Enemy at the Gates (4 page)

Those Germans who had protested the killings were ignored. Nothing interfered with the campaign of extermination. Nearly a million people died before Friedrich von Paulus assumed control and ended the genocide—at least in his sector—by rescinding both the Commissar and Severity Orders.

As commander of the Sixth Army, Paulus was victorious in his first major battle when, in May, the Russians had tried to upset German plans at Kharkov by attacking first. The Sixth Army was instrumental in rallying the Wehrmacht from near disaster and trapping more than two hundred thousand Russians in a giant envelopment. Congratulations poured in from old comrades, some of whom now assiduously courted his favor. It was clear to them that he was marked for greater responsibilties within the German Army's High Command. Later, when Operation Blue appeared to be sweeping the Russians away like chaff in the wind, Paulus's career expectations assumed even more gigantic proportions. Still fastidious, always the epitome of the cool, thinking machine, he traveled the barren steppe, seeking a last confrontation with the enemy.

An excellent cadre of staff officers made the task of running Sixth Army immeasurably easier. The chief of staff, Gen. Arthur Schmidt, was new but, like Paulus, he was a master of the smallest detail and promised to take much of that tedious work load upon himself. A thin-faced man with bulging eyes and a sharply pointed chin, Schmidt did not fit the traditional mold for German staff officers. Born in Hamburg to a merchant family, he had served in World War I as a soldier. Afterward he stayed through the convulsions of postwar politics and emerged as an officer under Hitler's reborn Reichswehr.

He was autocratic, overbearing, and had a nasty habit of interrupting conversations when the subject bored him. Many of- Ilcers disliked his imperious manner. Some resented his rapid rise in rank and responsibility, but as he assumed his job under Paulus, Schmidt ignored his critics. Sharply different in temperament and tastes, the two men thought alike on military matters. As a result, the Sixth Army was functioning like a smoothly running watch.

Then there were the field commanders, including such men as Gen. Waither Heitz, head of the Eighth Corps, a "bull," who had been in charge of the funeral procession for Chancellor Hindenburg, and now was a veteran professional who enjoyed soldiering and fox hunting. Walther Seydlitz-Kurzbach, of the Fifty-first Corps, the infantry arm of the army, was the stubborn, white-haired scion of a noble family in Prussia, a highly competent tactician, and only the fifty-fourth German to earn the coveted Oak Leaves to the Knighthood of the Iron Cross. Edler von Daniel, a hard-drinking womanizer, had been brought from peaceful occupation duty in Normandy to lead the
295th
Division. Hans Hube, a severely wounded veteran of World War I and the only one-armed general in the German Army, had persevered to become commander of the famous 16th Panzer Division, now hurrying to forge a link around the Russians at the Don. Hube was known as
"Der Mensch"
("The Man") to his troops.

Thus Sixth Army was a model of military brilliance, and in his camper, Friedrich von Paulus reflected on the good fortunes of past weeks and wrote an effusive letter to a friend in Germany, ". . . We've advanced quite a bit and have left Kharkov 500 kilometers behind us. The great thing now is to hit the Russian so hard a crack that he won't recover for a very long time. . .

In his enthusiasm, Paulus neglected to mention several nagging concerns. The dysentery he had first picked up in the Balkans during World War I was plaguing him. And on the strategy level, his left flank was worrisome. There, well to the north along the line of the tortuous upper Don, the armies of the satellite nations —Hungary, Italy, and Rumania—were struggling to hold the left flank while Sixth Army moved east. He was relying heavily on the strength of these puppet forces to blunt any enemy attack coming from that direction.

The armies Paulus worried about were moving slowly. Farthest toward the northwest, soldiers of the Hungarian Second Army had begun to dig in along the upper Don. To their right, men of the Italian Eighth Army were preparing to occupy a long stretch of looping river line running toward the east. The Italians not only had been given the job of containing any Russian threat from across the river, they also served as a buffer between the Hungarians and the Rumanian Third Army, which was to hold the territory from Serafimovich to Kletskaya deep in the steppe. Thc German High Command had inserted the Italians between the other two armies to avoid conflict between ancient enemies, who might forget the Russians and go at each other's throats.

