Enemy at the Gates (42 page)

In their cramped holes, the Germans were powerless to interfere. Ammunition had to be saved for an actual attack.

Knowing their enemy was impotent, Russian soldiers set up huge field kitchens, from which the aroma of hot food wafted toward Sixth Army foxholes. This sensual torture was worse for the Germans than seeing the tanks and guns that spelled imminent disaster.

Joseph Stalin had finally put his generals in motion to crush Paulus. Artillery genius Nikolai Nikolaevich Voronov appeared at the edge of the
Kessel
to lend his authority to plans for the final offensive. On a line seven miles long, he proposed the installation of seven thousand guns, more than enough to burst through the German perimeter.

Another key part in the new Soviet offensive was delegated to Vassili Chuikov in the city of Stalingrad. Aware that Paulus still kept seven divisions along the Volga despite manpower shortages elsewhere on his flanks, STAVKA assigned his Sixtysecond Army a significant tactical role in the final liquidation of the pocket.

Chuikov learned of this when a distinguished visitor, Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky, came across the Volga to his cliffside bunker. Sitting on an earthen bench, the front commander gave Chuikov the details. While simultaneous attacks were being mounted from west, north, and south, Sixty-second Army had to …attract more enemy forces in its direction, preventing them from reaching the Volga if they try to break out of encirclement…"

When Rokossovsky asked whether the Sixty-second Army could contain any such desperate enemy maneuver, General Krylov, Chuikov's chief aide, answered for his superior: "If in the summer and autumn all Paulus's forces were unable to drive us into the Volga, then the hungry and frozen Germans won't even move six steps eastward."

Each day, Sixty-second Army shock troops continued to intimidate these hungry and frozen Germans, who gave ground slowly as they scurried from cellar to cellar. Firefights erupted endlessly in workshops, apartment houses, and workers' homes, all mere shells by now but filled with desperate human beings, at bay and dangerous.

Trapped for more than three months in their concrete barn behind German lines, Natasha Kornilov and her mother lay under a blanket on the icy floor and listened to a sudden flurry of grenade explosions and staccato bursts from machine guns. The eleven-year-old girl had just come back from her daily trip to garbage heaps on the streets. Once again she had failed to find any food. Since the beginning of the encirclement, Natasha had come home empty-handed most of the time and by now, she was finding it extremely difficult to gather enough strength to walk out the door. But she always did, for otherwise she knew her mother would die of starvation.

Beside her under the blanket, Mrs. Kornilov had watched her eleven-year-old daughter waste away. The child's eyes bugged out from a hollowed face. Her dress hung limply on a skeletal frame. The girl's arms were like broomsticks. Though neither dared to voice her fears to the other, each wondered how long they could go on. Each prayed that the other would not die and leave the survivor alone in the concrete barn.

Gunfire outside rose to a crescendo, bullets pinged off the walls. The door flew open and a soldier trained his rifle on the figures under the covers. Natasha heard him say something in a guttural voice, then hands reached down and someone was gruffly telling her that everything was all right. Natasha smiled weakly into the bearded face of a Russian infantryman.

Twenty-five miles to the west, Pitomnik Airport was rapidly deteriorating into a living hell. At the two main medical stations, German doctors had been overwhelmed by an influx of wounded. Patients begged for medication to stop their pain, but with drugs in short supply, medics were forced to issue them only to the worst cases. Outside the hospitals, countless bodies lay unburied. So far, however, the corpses were being stacked in neat rows for future interment.

A few of the passengers on outgoing planes looked remarkably healthy. Specialists and administrators, they had been ordered to leave the pocket to form the nucleus of new divisions. Some benefited from General Seydlitz's abortive attempt to force a retreat in November: The staff of the 94th Division boarded Junkers and embarked on a mission to rebuild that "ghost" organization.

