Russian Against German: A Close-Up at Stalingrad

by ERICH WEINERT

DECEMBER 26, 1942. — In front of Stalingrad Hitler has concentrated his crack troops. It is interesting to determine from which strata of the population and from what parts of the “fatherland” this elite has been recruited. I have read more than a thousand letters which the soldiers of the doomed army have written home. Among the home addresses, the names of big cities hardly occur. Among a thousand letters the name Berlin appears fifteen times, Bremen four times, Leipzig five times, Chemnitz twice, Breslau eleven times, and Hamburg not once. That means that Hitler has gathered here his most devoted and reliable units from small cities and villages, from among peasants, whitecollar workers, small tradesmen, craftsmen, and so forth.

December 30, 1942. — Toward evening a German staff sergeant who was captured yesterday was brought before us. He is in his twelfth year of active military service. He is completely in agreement with Hitler’s war.
“Aren’t you glad that the war is over for you?” we asked him.
“No!”
“Would you like to get back to your outfit?” the Russian colonel asked.
“Yes, sir!”
“Have you been maltreated here in any way?”
“No!”
“If by chance you could get back to your outfit, would you tell your comrades that?”
“I would tell them the truth.”
“Then you shall go back. We will give you permission. Tonight we will take you over at a safe spot. . . . Well, aren’t you glad?”
The Hitler hero looks at us helplessly for a while. His “Yes, sir” sounds somewhat miserable.
“Are you ready to go?” asks the colonel.
Then the man completely loses his arrogant bearing and says with an almost imploring voice: “I should like to ask you, sir, if I may remain here. After all, I should like to return to my family when the war is over. ”
“You mean that you feel safer here?”
“Yes, sir!”
There it is, the “readiness to die for the Führer.”

January 2, 1943. — Reports are coming in of men giving themselves up singly and in groups — at one place even a whole company with their lieutenant; but these are only sporadic occurrences. Why don’t the others believe our broadcast assurances?
We question new prisoners: “Why aren’t more men giving themselves up?”
“They still think they will be rescued, in spite of everything. The officers say the encirclement is weak. They point out that other traps have been broken. They assure us all that we shall then be relieved and get a furlough home.”
“But if the Red Army strikes now, what then?”
“The officers say the Red Army is much too weak for that — or they would have attacked long ago.”
The picture is one of starvation — 200 grams of bread, in some cases only 150 grams a day. In the morning a liter of thin coffee; in the evening, half a liter of watery soup with a few peas and beans in it.
Sometimes a bit of horse meat. “The horses will all be eaten before long. Whenever one drops, everybody goes for it like a bunch of ravens. In five minutes only the bones and the guts are left.” “How about your winter clothing?”
“Very few have it. Most of them have only summer coats and leather boots, thin cotton gloves, and a muffler. There is hardly a man who hasn’t frozen something or other.”
“How much longer are you going to hold out?” “Many more want to come over. But they’re frightened.”
“Of what?”
“That they’ll be shot here, or at least starved to death. Our officers constantly tell us that the Russians are half starving because we have already occupied all their grain-growing regions. Or the men think that they’ll be deported to Siberia, where they’ll be left to die. Or that they’ll have to do forced labor here for years after the war, in order to rebuild everything again.”
“We’ve talked to you often enough across the lines. You shouldn’t believe all those lies.”
“They say that’s all enemy propaganda. The officers told us, ‘Those fellows who speak over there are no Germans; that’s all a bluff. Those are recordings.’ ”
“Aren’t the men discussing whether or not one should take a chance and allow oneself to be captured? ”
“Yes. Many do. They say, ‘We’ve had tough luck here. In winter the Russians are always at an advantage, but in spring we are going ahead again.’ ” It seems they will never realize how things stand until cannon speak, instead of arguments.

January 4, 1943. — Today we tried to stir the consciences of the responsible officers over there. Here is the text of the leaflet: —

TO THE OFFICERS OF THE GERMAN WEHRMACHT!

The hour is approaching which will decide the life and death of the men entrusted to you. The German High Command has left you in no doubt that the situation in the Stalingrad trap is hopeless. Your men are starving and half frozen.
You have ignored all proposals for an honorable capitulation made to you by the commanding officer of the Red Army. If your conscience does not demand that you lay down your arms before the Red Army liquidates the trap by force, tens of thousands of young Germans will die a senseless and inglorious death.
We speak to you as Germans. We are at the front opposite you. We do not feel the need of making “propaganda.” Your political opinions do not interest us. We are guided solely by our duty towards the German people, but above all by our duty to do everything for the tens of thousands of German mothers, wives, and children to save their sons, husbands, and fathers from useless destruction.
If an officer in such a situation considers it honorable to die rather than surrender, he is free to do so. But no one gives him the right to force upon his soldiers an attitude contrary to the people’s healthier conception of honor.
Do not abuse the trust of your men by keeping from them a realization of the danger by which they are engulfed.
We expect you, as German officers, to be conscious of your responsibility to our people. Remember that you will return from your captivity after the war to a new Germany in which the people are going to ask you if you have safeguarded as much as possible the lives of the men entrusted to you.

