War and Remembrance (112 page)

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
These dry words of Roon scarcely convey the reality as the Russians saw it.

The advance of the Sixth Army on Stalingrad was apparently the most terrifying event of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The army commanders, the populace, and Stalin himself were astounded at this renewed powerful thrust of the Germans into the vitals of their country. The August twenty-third bombardment was one of the most horrible ordeals by fire the Russians ever endured. Some forty thousand civilians were killed. The flaming streets of the town literally “ran with blood.” All communication with Moscow was cut off. For several hours Josef Stalin believed that Stalingrad had fallen. But though the city was to undergo one of the worst punishments in the history of warfare thereafter, that was the low point.

Most military writers conclude that if Hitler had not interfered with the Blue plan, the Volga Force would have reached the river weeks earlier, while Stalin was still under the delusion that the southern attack was a feint. Stalingrad would have fallen, a fruit of the massive initial surprise, and the whole war might have gone differently. Hitler disembowelled the Blue campaign by the diversion to Rostov.
—
V.H.

As previously stated, the capture of Stalingrad was
not
a military necessity.

Our aim was to take the land bridge between the rivers, and to deny the Soviets the use of the Volga as a supply route. Now we were at the Volga. All we had to do was invest the city and bombard it to rubble. After all, we invested Leningrad for more than two years. About a million Russians fell in Leningrad streets from starvation, and for all intents and purposes of the war, the city was a withered corpse. There was no
military
reason not to treat Stalingrad the same way.

But there was increasing
political
reason. For as the Caucasus Force
came to a halt in the wild mountain passes despite all Hitler’s savage urging; as Rommel stalled at El Alamein, failed in two assaults, and at last underwent the grinding assault of the British; as the
RAF
increased its barbaric fire raids on our cities, slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children and pulverizing important factories; as our U-boat losses suddenly and alarmingly shot up; as the Americans landed in North Africa with world-shaking political effect; as all these chickens came home to roost, and Adolf Hitler’s great summer flush of triumph waned, and the first cracks in his gigantic imperium appeared, the embattled Fuhrer felt a more and more desperate need for a prestige victory to turn all this around.

STALINGRAD!

STALINGRAD, bearing the name of his strongest foe! STALINGRAD, symbol of the Bolshevism he had fought all his life! STALINGRAD, a city appearing more and more in world headlines as a pivot of the war!

The capture of Stalingrad became for Adolf Hitler an unbelievably violent obsession. His orders in the ensuing weeks were madness compounded and recompounded. The Sixth Army, which with its mobile striking power had won an unbroken string of victories in Poland, France, and Russia, was fed division by division into the meat grinder of Stalingrad’s ruined streets, where mobile tactics were impossible. Slav snipers mowed down the veterans of the great Sixth in a house-to-house “rat war.” The Russian General Staff poured in defenders across the Volga to keep up this annihilation, while methodically preparing a stupendous counterstroke against the weak satellite armies on the Don flank. For Josef Stalin had finally grasped that Hitler, with his obsessive cramming of his finest divisions into the Moloch-maw of Stalingrad, was giving him a glorious opportunity.

Late in November the blow fell. The Red Army hurtled across the Don into the Rumanian army, guarding the flank of the Volga Force, northwest of Stalingrad. These unwarlike auxiliaries gave way like cheese to a knife. A similar attack routed the Rumanian flank corps in our Fourth Panzer Army, on the southern flank. As the attack developed into December, the Russians smashed into our lines all along the Don where Italians and Hungarians were protecting the Sixth Army’s rear; and a steel trap closed on three hundred thousand German soldiers, the flower of the Wehrmacht.

(From “Hitler as Military Leader”)

…As it happened, I was away from Supreme Headquarters during much of this trying period, on a long inspection tour. When I left late in August, all was going well enough in Russia. Both forces were advancing
rapidly on their diverging fronts; the Red Army still seemed to be fading away, taking no advantage of the great gap opening up in our line; and Hitler, though understandably tense and nervous, and suffering dreadfully from the heat, seemed in good spirits.

I returned to find a shocking change at Werewolf. Haider was gone, fired. Nobody had relieved him. General List of the Caucasus Force had been fired. Nobody had relieved him, either. Hitler had assumed both posts!

Adolf Hitler was now not only head of the German State, head of the Nazi Party, and Supreme Commander of the armed forces; he was now his own Army Chief of Staff, and he was in direct command of the Caucasus Force, stymied six hundred miles away in the mountains. And this was not a nightmare; it was all really happening.

