Enemy at the Gates

auxiliary airstrip at Stalingradski, on the outskirts of Stalingrad itself, where he spent the night in the company of hundreds of soldiers, pacing through the snow.

At 7:00 A.M. on January 22, a lone Heinkel 111 flew over several times, dropped food bombs into the fields, but would not land. The hours passed and the wounded had eyes only for the western horizon, where suddenly three specks appeared—Ju-52s. The “old reliables” grew bigger, circled, and came in for landings.

Moments later, Meunch saw a sight he would never forget: The wounded rose from the snow to rush the doors of the taxiing aircraft. Clawing at each other, they kicked the weak to the bottom of the pile and hoisted themselves into the empty cabins.

Meunch walked slowly up to a pilot and showed his special pass. The pilot shook his head:

“You don’t intend to get in there?” he said, pointing to the “animals” at the side of the plane. “You won’t make it. Get in with me through the cockpit.”

While Meunch clambered into the plane, Russian shrapnel sprayed the crowd. The pilot quickly gunned the motors and tried to lift off. He could not. Looking out the window Meunch saw nearly fifty men lying on the wings, holding on to anything they could with blue-cold hands as the Ju-52 picked up speed and raced down the strip. One by one, the riders fell off and tumbled back in the slipstream from the propellers. Shorn of its added burden, the plane rose swiftly into the bright sky and turned away from the Volga. Meunch tried hard to calm himself. For the first time in more than two months, he could not hear the sound of guns.

Radio message:

22 Jan. 43, 1602 hours

To Army Group Don

…For submittal to the Fuhrer and to commander in chief, Army Group Don….The Russians are advancing on a six-kilometer frontage both sides of Voporonovo toward the east, [toward Stalingrad] in part with flying colors. There is no possibility to close the gap…All provisions are used up. Over twelve thousand unattended [wounded] men in the pocket. What orders am I to issue to the troops, who have no ammunition left? …

Immediate decision is required, since symptoms of disintegration are noted in some places. However, the troops still have faith in their commanders.

Paulus

East Prussia had the answer ready within hours.

Capitulation impossible.

The troops will defend their positions to the last….The Sixth Army has thus made a historic contribution in the most gigantic war effort in German history.

Adolf Hitler

“A historic contribution,” Hitler had declared, so Paulus stopped trying to convince his superiors that further resistance was simply mass murder. Blocking out the reality of the men dying around him, he chose instead to be overwhelmed by the natural course of events, and he left Gumrak for a cellar in Stalingrad.

In an anteroom just off Adolf Hitler’s conference room, Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz waited nervously for an audience. Snatched from the Kessel by direct orders from East Prussia, he had flown to the Wolf’s Lair to echo Capt. Winrich Behr’s graphic description of conditions at Stalingrad.

When the door opened, Zitzewitz strode in and came to attention. Hitler walked forward and covered Zitzewitz’s right hand with both of his. Shaking his head, he said: “You’ve come from a deplorable situation.” And he waved his guest to a high stool beside a table.

Zitzewitz tried to adjust his eyes to the dim half-light in the room. A huge map of the Russian front framed one wall. A fireplace dominated another. He noticed Generals Zeitzler and Schmundt sitting back in the shadows.

Hitler opened the discussion. Pointing frequently to maps on the table, he spoke of German tanks striking across the Don and breaking into the Kessel with supplies. A battalion of them, he thought, could crush Russian resistance and reach Sixth Army.

Zitzewitz listened in growing disbelief. When his chance came to speak, he rattled off statistics and comments he had jotted down on a piece of paper: casualty rates, ammunition stocks, food supplies, death, disease, frostbite, morale. The figures were catastrophic, irreversible, and damning. While Hitler stared in surprise, Zitzewitz summed up. “My Fuhrer, permit me to state that the troops at Stalingrad can no longer be ordered to fight to their last round because they are no longer physically capable of fighting, and because they no longer have a last round.”

Hitler looked right through Zitzewitz. Dismissing the shocked major, the Fuhrer mumbled: “Man recovers very quickly.”

The railroad station at Gumrak burned brightly against the snow. Russian artillery fire had blown the structure apart and ignited the corpses that had been stacked against its walls up to the level of the second-storey windows. The frozen bodies became a gruesome bonfire that Sgt. Hubert Wirkner witnessed as he was carried to the edge of the runway and a last opportunity to get away from the Kessel.

Completely disabled by his arm and leg wounds which were complicated with frostbite, Wirkner lay unattended on a stretcher for hours while twenty-four transports screeched in, unloaded and took off with hundreds of soldiers. In disgust he watched some of the lesser wounded “play possum” in the snow until the doors of the planes opened, then leap into the aircraft before harassed officials could see them. Too weak and proud to consider doing such a thing himself, Wirkner felt only pity for those who stole seats from their comrades.

One more plane glided in through the foggy mist and settled on the runway. From his prone position, Wirkner stared in disappointment as hundreds of ambulatory patients crowded around it and blocked access to the more seriously wounded.

At one of the doors, Col. Herbert Selle helped check ongoing passengers. An engineering specialist, the colonel had received orders earlier that day to leave and train another unit for another battle. Surprised by the unexpected reprieve, he stifled his momentary guilt feelings and reported to General Paulus for a few last words.

Paulus’s appearance shocked Selle. The general was unshaven, bedraggled. His blue eyes, formerly so sparkling, “had become lifeless.”

The general had a brief but bitter message for Selle. “Tell them,” he said mournfully, “wherever you think it is advisable, that the Sixth Army has been betrayed by the Supreme Command.”

Selle had left the pathetic figure of his commander in chief and gone to Gumrak where he waited through the foggy night until the last Ju-52 landed. While the pilot kept the motors running, Selle counted “cases” into the plane. His orderly, who had accompanied him to the field in hopes of a free ride, hovered nearby. The colonel nodded his head and winked him into the rear section. Beside the runway, Hubert Wirkner craned his neck and watched the Ju-52 depart.

Resigned to being left to die, Wirkner began to crawl on hands and knees in the general direction of the gutted railroad station. He passed an officer who stared incredulously at him and then begged Wirkner to go back to the hospital. The sergeant ignored him and pushed on into a snowfield. The wind tore at him, ice formed on his face, and he breathed torturously as his mouth filled with lumps of snow.

He dragged his dead legs for nearly a mile, reached the main road to Stalingrad, and collapsed alongside the stream of traffic. When he tried to climb into the back of a truck, his legs collapsed and he fell down. With a final burst of strength, Wirkner rose once more to clutch a howitzer with his frozen hands. Grunting from the pain, he pulled himself over the gun barrel and dangled precariously, his head hanging down on one side, his feet on the other.

The howitzer crept toward the city. With his face inches from the ground, his eyes bulging and his head pounding from blood draining into it, Wirkner drifted in and out of consciousness. The sounds of speeding cars