January 8, 1943. — Our propaganda seems gradually to be getting on their nerves. We have a German regimental order for Christmas which contains the following passage: “But the Russians will destroy us neither by their propaganda nor by force of arms.” And today we even got hold of an order of the commanding general, Paulus himself, with a warning against Russian propaganda.

January 9, 1943. — The ultimatum has been delivered to Paulus. And refused.
Sat all last night in the radio station and sent the text of the ultimatum into the trap. From 4.00 to 7.00 A.M. I kept sending out an invitation to Paulus to send his officers out with a white flag, on the road from Marinowka to Platonow at 9.00 A.M.; officers of the Red Army would meet them there.
Their radio operators picked up our message and sent the radiogram to the commanding general. Sharp at 9.00, officers from both sides met at the designated spot, but the Germans merely declared they had orders not to accept anything.
Now we have to acquaint the soldiers themselves with the text of the ultimatum.

January 11, 1943. — The reconnaissance battalion of the division found a favorable spot yesterday where strong forces of the enemy must be concentrated, south of the village of Marinowka, which lies in the southwestern tip of the trap in a protruding salient. The shape of the front lines there is such that a loud-speaker can cover a wide sector.
After dark, the car with our loud-speaker moved along under cover of the embankment of the KalatschKarpowka railroad. The road to the dugout from which we were to send went through country swept by enemy fire. We therefore still had a few kilometers of exhausting slogging through the deep snow of the steppes. Under our heavy fur coats our bodies were covered with perspiration in spite of the freezing night. The enemy over there shot tracers across, but they were too high.
The technicians had already dashed ahead across the railroad embankment in an area without cover and had carried their apparatus to within 500 meters of the German lines. The night was clear and there was almost no wind.
Several times I read the ultimatum and its honorable conditions of capitulation. Then the last appeal of the commanding general of the Red Army, which told the soldiers that Paulus had refused the ultimatum. “Your fate is now in your own hands. Send your representatives with a white flag! Leave your trenches and dugouts with hands raised! Anybody who tries to resist will be killed. Your life now depends on your own judgment. The decision is yours!”
Once more we shouted to them not to believe their officers. Real Germans were standing here who had no intention of misleading them with propaganda, who had no other wish than to tell them the truth once more. If they would now listen to reason, not one more German need die in the trap. . . . But tomorrow would be too late.
There was no shooting. They had heard.

January 12, 1943. — Too late. The offensive has begun. Marinowka, the village into which we directed our appeal only yesterday, has already been taken. From other sectors of the front we received news that everywhere larger or smaller wedges have been driven into the trap.
When dark fell we started out through a light snowstorm. In newly conquered territory travel is somewhat more dangerous. To be sure, the roads had been cleared of mines, but in the whirling snow it is easy to lose one’s way and get into the mine field. We moved ahead very slowly. It was a vast field of wreckage. Most of the houses in Marinowka are shot to pieces. In the darkness we stumbled through rubble half covered with snow, in order to get to a suitable dugout. They have left their dugouts in fairly good condition for us. We visited a regimental staff in a near-by dugout.
The regimental commander and his deputy commander never left the telephone. Orders and reports poured in incessantly.
“What’s the enemy doing? Is he digging in? When did he leave these positions? Any movement noticeable at point X? Watch them carefully!”
Everybody in the dugout was tense and alert. There was an expression of serene confidence on all faces. We are moving forward. Hitler’s Sixth Army is being liquidated.
We began sending, again and again, the same urgent appeals: whoever does not surrender now will not get away alive. The first blow has been struck. The liquidation of the trap is a matter of days.
We didn’t know for sure if those startled soldiers over there heard us. There were rumors that in the neighboring sector several units had surrendered. U. talked to them. There was a group of fifteen men and another of sixty, who organized and surrendered with their lieutenant. When they were asked if they knew anything about the ultimatum, they said no. They reported that if the blows of the Red Army continued unabated, not one soldier would fight to the last cartridge — they would all surrender.
A captain, they said, had told them that the thunder of the German guns was already audible before Karpowka.
There was the thunder of cannon — anybody could hear that — only they weren’t German cannon.

