Europe Central (70 page)

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On 29.1.43, a signal rushed to Berlin: To the Führer! The Sixth Army greets their Führer on the anniversary of your seizure of power. The swastika yet flies over Stalingrad. Heil mein Führer! PAULUS.

On 30.1.43 the daily briefing said:
6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks against the N. and S. fronts of the southern pocket. 3 enemy tanks destroyed by shooting.

In the official Soviet accounts, he was captured by Sixty-fourth Army, under General M. S. Shumylov. He surrendered on 31.1.43, the day after the Führer had promoted him to Field-Marshal. (To General Pfieffer he is alleged to have treasonously said: I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.) Then he withdrew into a private room while his underlings negotiated the surrender. When that was completed, he ascended the stairs, flanked by a line of grinning Slavic boys in hooded white jackets. A German eyewitness writes:
Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes.
Outside, the Allied press was ready, and photographed Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus in his greatcoat plodding neatly through the snow. Major-General Schmidt was whispering in his ear: Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.—He didn’t have to go very far. They directed him to his own staff car, which carried him to headquarters, after which the car, a Mercedes just like his daughter Olga’s, was confiscated in the name of the people. Gunshots popped as gaily as champagne corks; they were shooting his Hiwis as they found them. In the Pioneer barracks they were already incinerating the wounded.

Paulus was now a slender, grey-stubbled cipher, his hat low over his downcast eyes.

He found himself in a peasant house. There was a warm fire. The enemy generals inspected him with self-congratulatory curiosity while he bowed and clicked his heels. In the doorway, a big bald Russian was filming him with a movie camera. The Russian’s jacket was filthy, oil-stained from the look of it. For some reason, this was particularly horrible to him. On the other hand, his own gloves were dirty. He stared at the wall.

First they demanded to know why Hitler hadn’t flown him out. They said that none of
them
would ever have been left to an enemy’s mercies.

I believe you’ve forgotten General Vlasov, he told them. He’s been working with us since last July.

That louse!

Doubtless you know him better than I, he said.

Anyhow, you still haven’t explained why your so-called “Führer” abandoned you.

It’s the tradition in our army, he patiently explained, for the officer in command to share the fate of his troops.

Well, we appreciate that inspiring lesson, Herr Field-Marshal! And you deserve our gratitude on another score, too. Thanks to you, we now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga; rest assured we’ll put it to use!

Realizing that they mocked him (which indeed was no less than he had expected), he kept silent.

They instructed him to order the remainder of his army to surrender.

Calmly he replied: That would be unworthy of a soldier!

They laughed their ugly Russian laughs, and one of them, a particularly nasty Slav who looked as if he were ready to spit in Paulus’s face, grinned and grinned, his teeth stained brownish-yellow like a Jewish corpse, and then this Slav demanded: How can it be possible to claim that saving the lives of your subordinates is unworthy of a soldier, when you yourself have surrendered?

I did not surrender, he corrected them. I was caught by surprise.

Well, well. Anyhow, we are speaking of a humanitarian act.

Even if I did sign any such order, they would ignore it, since by surrendering I have automatically ceased to be their commander.

Such logic, Herr General Field-Marshal!

They were exactly as his nightmares had depicted them: insolent, menacing, unswayed by argument. (We’ll find a way to deal with him, said Comrade Stalin.) One of them, a rather woebegone little lad, seemed dreamily familiar. Just as the German face is thinner and more expressive than the Slavic, more sensitive, so Paulus could not help but let his soul shine through, his inner anxiety, the desire to maintain a decent appearance which he’d always had. And he understood all too well that as of this instant forever afterwards he must hide his pain away, out of loyalty to himself; that in place of his white gloves he could only don a stony look; he’d freeze; he’d harden himself; he’d show them nothing. Wishing that he had fulfilled the Führer’s final expectation, Paulus told them: I must reiterate my refusal.

And I in turn must inform
you,
Herr General Field-Marshal, that by your refusal to save your own soldiers’ lives you are incurring a grave responsibility toward the German people and the future of Germany.

Turning his face back to the wall, he once again became as silent and stiff as a corpse caught in electrified wire.

