The Feldgendarmerie, hated by the troops and known as the ‘chain dogs’ because of the metal crescent gorget, hung on a chain, which they wore round their necks, guarded access to the runway, checking papers minutely to make sure that no malingerers got through. As hope of escape diminished in January, they resorted more and more to their sub-machine-guns to hold back the wounded and malingerers.
Many more wounded fitted into the giant, four-engined Focke-Wulf Condors, of which a few were used from the second week of January. They were, however, exceptionally vulnerable if overloaded. One sergeant in the 9th Flak Division watched the lumbering acceleration of a Condor on to which two of his wounded comrades had just been loaded. As the aircraft rose steeply after take-off to gain height, the helpless human cargo inside must have shifted or rolled towards the back, because the tail suddenly dropped. The engines screamed as the nose pointed almost vertically into the sky, then the whole aircraft fell back to the ground just beyond the perimeter and exploded in a fireball with a ‘deafening sound’.
Further out, soldiers at the west end of the Kessel witnessed the fate of Junkers transports, knowing full well that their heavy outbound loads consisted of wounded comrades. Often these aircraft ‘could not gain height quickly enough and ran into heavy flak, thus coming to a terrible end. I saw from my trench on several occasions this apocalyptic fate and was very, very depressed.’
As well as flying out wounded, couriers and certain specialists, the aircraft still brought in some officers and men who had gone on leave just before the Kessel was closed. Because of the news blackout in Germany, many of them had no idea of what had happened in their absence until their train reached Kharkov. Manstein’s aide, Alexander Stahlberg, described how his twenty-one-year-old cousin by marriage, Gottfried von Bismarck, arrived at Army Group Don headquarters at Novocherkassk on 2 January after Christmas leave at home in Pomerania. He had received an order to fly into the Kessel to rejoin the 76th Infantry Division. Manstein, on discovering the circumstances, invited him to his table for dinner, where conversation was unrestrained. Both Manstein and Stahlberg greatly admired the way the young man, with no complaint, upheld the Potsdam tradition of the 9th Infantry Regiment by returning to a lost battle, not for Hitler, but out of a Prussian devotion to duty. Bismarck himself, however, put it in less glorious terms. ‘I was a soldier, I had received an order and was obliged to accept the consequences.’
General Hube, when he returned to the Kessel on 9 January, the eve of the Soviet offensive, told Paulus and Schmidt that Hitler simply refused to acknowledge the possibility of defeat at Stalingrad. He had not listened to his account of conditions in the Kessel, instead he had tried to convince him that a second relief attempt might well be brought forward.
Some of Hube’s officers were downcast that he, of all people, seemed to have been taken in by one of Hitler’s performances of mesmerizing optimism—the ‘sun-ray cure’. ‘I was deeply disappointed’, recorded Hube’s intelligence officer, Prince Dohna, ‘how easily such a brave and upright soldier could be persuaded.’ Others, however, heard that Hube had even dared ‘to advise Hitler to try to finish the war’, and when Hube died in a plane crash the following year, rumours spread that Hitler might have had a hand in it. In a way, both sides were right. When Hube had reported to Army Group headquarters before flying back into the Kessel, Manstein certainly believed that he had been taken in by one of Hitler’s displays of confidence. On the other hand, he subsequently discovered that Hube had dared suggest to Hitler that he might do better to hand over supreme command of the army to a general, so that he would not be damaged personally if the Sixth Army were lost.
Hube had been one of the Führer’s favourite commanders, but his evident belief that the Sixth Army was doomed only confirmed Hitler’s suspicion that all generals were infected with pessimism. Paulus recognized this. He came to the conclusion that only a highly decorated young warrior might appeal to Hitler’s romantic notions and thus be in a better position to persuade him to listen to the truth.
Paulus had an obvious candidate for this mission in the form of Captain Winrich Behr, whose black panzer uniform with the Knight’s Cross was likely to produce the right effect on the Führer. And Behr, responsible for updating not only the situation map, but also all the facts and figures in reports, was one of the best-briefed officers at Sixth Army headquarters.
Behr received so little warning of his mission on the morning of 12 January, two days after the start of the Soviet offensive, that he did not have time to offer to take letters home from his colleagues. He bundled up the Sixth Army war diary in his belongings to take it to safety, then hurried to Pitomnik. The runway was already under fire from heavy mortars as well as artillery. As Behr ran to the Heinkel III, filling with wounded, the Feldgendarmerie armed with sub-machine-guns had to hold back hundreds of others trying to rush, or even crawl, to the plane.
The flight to Taganrog took one and a half hours. To his surprise, it was even colder down by the Sea of Azov than at Stalingrad. A staff car was waiting for him and he was taken to Field Marshal von Manstein’s headquarters. Manstein assembled some of his officers and asked Behr to report on the situation. Behr described everything: the famine; the casualty rates; the exhaustion of the soldiers; the wounded lying in the snow, waiting for evacuation, their blood frozen; the pitiful shortage of food, fuel and ammunition. When Behr had finished, Manstein told him: ‘Give Hitler exactly the same description as you gave me.’ An aeroplane had been ordered for the next morning to take him to Rastenburg. The Führer was expecting him.
The following morning was just as cold, even though the bright sun gave a deceptive impression of warmth. At the airfield the Luftwaffe officer assigned to fly Behr to East Prussia did not bother to take his gloves with him when he went out to warm up the motors. When he returned to the building he had no skin left on his hands from touching frozen metal. Another pilot had to be found.
Behr finally reached the Wolfsschanze in the early evening. His belt and pistol were taken from him at the guardroom. From there, he was escorted to the operations room, where eighteen months later Stauffenberg brought his briefcase filled with explosives. There were between twenty and twenty-five senior officers present. After ten minutes, the doors opened and Hitler appeared. He greeted the young panzer captain.
‘Heil Herr Hauptmann!’
‘Heil mein Führer!’ replied Behr, rigidly at attention in his black uniform, with the Knight’s Cross at the neck. Behr already knew from his brother-in-law, Nicolaus von Below, who was Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, what the Führer’s tactics were when a ‘Cassandra’ brought bad news. He always tried to control the conversation, imposing his version of events, and overwhelming his interlocutor, who knew only about a single sector of the front, with a powerful impression of the overall situation. This was exactly what happened.