January 14, 1943. — Karpowka. The offensive is rolling on. We have heard that a gigantic wedge has been driven in along the northern side of the valley of the little Rossoschka River to Karpowka, and has split off the western part of the trap. Dimitriewka, Atamanskij, and Karpowka have been taken by storm. Only recently the commanding officer of a reconnaissance detachment on the southern side of the trap showed us on a map the German positions near Karpowka, and the concrete fortifications which the Germans had constructed along the railway fine leading to Shirnoklejewka. The Nazis never imagined that the Red Army might take Karpowka by surprise, attacking from the back.
Everywhere there are signs of panic. The Nazis simply leave everything behind, and don’t even bother about their wounded and sick.
The big, wide village of Karpowka looks like a gigantic junk yard. Wherever you look, nothing but overturned guns, immovable tanks, heavy trucks left standing broadside across the street. In their flight the Germans tried to throw a lot of stolen goods onto their cars, which were still usable, and then they lost half the loot again. They even left their motorized batteries behind. Heaps of cartridges, shells, and bombs are lying around. Their dugouts, which they built with solid supports of pieces of rail and massive timber, stand as if built for eternity. Here they intended to spend the winter unmolested.
They had no time to burn things down. They were flushed too suddenly from their warm holes in the ground. Now they have to walk through the snow to Stalingrad. Their chests and little grips must soon become too heavy for them; they are already throwing them away on the highway. Who knows where they stole all that stuff? There are bales of cloth, linen, silk goods, preserves, soap, caviar, and other things. They must have parted from these things with heavy hearts. All this had been packed ready for their Christmas furlough.
A troop of prisoners comes shuffling along on the main street. They were cut off at Marinowka and Atamanskij. Half of them just hobble along on frozen feet.
“How about it?” I asked them. “Is the Red Army too weak to finish you off?”
They look at me with troubled eyes in grimy faces. “It was dreadful, sir,” a tall fellow with a wild, black beard said to me. “This barrage—I shall never forget it as long as I live. I don’t know how I ever got out of it.”
Some pressed around us and began a plaintive lament. “If we had only known how we were being cheated by the officers. Every day they told us that the Russians would kill us all. Otherwise we should have stopped firing long ago.”

January 15, 1943. — The offensive is making great progress. The trap has already been cut into different sections. In some sectors they are still said to be defending themselves desperately; in others they leave everything and disappear as soon as the artillery opens up. We have followed our forward troops into Sineokowskij. Our army is pushing forward in a long wedge in the direction of the circular Stalingrad railway.
The chaos is becoming ever greater. On all streets, in all yards, lonely trucks are standing around partly loaded with material from the various staffs. Red soldiers are busy at the moment unloading the stuff in order to use the trucks. And now leaves of documents, notebooks, and staff correspondence are whirling through the whole village, driven by the icy wind. German newspapers and illustrated magazines flutter across the steppes. The street is strewn with unsent letters which had still been at the post office, with paymasters’ records and other military records, with cheap novels, picture postcards, field service regulations, decrees, orders of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, and German paper money. The tanks rumble right over the paper.
Red Army men poke around, laughing, in this rubble of “Kultur.” Many know a little German from their schooldays.
“What is The Vision of the Intensification of the Germanic Man? ” one man asks me, leafing through a gaudily printed, cheap publication.
“Dear comrade,” I say, “that’s a new sort of language; I can’t even translate it into German, let alone Russian. That is Nazi abracadabra.”
And among all this trash lie the dead, grotesquely distorted, their mouths and their horror-filled eyes still wide open, frozen stiff, with their skulls torn away and their bowels torn out, most of them with bandages on their hands and feet still saturated with the ointment for chillblains. Human wrecks, with whom death has not yet quite finished, lie on their straw bags in the field hospital. Those were the patients suffering from frozen limbs, invalids and half-dead men for whom nobody had cared during the flight. There they lie, those wretched knights of the hooked cross, driven into all the blessed lands by their beer-bloated prophets.
When their troops retired, these abandoned cripples wanted to hobble after them and thus got into the line of fire of the rapidly advancing Red Army.
On the parapet of a trench in which the dead are piled one on top of the other, someone had stuck one of those staff pennons lying around by the hundreds — one of those pennons with a white skull and crossbones on a black field. In hoc signo!

