Enemy at the Gates (47 page)

Meunch rushed to the airfield where an officer standing beside a car shook his head vehemently and told him that no more aircraft were going out that day. "Get in," he shouted, "or else you will stay here. I am going to the city."

Exhausted from the tension and hunger of previous days, Meunch sagged into the car and rode on to the tiny auxiliary airstrip at Stalingradski, on the outskirts of Stalingrad itself, where he spent the night in the company of hundreds of soldiers, pacing through the snow.

At 7:00
A.M
. on January 22, a lone Heinkel 111 flew over several times, dropped food bombs into the fields, but would not land. The hours passed and the wounded had eyes only for the western horizon, where suddenly three specks appeared—Ju-52s. The "old reliables" grew bigger, circled, and came in for landings.

Moments later, Meunch saw a sight he would never forget: The wounded rose from the snow to rush the doors of the taxiing aircraft. Clawing at each other, they kicked the weak to the bottom of the pile and hoisted themselves into the empty cabins.

Meunch walked slowly up to a pilot and showed his special pass. The pilot shook his head:

"You don't intend to get in there?" he said, pointing to the "animals" at the side of the plane. "You won't make it. Get in with me through the cockpit."

While Meunch clambered into the plane, Russian shrapnel sprayed the crowd. The pilot quickly gunned the motors and tried to lift off. He could not. Looking out the window Meunch saw nearly fifty men lying on the wings, holding on to anything they could with blue-cold hands as the Ju-52 picked up speed and raced down the strip. One by one, the riders fell off and tumbled back in the slipstream from
the
propellers. Shorn of its added burden, the plane rose swiftly into the bright sky and turned away from the Volga. Meunch tried hard to calm himself. For the first time in more than two months, he could not hear the sound of guns.

Radio message:                22 Jan. 43, 1602 hours

To Army Group Don

…
For submittal to the Führer and to commander in chief, Army Group Don….The Russians are advancing on a six-kilometer frontage both sides of Voporonovo toward the east, [toward Stalingrad] in part with flying colors. There is no possibility to close the gap…All provisions are used up. Over twelve thousand unattended [wounded] men in the pocket. What orders am I to issue to the troops, who have no ammunition left?...

Immediate decision is required, since symptoms of disintegration are noted in some places. However, the troops still have faith in their commanders.

Paulus

East Prussia had the answer ready within hours.

Capitulation impossible.

The troops will defend their positions to the last….The Sixth Army has thus made a historic contribution in the most gigantic war effort in German history.

Adolf Hitler

"A historic contribution," Hitler had declared, so Paulus stopped trying to convince his superiors that further resistance was simply mass murder. Blocking out the reality of the men dying around him, he chose instead to be overwhelmed by the natural course of events, and he left Gumrak for a cellar in Stalingrad.

In an anteroom just off Adolf Hitler's conference room, Maj. Coelestin von Zitzewitz waited nervously for an audience. Snatched from the
Kessel
by direct orders from East Prussia, he had flown to the Wolf's Lair to echo Capt. Winrich Behr's graphic description of conditions at Stalingrad.

When the door opened, Zitzewitz strode in and came to attention. Hitler walked forward and covered Zitzewitz's right hand with both of his. Shaking his head, he said: "You've come from a deplorable situation." And he waved his guest to a high stool beside a table.

Zitzewitz tried to adjust his eyes to the dim half-light in the room. A huge map of the Russian front framed one wall. A fireplace dominated another. He noticed Generals Zeitzler and Schmundt sitting back in the shadows.

Hitler opened the discussion. Pointing frequently to maps on the table, he spoke of German tanks striking across the Don and breaking into the
Kessel
with supplies. A battalion of them, he thought, could crush Russian resistance and reach Sixth Army.

Zitzewitz listened in growing disbelief. When his chance came to speak, he rattled off statistics and comments he had jotted down on a piece of paper: casualty rates, ammunition stocks, food supplies, death, disease, frostbite, morale. The figures were catastrophic, irreversible, and damning. While Hitler stared
in
surprise, Zitzewitz summed up. "My Führer, permit me to state that the troops at Stalingrad can no longer be ordered to fight to their last round because they are no longer physically capable of fighting, and because they no longer have a last round."

Hitler looked right through Zitzewitz. Dismissing the shocked major, the Führer mumbled: "Man recovers very quickly."

