Stalingrad

the hand not to bother, and handed over his shaving kit.

Shortly before midnight, Paulus was told that the Red Army commanders were now assembled and waiting to interview him. Lieutenant Yevgeny Tarabrin, the German-speaking NKVD officer sent to escort him everywhere, heard Paulus whisper to Schmidt, as he helped him into his overcoat: ‘What should I say?’

‘Remember you are a General Field Marshal of the German Army,’ Schmidt is said to have hissed back. More surprising, and most significant to the ears of Red Army intelligence, the Russian officer reported that Schmidt used the du intimate form of address to his superior.[19]

Only half an hour before the meeting began, Captain Dyatlenko of the NKVD received orders to report to the izba used by Marshal Voronov, who had just been promoted by Stalin. ‘So Captain,’ Voronov greeted him affably. ‘You no doubt remember the time the old man didn’t want to receive you. Well, now he’s visiting us himself. And you’re going to receive him.’

Voronov was sitting at the table with General Rokossovsky, the front commander, and General K. F. Telegin, the front commissar. A photographer appeared wearing a fur-lined flying jacket. To Dyat-lenko’s astonishment, he treated Voronov with relaxed familiarity. It transpired that this was the famous documentary film-maker Roman Karmen, who had become friendly with Voronov during the Spanish Civil War. Karmen lined up the chair destined for Paulus, to get the right shot through the door from Voronov’s bedroom. He knew that the result was to be used to tell the world of the Soviet Union’s great victory.[20]

The atmosphere was tense in Voronov’s izba when their ‘guest’ arrived. The tall, thin, stooping Paulus presented a grey figure, with his ‘mouse-coloured’ uniform and face ashen from nervous strain. His hair was turning to ‘pepper and salt’, and even the growth of beard was black and white. Only when Paulus approached the table did Voronov indicate the empty chair. ‘Sit down, please,’ he said in Russian. Dyatlenko jumped to his feet, and interpreted. Paulus made a half-bow and sat down. Dyatlenko then introduced the two Soviet commanders. ‘The Representative of the Stavka, Marshal of Artillery Voronov! Commander of the Don Front, Colonel-General Rokos-sovsky!’ Paulus jerked to his feet and made half-bows in each man’s direction.

Voronov began to speak, pausing every few moments for Dyatlenko to translate. ‘Herr Colonel-General, it is rather late and you must be tired. We have also been working a lot during the last few days. This is why we will now discuss just one problem which is urgent.’

‘Excuse me,’ Paulus broke in, taking Dyatlenko off balance. ‘But I am not a colonel-general. The day before yesterday, my headquarters received a signal saying that I had been promoted to general field marshal. It is also written in my military identity papers.’ He touched the breast pocket of his tunic. ‘It was not possible, however, to change my uniform in the circumstances.’

Voronov and Rokossovsky exchanged glances of ironical amusement. General Shumilov had already informed Don Front head-quarters of Paulus’s last-minute promotion.

‘So, Herr General Field Marshal’, Voronov resumed, ‘we are asking you to sign an order addressed to the part of your army which still resists, telling them to surrender to prevent the useless loss of life.’

‘It would be unworthy of a soldier!’ Paulus burst out before Dyatlenko had finished his translation.

‘Is it possible to say’, asked Voronov, ‘that to save the lives of your subordinates is behaviour unworthy of a soldier when the commander himself has surrendered?’

‘I didn’t surrender. I was taken by surprise.’

This ‘naive’ reply did not impress the Russian officers, who were well aware of the circumstances of the surrender. ‘We are talking of a humanitarian act,’ Voronov continued. ‘It will take us only a couple of days or even just a few hours to destroy the rest of your troops who continue to fight on. Resistance is useless. It will only cause the unnecessary deaths of thousands of soldiers. Your duty as an army commander is to save their lives, and this is even more the case because you yourself saved your life by surrendering.’

Paulus, who had been playing nervously with the packet of cigarettes and ashtray laid on the table for his use, shirked the question by sticking to formulae. ‘Even if I did sign such an order, they won’t obey. If I have surrendered, I automatically cease to be their commander.’

‘But a few hours ago you were their commander.’

‘Since my troops were split into two groups,’ Paulus persisted, ‘I was the commander of the other pocket only in theory. Orders came separately from Fuhrer headquarters and each group was commanded by a different general.’

The argument went ‘round and round in circles’. Paulus’s nervous tic was even more pronounced, and Voronov too, knowing that Stalin was waiting in the Kremlin to hear the result, began to show the strain. His upper lip twitched, the legacy of a car crash in Belorussia. Paulus, in his blocking tactics, even claimed that if he did sign the paper, it would be regarded as a forgery. Voronov replied that, in that case, they would have one of his own generals brought over to witness the signature, and he would be sent into the north Kessel with the paper to guarantee its authenticity. But Paulus, however lame his arguments sounded, stuck to his refusal to sign. Voronov finally had to accept that any further attempt to persuade him was useless.

‘I must inform you, Herr General Field Marshal,’ Dyatlenko translated, ‘that by your refusal to save the lives of your subordinates, you are taking on a heavy responsibility for the German people and the future of Germany.’ Paulus stared at the wall, depressed and silent. In this ‘tormented pose’ only the tic in his face indicated his thoughts.

Voronov then brought the interview to a close by asking Paulus if his lodging was satisfactory, and whether he needed a special diet because of his illness. ‘The only thing I would like to request,’ Paulus replied, ‘is to feed the many prisoners of war, and to give them medical attention.’ Voronov explained that ‘the situation at the front made it difficult to receive and cope with such a mass of prisoners’, but that they would do all they could. Paulus thanked him, stood up and gave another half-bow.

Hitler heard the news at the heavily guarded Wolfsschanze deep in the East Prussian forest, a place once described by General Jodl as a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp. He did not bang the table this time, he stared silently into his soup.

His voice and anger returned the next day. Field Marshal Keitel and Generals Jeschonnek, Jodl and Zeitzler were all summoned to the Fuhrer’s midday conference. ‘They have surrendered there formally and absolutely,’ said Hitler in angry disbelief. ‘Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with their last bullet. When you consider that a woman has the pride to leave, to lock herself in, and to shoot herself right away just because she has heard a few insulting remarks, then I can’t have any respect for a soldier who is afraid of that and prefers to go into captivity.’

‘I can’t understand it either,’ replied Zeitzler, whose performance on this occasion makes one wonder about his assurances to Manstein and others that he had done everything to convince the Fuhrer of the true situation regarding the Sixth Army. ‘I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he is lying there badly wounded.’

Hitler kept coming back again and again to Paulus’s failure to commit suicide. Clearly, it had entirely sullied the myth of Stalingrad in his imagination. ‘This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling… What is Life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway… What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.’

The northern pocket, with the remnants of six divisions under General Strecker, still held out. Strecker, with the headquarters of XI Corps in the Stalingrad tractor plant, signalled: ‘Troops are fighting without heavy weapons or supplies. Men collapsing from exhaustion. Freezing to death still holding weapons. Strecker.’ His message was robust, but conspicuously avoided Nazi cliches. Hitler, who received the signal after the meeting with Zeitzler, replied late in the afternoon: ‘I expect the north Kessel to hold out to the last.’ To emphasize the point still further, he issued a Fuhrer directive a short time later: ‘XI Army Corps must resist to the last to tie down as much enemy strength as possible to facilitate operations on other fronts.’

The four Soviet armies had redeployed rapidly to crush the last pocket. With a concentration of 300 field