January 16, 1943. — I am squatting with a captain in a very small, dark dugout of the Jablonowa ravine. The little glass pane above the door is covered by driving snow every moment. The little stove, which has been patched up from old gasoline cans and shell cases, smokes so badly one is almost suffocated. The best thing to do is to hang about outside during the day, in spite of the 48 degrees below zero.
We came here from Sineokowskij, among steppe valleys which grow increasingly wilder. All the roads are covered with tanks, cars, and guns, some unharmed and some bombed into unrecognizable junk. Pulverized motorcycles, field kitchens, ammunition boxes, and among all these, frozen corpses of men and beasts in their last agony of death.
The crows have already settled on a corpse lying farther up on the height, and are now fighting for the eyes.
“Once you are back, my dearest,” I read in a letter from Frankfurt which I picked up somewhere recently, “I shall do nothing but look into your dear eyes again and again. In them I want to forget the dreadful sorrows of these years.”
In another ravine we did find, after all, one surviving Hitlerite. He looked at us deliriously. Our medical orderly had just put a new bandage around his feet.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.
“My feet are half frozen. There were three of us here when our fellows left. None of them cared about us. No water, no wood, not a piece of bread. One very sick fellow died yesterday. My other comrade said, ‘Our men have left already; we must see if we can get a truck. If the Russians come we are done for.’ So we crawled out of the dugout. Then a shell struck a few feet away from us. The other couldn’t get up any more. I dove back into the dugout. Then in the evening the Russians came.”

January 19, 1943. —Last night we got to the former flying field of Pitomnik, which is in the center of the area where the Nazis have been trapped. When we arrived there in the dim light of the moon, we thought we were in the midst of an inhabited place. But then we saw that what we had taken for small houses were really tanks and trucks the Germans had left standing there. Thousands and thousands of them.
Early in the morning we climbed up on an embankment. And what an unimaginable sight we had from there. As far as the eye could reach, nothing but tanks, carts, cars, guns, machine guns, dump trucks, remnants of planes, supply sheds, and ammunition dumps. Tanks knocked in as though they were tin cans, eight-ton trucks burned down to their iron frames, guns with their barrels burst, and amid all this, corpses of men and beasts, the whole litter of war, from a shell case to a shaving brush.

January 20, 1943. — The enemy is still holding out along the circular railroad 15 kilometers west of Stalingrad. From that direction the air reverberates.
The general invited us for breakfast this morning. While we were sitting at breakfast, we heard a terrific shouting outside. We ran out. All the Red soldiers were pointing up and shouting, “It’s on fire.” Not too high above the field a Ju-52 that had been hit came roaring down, emitting smoke. He had intended to land on the old flying field, but hadn’t found anything that resembled it. After a few seconds it was completely enveloped in smoke, went into a spin, and burst into flames. Not one of the crew had a chance to jump.
An hour later we heard the same lively shouting again — another bird looking for his old nest. A Junkers appeared from the cloud cover at about 700 or 800 meters and began to circle. The flak thundered from all sides. The guards tore the tommy guns from their shoulders and fired away.
He had hardly made a semicircle when a long white glowing flame shot out of his left motor. He was burning. The pilot attempted a quick landing. But in the next instant the plane tilted over and dashed to the ground. There it exploded with a mighty roar. Ammunition transport. Atomized!
At noon there came a third one, but he smelled a rat in time and turned tail. When he had almost disappeared in the haze, he suddenly trailed a thick plume of smoke. He won’t get back to Rostov either.

January 22, 1943. — The staffs are moving up. The trap disintegrates into its last component parts. Hitler’s Sixth Army was concentrated on the edge of the city of Stalingrad and on Gorodischtsche. There were unceasing lightning and thunder across the steppe. One was almost deafened by the firing of hundreds of guns.
The nearer we came to Stalingrad, the more gruesome the picture became. Wherever one looks the relics of the former elite army are lying about. Everywhere, frozen stiff, lie and squat all those who could not tag along in the retreat, and broke down here, left to their fate by their own comrades. One man lies toppled over, still embracing the post of a road sign — “To Stalingrad!”
In the ravine which leads to the outer fortifications of Gontschara, hell itself must have broken loose yesterday. The whole ravine is full of tanks and trucks all shot to pieces. Some lie overturned. Tank turrets that have been blown off and guns that have burst clog the road. Corpses were mashed to pulp by the caterpillar tracks. Artillery and guns pressed forward through the defile. It is difficult to make headway on foot through all this wreckage.
On the height there comes a procession of prisoners, Germans and Rumanians.
Behind them hobble the cripples with frozen limbs, their feet wrapped in handkerchiefs. They implore the others with beseeching eyes not to walk so fast; they are afraid of being left behind on the steppes to freeze to death.
“If you had surrendered on January 9,” I said, “you would have driven to the prisoners’ camps in your own tens of thousands of trucks.”
Moaning they hobbled on.
Behind us in the ravine our own guns thundered away at the last fortifications of Stalingrad.

