commuted to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Lieutenant Gottfried von Bismarck was condemned to twenty-five years’ hard labour because Russian prisoners of war had worked on his family’s estate in Pomerania. In July 1950, the thoroughly disillusioned and embittered General von Seydlitz was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment as a war criminal and ‘revanchist reactionary general’.
Less controversial prisoners found peace of a sort, often thanks to the compassion of Russian women. In some cases, it formed part of an old tradition. Past the prison camp of Kamshkovo, between Moscow and Gorky, ran the Vladimirskaya, the old road along which tsarist exiles were marched to Siberia. Peasants had come out to give them water or even to carry their burdens along the road for them. A similar humanity, untouched by ideology, still existed.
The Austrian doctor, Hans Dibold, was deeply moved by the sympathy of Russians when one of their most respected medical officers, Dr Richard Speiler, from the Weizsacker hospital in Heidelberg, fell ill suddenly in the early spring of 1946. He had survived typhus, typhoid and diphtheria in the Ilmen camp. His colleagues were convinced at first that he had malaria. In fact it was blood poisoning picked up during his work. His colleagues were tormented by the idea that their misdiagnosis was leading to his death. They gave him sulphonamides and the last of their penicillin. The two Russian dispensary assistants also handed over the last of their penicillin, which had been allocated for Russian patients, but he died just the same.
The hospital cemetery was approached by a track with low pines and juniper bushes on each side. Behind lay the forest. The Russian doctors paid their respects and the commandant allowed Speiler’s colleagues to organize his funeral in the forest cemetery exactly as they wished. Speiler had returned to the Christian faith in his last few days. The Russian doctors, paying no heed to the possible reactions of a commissar, also attended the funeral service, conducted by a tall, frail pastor. For survivors of the Sixth Army present that day, the service ‘was valid not only for the one dead man there, but for all who lay outside, and all those others far to the south, in Stalingrad and in the steppe between the Don and the Volga, and whom no Christian word had accompanied to their last rest’.
Since 1945, some 3,000 or so of the Stalingrad prisoners had been released, either individually or in batches and allowed home, usually because they were deemed unfit for labour. In 1955 there were still 9,626 German prisoners of war, or ‘convicted war criminals’ as Khrushchev described them, of whom some 2,000 were survivors of Stalingrad. These prisoners were finally set free after Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in September 1955. They included Generals Strecker, Seydlitz, Schmidt and Rodenburg, and Lieutenant Gottfried von Bismarck, who, almost thirteen years before, had flown into the
Seydlitz, when their journey ended in Friedland bei Gottingen, knew that he faced a difficult future in the atmosphere of the Cold War. In April 1944, he had been condemned
As the historical events were raked over in the post-war years, the mutual recriminations over responsibility for the sacrifice of the Sixth Army became increasingly bitter. Schmidt, who contrary to Hitler’s expectations had always refused to cooperate with his captors, remained ferociously hostile to officers in the Free Germany movement. Colonel Adam, who had accused him of forcing Paulus to fight to the end, was treated witheringly in return as a ‘pensioner of the Soviet-occupied zone’.
Paulus, in East Germany, tried vainly to defend himself from accusations of having been subservient to Hitler and indecisive. After his release from captivity in the autumn of 1953, he lived in the Soviet zone, where he wrote paper after paper explaining the situation he had faced. A long, painful illness led to his death in Dresden in 1957. His body was brought to the west, and buried next to that of his wife, in Baden-Baden.
His opponent at Stalingrad, General Chuikov, whose 62nd Army had followed the long road to Berlin as the 8th Guards Army, became commander of the occupation forces, a Marshal of the Soviet Union and deputy minister of defence under Khrushchev, who had appointed him on that September night of crisis by the Volga. The thousands of Soviet soldiers executed at Stalingrad on his orders never received a marked grave. As statistics, they were lost among the other battle casualties, which has a certain unintended justice.
Illustrations
