Hitler's Commanders (17 page)

Paulus was by now on the verge of physical and mental collapse, a condition exacerbated by a head wound he suffered when a Soviet bomb exploded near him on January 25. Schmidt, however, continued to direct the remnants of the 6th Army, with no interference from Paulus.

Three days later—on January 28—the Red Army cut the southern pocket in half. Paulus was isolated in the southernmost of the three pockets, in the ruins of a large department store in Red Square. On January 30, he sent Hitler an inspirational message, congratulating the Fuehrer on the 10th anniversary of his assumption of power and saying that he hoped 6th Army’s struggle would set an example for future generations never to surrender, no matter how great the odds. That same day, only a few hundred yards from Paulus’s command post, the Headquarters, XIV Panzer Corps (now under Lieutenant General Helmuth Schloemer), was surrounded and forced to surrender. In the central pocket Soviet tanks penetrated to Heitz’s CP and captured him, Seydlitz, and five other generals.

That night—and with misgivings—Hitler acted on one of Zeitzler’s recommendations and promoted Paulus to field marshal. He also sent him a message reminding him that no German field marshal had ever been captured—a clear invitation for Paulus to commit suicide.

At 6:15 a.m. on January 31, 6th Army Headquarters signaled OKH that there were Russians outside the door. It did not inform them that Arthur Schmidt was even then negotiating the surrender of the 6th Army. The last transmission was made at 7:15 a.m. Shortly thereafter, Friedrich Paulus surrendered to the Soviets. Now, only General Strecker refused to surrender. William Craig called his prolonged resistance “a futile gesture of defiance.”
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This last island of resistance disappeared at 8:40 a.m. on February 2, when Strecker surrendered the northern pocket and the remnants of XI Corps to the Red Army. He and his chief of staff, Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, deliberately omitted the customary “Heil Hitler” from their last transmission.
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Of the 274,000 men surrounded in Stalingrad on November 22, about 240,000 were Germans. Of these, approximately 25,000 (mostly sick and wounded) were flown out and 91,000 surrendered. The rest lay dead in the ruins of Stalingrad.

As General Strecker watched his men march off into captivity, he noted that they looked “spiritually broken. . . . Nothing [was] left to them. Death [could] not be worse.”
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Most of them were soon dead. They were forced to make long marches through the Russian winter just to reach the POW camps on the other side of the Urals. In their weakened condition, many perished in the cold. Then, in crowded and filthy camps, typhoid spread quickly. At least 75 percent of them had died by spring. Of the perhaps 15,000 still alive in July 1943, only about 6,000 were returned to Germany in 1955.
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Walter von Seydlitz-Kurzbach was sent to a Communist prison camp, where he was subjected to Soviet indoctrination. Their words found fertile ground, for von Seydlitz was a thoroughly disillusioned man and was very embittered and perhaps emotionally unbalanced over the senseless slaughter he had witnessed at Stalingrad. Shortly before the end he was openly contemplating suicide. Before he had been in captivity very long he was convinced that any act that sped the fall of Hitler was good for Germany—even if it meant working for Stalin. By early September, Seydlitz had been completely persuaded and was actively cooperating with the Soviets. At Lunyovo on September 11 and 12, he and 93 other officers, including Lieutenant General Elder Alexander von Daniels, Major General Dr. Otto Korfes, and Major General Martin Lattmann (all captured at Stalingrad), formed the League of German Officers—a military correlate to the Communist National Free Germany Committee. Seydlitz was selected president of the League, and the Soviets had great hopes that its propaganda efforts would demoralize the Germans and convince officers in pocket situations to surrender more quickly. Their hopes were soon dashed. The League’s first test was at Cherkassy, where the German XI and XXXXII corps were surrounded in February 1944. The pocket commander, General of Artillery Wilhelm Stemmermann, signaled OKH on February 14 that he had received letters from Seydlitz demanding his surrender but that he had refused to answer them.
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Soviet propaganda trucks, loudspeakers, and radio broadcast facilities were all put at the disposal of the League, but to no avail. There were few desertions and no surrenders, and on the night of February 16–17 the defenders broke out of the cauldron. Of the 54,000 men who had been encircled, 32,000 eventually escaped. Most of the rest were killed.

After Cherkassy, the Soviet High Command quickly (and correctly) branded the League a miserable failure, and, although they continued to use it occasionally, they never again expected much from it and indeed derived very little benefit from it.

