Enemy at the Gates

more optimistic tone.

Zitzewitz had learned his lesson. From then on, he only sent off reports after Schmidt had gone to bed. Far from being a yesman, the major wrote unvarnished accounts of the debacle he witnessed. He went everywhere: to the front-line foxholes, to hospitals, ammunition dumps, and icy ravines. In the mile long balkas at Baburkin, Gorodische, and Dimitrevka, he followed German troops into their dark, clammy bunkers where lack of fuel spawned colds, pneumonia, and an increased weakness to other infections. Improper sanitation in these refuges was also bringing out armies of lice.

Zitzewitz sat among hordes of mice and rats that overran the bunkers and gnawed scraps of food hoarded by Germans in knapsacks and pockets. The rodents were ravenous. He witnessed one case where they even descended on a soldier whose feet were badly frostbitten. While he slept, they chewed off two of his toes.

Above all, Zitzewitz monitored Pitomnik where the wounded crowded into hastily laid-out hospitals and waited for doctors to ease their pain while the Junkers and Heinkels circled and landed or flamed and crashed.

The major spared nothing in his attempt to alert Hitler to the whole truth. But his grim reports had an unanticipated impact at the Wolf’s Lair. In discussing them, Reichmarshal Hermann Goering shook his head in disbelief. “It is impossible that any German officer could be responsible for defeatist messages of this sort,” he declared. “The only possible explanation is that the enemy has captured his transmitter and has sent them himself.”

Thus, Zitzewitz’s reports were dismissed as Russian propaganda.

Stragglers from the Italian Eighth Army could have assured Hermann Goering that Zitzewitz’s chronicles of despair were totally authentic. They were still plodding through knee-deep snow toward far-off prison camps.

Lt. Felice Bracci had continued marching in a northerly direcEnemy tion, across the silvery ice of the upper Don River that he once hoped to ford as a conqueror. Now he was sure it was a bewitched stream, never to succumb to an invader’s boots. For several agonizing days, Bracci had kept his mind and body functioning as the “long black snake” of captives passed numerous villages where Russian women unaccountably smiled and threw crusts of bread and frozen potatoes into his outstretched hands.

Some Russians exchanged food for wedding rings, clothing or blankets. When Bracci offered a piece of adhesive tape from a roll he had saved, a villager thrust a large piece of black bread at him in payment. Bracci wolfed it down in seconds.

On December 28, Russian guards stopped the Italians at a huge barracks near a railroad station. Jammed into the dark building with hundreds of other prisoners, Bracci spent the next three days clinging to sanity. Some of his friends had contracted gangrene from frostbite and screamed without letup. Italian doctors amputated the worst limbs with homemade knives and the moans of the patients, operated on without anesthesia, drove everyone to despair.

Surrounded by bedlam, by prayers for God’s mercy, Bracci and his comrades scrounged bits of wood and lit small fires in a corner of the room. The tiny blazes nourished them somewhat while the Russians subjected them to a propaganda campaign.

Two Soviet officers, one a woman, came into the barracks, and speaking fluent Italian, they asked why Bracci and his friends had come to wage war on Russia and whether the soldiers were really Fascists. The Russians told the captives that Mussolini and Hitler were finished and ended their harangue with the lie that King Victor Emmanuel had died recently of a broken heart. The woman then took out scraps of paper and pencils and asked the prisoners to write messages back to loved ones in Italy. Taking a pencil in his numbed fingers, Bracci wrote: “I am alive… I am well….” He had no hope that his words would ever arrive in Rome.

The propaganda barrage continued into the next day, when all the Italian officers were lined up to hear a speech from a bespectacled civilian speaking from atop a car. In flawless Italian, the man cursed the Fascist government and warned his listeners that it was extremely unlikely they would ever leave Russia alive. The cold, he claimed, would “mow them down.”

Shivering in formation, Bracci wondered whether the speaker would mention starvation as a factor contributing to his imminent death, but the expatriate Italian did not. When he finished, the prisoners had to parade past a cameraman, who filmed their misery for some unknown audience.

On New Year’s Eve, Bracci tried to forget his plight. Lying on the frozen barracks floor, he listened as Colonel Rosati took his comrades on a gourmet visit of Rome’s best restuarants: the elegant “Zi,” the Bersagliera, and on to the dining room atop the Tarpeian rock.

When the colonel recited the meal he would order in each establishment, his audience groaned. “Thursday, gnocchi,” Rosati savored the words and men chewed endlessly on nothing. Spittle formed in their mouths; their stomachs churned. Someone told Rosati to shut up, but the protestor was shouted down by others desperate to hold off reality. “Saturday… tripe,” the colonel went on and added mellow white wines to the menu.

Outside the barracks, a roaring wind blew gusts of snow through the paneless windows onto the huddled “diners.” Ignoring the chill, they listened raptly: “Monday… cannelloni, in cream sauce….”

At 10:00 P.M. on December 31, Russian artillery around the Kessel exploded in a frenzied acknowledgement of the holiday. Because they knew Soviet gunners were operating on Moscow time, two hours ahead of German clocks, Sixth Army troops had prepared for the deluge. Hunkered down in their holes, they rode out the fifteen-minute salvo welcoming in a year of promised glory for Soviet Russia.

Inside Stalingrad, the expectations of Russian troops ran high. The ice bridge across the Volga was the main reason for their attitude. From Acktuba and Krasnaya Sloboda, hundreds of trucks now crossed the river daily, bringing white camouflage suits to replace tattered gray brown uniforms. In the middle of the river, traffic masters waved food convoys to depots set up under the cliff. Cases of American canned goods began to litter foxholes strung along the defense line from Tsaritsa to the tractor works. Ammunition piled up to the point where Russian gunners now fired antitank shells at lone German soldiers.

On New Year’s Eve, discipline in the revitalized Sixty-second Army relaxed and, along the shore, high-ranking Soviet officers held a series of parties to honor actors, musicians, and ballerinas visiting Stalingrad to entertain the troops. One of the troupe members, violinist Mikhail Goldstein, stayed away and went instead into the trenches to perform another of his one-man concerts for the soldiers.

In all the war Goldstein had never seen a battlefield quite like Stalingrad: a city so utterly broken by bombs and artillery, cluttered with skeletons of hundreds of horses, picked clean by the starving enemy. And always there were the grim police of the Russian NKVD, standing between the front line and the Volga, checking soldiers’ papers and shooting suspected deserters dead.

The horrible battlefield shocked Goldstein and he played as he never played before, hour after hour for men who obviously loved his music. And while all German works had been banned by the Soviet government, Goldstein doubted that any commissar would protest on New Year’s Eve. The melodies he created drifted out through loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.

When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”

Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach Gavotte.

At the stroke of midnight, Berlin time, a soldier of the German 24th Panzer Division at the northeastern part of the Kessel raised his machine pistol and fired a magazine full of tracer bullets into the sky. Others in his unit spontaneously followed his salute. The idea flared quickly along the perimeter west to the 16th Panzers, then to the 60th Motorized and on around the curve to the Marinovka “nose,” through the 3rd Motorized and down to the 29th Division, eastward along the southern edge of the pocket, past the 297th and 371st to the Volga, and back to the darkened streets of Stalingrad where men poked rifles and machine guns through slits and blasted an arc of kaleidoscopic fireworks above the brooding bulk of the factories. The rainbow of fire circled the fortress for minutes as German soldiers welcomed a New Year shorn of hope.

To those standing in the middle of the steppe, around Pitomnik and Gumrak, the pyrotechnics proved only the futility of the German position. The entire horizon was a band of flame from tracer bullets. Buz they formed a complete circle of fire around Sixth Army.