The hold-outs in the northern pocket (Eleventh Corps) surrendered anyhow, of course, on 2.2.43; and we next see them in their frostbitten hordes, stonefaced, despairing or shyly smiling at the Soviet supermen in white who hurried them on to Siberia, shooting stragglers on either side. For years, long dark double lines of them remained at work in Stalingrad’s ruined squares. They learned to be very good at burying corpses. Almost all would perish from exposure, starvation, typhus, neglect and cruelty. (I’ve lost track of what happened to a certain Schmundt, who’d kept advising him: We must become more fanatical, sir. Major-General Schmidt, however, remained loyal to our Führer to the very end, which is why he got twenty-five years in a labor camp.) If they had anything at all to look forward to, it would have been the brisk, commanding, yet not entirely compassionless behavior of the Slavic female, especially of the woman official. Even Paulus clicked his heels, kissed the woman doctor’s hand. (Socialism would obliterate all such national traits, but of course that would take time.) A few of them, the strong, technically inclined workers already preconditioned to obedience, did rather well as foremen in the Arctic construction battalions.

Paulus, weary and thin, joined the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Why not? The Führer had already said: That’s the last Field-Marshal I shall appoint in this war.
³⁶
—Gazing down at the brass pen-stand in his interrogator’soffice, trying not to think of what Field-Marshal von Manstein would say, he joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. They were correct with him, for they respected his talents. Some of them even congratulated him on having once bested General Timoshenko at Kharkov. Clicking his heels, he bowed, smiling woodenly. They were very gentle with the former Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus. He wondered how he ever could have believed that anybody might defeat the Soviet Union, which stood for the people. (Two months after his surrender, the Stalingrad Tractor Works had already been reconstructed sufficiently to commence tank repair operations.) Soon he’d become a committed Marxist-Leninist. He now saw that national questions, if indeed they were not entirely spurious, should always be subordinated to more general social questions.

They paraded him for more journalists. The
London Sunday Times
correspondent A. Werth wrote:
Paulus looked pale and sick, and had a nervous twitch in his left cheek. He had more natural dignity than the others, and wore only one or two decorations.

In Moscow there were photographs of Stalin and Beria in the interrogation room, Bokhara rugs on the floor. They gave him a whole pack of cigarettes. He sat at the little table screwed to the floor in his cell in the Lubyanka and earnestly thought through the best way to do as he had been told. For this reason, and because of his value as a captured chessman, he never had to discover very much about the Kolyma gold mines, the quarries where German prisoners got worked to death, the three ration categories, the pleasures of logging fir-trees in exchange for squares of dirty bread. They put him and twenty of his generals on a special train which carried them to a very soft camp in Krasnogorsk. This train, well, it wasn’t quite as nice as the Führer’s, which is completely composed of welded steel; on the other hand, it was warm. For the time being, he even got to keep his silver cigarette case. Later he was sent to Susdal, then to Voykovo Camp Forty-eight. A wise old convict said: Even a miserable life is better than death—but nobody ever said that to the last Field-Marshal, who was treated even better than a high status
urka
criminal. (Our Führer promised to court-martial him after the war, because he hadn’t shot himself. Our Führer said: What hurts me the most personally is that I went on and promoted him Field-Marshal. Our Führer said: So many men have to die and then a man like this comes along and at the last moment besmirches the heroism of so many others.)

Had he been anybody else, they would have torn up Coca’s photograph in one of the searches; and had he protested, a guard would have chucklingly twisted his ear and said: Nice-looking woman! Don’t worry. Russians have already had her.—As it was, he got to keep her likeness until the very end, although it’s true that he never saw her again. They informed him that the Gestapo had invited her to divorce him and change her name; but she’d remained true to him; she’d chosen the concentration camp. (No doubt they’d hinted at the other choice she should have taken, the one which would have pleased the Führer, who always admired our proud German women to whom honor remains more important than existence. Anyhow, she was only a Romanian.) The NKVD officers expressed satisfaction that Coca had followed the correct line. They had no information as to whether she was still alive.

They photographed him shaking hands with a Siberian ballerina who’d flown parachute troops behind his lines at Stalingrad. This is my fate, he said to himself. They photographed him addressing the Union of German Officers, whose members are now as irrelevant as those eighteenth century German princes with curled and powdered hair.

