Zeitzler agreed: “I can’t understand it either. I’m still of the opinion that it might not be true; perhaps he [Paulus] is lying there badly wounded.”
“No, it is true,” Hitler said. “They’ll be brought to Moscow, to the GPU right away, and they’ll blurt out orders for the northern pocket to surrender, too. That Schmidt will sign anything. A man who doesn’t have the courage, in such a time, to take the road that every man has to take sometime, doesn’t have the strength to withstand that sort of thing…He will suffer torture in his soul. In Germany there has been too much emphasis on training the intellect and not enough on strength of character….”
The conversation droned on.
Zeitzler said, “One can’t understand this type of man.”
Hitler was disgusted: “Don’t say that. I saw a letter…. It was addressed to Below [Nikolaus von Below, Winrich Behr’s close friend]. I can show it to you. An officer in Stalingrad wrote, ‘I have come to the following conclusions about these people—Paulus, question mark; Seydlitz, should be shot; Schmidt, should be shot.’”
“I have also heard bad reports about Seydlitz,” Zeitzler offered.
“One could say that it would have been better to leave Hube in there and bring out the others,” Hitler added. “But since the value of men is not immaterial, and since we need men in the entire war, I am definitely of the opinion that it was right to bring Hube out. In peacetime, in Germany, about eighteen or twenty thousand people a year chose to commit suicide, even without being in such a position. Here is a man [Paulus], who sees fifty or sixty thousand of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end. How can he surrender himself to the Bolshevists?… That is something one can’t understand at all.”
“But I had my doubts ‘before,” Hitler continued. “That was at the moment when I received the report that he was asking me what he should do [about the Russian ultimatum to surrender]. How could he ever ask about such a thing?…”
“There is no excuse,” declared Zeitzler. “When his nerves threaten to break down, then he must kill himself.”
Hitler nodded, “When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself….” Hitler stared at Zeitzler, who replied: “I still think they may have done that and that the Russians are only claiming to have captured them all.”
“No…” said the Fuhrer vehemently. “In this war, no more field marshals will be made…. I won’t go on counting my chickens before they are hatched….”
Zeitzler shrugged: “We were so completely sure how it would end, that granting him a final satisfaction….”
“We had to assume that it would end heroically.”
Zeitzler agreed, “How could one imagine anything else?…”
Hitler sounded depressed: “This hurts me so much because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one single characterless weakling….”
In the northern part of Stalingrad, Eleventh Corps commander, General Strecker, held out for another forty- eight hours in a futile gesture of defiance.
On the morning of February 2, all the Russian artillery concentrated on this area, and for two hours, shells rained down on the pitiful survivors of the Sixth Army. Then the barrage was over and thousands of Russian troops rushed the cellars while German machine-gunners fired their last belts of ammunition. Enraged at the fanatic resistance, the Russians pulled prisoners out of foxholes and beat them savagely. With clubs and fists they pummeled the die-hards, cursing the “Nazi swine” who continued the bloodshed long after Paulus had quit the field and stopped the killing.
Suddenly white flags popped out of windows up and down the side streets across from the factories. The stronghold began to collapse.
While Hans Oettl paused to urinate outside his building, a Russian sergeant poked a gun in his back and demanded in broken German that he call everyone out of the cellar to surrender. Oettl refused and stared into the silver-toothed grin of his captor, who made a motion with his weapon as if tu kill him. When Oettl still refused, the sergeant shouted “
Across the main road from Oettl’s basement, the Russians poured into the tractor factory assembly rooms where hundreds of wounded lay on shelves against the walls. Other Germans dangled grotesquely from belts hooked onto stanchions. Unwilling to endure captivity, they had taken their own lives during the hours before dawn. Just before the Eleventh Corps command post was overrun, General Strecker issued a last message to the Fatherland: “Eleventh Corps and its divisions have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”
At 12:35 P.M. that afternoon, Army Group Don at Taganrog logged the final words from Sixth Army at Stalingrad when a weather team filed its daily report: “Cloud base fifteen thousand feet, visibility seven miles, clear sky, occasional scattered nimbus clouds, temperature minus thirty-one degrees centigrade, over Stalingrad fog and red haze. Meteorological station now closing down. Greetings to the homeland.”
Reacting to Soviet proclamations about their stupendous triumph, the Nazi government reluctantly told the German people of the loss of the entire Sixth Army. For an unprecedented three days, all radio broadcasts were suspended. Funeral music droned into thousands of homes across the Third Reich. Restaurants, theaters, cinemas, all places of entertainment were shut down, and the trauma of defeat gripped the population.
In Berlin, Goebbels began to draft a speech calling for a realization that Germany must prepare for “total war.”
Two days after organized resistance ended, on February 4, A. S. Chuyanov of the City Soviet Committee phoned across the Volga to a foreman from the tractor factory. “It’s time to come back,” he said, and the workers who had waited months for that message packed their equipment and started home. They drove across the ice, past traffic masters directing long lines of Germans out of the city, and the jubilant Russians snickered at the wretched state of their enemies, many of them wrapped in shawls and women’s clothing to ward off the cold.
In five months of fighting and bombings, 99 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble. More than forty- one thousand homes, three hundred factories, 113 hospitals and schools had been destroyed. A quick census revealed that out of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of the previous summer, only 1,515 civilians remained. Most of them had either died in the first days or left the city for temporary homes in Siberia and Asia. No one knew how many had been killed, but the estimates were staggering.
In Dar Goya, the Fillipovs remained to mourn the irreparable loss of their cobbler son, Sacha. And behind General Rodimtsev’s grain mill headquarters on the Volga bank, Mrs. Karmanova and her son, Genn, celebrated their freedom after months of hiding in trenches and snowholes. On Red Square, two little girls, separated since September, hopped over corpses to meet in a joyful embrace. Their innocent laughter, carrying far in the still air, brought smiles to Russian soldiers, who were tossing dead Germans onto a roaring bonfire.
The Russian Sixty-second Army began to leave the city for a wellearned rest on the eastern side of the Volga. Within weeks, the rejuvenated troops would follow Vassili Chuikov to other battlefields. But behind them, in hospitals across Russia, they left thousands of comrades from the darkest days in Stalingrad who would be fighting another kind of war, the struggle toward physical and mental recovery.
In a hospital bed at Tashkent, the tiny blond sniper Tania Cherriova, was slowly recuperating from the stomach wound that had nearly taken her life. She had borne well the news that the operation she had endured would prevent her from ever bearing a child. She had obeyed the doctors’ orders to the letter and looked forward to a speedy release from confinement. But when she received a letter from a friend in the Sixty-second Army, her world fell apart.
