Enemy at the Gates

…Limit the daily marching time to 25-30 km. Install stopping places for overnight stays. Give out warm food and water to the POW, and have ready a heating facility,

…Leave the POW their clothes, shoes, underwear, bedding and eating utensils. If a prisoner lacks any of these, it is a duty to replace the missing objects from loot, or from effects of killed or dead enemy soldiers or officers….

To the chief of sanitary inspection of the Red Army:

…at check points have a control station. for marching POW and give medical attention to the sick… such POW who cannot continue the march due to illness are to be taken out of the column and sent to a field hospital close by….

Forbid that POW be forwarded in cars not suitable for human transport….

Sent on to Russian commanders by telegram, the document was ignored. The reasons were twofold: Hobbled by acute shortages of rail cars, medical supplies, and food, Russian officials could not cope with the enormous influx of Axis prisoners during December and January. Furthermore, the prison personnel allowed their hatred for the invaders to influence their actions. Thus, as the POWs walked and rode to internment, many Red Army officers responsible for their well-being tacitly condoned their deaths.

“Vodi! Vodi!” The plaintive cry for water irritated Felice Bracci as some of the thirty-five men riding in his freight car shouted their desperate plea. Bracci had no idea of their destination and, after listening to this pitiful lament for three days, he was beginning to lose his temper. Conditions were frightful enough for everyone without the constant whining from the weak.

Bracci and his fellow officers were barely alive. Twenty-four slept in shifts on the ice-covered floor, where they curled up in embraces to draw heat from each other. To pass the time, some men whispered stories of previous days and future dreams. Martini, Branco, and Giordano agreed to set up a restaurant in Rome with their savings. Franco Fusco wanted to go into business. Fasanotti talked about continuing his career as a public prosecutor.

One officer refused to talk of what might be. Instead, he announced that the trip was merely an exquisite torture conceived by the Russians, who would keep the train going endlessly until all its passengers died. It seemed that way. Just once a day, guards pulled the door open to give them a hunk of black bread and a bucket of water.

While the thirstiest howled for more than their share, Bracci and his friends carefully watched a soldier whittle the frozen bread into equal portions. The men never took their eyes off the knife as it shaved and jabbed the rock-like meal. Carefully handed out to groups of five, the bread was consumed immediately and then, in the dim light that seeped through cracks, the Italians rocked along in contemplative silence.

As the miles and days passed, each man attended to his bodily needs in a corner and a cone-shaped mound of excrement rose slowly, a daily calendar recording the length of the trip. The excrement was always gray, the color of the bread, their only sustenance.

Bracci slept as much as he could. But when he was awake, he thought often about his captors and he was torn by his feelings toward the Russian guards. In their strange dress, they looked like big wicked apes. Boisterous, crude, they showed no trace of sensitivity. Yet, Bracci knew that out on the lonely steppe of southern Russia, their women and children suffered, too. Like him, they loved and laughed, cried and bled. But the men who guarded the trail from Kalmikov and rode the train to prison camp as jailers were not the same, could not be related to those Russians who generously gave him food during the march. To these guards, the Italians were “mere objects'; not men, not slaves. They were nothing.

The prisoners’ train moved due north, toward Moscow and beyond. Behind it, on the road Bracci had marched along earlier, lay thousands of frozen corpses. Some had bullet holes in the torso. Most had gunshot wounds in the back of the neck.

Baggage peculiar to the Italian Army lay on the crusted snowtrail. Crucifixes, mass cards, pictures of Jesus Christ and the saints, had fallen near the dead. One victim sat placidly in a drift. Eyes wide open, a smile creasing his face, he held a black rosary in his hands. The soldier had begun the second decade of the beads when a Russian guard shot him.

Cristoforo Capone came along this same trail several days behind Bracci. The doctor saw the ravens Bracci had noticed circling and he heard the same shouts: “Davai bistre!” “Davai bistre!” as Russian guards robbed the prisoners of their warm clothing and beat them when they protested. Capone, too, watched the weak fall down and winced at the sharp cracks of rifle fire as they died. Like Bracci, he huddled for many nights in below-zero weather with soldiers who screamed from the pain of frostbite or wailed to God about their cruel fate. The doctor pitied these men in their misery, but he had decided to live. Some unknown inner strength brought him to a railroad station and a section of floor in a freight car, where he now sprawled to rest.

While an Arctic wind whistled outside and the men clutched each other to transmit body heat, the train sped north. Capone began to lick the icicled walls to quench his raging thirst. Men died beside him each night and, in the morning, Russian guards opened the doors and screamed: “Skolco kaput?” (“How many dead?”) That was all they cared about, the number of corpses they had to pull out and discard in the snow.

On the evening of January 8, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein entertained guests at Novocherkassk. Among them were Gen. Hans Hube, “Der Mensch,” who had just returned from East Prussia. On the way back he traveled with Col. Gunter von Below, who had been invalided out of Stalingrad in September with jaundice, and was returning to duty at a time when most German soldiers were praying to leave the pocket.

During their flight, Below had learned from Hube that the Fuhrer was planning another attempt to extricate the Sixth Army. Three panzer divisions were supposedly coming from France and would be ready to attack by the middle of February. It was apparent to Below that the aggressive Hube had succumbed to Hitler’s mesmerizing personality and believed implicitly in this new rescue expedition.

At dinner that night Hube continued to talk about the promised panzers. But each time he tried to solicit Erich von Manstein’s opinions, the field marshal changed the subject. Throughout the meal, in fact, Manstein avoided any comment about the army inside the Kessel.

Later, over drinks with staff officers of Army Group Don, Below found one reason for Manstein’s negative responses when his companions told him that less than a hundred tons a day had been airlifted to Stalingrad. Without making any definite admissions about the Kessel being a hopeless trap, they convinced Below that he was “a condemned man having a last meal” before going to his death. The chastened colonel drank until a late hour.

The next day, January 9, he and Hube touched down at Pitomnik and went on to the crowded interior of the headquarters bunker at Gumrak, where Paulus and Schmidt awaited them. Extremely agitated, Paulus quickly told his visitors it was impossible for Sixth Army to hold out much longer. When Hube broke in to mention the tanks coming from France, Paulus merely shrugged in resignation. Still, as Hube kept insisting on the need to hold out until the panzer force arrived at the perimeter, Paulus began to show a spark of interest in the idea. A desperate man, stripped of options by the higher authority he would never disobey, Paulus had to force himself to believe in a miracle.

Only hours earlier, Hitler had again denied him the requested “freedom of action” about the Russian ultimatum of surrender. The Fuhrer was insisting on a fight to the death, because “…every day the Army holds out helps the entire front….”

That message had settled Paulus’s mind on a basic issue. Tempted to give up the struggle, he dismissed that thought when “higher authority” declared Sixth Army’s agony to be a vital necessity. Thus he now listened to Hube’s ramblings about panzers coming from France and, at the same time, issued a stem warning to his troops about the Soviet peace offer: “…Any proposals of negotiations are… to be rejected, not to be answered and parliamentaries are to be repulsed by force of weapons…”

As the ultimatum’s time limit expired, an eerie quiet descended on the steppe. In their holes and trenches, German soldiers waited fearfully for Russian reaction to Paulus’s order for all-out resistance.