Enemy at the Gates

On the first day of 1943, Adolph Hitler remembered Paulus at Stalingrad: “To you and your brave army I send, also in the name of the whole German population, my warmest New Year’s wishes. I am aware of the difficulty of your responsibility. The heroic attitude of your troops is appreciated. You and your soldiers should begin the New Year with a strong faith that I and the… German Wehrmacht will use all strength to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad and make their long wait the highest achievement of German war history….”

At an officers’ mess inside the Kessel, blond Lt. Hans Oettl was surrounded by men wishing him a happy birthday. Seated in front of his own blue china, from which he had eaten for years, he watched a cook ladle out a huge steaming portion of goulash filled with thick chunks of meat. Astounded and delighted, Oettl began to eat.

The door suddenly burst open and a military policeman stormed in, demanding to know whether anyone had seen his watchdog. In the sudden silence, Hans Oettl looked at his companions, now staring uncomfortably at the floor, then his gaze returned slowly to the goulash and mountain of meat in front of him.

While the policeman thundered threats against anyone who might have killed his pet, the lieutenant deliberately raised his fork and chewed a portion of the policeman’s German Shepherd.

Sgt. Albert Pfluger had waited patiently for a flight home, but when bad weather closed off most of the shuttle, he suddenly made up his mind to go back to his men in the 297th Division. Still drugged by pills and nearly crazed by the itching of lice under the cast on his arm, he hitched a ride to a railroad siding near Karpovka and boarded the small train that ran for a few miles toward the suburbs of Stalingrad.

In a freight car, Pfluger found company: two Rumanian enlisted men and six Rumanian officers, who stood menacingly over them. While the train moved along in fitful starts and stops, one officer told Pfluger the soldiers were prisoners who had been condemned to death for stealing food. While they talked, for some reason Pfluger could not fathom, another officer suddenly whipped the two men mercilessly.

At Peschanka, Pfluger jumped down from this depressing scene, and within hours he found his first sergeant, who greeted him exuberantly and took him to his old unit. In only a few days, six of Pfluger’s men had been wounded or killed. But the survivors welcomed him and the company butcher showered him with hoarded chocolate, cigarettes, and tins of meat.

Glad to be back with his own people, Pfluger quickly dismissed the memory of missing the flight at Pitomnik.

In Novocherkassk, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein greeted the New Year in a somber mood. His attempt to save Paulus was a failure, and he knew that the fate of the Sixth Army was sealed.

But another crisis, of even greater magnitude, was at hand. Four hundred miles south of Stalingrad, Army Group A, cornprising the First Panzer and Seventeenth armies, stood alone and vulnerable in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Unless Manstein brought these armies north, safely through the bottleneck city of Rostov, the Russian High Command could effect the “super-Stalingrad Kesser that Stalin sought.

Ever since Manstein had pulled Hermann Hoth’s panzers back from the relief effort toward Stalingrad, he had phoned daily demands to East Prussia for the prompt withdrawal of the Germans in the Caucasus. And only on December 29 had Adolf Hitler authorized the retreat of the First Panzer Army.

Now, on New Year’s Day, they finally turned their vehicles around and bolted for safety. As their Mark IIIs and IVs drummed northward, the tankers were praying that Manstein would hold Rostov open long enough to save their lives.

Chapter Twenty-five

From the beginning of the encirclement, German military censors outside the Kessel had kept careful watch on the mail flown from Pitomnik to Germany. At first, the monitors estimated that more than 90 percent of the letter writers exuded both complete confidence in their leaders and in their own ability to endure hardships caused by temporary reliance on the airlift. Also, because they had been involved in other temporary “cauldrons” in the lightning-fast panzer actions of past years, German troops had had little difficulty relating those “defeats turned to victory” to the predicament they faced at Stalingrad. Had not General Seydlitz-Kurzbach himself been involved in the rescue of a hundred thousand Germans at Demyansk in Central Russia the past winter? Thus the initial avalanche of mail to the Reich reflected an apparently unshakable conviction that the Wehrmacht was still invincible.

That conviction had held until Christmas. Between that day and the end of the year, however, censors noted a sharp decline in morale. Men began to demand better mail delivery and a speedup of parcels from home to supplement dwindling rations. They also complained openly about the cold, averaging twenty degrees below zero, and bemoaned the incessant snowfall, the lice, fleas, and rats.

Still, the majority of the Germans in the Kessel seemed to retain a spirit of defiance and hope, or so they told their loved ones. One man wrote: “Our weapons and our command are the best in the world.” Another boasted: “…we gladly make every sacrifice for our country in hopes that our people will see better times than we do.” A third said: “Of course we will always be the stronger ones, there can be no doubt about that.”

Two enlisted men breathed both defiance and a rigid belief in the regime that had led them to the Kessel: On December 30, one, a corporal, APO No. 36 025 had written:

Don’t get any false ideas. The victor can only be Germany. Any battle requires sacrifices, and you should be proud to know that your son is in the very center of the decision. How pleased I will be to stand before you some day with all my medals. And to prove my valor to Uncle Willi, who always told us boys that our first goal was to become a man during combat. I remember those words all the time. We know what is at stake as far as our country is concerned. We love our country now more than ever before. Germany shall live even though we may have to die.

On December 31, the other, a private first class, APO No. 24836B wrote:

The Russians are flooding us with leaflets. When I come home I shall show you some of the nonsense that they are writing. They want us to surrender. Do they really believe we are puppets for them? We will fight to the last man and the last bullet. We will never capitulate. We are in a difficult position in Stalingrad, but we are not forsaken. Our Fuhrer will not leave us in the lurch…. We will receive help and we shall endure…. If we have a little less to eat, and if we have to do without many other things, it does not matter. We shall endure.

In their mail analysis, censors flashed a warning signal to higher authorities about what to expect when January came: “it must be expected that there will be a decline in morale as hope for relief… wanes….” The censors’ prediction proved alarmingly accurate. An abrupt, fatal change in mood occurred, and the number of farewell letters increased dramatically.

The tone of these messages reflected the sudden awareness that events were narrowing each man’s prospects of survival to infinitesimal percentages. When last wills and testaments multiplied, censors tried to be delicate in their excisions of material. Using pens or pencils to match that used by the sender they smudged over words or made them illegible, as though the writer himself had made the errors.

One discouraged officer told his family, “…You can’t starve those swine…. They have absolute air superiority here, day and night, nothing but those rapacious birds. I cannot imagine an end to this and that is what really gets you down.”

A surgeon writing to his wife was brutally frank with her about life in the Kessel. He described how he had just taken off a man’s leg at the thigh with a pair of scissors, and how the patient endured the hideous surgery without anesthesia.

A corporal mirrored a growing sentiment; “To tell you the truth, I would rather meet with sudden death than