It was some time before soldiers realized that the Christmas post delivered on 22 December was probably the last they would receive from the outside world. Odd batches came through afterwards, one as late as 18 January, but the regular Luftpost effectively ceased after 13 January, when soldiers were told that they had a last chance to write home. Many mentioned in their letters that they only had time ‘to scribble a couple of lines’. As a doctor observed in a letter to his father, ‘The mood here is very mixed. Some take it very badly, others lightly and in a composed way. It is an interesting study in character.’
The main contrast seems to be between those who wrote to impress their family with the patriotic symbolism of their approaching death, and those who wrote out of love. The latter, unlike the fervent nationalists, usually started their letter as gently as possible: ‘Perhaps this will be the last letter from me for a long time.’
A Major von R. wrote to his wife: ‘You are always my first and last thought. I am certainly not abandoning hope. Things are, however, so serious, that one does not know whether we will see each other again. Our men have been and still are achieving the impossible. We must not be less brave than them.’
The word ‘fate’ seems to be about the only word shared equally. ‘Dear parents,’ wrote a corporal. Tate has decided against us. If you should receive the news that I have fallen for Greater Germany, then bear it bravely. As a last bequest, I leave my wife and children to your love.’
Those most devoted to the regime focused far more in a self-important way on national honour and the great struggle, than on family farewells. They wrote of the ‘fateful battle of the German nation’, while still maintaining that ‘our weapons and our leadership are still the best in the world’. In an attempt to derive a meaning from the grotesque tragedy, they buoyed themselves up with the idea that future generations would see them as the defenders of Europe from Asiatic bolshevism. ‘This is a heroic struggle, the like of which the world has never experienced in such cold,’ wrote a sergeant. ‘German heroes guarantee Germany’s future.’
These letters were never delivered. Captain Count von Zedtwitz, the chief of Fourth Panzer Army’s field-post censorship, had been given the task of studying letters from the Stalingrad Kessel, to report on morale and feelings towards the regime. Although his reports bent over backwards to avoid sounding defeatist, it appears that Goebbels ordered that this last collection of post should be held back and eventually destroyed. The above quotations come from a sample apparently copied by Heinz Schröter, a junior officer formerly attached to the Sixth Army’s propaganda company, who had been commissioned by the propaganda ministry to write an epic account of the battle.[18]
Other letters had already been intercepted in a very different way. General Voronov recorded that, on 1 January, ‘we heard in the evening that a German transport plane had been shot down over our positions. About 1,200 letters were discovered in the wreckage.’
At Don Front headquarters, the department run by Captain Zabashtansky and Captain Dyatlenko went to work with every spare interpreter as well as all the German ‘anti-fascists’ on the mailbags for three days. They included letters in diary form from General Edler von Daniels to his wife. According to Voronov and Dyatlenko, the latest letter of 30 December revealed much about the weak defences of the 376th Infantry Division on the south-western flank, which tied in with what the NKVD interrogators had managed to find out from prisoners.
Until the final Soviet offensive began on 10 January, the main preoccupation of the Sixth Army remained the same. ‘Enemy No. 1 is and always remains hunger!’ wrote a doctor. ‘My dear parents,’ a corporal wrote home pathetically, ‘if it’s possible, send me some food. I’m so ashamed to write this, but the hunger is too much.’
German soldiers started to take great risks, venturing forward into no man’s land to search the corpses of Russian soldiers for a crust of bread or a bag of dried peas, which they would boil in water. Their greatest hope was to find a twist of paper containing salt, for which their bodies ached.
The hunger pains of German soldiers in the Kessel were indeed bad, but others suffered far more. The 3,500 Russian prisoners of war in the camps at Voroponovo and Gumrak were dying at a rapidly accelerating rate. Several German officers were deeply shocked to discover during January that these prisoners were reduced to cannibalism, and made verbal reports. When Russian troops reached the camps at the end of January, the Soviet authorities claimed that only twenty men remained alive out of the original 3,500.
The spectacle which greeted the Russian soldiers—to judge by the film taken by newsreel cameras rushed to the spot—was at least as bad as those seen when the first Nazi death camps were reached. At Gumrak, Erich Weinert described the scene: ‘In a gully, we found a large heap of corpses of Russian prisoners, almost without clothes, as thin as skeletons.’ The scenes, particularly those of the ‘Kriegsgefangen-Revier’ filmed at Voropovono, may have done much to harden the hearts of the Red Army towards the new defeated.
Many of the thousands of Hiwis still attached to German divisions were starving too. Girgensohn, after carrying out an autopsy on one corpse, told the German officer in charge that this particular Hiwi had indeed died of hunger. This diagnosis ‘left him completely astonished’. He claimed that his Hiwis received the same rations as German soldiers.
Many were treated quite well by their German officers, and there are numerous accounts demonstrating mutual trust during the last battle. But by then Russians in German uniform knew that they were doomed. There were no places for them on the aircraft flying out, and the encircling Soviet armies were accompanied by NKVD troops waiting to deal with them.
21. ‘Surrender Out of the Question’
The front out in the steppe had been comparatively quiet during the first week in January. Most of the time, there had been little more than the dull crack of a sniper’s rifle, the odd burst of machine-gun fire, and the distant whistle at night of a signal flare going up: altogether what a lieutenant called ‘the usual melody of the front’. After the broadcast and leaflet drops on 9 January, German soldiers knew that the final offensive was imminent. Sentries, shivering uncontrollably, had an even stronger reason to stay awake.
One soldier remarked to a chaplain on his rounds just before the offensive: ‘Just a little bit more bread, Herr Pfarrer, then come what may.’ But the bread ration had just been reduced to seventy-five grams. They all knew that they would have to face the Soviet onslaught weak from hunger and disease and with little ammunition, even if they did not entirely understand the reason.
There was both a fatalism—‘one spoke about death just like about a breakfast’—yet also a will to believe. Ordinary soldiers believed the stories of the SS Panzer Corps and reinforcements landing by air. In the 297th Infantry Division, soldiers continued to be convinced, ‘that the relief force has already reached Kalach… the Grossdeutschland and the Leibstandarte divisions’. A star shell seen to the west was instantly interpreted as a signal from them. Even junior officers were misinformed by their superiors, as a lieutenant told his NKVD interrogator. Right into the first week of January, his regimental commander in the 371st Infantry Division was still telling them: ‘Help is close.’ The shock was great when they heard ‘through informal sources’ (presumably Luftwaffe personnel) about the failure of the attempt to rescue them and Army Group Don’s retreat to the west.
18
The examples published in an anonymous collection entitled