as ‘limping and shuffling ghosts in rags’ followed the back of the man in front. As soon as the exertion of the march warmed their bodies, they could feel the lice become more active. Some civilians grabbed blankets from their backs, spat in their faces and even threw stones. It was best to be close to the front of the column and, safest of all, to stay near one of the escorts. Some soldiers whom they passed, contrary to Red Army orders, took pot shots for fun at the columns of prisoners, just as German soldiers had fired at columns of Red Army prisoners in 1941.
The luckier ones were marched straight to one of the designated collection camps in the area, although they varied greatly in distance. Those from the northern pocket, for example, were marched over twelve miles to Dubovka, north of Stalingrad. It took two days. During the night, they were shepherded into the roofless remains of buildings — destroyed by the Luftwaffe, as their guards did not fail to remind them.
Thousands, however, were taken on what can only be described as death marches. The worst, without food or water in temperatures of between twenty-five and thirty degrees below zero, followed a completely zigzag route from the Tsaritsa ravine, via Gumrak and Gorodishche, finally ending up on the fifth day at Beketovka. From time to time, they heard shots in the freezing air, as another victim collapsed in the snow, unable to walk any further. Thirst was as great a threat as weakness from hunger. Although surrounded by snow, they suffered the fate of the Ancient Mariner, knowing the dangers of consuming it.
Shelter was seldom available at night, so the prisoners slept in the snow together. Many woke to find close comrades dead and frozen stiff beside them. In an attempt to prevent this, one of the group was designated to stay awake ready to wake the others after half an hour. Then they would all move as briskly as they could to reactivate the circulation. Others did not even dare to lie down. Hoping to sleep like horses, they stood together in a group with a blanket over their heads to keep in some warmth from their breath.
Morning brought not relief, but dread of the march ahead. ‘The Russians had very simple methods,’ observed a lieutenant who survived. ‘Those who could walk, were marched off. Those who could not, either through wounds or sickness, were shot or left without food to die.’ Having quickly grasped this brutal logic, he was prepared to barter his woollen pullover for milk and bread from a Russian peasant woman at the night stop, because he knew that otherwise he would collapse from weakness the next day.
‘We set out with 1,200 men,’ recounted a soldier from the 305thInfantry Division, ‘and only a tenth, about 120 men, were left alive by the time we reached Beketovka.’
The gateway to the main camp at Beketovka was another entrance which deserved the superscription: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
On their arrival, the guards searched prisoners for valuables once again, then made them stand for ‘registration’. The prisoners soon discovered that standing out in the freezing weather for hours and hours, parading in groups of fives for ‘counting parade’, would be a daily penance. Finally, after the NKVD had carried out an initial processing, they were led off to the wooden huts, where they were packed in, forty or fifty men to a room, ‘like herrings in a barrel’, recorded a survivor. On 4 February, an NKVD officer complained to Don Front headquarters that the situation was ‘extremely critical’. The camps at Beketovka had received 50,000 prisoners, ‘including also sick and wounded’.
The NKVD camp authorities were overwhelmed. They had no motor transport at all and tried to beg the army for a single truck. Water was eventually brought to the camp in iron barrels on carts towed by camels. A captured Austrian doctor noted his first impression: ‘Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, filthy snow and urine-yellow ice offered the only relief for an unbearable thirst… Every morning more corpses.’ After two days, the Russians provided some ‘soup’, which was no more than a sack of bran tipped into warm water. Anger at the conditions led to prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off their own bodies and throwing them at their guards. Such protests provoked summary execution.