As soon as he joined the League, Seydlitz was shunned by Paulus and most of the other captive generals, including Heitz, Carl Rodenburg, Hans-Heinrich Sixt von Armin, Strecker, and Schmidt. The Nazis were not slow in responding to Seydlitz’s actions, either. On April 26, 1944, a military tribunal in Dresden found him guilty of treason and sentenced him to death in absentia. In a typically tasteless Nazi gesture, the news of this sentence was made public on October 18, 1944, at the funeral of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—who had been forced to commit suicide for his part in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Of course, the facts behind Rommel’s death were suppressed until after the war. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel informed Ingeborg von Seydlitz that he wanted her to divorce her husband; otherwise, her safety and that of her four daughters would be in jeopardy. She took the warning and quickly (and wisely) initiated the divorce action. The final divorce decree was signed on the morning of July 20, 1944—only a few hours before Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life.

After the July 20 attempt misfired, the Gestapo arrested anyone who might be remotely connected to the plot, and often their families as well. Frau Seydlitz was taken into custody at Yerden/Aller on August 3 and was imprisoned at Bremen. Her two oldest daughters (Mechthild, age 19, and Dietlind, age 16) were picked up two days later, and Seydlitz’s brother-in-law, Dr. Eberhardt Barth, was arrested about the same time. The general’s two youngest daughters, 10-year-old Ingrid and 8-year-old Ute, were placed in the children’s concentration camp at Bad Sachsa, under their mother’s maiden name. Due to the divorce decree, and with the help of Reichsminister Albert Speer,
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all five of the Seydlitz females were released around Christmas 1944, although they were not allowed to return home until March 1945.

After the war, Walter von Seydlitz was kept in various prisons until July 8, 1950, when he underwent a “show trial” by a Soviet military tribunal and was sentenced to death on five charges dealing with his period in command of the 12th Infantry Division. His sentence was commuted to 25 years’ imprisonment, and he was sent to Rostov, where he was confined under deliberately cruel conditions—presumably his punishment for the failure of the League of German Officers. He was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to psychological torture, including an electric light that was kept burning in his cell 24 hours a day for four years. He was not allowed to communicate with his family and did not know if they were alive or dead. All of this, plus the guilt and worry about his wife and four young girls, gradually eroded his self-confidence and led to a nervous breakdown on November 26, 1954. After that he was transferred to the Butyrskaya prison near Moscow, where he marked time under less strenuous conditions.

In September 1955, West German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer visited Moscow, where he pulled a coup. He would refuse to establish diplomatic relations, he said, until the Germans still in Soviet prisons were released. The Soviets reacted with typical bad grace, but they finally pardoned and granted exit visas to all but 749 of them. The rest were turned over to the courts of East or West Germany for trial for war crimes.

Walter von Seydlitz was released on October 4, 1955, and reunited with his family two days later. Most of Germany and even many of his old comrades greeted his return with stony silence. Seydlitz seemed to accept this as his verdict and, his old arrogance gone, lived in relatively quiet retirement in Bremen until his death on April 28, 1976. The argument over whether or not he was a traitor to Germany continues to this day.

Friedrich Paulus never overcame Stalingrad, physically or psychologically. He initially refused to join the National Free Germany Committee or the League of German Officers because he disapproved of officers who had been taken prisoner engaging in political activity. He changed his views when he learned the details of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt and its aftermath. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had served under him at OKH, and Paulus also had great respect for two other prominent conspirators: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben and Colonel General Erich Hoepner.

On August 8, 1944—the same day Witzleben and Hoepner were hanged—Paulus made his first anti-Nazi broadcast, calling on the German armies in the East to oppose Hitler. The Gestapo arrested his family that same day, except for his son Friedrich. He had been killed in action at Anzio four months before.

Unlike the Seydlitz family, the Paulus family was never reunited. Paulus appeared as a witness for the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg in 1946 but was not released from prison until 1953. He never saw his wife again: she had been freed from a Nazi prison by the Americans at the end of the war, but she died in Baden-Baden in 1949. Professing now to believe that Communism was the best hope for Europe, the former marshal settled in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked as an inspector of People’s Police and tried to defend his military reputation from the attacks of historians and former comrades alike, but with little success. Even though his only surviving son, Ernst, was allowed to visit him a few times, Paulus’s last years were lonely. Also, Ernst openly disapproved of his father’s conversion to Communism, which did not help matters. Plagued in his last years by ill health, Friedrich Paulus died (apparently of cancer) in Dresden on February 1, 1957—one day after the 14th anniversary of his surrender at Stalingrad. Ernst, incidentally, committed suicide in 1970.

