of your subordinates is unworthy of a soldier, when you yourself have surrendered?
I did not surrender, he corrected them. I was caught by surprise.
Well, well. Anyhow, we are speaking of a humanitarian act.
Even if I did sign any such order, they would ignore it, since by surrendering I have automatically ceased to be their commander.
Such logic, Herr General Field-Marshal!
They were exactly as his nightmares had depicted them: insolent, menacing, unswayed by argument. (We’ll find a way to deal with him, said Comrade Stalin.) One of them, a rather woebegone little lad, seemed dreamily familiar. Just as the German face is thinner and more expressive than the Slavic, more sensitive, so Paulus could not help but let his soul shine through, his inner anxiety, the desire to maintain a decent appearance which he’d always had. And he understood all too well that as of this instant forever afterwards he must hide his pain away, out of loyalty to himself; that in place of his white gloves he could only don a stony look; he’d freeze; he’d harden himself; he’d show them nothing. Wishing that he had fulfilled the Führer’s final expectation, Paulus told them: I must reiterate my refusal.
And I in turn must inform you, Herr General Field-Marshal, that by your refusal to save your own soldiers’ lives you are incurring a grave responsibility toward the German people and the future of Germany.
Turning his face back to the wall, he once again became as silent and stiff as a corpse caught in electrified wire.
The hold-outs in the northern pocket (Eleventh Corps) surrendered anyhow, of course, on 2.2.43; and we next see them in their frostbitten hordes, stonefaced, despairing or shyly smiling at the Soviet supermen in white who hurried them on to Siberia, shooting stragglers on either side. For years, long dark double lines of them remained at work in Stalingrad’s ruined squares. They learned to be very good at burying corpses. Almost all would perish from exposure, starvation, typhus, neglect and cruelty. (I’ve lost track of what happened to a certain Schmundt, who’d kept advising him: We must become more fanatical, sir. Major-General Schmidt, however, remained loyal to our Führer to the very end, which is why he got twenty-five years in a labor camp.) If they had anything at all to look forward to, it would have been the brisk, commanding, yet not entirely compassionless behavior of the Slavic female, especially of the woman official. Even Paulus clicked his heels, kissed the woman doctor’s hand. (Socialism would obliterate all such national traits, but of course that would take time.) A few of them, the strong, technically inclined workers already preconditioned to obedience, did rather well as foremen in the Arctic construction battalions.
Paulus, weary and thin, joined the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Why not? The Führer had already said: That’s the last Field-Marshal I shall appoint in this war.36—Gazing down at the brass pen-stand in his interrogator’soffice, trying not to think of what Field-Marshal von Manstein would say, he joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. They were correct with him, for they respected his talents. Some of them even congratulated him on having once bested General Timoshenko at Kharkov. Clicking his heels, he bowed, smiling woodenly. They were very gentle with the former Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus. He wondered how he ever could have believed that anybody might defeat the Soviet Union, which stood for the people. (Two months after his surrender, the Stalingrad Tractor Works had already been reconstructed sufficiently to commence tank repair operations.) Soon he’d become a committed Marxist-Leninist. He now saw that national questions, if indeed they were not entirely spurious, should always be subordinated to more general social questions.
They paraded him for more journalists. The London Sunday Times correspondent A. Werth wrote: Paulus looked pale and sick, and had a nervous twitch in his left cheek. He had more natural dignity than the others, and wore only one or two decorations.
In Moscow there were photographs of Stalin and Beria in the interrogation room, Bokhara rugs on the floor. They gave him a whole pack of cigarettes. He sat at the little table screwed to the floor in his cell in the Lubyanka and earnestly thought through the best way to do as he had been told. For this reason, and because of his value as a captured chessman, he never had to discover very much about the Kolyma gold mines, the quarries where German prisoners got worked to death, the three ration categories, the pleasures of logging fir-trees in exchange for squares of dirty bread. They put him and twenty of his generals on a special train which carried them to a very soft camp in Krasnogorsk. This train, well, it wasn’t quite as nice as the Führer’s, which is completely composed of welded steel; on the other hand, it was warm. For the time being, he even got to keep his silver cigarette case. Later he was sent to Susdal, then to Voykovo Camp Forty-eight. A wise old convict said: Even a miserable life is better than death—but nobody ever said that to the last Field-Marshal, who was treated even better than a high status urka criminal. (Our Führer promised to court-martial him after the war, because he hadn’t shot himself. Our Führer said: What hurts me the most personally is that I went on and promoted him Field-Marshal. Our Führer said: So many men have to die and then a man like this comes along and at the last moment besmirches the heroism of so many others.)
Had he been anybody else, they would have torn up Coca’s photograph in one of the searches; and had he protested, a guard would have chucklingly twisted his ear and said: Nice-looking woman! Don’t worry. Russians have already had her.—As it was, he got to keep her likeness until the very end, although it’s true that he never saw her again. They informed him that the Gestapo had invited her to divorce him and change her name; but she’d remained true to him; she’d chosen the concentration camp. (No doubt they’d hinted at the other choice she should have taken, the one which would have pleased the Führer, who always admired our proud German women to whom honor remains more important than existence. Anyhow, she was only a Romanian.) The NKVD officers expressed satisfaction that Coca had followed the correct line. They had no information as to whether she was still alive.
36
He kept this promise as perfectly as all the others. On 1.2.43, which is to say the day after Field-Marshal Paulus’s surrender, Generals von Weichs, von Kleist and Busch all attained to the selfsame dignity. On 1.3.44, “Hitler’s fireman,” the brave General Model, got elevated in recognition of his defensive excellence, which bought us time to gas the Hungarian Jews. The truly final Field-Marshal was Schoerner (5.4.45), a man whose commendably hysterical brutality made him long to do to the defeatists of the German General Staff what he’d already done to Russian civilians; it seems more than befitting that he received his baton from the hands of our Führer himself.