Right from the start, the Soviet authorities set out to divide the prisoners of war, first on national lines, then political. Romanian, Italian and Croat prisoners of war were given the privilege of working in the kitchens, where the Romanians in particular set out to gain revenge on their former allies. The Germans had not only got them into this hell, they believed, they had also cut off their supplies in the
‘Then came another shock,’ recorded a Luftwaffe sergeant-major. ‘Our Austrian comrades suddenly ceased to be Germans. They called themselves “Austritsy”, hoping to secure better treatment — as indeed happened.’ Germans felt bitter that ‘all the guilt of the war was heaped on those of us who remained “Germans”,’ particularly since Austrians, with an interesting turn of logic, tended to blame Prussian generals, rather than the Austrian Hitler, for their predicament.
The struggle to stay alive remained paramount. ‘The dead each morning were laid outside the barrack block,’ wrote a panzer officer. These naked, frozen corpses were then stacked by working parties in an ever-extending line down one side of the camp. A doctor estimated that at Beketovka the ‘mountain of bodies’ was ‘about a hundred yards long and six feet high’. At least fifty to sixty men died every day, estimated the Luftwaffe warrant officer. ‘We had no tears left,’ he wrote later. Another prisoner used as an interpreter by the Russians later managed to get a look at the ‘death register’. He noted down that up to 21 October 1943, 45,200 died in Beketovka alone. An NKVD report acknowledges that in all the Stalingrad camps, 55,228 prisoners had died by 15 April, but one does not know how many had been captured between Operation Uranus and the final surrender.
‘Hunger’, observed Dr Dibold, ‘changed the psyche and character, visibly in behaviour patterns and invisibly in men’s thoughts.’ German as well as Romanian soldiers resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Thin slices of meat cut from frozen corpses were boiled up. The end product was offered round as ‘camel-meat’. Those who ate it were quickly recognizable, because their complexion acquired a hint of red, instead of the grey-green pallor of the majority. Cases were reported from other camps in and around Stalingrad, even in a camp housing prisoners captured during Operation Uranus. One Soviet source claims that ‘only at gunpoint could prisoners be forced to desist from this barbarism’. The authorities ordered more food, but incompetence and corruption in the system blunted any measure.
The accumulated effect of exhaustion, cold, sickness and starvation dehumanized prisoners in other ways. With dysentery rife, those who collapsed and fell into the hell-hole of the latrines were left to drown, if still alive. Few had the strength or the will to pull them out. Their terrible fate below was ignored. The need of others suffering from dysentery to use the latrine was far too urgent.
Curiously, the latrine saved one starving young lieutenant, a count whose family owned several castles and estates. He overheard a soldier say something in the unmistakable dialect of his district, and quickly called out, asking where he was from. The soldier gave the name of a small village nearby. ‘And who are you and where do you come from?’ he asked in return. The officer told him. ‘Oh yes,’ the soldier laughed. ‘I know. I used to see you go past in your red Mercedes sports car, off to shoot hare. Well, here we are together. If you are hungry, perhaps I can help.’ The soldier had been chosen as a medical orderly in the prison hospital, and because so many of the inmates died before they had a chance to eat their bread ration, he managed to accumulate a bag of leftover crusts to share with others after each spell of duty. This utterly unexpected intervention saved the young count’s life.
Survival often ran counter to expectation. The first to die were generally those who had been large and powerfully built. The small thin man always stood the best chance. Both in the
When spring arrived, the Soviet authorities began to reorganize the prisoner-of-war population in the region. Altogether some 235,000 former members of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army, including those captured during Manstein’s attempted relief operation in December, as well as Romanians and other allies, had been held in around twenty camps and prison hospitals in the region.
The generals were the first to leave. Their destination was a camp near Moscow. They departed in what junior officers cynically dubbed the ‘White Train’, because its carriages were so comfortable. Great bitterness was caused by the fact that those who had given orders to fight to the end had not just outlived their own rhetoric, but now enjoyed incomparably better conditions than their men. ‘It is the duty of a general to stay with his men,’ remarked one lieutenant, ‘not to go off in a sleeping-car.’ Chances of survival proved brutally dependent on rank. Over 95 per cent of soldiers and NCOs died, 55 per cent of junior officers and just 5 per cent of senior officers. As
