When Hitler had finished recounting his plans for Operation Dietrich, a great counter-attack with SS panzer divisions turning defeat into victory, he said to Behr: ‘Herr Hauptmann, when you return to General Paulus, tell him this and that all my heart and my hopes are with him and his Army.’ But Behr, well aware that this was Hitler’s ‘trick’, knew that he must not allow himself to be silenced.
‘Mein Führer,’ he answered. ‘My commander-in-chief gave me the order to inform you of the situation. Please now give me permission to deliver my report.’ Hitler, in front of so many witnesses, could not refuse.
Behr began to speak, and Hitler, rather to his surprise, made no attempt to interrupt him. He did not spare his audience any detail, including the growing desertions of German soldiers to the Russians. Field Marshal Keitel, unable to bear such frankness in the Führer’s presence, shook his fist at Behr from behind Hitler’s back in an attempt to silence him. But Behr continued relentlessly with his description of the exhausted, starving and frozen army, faced by overwhelming odds, and without the fuel or ammunition to repulse the new Russian offensive. Behr had all the figures of the daily deliveries by air in his head. Hitler asked if he was certain of these statistics, and when Behr replied that he was, he turned to a senior Luftwaffe officer and asked him to explain the discrepancy.
‘Mein Führer,’ replied the Luftwaffe general, ‘I have here the list of planes and cargoes dispatched per day.’
‘But mein Führer,’ Behr interrupted. ‘For the Army, what is important is not how many planes were sent out, but what we actually receive. We are not criticizing the Luftwaffe. Their pilots really are heroes, but we have received only the figures I have told you. Perhaps some companies retrieved odd canisters and kept them, without notifying their headquarters, but not enough to make a difference.’
Some senior officers tried to deflect Behr’s criticisms with ‘idiotic questions’, but Hitler proved surprisingly helpful, probably because he wanted to appear to defend the interests of the Stalingradkämpfer against the general staff. But when Behr came to the situation facing the Sixth Army, Hitler turned back to the great map dotted with little flags as if nothing had changed. Behr knew that these flags, ‘the same as months before’, now represented ‘divisions with only a few hundred men left’. Yet Hitler once again resorted to his message of reversing the whole situation by a brilliant counterstroke. He even proclaimed that a whole SS Panzer Army was already grouping round Kharkov, poised to strike towards Stalingrad. Behr knew from Field Marshal von Manstein that the SS formations being brought eastwards would need several more weeks. ‘I saw then that he had lost touch with reality. He lived in a fantasy world of maps and flags.’ For Behr, who had been an enthusiastic and ‘nationalistic young German officer’, the revelation came as a shock. ‘It was the end of all my illusions about Hitler. I was convinced that we would now lose the war.’
Behr was not sent straight back to the Kessel as planned. He saw Hitler again the next day at noon, with Field Marshal Milch, who was ordered to galvanize Luftwaffe relief efforts to Stalingrad. Behr was later summoned by Hitler’s senior military aide, General Schmundt, and subjected to a long and searching, although friendly, interview. Schmundt, one of Hitler’s most loyal admirers (he was to die eighteen months later from Stauffenberg’s bomb), quickly sensed that the young panzer captain had lost his faith. Behr admitted this openly when the question was put. Schmundt therefore decided that he should not be sent back to Paulus, in case he passed on his misgivings. Behr would return to the Black Sea coast, and work there at Melitopol as part of the new ‘Special Staff’ to be set up under Field Marshal Milch to help Fortress Stalingrad hold out to the last.
At Rastenburg, General Stieff and also Lieutenant-Colonel Bern-hard Klamroth, who knew Behr well from before the war, took him aside and asked—‘in a coded manner’—whether he would join a movement to oust Hitler. Behr, who had only just seen the truth ‘about Hitler’s disastrous leadership, felt that he could not do a complete about-turn. Klamroth understood, but warned him to be careful with Manstein. ‘At table he is very much against Hitler, but he just shoots his mouth off. If Hitler were to order him to turn left or right, he would do exactly what he was told.’
Klamroth’s criticism was not exaggerated. For all the disrespect Manstein showed for the Führer in private among trusted subordinates and with his dachshund’s trick of raising its paw in the Nazi salute, he did not want to risk his own position. In his memoirs, he used what might be called the stab-in-the-back argument: a coup d’état would have led to an immediate collapse of the front and chaos inside Germany. He was still part of the officer class, whose anti-Bolshevik loathing had been moulded by the 1918 mutinies and revolution. Behr took Klamroth’s advice, and was cautious when he reported back to Army Group Don.
Manstein’s fear of Hitler was soon demonstrated. The frank discussions among his own officers about responsibility for the Stalingrad disaster unnerved him so much that he issued an order to his chief of staff that ‘Discussions about the responsibility for recent events must cease’ because ‘they can do nothing to change the facts of the matter and can only cause damage by undermining confidence’. Officers were also strictly forbidden to discuss ‘the causes for the destruction of the Sixth Army’ in their personal correspondence.
The Führer now wanted, whatever the outcome, a heroic example for the German people. On 15 January, he awarded Paulus the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross and announced 178 other important decorations for members of the Sixth Army. Many recipients still failed to recognize how double-edged these honours were.
Manstein, on the other hand, while despising Hitler’s motives, knew that he too needed to prolong the agony of the Sixth Army. Every extra day that it held on gave him more time to pull the two armies in the Caucasus back to a defensible line. Hitler, through one of his grotesque twists of logic, could now argue that his decision to order Paulus to maintain his position had been correct.
The madness of events seems to have become slightly infectious. Max Plakolb, the Luftwaffe officer in charge of the radio operators at Pitomnik, recorded several strange messages of exhortation they received from their own senior commanders. On 9 January, the day that the Soviet ultimatum was proclaimed, Plakolb and another member of his team received orders to fly out of the Kessel. ‘ Taking leave of those staying behind was hard. Each one wrote a letter home, which we took with us.’ But like almost everyone escaping the Stalingrad Kessel at that time, he experienced a sensation of being born again. ‘Thus did this 9 January become my second birthday.’ Those escaping, however, were bound to undergo some form of survivor guilt. ‘We never heard anything more of those comrades left behind.’
Everyone who had the chance entrusted last letters or small important possessions to comrades allotted a place on the aircraft. The piano-playing battalion commander from 16th Panzer Division had fallen sick, so Dr Kurt Reuber persuaded him to take the ‘Fortress Madonna’ with him. Reuber also managed to finish a last picture for his wife when his commanding officer’s departure was delayed by a day because of bad weather. His last letter to her from Stalingrad went with it. He saw no point in shrinking from the reality of what they faced. ‘Scarcely an earthly hope remains…’