That rivalry was hardly an auspicious omen. It underlined the Germans' desperate manpower situation, for the three satellite armies had been brought together in a haphazard manner. The Hungarian and Rumanian forces were staffed mostly by political officers who were unschooled in warfare. Both armies were riddled by corruption and inefficiency. The lowly soldier had it worst of all. Poorly led and poorly fed, he endured outrageous privations. Officers whipped enlisted men on the merest whim. When action got dangerous, many officers simply went home. One private wrote his family that even his priest had deserted in a moment of crisis. Worse, they were equipped with antiquated weapons: antitank guns were almost nonexistent; rifles were of World War I vintage.

Many similar conditions prevailed in the Italian Army. Dragooned into service far from their homeland, wary of the bond between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist state, the troopers grumbled unhappily as they marched through shattered Russian towns and villages. These men had not come on any crusade for
lebensraum
("space for living"); they moved toward the Don because Benito Mussolini bargained for Hitler's favor with the bodies of his soldiers.

The Italians had sent their best units into the Soviet Union. Proud military names such as the Julia, Bersaglieri, Cosseria, Torino, Alpini, graced the shoulder patches of troops struggling through the enervating heat. Their fathers had fought along the Piave and Isonzo rivers against the Austrians during World War I, and Ernest Hemingway immortalized their battles in
A Farewell to Arms.

Some of the Italian soldiers questioned the reasons they were fighting for the Nazi cause. At a railroad siding in Warsaw, twentyone- year-old Lt. Veniero Marsan had seen its harsh realities for the first time. From a train window, he watched a long line of civilians passing by. Apathetic, forlorn, each wore the yellow Star of David. Then Marsan saw the cruel-faced guards with guns, cocked and ready to fire. A chill rippled along his spine and, long after his train had rocked on into Russia, he brooded about what he had witnessed.

For other Italians, the expedition into the steppe had different connotations. Crack Alpini soldiers guided mules along and kept their mountain-climbing gear under canvas. The nearest mountains were in the Caucasus, far to the south, and Hitler had decided to conquer them without the Italians. Shaking their heads in amazement, the elite Alpini trudged along the flat plains wondering why they were in Russia at all.

But twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Felice Bracci was delighted with the great adventure. He had always wanted to explore the steppe country of Russia, to gaze on its timeless beauty. A recent university graduate, Bracci joined the Young Fascist League and went from there directly into Mussolini's army.

In his first battles in Albania, he was wounded and decorated for defending an outpost. When offered the choice of going to Libya or Russia, the decision was difficult to make: he wanted desperately to see the pyramids. Finally choosing the steppe, he now led a company of men eastward to the Don.

Dr. Cristoforo Capone did not share Bracci's cultural interests, but that mattered little. He, too, was pleased to be part of the Russian expedition. The seventh of nine children, he was the "rogue" in his family. Constantly good humored, he delighted everyone who met him. In his division, the Torino, the prankster, was easily the most popular man among soldiers trying to conquer homesickness.

When the news came of the birth of his first daughter, Capone got permission for a month's leave. With a last joke and a smile, the happy doctor waved goodbye to his friends and left the line of march for a reunion in Salerno. He hoped to be back in time for the finish of the "walkover" campaign.

In the meantime, his comrades plunged doggedly ahead, dragging their antiquated cannon and rifles, singing songs of Sorrento and the sunlight. On their hats they wore bright green-and-red cockades; in their hearts they longed for home.

Chapter Two

Deep in a Ukrainian pine forest, outside the town of Vinnitsa and five hundred miles west of the German troops near the Don—on the same morning that Friedrich von Paulus wrote glowingly of the future to a friend—Adolf Hitler climbed the steps of a log cabin and swept into a starkly furnished conference room. Seating himself on an iron chair at the head of a map table with his back to a window, he listened carefully to the latest intelligence reports as they were explained by his chief of staff, the bespectacled, trimly mustachioed, Gen. Franz Halder.