Their division veterinarian, Herbert Rentsch, stayed behind to dispose of his livestock. His camels had just been slaughtered and now Rentsch processed the last of his twelve hundred horses for food. But he still refused to send his own horse, Lore, to the knife. Though she had lost most of her strength, when Rentsch looked at her he could not order her destruction. He rationalized his decision by thinking that one more dead horse would make little difference to the outcome of the battle.

Lt. Hans Oettl had no such problem. When he found his goat Maedi eating the documents in his files, he knew she was doomed to starvation. Bringing out his small library of books, he fed them to Maedi page by page, then handed her to the company butcher and walked away.

On the northern perimeter of the
Kessel,
some lucky German soldiers were actually having a feast. Their bonus was the gift of a grateful Dr. Ottmar Kohler who, on returning as promised from his furlough in Germany, had loaded thirty geese in the back of a Heinkel bomber as a gesture of thanks to those who had given him a brief moment with his family during the holidays.

If he had so chosen, the doctor could have stayed at home. It would have been easy for him to make an excuse, to feign illness, until too late to return. But Kohler always knew he would go back; he could not live with himself otherwise.

When he stood again in the doorway of the hospital, some of the wounded wept on seeing him, and Kohler immediately plunged back to work, trying to handle a staggering number of patients, many of whom just lay on their cots and died without a struggle. Convinced that he knew the underlying cause of their deaths, Kohler went to an autopsy to prove his case.

He joined other doctors around an operating table on which the body of a thirty-year-old lieutenant lay stripped. There was no mark on the painfully thin corpse, but it was so frozen that attendants brought in strong lights and portable heaters to thaw it sufficiently for examination. Finally the pathologist moved to the cadaver and with swift strokes made a modified Y incision, cutting from each clavicle inward to the sternum and then straight down the torso to the pubis.

With a pair of surgical shears, the pathologist proceeded to open the rib cage. The loud snap of severed bones and cartilage accompanied his dry commentary: "Thoracic cavity, complete absence of subcutaneous fat." When he excised the heart and held it up for all to see, a murmur of surprise went around the room. The organ was shrunken to the size of a baby's fist.

The autopsy continued, the pathologist's voice droned on: "Duodenum, complete absence of subcutaneous fat; peritoneal cavity, small amount of fluid, complete absence of subcutaneous fat. . . ." To Kohler, the verdict already was obvious. He listened intently as the dissector finally straightened up and announced his diagnosis: "I cannot find any valid reason why this man is dead."

Stunned, Kohler shouted: "Shouldn't we at least offer an opinion among ourselves? The man's heart has shrunk to that of a child. There's not a bit of fat in him. He has starved to death."

His remarks were met by deadly silence, and Kohler realized that no one was about to side with him against Sixth Army Headquarters, which had banned all mention of starvation as a factor contributing to death. Disgusted with his peers, Kohler stormed from the room.

Lt. Heinrich Klotz, leader of the oldest company of men in Sixth Army, would have seconded Dr. Kohler's cry of outrage. During the past weeks, he had watched his soldiers disintegrate physically. When a doctor examined the unit, he shook his head, exclaiming: "I must say, the condition of your people is even worse than that of the Rumanians."

The men of Klotz's company died quietly. One night a forty year-old man went to sleep and never woke up. Two other soldiers walking back from a trench-digging detail just stumbled and fell down. When the lieutenant reported their deaths, a superior demanded they be listed as "killed in action." Klotz did as he was told.

While increasing numbers of Sixth Army troops toppled into the snow from the effects of malnutrition, the distance between them and their comrades who had tried to rescue them widened perceptibly. Now, more than eighty miles southwest of the
Kessel,
General "Papa" Hoth's original relief expedition was slowly being forced backward by Russian divisions pressing in close pursuit.

Acting under Manstein's order to protect the city of Rostov as long as possible, Hoth was conducting a masterful delaying action as he feinted, ambushed, and kept the Soviet units off balance. Hoth's tactics exasperated not only the Red Army, but also Hitler, who began to complain to Manstein about this strategy of "elastic" withdrawal. When the Führer finally insisted that Hoth stop and hold every foot of ground, on January 5, Manstein abruptly offered his resignation in a curt telegram to Rastenburg: "Should . . . this headquarters continue to be tied down…I cannot see that any useful purpose will be served by my continuing as commander of Don Army Group."