January 24, 1943. — A terrific blizzard started yesterday. The steppes become ever more treacherous. The trucks have sunk into snowdrifts. Toward evening we moved on to Gurnrak. The Nazi garrison in Stalingrad is already split in two.
We arrived in Gumrak in deep snow after dark. On the way we saw some of the huge military graveyards, thousands of wooden crosses set in neat rows.
“Lebensraum!” Behind the village lay the deserted German staff dugouts, dispersed over the deeply snow-covered steppes.
The dugout which we entered must have been left just recently in a great hurry. The little stove, which was heated with coal, was still lukewarm. The walls were covered with a sort of Linkrusta wallpaper. The occupants had obviously settled down very comfortably for the long winter. They had probably stolen the armchairs from houses in Stalingrad. There were still some cups of tea on the table. They left their brushes, mirrors, shaving kits, Eau de Cologne bottles, and other junk on the shelves along the wall.

January 25, 1943. — We have been walking around Gumrak this morning. A few houses hit by German bombs yesterday are still burning. The whole landscape is strewn with ruins and corpses. The snowfall at night half covered these horrible pictures. Here and there skulls, feet, or hands stick out from the snow.
In a ravine we found the corpses of Russian prisoners of war, almost naked, as thin as skeletons, with the skin already a blackish-brown, all thrown together in a heap. They must have been lying here for some time. Starved or tortured to death.
Everywhere troops of prisoners are moving along.
In the village we found three German medical corps officers, who did not know where to go and so waved to the first Russian tank that came their way.
“Don’t you think,” our instructor asked them, “that the last ten thousand would certainly lay down their arms if they knew that just as little would happen to them as happened to you?”
“I am absolutely convinced of that,” said one of the medical officers. “Everything should be done to save them.”
“Will you help us save your compatriots?” asked the instructor.
“Certainly! But how?”
“Tonight, after dark, we are driving up to the front lines. There we can shout across to them through our loud-speakers. You are medical men and officers. You have great authority with your soldiers. Won’t you call over to them and tell them how you were received here as prisoners of war?”
Then suddenly these three heroes couldn’t take it. The one pretended to have a sprained ankle; the second felt sick; the third began to cough and said he had such a catarrh that he could hardly make his voice audible at all.

January 27, 1943. — From all sides streams of prisoners are gathering together — hobbling, shuffling wretches, wrapped in rags. Napoleon’s grenadiers must have looked the same way after crossing the Berezina. The most difficult problem now is to find accommodation and food for these wretches, until they can be shipped away. The stronger ones are immediately sent off to march to the gathering point at Karpowka, with loaves of bread under their arms. It is 25 kilometers. The weaker ones and those with chillblains have to be stowed away for the time being in all the available dugouts and sheds. The greatest difficulty arises in bringing up supplies for the thousands, especially since the supply columns can only move slowly in the deep snow.
Three of these bedraggled specters shuffled past our dugout. The commanding officer fetched them in. “Here, have something hot to drink!” Meantime they just stared at the two loaves of bread which lay on the shelf. The commanding officer noticed it. “Take the bread along,” he said, and handed it to them. “We have plenty of bread. You came here to steal our daily bread. But we can still give you poor devils something.”
The three immediately tore hunks out of the bread and ate so greedily they nearly choked on it.

January 30, 1943. — On my trip today I passed again through Karpowka. It is now 40 kilometers behind the front lines. And life has already returned again. A fortnight ago it was dead and empty; now it is swarming with life. The peasant women are back and have already started repairs on the houses. The wintry sun shines brightly. Children are skating on the lake where a dead German still lies. They have taken the seats out of the destroyed cars and are coasting down the slope, shrieking with mirth.
In the evening twilight, while the village street was still full of life, a Heinkel came suddenly shooting out of the sky, flew over the village at treetop level, and strafed it with all guns blazing. This is the third day, they say, that he has raced along over the villages in an impotent fury, like a hornet whose nest has been destroyed.
I sat in my billet and heard the bullets strike the house. As I ran out to see what harm that mad dog had done, I saw our guard lying in front of our door. A ricocheting bullet had struck his chest. Only ten minutes ago he had been sitting with us, warming himself by the stove and telling me about his home in the Donets region.
As the woman doctor approached, he opened his eyes once more. Then his head pitched backward.
An old bearded peasant stood near-by. Suddenly he opened his mouth wide, as though he wanted to shout something, struck his chest wildly with his fist, then raised it up and shook it in a raging fury.
But he uttered only one hoarse word; “Mestj! Revenge!”