Europe Central (65 page)

Then came the teeming red arrows of Russian advances, the tiny blue circles of German, Romanian and Italian divisions overwhelmed by vast new tank armies.

Our defensive line is broken, Herr Lieutenant-General!

He touched his cheek in disbelief.

Romanian Third Army’s on the run, sir!

Inform the OKW, said Paulus.

Herr Lieutenant-General, the Führer has personally ordered Forty-eighth Panzer to stabilize the line . . .

They all looked away, for an order like that was an insult to him, a vote of no confidence. He was thinking: Poor Coca must never know of this.

Good, he quietly said. I’d like you to send a message to General Heim . . .

By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General!

Where’s Seventh Romanian Corps right now?

At Pronin, Herr Lieutenant-General.

So if they link up with Twenty-second Panzer—

Sir, Perelazovskii has fallen!

I don’t understand why we failed to hold Perelazovskii, said Paulus. Try again to reach General Heim.

Herr Lieutenant-General, Twenty-second Panzer’s falling back—

But Seventh Romanian should have—

Excuse me, Herr Lieutenant-General, but here’s a message from Army Group B Headquarters . . .

Well, well, said Paulus, putting his glasses on. Evidently we’re expected to take radical measures.

Herr Lieutenant-General, Sixth Romanian Corps has surrendered.

All of them?

Herr Lieutenant-General, I—

Herr Lieutenant-General, we’ve positively identified Thirteenth Soviet Tank Corps coming north—

They weren’t supposed to be in our sector at all, he lectured them, and they fell silent.

Where’s our Twenty-ninth Motorized? Not far from Nariman, I suppose . . .

We’ve lost contact, Herr Lieutenant-General.

Herr Lieutenant-General, the Romanians refuse to—

Herr Lieutenant-General, what should—

Where’s Schmidt?

Sir, he’s—

Herr Lieutenant-General, contact broken with—

Herr Lieutenant-General, Sixty-fifth Soviet Army has sliced open our flank!

He opened his silver cigarette-case and told them: Keep calm, please.

But, Herr Lieutenant-General, we’re being pushed back over here!

Said Paulus: Against all your objections I speak two words:
Adolf Hitler.

14

According to the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
whose thirty-one volumes contain the entire sum of useful knowledge,
encirclement is most often achieved when the enemy defense is broken through in two or more sectors of the front and the attack develops along converging axes. As a result, a solid internal front and an active external front are created, cutting the surrounded grouping off from the remainder of its forces.
The Soviet tank brigades, shock armies, cavalry corps and ski battalions had accomplished this, and now the ring was hardening just as ice does: a delicate skin at first, as easy to crack as sugar-glazing. Paulus, his eyes now sunken deep behind the thick, almost Slavic brows, realized that the enemy spearheads would probably meet at Kalach. He possessed no reserves to stop them. On the other hand, they’d already lost a hundred tanks. Perhaps they were finished.

On 21.11.42 the encirclement of Stalingrad was complete. He calmly requested two Fiesler-Storch airplanes to convey himself and Major-General Schmidt to Nizhne-Chirskaya, where General Hoth would be instructed to meet them. He instructed his aides to begin burning documents. Then he ordered Eleventh Army Corps to retreat across the Don into the center of the pocket, which they did, using Russian prisoners to pull the ammunition-carts and shooting them when they could pull no more. According to his reports, more Russians, white-clad Russians, were already running across the black-smeared snow, five armies of them; and they had linked up at Sovietsky and were digging in. Soon it would be too late. A bluish-jawed Russian with a star on his cap opened his mouth in a scream of joyous hatred as the Katyushas went off . . .

As the plane became airborne, he gazed out the window and saw Russian troops attempting with laughable fanaticism to bring him down with small arms. Their muzzle-flashes winked like mica. Major-General Schmidt shook a finger at them and winked. Then a zone of yellowish cloud took Stalingrad away, and Paulus closed his eyes, pretending to sleep so that he would not need to look at Schmidt. He could not help remembering that June day in Poltava when he’d promised the Führer that Sixth Army would carry out its assignment. He’d never become a Field-Marshal now.

At Nizhne-Chirskaya, pensive R-maidens, whose hair was as delicious as the Ukraine’s flax and buckwheat, took his spare uniform away to be pressed, and when he had finished his bath they brought freshly laundered white gloves for him to wear for when he bent over the conference table, overgazing the most recent aerial reconnaissance photographs from Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B. After awhile, he realized that the photographs were old and out of date. There was no indication at all of the enemy troop movements, not even any prefiguration of it, although that might have been due to their excellent winter camouflage. At the far end of the room, Major-General Schmidt was on the telephone to Eighth Air Corps, demanding resupply. And now Paulus rose to exchange greetings with General Hoth, wrinkled, shaveheaded General Hoth whose oakleaf collar was always buttoned up tight.

Our main task, instructed Paulus, must now be to destroy the opposing tanks.

But that was already long past possible, due to the Russians’ superior capacity for tank production.

He asked General Hoth what he could do, but General Hoth could do nothing.

What about Sixteenth Motorized?

Didn’t you hear? They buried their tanks for warmth, and fieldmice ate all the wires!

Everyone advised him to recommend a breakout to the Führer, before it was too late.

In that case, he said to them, more than ten thousand wounded and most of our heavy weapons would have to be written off. And then what? First we give up Stalingrad; then we recapitulate Napoleon’s retreat. Surely you remember your history, gentlemen. He started with four hundred thousand men. When he left Moscow he had a hundred thousand. That’s attrition for you. Then the retreat. He got to Poland with ten thousand . . .