In February 1946 we find him sullen-eyed and pale, pretending with convict’s craft to gaze as openly as in the days before his ruin, when really his stare is pacing within the prison of his own skull, circumnavigating itself as he hunches there in the witness box at Nuremberg, gripping the headphones tight against his shriveled temples. The Russian prosecutors laughingly called him their
secret weapon,
so much did his sudden appearance astonish the court. (The others called him
the Ghost of Stalingrad.
)

Lieutenant-General Roman Rudenko demanded of him which of his former comrades (now glaring at him from the dock) had been active participants in initiating the war of imperialist aggression against the USSR (or, as his former employer would have called it, the Jewish-Asiatic Power). Calmly, unhesitatingly, Paulus named them all.

(I always took his side with the Führer, whispered “the nodding ass,” Field-Marshal Keitel, who was soon to be hanged.—What a shame for Paulus to be testifying against us!)

Rudenko next inquired, eager-eyed: Have I rightly concluded from your testimony that long before 22 June 1941 the Hitlerite government and the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces were planning an aggressive war against the Soviet Union?

Paulus stared at Rudenko’s two rows of shining buttons. He replied: That is beyond doubt according to all the developments as I described them and also in connection with all the directives issued.

In the back of the courtroom, his son Ernst, who looked very thin, was staring at him shyly and wretchedly.

The defense attorney, remembering Göring’s instructions
(Ask that dirty pig if he’s a traitor! Ask him if he’s taken out Russian citizenship papers . . .
), cleared his throat and inquired: What about you, Field-Marshal Paulus? If the aggressive nature of this war was beyond doubt, why did you participate?

Folding his head down against his chest, drawing in his shoulders like the wings of a bird at evening, the last Field-Marshal replied: I didn’t come to a full understanding of this issue until after Stalingrad, because, like most German officers, I saw nothing unusual in basing the fate of a people and a nation on power politics. As I conceived it, I was doing my duty to the Fatherland . . .

They escorted him out, and he pretended to gaze straight ahead but once again inturned his sight so as not to see those doomed defendants in the double-rowed dock, walled in by rigid, white-helmeted agents of victors’ justice. Had he won the battle of Stalingrad, he would have been sitting there, too; for any war against our Soviet Union must be a lost war. (That man is finished, remarked the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop. He has disgraced himself. —Of course, said General Jodl, who had once yawned during one of Paulus’s presentations at Wolf’s Lair. Coca had advised her husband to cut him dead.—He is all washed up, continued Jodl, but I can hardly blame him; he needs to save his neck.—Both defendants lost theirs.) Past the wavy, roofless facades of destroyed German houses, past the fragments of the city wall he floated, back to his Russian prison.

First Hitler, then Stalin. He remained honest to the working class which had forgiven and adopted him. After Stalin died in ’53, they let him go to Dresden, which was just beginning to establish its prestige in the electrical and optical industries.

On his first day of liberty there, he was walking with his now pronounced stoop, and he came to a concert in a bombed-out hall whose sooty and dismembered rococo nymphs clung to the walls as faithfully as corpses frozen into Russian roadways; and here, in a huddle of black dress suits, the musicians were playing a string quartet by a certain D. D. Shostakovich, said to have been a great favorite of the late Comrade Stalin’s. The last Field-Marshal stood politely smiling as he listened. He hated the dissonant harmonies, which reminded him less of melody than they did of war. The scores gleamed all the whiter against the players’ dark attire, like Alpine snowfields interrupted by rock-silhouettes; but the audience around them were grey and feeble, and across the street a dog’s carcass stank in a burned house. Eight years since the firestorm it had been, but in our Deutsche Demokratische Republik time passes more slowly, change being released in controlled and minuscule doses for the sake of our delicate personalities soon to be protected by the Berlin Wall. Every now and then, the rebuilders still came across relics which resembled Berlin’s time-blackened statues of Silesian sandstone. Over the musicians hung a sign adorned by a red star:
LANG LEBE STALIN !
and now the authorities dared neither to remove nor retain it; they must wait on Comrade Khruschev’s word.