Stalingrad

was beyond them. In many cases, however, the lack of food led not to apathy but to crazed illusions, like those of ancient mystics who heard voices through malnutrition.

It is impossible to assess the numbers of suicides or deaths resulting from battle stress. Examples in other armies, as already mentioned, rise dramatically when soldiers are cut off, and no army was more beleaguered than the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Men raved wildly in their bunks, some lay there howling. Many, during a manic burst of activity, had to be overpowered or knocked senseless by their comrades. Some soldiers feared breakdown and madness in others as if it were contagious. But the greatest alarm was provoked when a sick comrade had dilated nostrils and black lips and the whites of his eyes turned pink. The fear of typhus seemed curiously atavistic, almost as if it were a medieval plague.

The sense of approaching death could also stimulate an intense awareness of all that they were about to lose. Tough men dreamed feverishly of images of home, and wept silently at the idea of never seeing wife or children again. More reflective characters re-examined memories, or studied the world about them, especially their comrades, with a new interest. Some even had enough emotion left to feel sorry for the starving horses gnawing desperately at a piece of wood.

For the first week or ten days in January, before the Soviet offensive broke, men tried not to let their true degree of wretchedness show in letters home. ‘I received a quarter litre of vodka and thirteen cigarettes for the New Year,’ wrote a soldier called Willy to his parents in a letter which never reached them, ‘but all the food I’ve got now is a piece of bread. I’ve never missed you more than today when we were singing the “Wolgalied”. I’m sitting in a cage here — it’s not made of gold but of the Russian encirclement.’ Many soldiers camouflaged the truth even further. ‘We can only count upon the fact that spring will start soon,’ a soldier called Seppel wrote home. ‘The weather is still bad, but the main thing is to be healthy and have a good stove. The Christmas holidays passed well.’ Others, however, did not try to conceal their feelings: ‘The only thing left to me is to think about the three of you,’ a soldier wrote to his wife and children.

Some desperate to escape considered self-inflicted wounds. Those who went through with it did not just risk execution. Even if no suspicions were aroused, they risked death from their own action. A light flesh wound was not enough to earn a flight out of the Kessel. A shot through the right hand was too obvious, and with so few soldiers left in the front line, the wound had to be disabling if they were to be released from combat duties. But once the final Soviet advance began, even ‘a light wound which hindered movement, practically signified death’.

From early January, an increasing number of German soldiers began to surrender without resistance or even to desert to the enemy. Deserters tended to be infantrymen at the front, partly because they had more opportunity. There were also cases of officers and soldiers who refused evacuation, out of bravery and an almost obsessive sense of duty. Lieutenant Lobbecke, the commander of a company of tanks in 16th Panzer Division, had lost an arm in the fighting, but soldiered on without having the wound properly treated. His divisional commander could not persuade him to go for treatment. Eventually, General Strecker got hold of him.

‘I request permission to stay with my men,’ Lobbecke said immediately. ‘I cannot leave them now when the fighting is so desperate.’ Strecker, presumably from the smell, realized that the stump of Lobbecke’s arm was putrefying. He had to order him on to an aircraft out of the Kessel to a base hospital.

For the truly incapacitated, the only hope of evacuation back to a field hospital was by sled or in an ambulance. Their drivers were already recognized as ‘steering-wheel heroes’, because of the very high casualty rate. A moving vehicle — and ambulances were among the very few allowed any fuel — immediately attracted Russian ground fire or air attack.

Walking wounded and sick made their own way to the rear through the snow. Many stopped to rest and never rose again. Others arrived in spite of appalling wounds or advanced frostbite. ‘One day somebody knocked at our bunker,’ remembered a Luftwaffe lieutenant at Pitomnik. ‘Outside stood an older man, a member of the Organisation Todt engaged on road repair. Both his hands were so badly swollen from frostbite that he would never be able to use them again.’