Faced with such an outburst from Manstein, Hitler backed down and allowed General Hoth to retreat as planned.

The Russian divisions stalking Hoth were under the control of Andrei Yeremenko, who was still smarting over his recent demotion in favor of Rokossovsky. Intent on restoring his position with STAVKA and the premier, the general was pushing hard to seize Rostov and foil German Army Group A's withdrawal from the Caucasus. To that end he had already taken Kotelnikovo, fifty-two miles northeast of Rostov, and there his troops had been embraced by thousands of ecstatic Russian civilians, who blurted out a torrent of stories about Nazi oppression: three hundred boys and girls deported as slave laborers to Germany; four people shot for harboring a Russian officer. One man sorrowfully told how …they burned down the public library." Another described, "a lot of rape…" The litany of crimes shouted out by the citizens of Kotelnikovo infuriated their rescuers.

Southwest of Kotelnikovo, Sgt. Alexei Petrov spurred his gun crew on toward Rostov. The squat artilleryman had lost count of the times he had crossed and recrossed the twisting loops of the lower Don, but he ignored his exhaustion as he pursued an enemy who had held his family in bondage for more than a year.

In the midst of this offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a steppe village, the inhabitants— men and women—ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.

The Kazakhs screamed insults and shouted: "We don't want any Russians here!" while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: "Destroy them all."

In the general bombardment that followed, Petrov fired highexplosive shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off anyone who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.

Gazing at the crackling flames, Petrov suddenly wondered why these people had such hatred for the state. What was it about Communism that made them turn on their brothers? He was plagued by a terrible guilt for killing his own brethren. s

"Eins, zwei, drei, vier! Eins, zwei, drei, vier!"
The harsh cadence rang across the steppe as German officers inside the
Kessel
trained recruits for the infantry. Clerks, cooks, telephone operators, orderlies, men under company punishment for crimes—they all marched up and down the
balkas
in close-order drill. The man who taught them, Lt. Herman Kastle, did not enjoy his job. Some of the troops had been his friends for years, and he knew he was sending them to a sure death.

The soldiers he hurriedly prepared for combat were in a state of shock. Few had ever dreamed they would have to face the Russians across no-man's-land. Most had enjoyed soft assignments; almost none of them had come out of their warm bunkers during the winter.

As Kastle issued final instructions before sending them off to battle, one soldier broke down completely. Sobbing hysterically, he clutched at the lieutenant and begged to be spared. Kastle talked urgently to him, trying to quiet his fears. The man listened and then, while the column started to march off, he wiped his tears away and ran to take his place in formation.

Kastle watched him out of sight.

Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert was already at the main line of resistance. Ever since he had de-trained from Germany, he had walked back and forth across the steppe: standing guard duty, lining up for inspections, sitting on buses which never broke out of the
Kessel.
Now he was merely two hundred meters away from the burned out hulk of a Soviet tank whose driver, charred to a "black tailor's dummy," seemed to stare back at him every day.

When he first saw the body, Brunnert had felt a brief spasm of compassion. The man must have suffered indescribable tortures trying to escape the flames. Still, Brunnert reasoned, the same thing had happened countless times to Germans in the war and that thought helped him forget the gruesome sight in front of his foxhole.

His life followed a strict pattern. He stood watch every four hours and at 5:00
P.M
. every day, he crawled back to the company kitchen for rations. Otherwise he read and reread Soviet propaganda leaflets that showered down from the sky. Brunnert never once thought of defecting, but the pictures on the literature haunted him: a beautiful Christmas tree, beneath which a woman buried her face in a handkerchief. Beside her a little child sobbed her grief as they both stared at their present, the body of a soldier father. In another leaflet, a woman sang carols with her children while the figure of the dead father hovered over them like a ghost.