Enemy at the Gates

Rodimtsev, who had thrown his cannon-fodder division into Stalingrad on September 14 to hold the Germans between Mamaev and the Tsaritsa Gorge, spied tanker captain Usenko and cried: “Tell your commander that this is a happy day for us….” More than eight thousand guardsmen under his command had died in the last four months. Embracing, the general and captain wept together.

A few hours later, Sixth Army Headquarters moved abruptly to the hulking Univermag Department Store on Red Square. The buildings around the square were just shells—windowless, pocked with gaping holes. The building housing Pravda was gutted; so were those of the City Soviet and the post office. The theater had fallen in.

Paulus went past these ruins, down a broad ramp in the Univermag courtyard, and into the basement warehouse. While aides set up a radio room for last transmissions to Manstein, the general retired to a curtained cubicle containing a cot and chair, and sagged down to rest. A barred window cast a pale light on his haggard, bearded face.

Later in the day, Arthur Schmidt stormed into Paulus’s room to announce: “Sir, the Fourteenth Armored Corps is considering capitulation. Muller [the Fourteenth Corps chief of staff] said that the troops had reached the end of their strength and that they had no ammunition left. I told him that we are aware of the situation, but that the order to continue combat was still valid and a capitulation was out of the question. Nevertheless, sir, I would suggest that you visit those generals and talk to them.”

At the NKVD prison, “those generals” were holding a meeting. “Paulus will refuse to sign a capitulation, we all know that,” stated General Schlomer, commander of the Fourteenth Corps. “But we cannot let this mass murder continue. I ask for your approval to get hold of Paulus, whereafter I shall bring the negotiations to an end acting as the new commander in chief.”

At this remark, the mercurial General Seydlitz-Kurzbach jumped up and shouted: “By God, gentlemen, this is treason!” As his astounded colleagues stared in amazement, he reached for his hat and put his hand on the doorknob to leave.

Suddenly the door opened from the other side and Paulus walked in to face his adversaries. His lips tightly pressed together, and the tic on his cheek noticeably aggravated, he glanced coldly at the mutineers and in that brief instant assumed complete command of the men who had followed him to the Volga and disaster.

“Schlomer, you will go back to your duties. Seydlitz,” he gestured at the Fifty-first Corps commander, “you will resume your responsibilities. And the others will do the same.”

A babble of protest broke out, centering on Arthur Schmidt’s insistence on fighting to the last bullet. Refusing to be drawn into an argument, Paulus turned and walked out of the building. Behind him, the rebellious generals gathered their belongings and left the room. No one mentioned mutiny again.

On January 28, the Russians divided the city into three sectors: the Eleventh Corps was isolated around the tractor plant; the Eighth and Fifty-first corps around an engineering school west of Mamaev Hill; the remainders of the Fourteenth and Fourth corps were in the downtown area around the Univermag.

At the Schnellhefter Block across from the tractor plant, Dr. Ottmar Kohler had run out of morphine. Wallowing in filth and blood, he operated under flickering lights and in incredible cold. Outside the building, lines of soldiers crowded the entrance, looking for a place to sleep. An officer went to the door and begged them to go away because there was no room, but they said they would wait until morning.

At sunrise, the visitors were still there, huddled together against the below-zero temperature. During the night they had all died from exposure.

At the central military garrison post, now a hospital a mile north of the Univermag, three thousand wounded lay under a merciless wind that whipped through the building’s shattered walls. Without enough medicine to care for everyone, doctors placed gravely ill soldiers at the edge of the crowd so they would die first from the cold.

Ringing the huge building on four sides was a stack of bodies six feet high. When soldiers stopped at the garrison to ask for food, they earned it by arranging corpses in neat piles, like railroad ties. After stacking their quota of bodies, cooks splashed soup into their outstretched mess tins and they shuffled away from the cordwood cemetery.

Batteries of Russian mortars zeroed in on the Central garrison and set it afire. While medics screamed for the wounded to get up and run, flames fanned by the gale winds raced through the cavernous hallways. In the courtyard, onlookers saw the building billow into a fire that flashed out of every opening on the upper floors. When fiery bodies hurtled out of the inferno, they sizzled in the snow for minutes.

The hospital walls turned cherry red in color and became almost transparent. Finally they bulged outward and whole sections crumpled into the streets. Through the breaks, horrified witnesses saw patients tearing at burning bandages in frantic dervish dances.

After the ceilings crashed down and the violent whoosh of flames subsided, rescuers pushed in to save as many as they could. They found every stairway clogged by a chain of corpses.

With the last hours at hand, wounded German soldiers in countless cellars asked for pistols, placed them to their temples and fired. The lice that had lived on them for weeks quickly left the cooling bodies and moved like gray blankets to other beds.

At the bottom of a ravine west of Mamaev Hill, General Seydlitz-Kurzbach debated suicide with his companions. Once again, the chameleon-like general had changed his attitude toward Paulus and Hitler. Only a short time before he had told his comrades they were plotting treason; he now spent hours cursing the Nazis and Hitler’s insanity, and openly advocated a revolt of the masses against the Third Reich.

His companions tended to agree with him. White-haired General Pfeiffer goaded Seydlitz-Kurzbach on, shouting that he owed no subservience to “a Bohemian corporal skunk.” General Otto Korfes vacillated between calling for a Gotterdammerung and cursing the leaders of the Nazi regime. Colonel Crome withdrew into a careful reading of the Bible; General Heitz ignored the seditious talk around him. Totally loyal to Paulus, he mounted guns at the entrance to the bunker and said, “I will shoot the first man who deserts.”

While Seydlitz-Kurbach openly discussed taking his own life, his orderly, an elderly man, blew himself up with a hand grenade.

At the Univermag, Arthur Schmidt had intercepted a colonel named Steidle who wanted to plead with Paulus to capitulate. Raging at the man, Schmidt threatened him with the firing squad.

In public Schmidt showed a tenacious will to resist to the final bullet but in secret, he was having conversations with two officers, one a Colonel Beaulieu, who had spent some years in Russia in the twenties and the other, Capt. Boris von Neidhardt, a Bait and former czarist officer. Both men spoke fluent Russian and were knowledgeable about life in the Soviet Union. Schmidt spent hours with each man, asking probing questions about their experiences.

Col. Wilhelm Adam, Paulus’s adjutant, intercepted Beaulieu after one of these talks and asked what was going on behind Schmidt’s closed door. Beaulieu was candid, “Schmidt asked me to tell him about the Red Army. He was particularly interested to learn what one had to expect of their soldiers and officers. I didn’t know that your chief of staff could be so friendly.”

The suspicious Adam checked with Neidhardt and found that Schmidt had quizzed him on the same topics.

On the evening of January 29, Adam received further proof that Schmidt had no intention of fighting to the last breath. Schmidt’s orderly suddenly pulled Adam into the chief of staff’s room, and pointing to a suitcase in the corner, whispered, “To all his subordinates he says ‘you must hold out, there will be no capitulation,’ but he himself gets ready for captivity.”

Seething with hatred, Adam went back to his cot and brooded.

From his basement window just off Red Square, Sgt. Albert Pfluger looked past his machine gun at a water fountain on the intersection. For days it had been the focal point of firefights, and Pfluger had killed a number of Russians trying to reach it. There was also a line of dead Germans around it, cut down as they crawled across the