We’re supposed to counterattack, they insisted.

Who told you that?

I heard that our Führer himself—

But Major-General Schmidt was on the telephone again. Army Group B no longer possessed any force for counterattack.

General Hoth wondered aloud whether Army Group A could relieve them, at which Paulus was compelled to indicate in a single sweep of his map-hand the breadth of the Kalmyk Steppes.

The bitter facts which were pressing in on him from all sides could not be gainsaid, although he’d spoken against retreat, partly because so drastic a decision must first be considered at length and partly in order to express his confidence in our Führer, who was already accusing
him
of cowardice for flying out, so he’d heard. His immediate return to Sixth Army was demanded. He was to organize a hedgehog defense and await further orders. Field-Marshal von Manstein was to command the new Army Group Don. (Coca rather liked his wife Jutta-Sibylle.) For now, any breakout was forbidden. Voronezh and Stalingrad were our two strongpoints in this zone. Both of them must be held to the death. They said to Paulus: The Führer’s instructed the Ministry of Aviation to supply you with all resources . . .—General Heim, who’d done no wrong, was arrested and condemned to death, although his colleagues later saved him. Incensed and shamed by these imputations—in fact he felt like one of those medieval criminals who’d been condemned to being pulled apart by four horses; which way could he go? what could he do?—but betraying nothing, if we exclude the twitching of his face, Paulus strapped himself into the Fiesler-Storch, accompanied by a present from General Hoth: red Romanian wine and a case of Veuve Clicquot from Paris. He was too good for these people.—Are you ready, Herr Lieutenant-General? Evasive action time! It may be a bit bumpy . . .—These Luftwaffe pilots certainly deserved the green ribbon for bravery! He wished that he could decorate them all. Seeing into the future as effortlessly as ever, he worried about Sixth Army’s long-term fuel situation: Petrol gives us not only warmth, but mobility. Schmidt was staring at him; he turned away. Now here came the river Aksay’s long, narrow valley-lips, the river itself frozen over, then the four-meter snowdrifts he knew so well, the yellow-grey sky, the lengthy black lines of frozen trucks in the whiteness of Gumrak’s runway, grey tents in the snow, the railroad station which was now Stalingrad HQ (for Golubinskaya, the headquarters he’d flown out of yesterday, was now in enemy hands), the encircled army frozen in time like silver-armored knights in a museum, all knight-flesh long since rotted away from inside the armor. The
surgeon said that several dozen men had developed frostbite gangrene in the folds of the eyelids.—Thank you, said Paulus. You may go.—He summoned all his staff officers to analyze the dispositions of the enemy’s strike groups. After that, they pored over the perfect black glossiness of Paulus’s formations superimposed on the half-real grey map, which never depicted enemy troops. First defense, then preparations for breakout; that was how it had to be done. The outer line was to be forward of Kotel’niko. As soon as it became clear what he must do next, he’d have to exert himself to the utmost. His fingertips felt very cold within the white gloves, and his mouth was dry. He needed to save himself for the moment of decision, but when would that moment come? For the sake of his own evenness of mind, on which the outcome depended, he tried to repel all recollections of our Führer’s criticism, but then it came back, the filthy shame, as if he were a boy again and his father the bookkeeper had caught him masturbating; all he could do was try to convince himself that very likely the Führer hadn’t given his own accusations any further thought; everybody knew that the Führer’s temper had been growing worse ever since Moscow.

Paulus felt unsure of himself. But Sixth Army was still conditionally fit. The air stank of cigarettes.

After all, said Major-General Schmidt, it was the Romanians who let the enemy break through. What can you expect from that Slavicized trash? The Führer’s expecting us Germans to step in and do our duty.—In fact, there was not much to do but wait for our Führer and Field-Marshal von Manstein, and they all knew it.

Never mind, they kept telling each other, trying to maintain the correct attitude. Every cadet knows that defense is the strongest form of fighting.

Our will—

But where did all those operational groupings come from?

What do you mean, where did they come from? Russia’s infinite, you idiot!

If we only harden ourselves enough—

... Or else the enemy will break through to Europe!

... Struggle as the precondition of higher development . . .

As soon as von Manstein—

He doesn’t care about us.

Who doesn’t?

You know.

On the contrary, I can assure you that he cares almost too much.
Mein Kampf
proves it beyond any doubt. It’s because he has a horror of witnessing your suffering—

They sincerely tried to be brave, in much the same way that a meager-faced
-man awaits his capture and murder at the hands of cigarette-smoking Kazakh horsemen.

Reddish clouds of sunset dirt settled over the frozen ruins. He served the champagne all around. This was now Fortress Stalingrad, our Führer said. It would be their destiny to recapitulate the suffering of the Russians at Leningrad. They invoked the German cornfields, coal mines and refineries which would soon rise out of this barrenness, all bunkered behind a massive Ostwall, in the service of which he raised the matter of village-based strong pockets. Now, the bubbles going to their heads, they cried that they wanted to break out at once, but Lieutenant-General Paulus made it clear that he accepted the Führer’s decision.—I can’t give up, he said in one of his rare, gentle jests. You see, I’m as stubborn as a Westphalian!—The Führer had doubted his bravery, and so he could never break out now. If we want to understand the sort of person he was, we might compare him to Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, who in Field-Marshal von Manstein’s opinion was
not belonging to quite the same class as Baron von Fritsch, Beck, von Rundstedt, von Bock and Ritter von Leeb.