Unlike Paulus and von Seydlitz, Arthur Schmidt refused to cooperate with the Soviets in any way and, in fact, maintained his belligerent attitude toward them throughout his captivity. He was, in fact, just as stubborn as a prisoner as he was at Stalingrad. Neither torture nor prolonged solitary confinement could convince him to work for the Communists, who were anxious to use him in their propaganda efforts against Hitler. When his captors were finally convinced that Schmidt would not break, they sentenced him to 25 years’ imprisonment and hard labor. He was among those released in October 1955. Schmidt returned to his home town of Hamburg, where he repeatedly denied that he exerted undue influence on Field Marshal Paulus at Stalingrad. He also maintained a bitter hatred for the officers of the National Free Germany Committee for the rest of his life. He died at Karlsruhe on November 5, 1987.

Unlike Friedrich Paulus, the fanatical Nazi General Walter Heitz actually did try to commit suicide when Stalingrad fell; however, his chief of staff, Colonel Friedrich Schildknecht, prevented him from shooting himself. Like Paulus, Heitz received a special promotion (to colonel general) on January 30, 1943, the 10th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power. He was thus the second-highest-ranking prisoner taken at Stalingrad and third-highest-ranking German taken prisoner by the Allies at that time (behind Rudolf Hess and Paulus). Like most of those who surrendered in the ruins of the city on the Volga, he did not survive Soviet captivity, dying in Moscow of unspecified causes on February 9, 1944. He was buried in Krassnogorsk.

Like all the Luftwaffe generals,
wolfgang pickert
, the commander of the 9th Flak Division, flew out of the pocket before Stalingrad fell. He was later promoted to lieutenant general and commanded the III Flak Corps in the Normandy campaign, where his failure to cooperate with Field Marshal Rommel contributed to the German defeat. Since Goering and the Desert Fox bitterly disliked each other, this did not impede his advancement. Decorated with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross, he was named general of the Flak Army at
Oberkommando der Luftwaffe
(OKL) in Berlin and on March 1, 1945, was promoted to general of flak artillery. When Hitler allowed nonessential personnel to leave Berlin as the Soviets approached in April 1945, Pickert headed south, for Bavaria. Here, in early May 1945, he helped free Hermann Goering from the SS guard that had arrested him on Hitler’s orders several days before. Pickert, who was born in Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland), on February 3, 1897, died in Weinheim (in the Rhine-Necker district, about six miles north of Heidelburg) on July 19, 1984.
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erwin jaenecke
was born in Freren in 1890 and joined the army as a Fahnenjunker in 1911. Commissioned in the 10th Engineer Battalion in 1912, he spent most of his career in the engineer branch, but first earned prominence as chief of staff of Special Staff “W” during the Spanish Civil War. He was named chief of staff to the inspector of fortresses in 1938. After various engineer staff assignments in Poland, Belgium, Paris, and the West in the first three years of the war, he was promoted to lieutenant general on November 1, 1941. For him, the road to Stalingrad began when he accepted command of the 389th Infantry Division at Prague in February 1942. He was assigned to the 6th Army in May and fought at Kharkov. His old friend Paulus named him commander of the IV Corps after he sacked Schwedler, and Paulus was behind Jaenecke’s promotion to general of engineers on November 1, 1942. It seemed as if General Jaenecke would share the fate of so many of his comrades in Stalingrad, but he found a way out in the last days of the siege. There are two versions of his controversial departure. One is that he was hit by Soviet shrapnel and was evacuated with 16 holes in his body.
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The other version is much less heroic. According to it, the building that Jaenecke was in was hit by a Soviet artillery shell, causing a board or piece of plaster to fall. It struck Jaenecke on the head and actually drew blood. After that, Jaenecke acted like lightning and had himself medically evacuated at almost the last possible minute. He remained in seclusion at an isolated hospital until he “recovered.” It has been suggested that had Hitler or some of his cronies at Fuehrer Headquarters been aware of how minor Jaenecke’s wound was, he might not have survived the Stalingrad campaign after all.
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In any case, he was ready to return to active duty by March and on April 1 took command of the LXXXVI Corps in southwestern France.
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On June 1, 1943, he assumed command of the 17th Army in the Crimea and was promoted to colonel general on January 30, 1944.