Hitler was not speaking to Jodl, his erstwhile pet and confidant. He was not speaking to anybody. He was taking his meals alone, spending most of his time in a darkened room, brooding. At his formal meetings with the staff, secretaries came and went in relays, writing down every word; and it was with these secretaries and nobody else that Hitler was conversing. The break with the army was complete.

Gradually I pieced together what had happened. Halder’s objections to Hitler’s senseless pressing of the Stalingrad attack had at last resulted in his summary dismissal in September; and so the last level head among us, the one senior staff officer who for years would talk up to Hitler, was gone.

As for the pliable Jodl, the Fiihrer had sent him by plane to the Caucasus Force, to urge General List to resume the advance at all cost. But Jodl had come back and, for once in his life, had told Hitler the truth —that List could not advance until logistics improved. Hitler had turned nasty; Jodl, in an amazing burst of spirit, had rounded on his master, reeling off all Hitler’s orders which had led to this impasse. The two men had ended screeching at each other like washerwomen, and thereafter Jodl had been barred from the great man’s presence.

It was several days before I was summoned to appear at a briefing. I was quite prepared, even at the cost of my head, to give my report on the bad state of Rommel’s supply. As it happened, Hitler did not call on me to speak. But I will never forget the glance he fixed on me when I first entered the room. Gray-faced, red-eyed, slumped in his chair with his head sunk between his shoulders, holding one trembling hand with the other, he was searching my face for the nature of my news, for a ray of optimism or hope. What he saw displeased him. He gave me a menacing glare, uncovering his teeth, and turned away. I was looking at a cornered animal. I realized that he knew in his heart that he had botched the Blue campaign, thrown away Germany’s last chance, and lost the war; and that from all quarters of the globe, the hangmen were approaching with the rope.

But it was not in his nature to admit mistakes. All we heard, in the dreadful weeks that dragged on until the Sixth Army surrendered — and indeed until he shot himself in the bunker in 1945,— was how we generals had failed him; how Bock’s delay at Voronezh had lost Stalingrad; how incompetent List was; how battle nerves had incapacitated Rommel; and so on without end. Even when the Stalingrad pocket, cut to pieces, began surrendering piecemeal, all he could think of was to promote Paulus to Field Marshal; and when Paulus failed to kill himself rather than surrender, he threw one of his worst fits of rage. That ninety thousand of his best soldiers were going into captivity; that more than two hundred thousand more had been hideously lost for his sake; all that meant nothing to the man. Paulus had failed to show proper gratitude for promotion, by blowing his brains out. That upset Hitler.

(From
World Holocaust)

Hitler would never allow the Sixth Army its one chance, which was to fight its way out to the west; either early in the entrapment, when it might have broken out by itself, or in December, when Manstein at the head of the newly formed Don Force battled his way through the snow to within thirty-five miles of a join-up. Not once would he give Paulus permission to break out. The screeching refrain that echoed through Headquarters until Paulus surrendered was, “I
won’t leave the Volga!”

He kept prating of “Fortress Stalingrad,” but there was no “fortress,” only a surrounded and shrinking army. He boasted in a national broadcast, late in October, that he had actually captured Stalingrad, and was reducing pockets of resistance at leisure because “he did not want another Verdun,” and time was of no consequence. Thus he burned his public bridges, condemning the Sixth Army to stand and die.

Some military analysts now lay the disaster to Goring, who promised to supply the trapped Sixth Army at a rate of seven hundred tons of supplies a day. The Luftwaffe effort never reached two hundred tons, and Goring blamed the bad weather. Of course Goring’s promise was just a jig to his master’s tune. They were old comrades-in-arms. He knew what Hitler wanted him to say, so he said it, and condemned large numbers of Luftwaffe pilots to useless deaths. Hitler never reproached Goring for this. He wanted to stay at the Volga until tragedy befell, and Goring’s transparent lie helped him to do it.

Jodl testified at Nuremberg that as early as November Hitler privately admitted to him that the Sixth Army was done for; still it had to be sacrificed
to protect the retreat of the armies in the Caucasus. What balderdash! A fighting retreat from Stalingrad would have made far more sense. But the propagandist in Hitler sensed that a heartrending drama of a lost army might rally the people to him, whereas an ignominious swallowing of his boasts with a retreat would sully his prestige. On some such reasoning, he sacrificed a superb striking arm of battle-hardened veterans which could never be replaced.

Franklin Roosevelt’s proclamation at this time of the slogan “Unconditional Surrender,” at the Casablanca conference in January, was in every way a masterstroke. Critics of the slogan — including the august General Eisenhower— fail to understand what Roosevelt accomplished with this thunderous stroke; which, with his usual guile, he passed off as a casual remark at a press conference.