The meticulous Halder had no love for the man he served. He acted deferentially toward his Führer and accepted frequent tirades with the calm of one resigned to his fate. Before and during the war, Halder had schemed with other officers to overthrow Hitler and replace him with a monarchy. The dissident group was too timid and vacillating to initiate the coup, however, and watched passively as the German Army scored triumph after triumph under Hitler's almost mystical leadership. By the summer of 1942, Halder was a captive in thrall to a despot.

For weeks, though, he had reminded Hitler that the signs of Russian disintegration were illusory, that the enemy was not
"kaputt."
Halder believed that the campaign in the previous winter had bled Germany white. The equivalent of eighty divisions, nearly eight hundred thousand men, were buried beneath the soil of Russia. Despite carefully doctored tables of strength, the majority of the German divisions were 50 percent under strength. And while more than a million besieged Russian civilians had starved to death during the nightmarish winter of 1941, Leningrad still clung to life. Moscow also remained as the nerve center of the Soviet state. Of more significance, the oil fields in the Caucasus pumped life-giving petroleum products to the Soviet war machine.

As a result, Hitler had become obsessed with the importance of petroleum products to a mechanized state, and he had devised Operation Blue expressly to strangle Russia's oil production and, thereby, her potential to wage modern war. To promote the offensive, he had flown to Poltava on June 1, and, surrounded by deputies such as Paulus, he put on a brilliant oratorical display that mesmerized everyone. Predictably, the generals failed to make any rebuttal to his proposal, which completely ignored German shortages in manpower and equipment and concentrated only on the abysmal state of the Red Army.

Thus, Operation Blue had begun when the Fourth Panzer Army struck on June 28, due east toward the rail junction of Voronezh. Two days later, Paulus's Sixth Army followed suit, covering the Fourth Army's right flank and engaging Russian forces pulling back in disorder. Almost immediately, the Fourth Army ran into difficulties. Originally, Hitler planned to bypass Voronezh in hopes of trapping the Soviet armies on the open plains. But when German armor easily penetrated the outskirts and commanders radioed for permission to seize the rest of the city, Hitler vacillated, leaving the decision to Army Group B's commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Amazed at being given a choice, Bock hesitated briefly, then sent two tank divisions into Voronezh.

The Russians had rushed in reinforcements, quickly pinning the Germans down in savage street fighting, and soldiers in the Fourth Army soon referred to Voronezh as a "cursed town." Meanwhile, Hitler raged. The main Russian armies were slipping away, down a long corridor to the southeast between the Don and Donets rivers. Hitler demanded that Bock catch the Russians. The marshal tried, but the Russians withdrew rapidly, taking most of their trucks and tanks with them.

To General Halder, this successful withdrawal was ominous. It meant the Soviet High Command still was retreating according to plan. But once again, when he told Hitler his fears, the Führer laughed aloud. Arrogant in his belief that the Russians were reeling, confused, and ripe for slaughter, the Führer began to tinker with the delicate balance of his own forces. He separated the army groups, sending Group A off at a right angle into the Caucasus while Group B drove straight ahead across the steppe toward Stalingrad. Worse, Hitler stripped the Fourth Panzer Army from Group B and attached it to the Caucasus operation. That left Paulus's Sixth Army alone, driving on into the hostile depths of the Soviet Union.

By his action, Hitler had weakened each army group and left them vulnerable to Soviet counterstrokes. The move also caused consternation within German Army Headquarters. Halder could not believe the Führer would commit such a blunder. Stunned, he went to his quarters and poured his agonized feelings into his diary: “…The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions…Serious work is becoming impossible here. This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment…”

When Hitler pivoted an entire army across another's path, he had defied the military maxim that any interference with the delicate internal functions of a massed body of troops frequently leads to chaos. And on the steppe roads of Russia, the Sixth Army stopped dead while swarms of vehicles and men from the Fourth Panzer Army cut left to right across its line of advance. Enormous traffic jams developed. Tanks of one army mingled with those of the other; supply trucks got lost in a maze of contradictory signposts and directions handed out by irate military policemen. Worse, the Fourth Army took the bulk of the oil and gasoline meant to fuel both armies.