Reaching the general hospital by the airfield was still far from a guarantee of evacuation or even treatment in the large tents, which did little to keep out the cold. Wounds and frostbite represented only a small part of the workload, which threatened to overwhelm doctors. There was a jaundice epidemic, dysentery and all the other sicknesses, accentuated by undernourishment and often dehydration, since there was no fuel to melt the snow. The wounded were also far more exposed to Soviet air attack than they had been at the front. ‘Every half-hour Russian aircraft attacked the airfield,’ reported a corporal later. ‘Many comrades who were just about to be saved, having been loaded into aircraft, and were waiting to take off, lost their lives at the very last moment.’

The evacuation by air of the wounded and sick was just as unpredictable as the incoming supply flights. On three days, 19 and 20 December and 4 January, over a thousand were taken on each occasion, but the overall average, including days when no flights were possible, between 23 November and 20 January came to 417.

Selection for the aircraft was not made by the severity of wounds. It developed into a ruthless triage due to the shortage of aircraft space. ‘Only the lightly wounded, those able to move themselves, could hope to get away,’ recounted an officer courier. ‘There was enough room for only about four stretchers inside a Heinkel fuselage, but you could pack in nearly twenty walking wounded. So if you had been severely hit, or were so sick that you could not move, you were as good as dead.’ Luck, however, could still intervene. By pulling rank, this officer managed to get an infantry non-commissioned officer, who had been lying at the airfield for three days with a bullet lodged in his back, on to his aircraft. ‘How this man had got to the airfield, I never knew.’ He also pulled another NCO, an elderly man with a high fever, on board.

The Feldgendarmerie, hated by the troops and known as the ‘chain dogs’ because of the metal crescent gorget, hung on a chain, which they wore round their necks, guarded access to the runway, checking papers minutely to make sure that no malingerers got through. As hope of escape diminished in January, they resorted more and more to their sub-machine-guns to hold back the wounded and malingerers.

Many more wounded fitted into the giant, four-engined Focke-Wulf Condors, of which a few were used from the second week of January. They were, however, exceptionally vulnerable if overloaded. One sergeant in the 9th Flak Division watched the lumbering acceleration of a Condor on to which two of his wounded comrades had just been loaded. As the aircraft rose steeply after take-off to gain height, the helpless human cargo inside must have shifted or rolled towards the back, because the tail suddenly dropped. The engines screamed as the nose pointed almost vertically into the sky, then the whole aircraft fell back to the ground just beyond the perimeter and exploded in a fireball with a ‘deafening sound’.

Further out, soldiers at the west end of the Kessel witnessed the fate of Junkers transports, knowing full well that their heavy outbound loads consisted of wounded comrades. Often these aircraft ‘could not gain height quickly enough and ran into heavy flak, thus coming to a terrible end. I saw from my trench on several occasions this apocalyptic fate and was very, very depressed.’

As well as flying out wounded, couriers and certain specialists, the aircraft still brought in some officers and men who had gone on leave just before the Kessel was closed. Because of the news blackout in Germany, many of them had no idea of what had happened in their absence until their train reached Kharkov. Manstein’s aide, Alexander Stahlberg, described how his twenty-one-year-old cousin by marriage, Gottfried von Bismarck, arrived at Army Group Don headquarters at Novocherkassk on 2 January after Christmas leave at home in Pomerania. He had received an order to fly into the Kessel to rejoin the 76th Infantry Division. Manstein, on discovering the circumstances, invited him to his table for dinner, where conversation was unrestrained. Both Manstein and Stahlberg greatly admired the way the young man, with no complaint, upheld the Potsdam tradition of the 9th Infantry Regiment by returning to a lost battle, not for Hitler, but out of a Prussian devotion to duty. Bismarck himself, however, put it in less glorious terms. ‘I was a soldier, I had received an order and was obliged to accept the consequences.’

General Hube, when he returned to the Kessel on 9 January, the eve of the Soviet offensive, told Paulus and Schmidt that Hitler simply refused to acknowledge the possibility of defeat at Stalingrad. He had not listened to his account of conditions in the Kessel, instead he had tried to convince him that a second relief attempt might well be brought forward.

Some of Hube’s officers were downcast that he, of all people, seemed to have been taken in by one of Hitler’s performances of mesmerizing optimism — the ‘sun-ray cure’. ‘I was deeply disappointed’, recorded Hube’s