The railroad station at Gumrak burned brightly against the snow. Russian artillery fire had blown the structure apart and ignited the corpses that had been stacked against its walls up to the level of the second-storey windows. The frozen bodies became a gruesome bonfire that Sgt. Hubert Wirkner witnessed as he was carried to the edge of the runway and a last opportunity to get away from the
Kessel.

Completely disabled by his arm and leg wounds which were complicated with frostbite, Wirkner lay unattended on a stretcher for hours while twenty-four transports screeched in, unloaded and took off with hundreds of soldiers. In disgust he watched some of the lesser wounded "play possum" in the snow until the doors of the planes opened, then leap into the aircraft before harassed officials could see them. Too weak and proud to consider doing such a thing himself, Wirkner felt only pity for those who stole seats from their comrades.

One more plane glided in through the foggy mist and settled on the runway. From his prone position, Wirkner stared in disappointment as hundreds of ambulatory patients crowded around it and blocked access to the more seriously wounded.

At one of the doors, Col. Herbert Selle helped check ongoing passengers. An engineering specialist, the colonel had received orders earlier that day to leave and train another unit for another battle. Surprised by the unexpected reprieve, he stifled his momentary guilt feelings and reported to General Paulus for a few last words.

Paulus's appearance shocked Selle. The general was unshaven, bedraggled. His blue eyes, formerly so sparkling, "had become lifeless."

The general had a brief but bitter message for Selle. "Tell them," he said mournfully, "wherever you think it is advisable, that the Sixth Army has been betrayed by the Supreme Command."

Selle had left the pathetic figure of his commander in chief and gone to Gumrak where he waited through the foggy night until the last Ju-52 landed. While the pilot kept the motors running, Selle counted "cases" into the plane. His orderly, who had accompanied him to the field in hopes of a free ride, hovered nearby. The colonel nodded his head and winked him into the rear section. Beside the runway, Hubert Wirkner craned his neck and watched the Ju-52 depart.

Resigned to being left to die, Wirkner began to crawl on hands and knees in the general direction of the gutted railroad station. He passed an officer who stared incredulously at him and then begged Wirkner to go back to the hospital. The sergeant ignored him and pushed on into a snowfield. The wind tore at him, ice formed on his face, and he breathed torturously as his mouth filled with lumps of snow.

He dragged his dead legs for nearly a mile, reached the main road to Stalingrad, and collapsed alongside the stream of traffic. When he tried to climb into the back of a truck, his legs collapsed and he fell down. With a final burst of strength, Wirkner rose once more to clutch a howitzer with his frozen hands. Grunting from the pain, he pulled himself over the gun barrel and dangled precariously, his head hanging down on one side, his feet on the other.

The howitzer crept toward the city. With his face inches from the ground, his eyes bulging and his head pounding from blood draining into it, Wirkner drifted in and out of consciousness. The sounds of speeding cars washed over him and he heard the mournful prayers of soldiers lying on the ice. Screams, machine -gun fire, and curses came at him from all sides. He fainted again and when he woke up, he was surrounded by Germans sitting beside the road. When he called weakly for help, they failed to respond. Wirkner heard the wind and gunfire but nothing from his companions. They were all dead.

The lights of a truck flashed over him and he tensed for a terrible blow, but the driver had seen him move and stopped to pick him up. Wirkner rode the rest of the way into Stalingrad, where, again on all fours, he dragged himself into a dark cellar and "switched off his mind."

At Gumrak, Russian tanks were rolling over the runways and firing point-blank into hospital bunkers. Hundreds of German wounded died where they lay, abandoned by countrymen now stampeding into Stalingrad. Along the main road into the city, a long line of trucks and cars roared through the fog, while in the fields beside the highway, a thin line of troops sat in hip-deep snow as a rear guard protecting the disorderly retreat. Panicked at the thought of being left alone to face Soviet armor, some of them swiveled their guns around and fired into the vehicles. When a driver was hit and his truck stopped, the gunners ran to the road, pulled their victim from the front seat and drove off themselves.

On the morning of January 24, the "Road of Death" as the truckers called it, was a five-mile stretch of snow coated with frozen blood left by the passage of Sixth Army to its final positions. By now more than a hundred thousand Germans had plunged into the black basements of Stalingrad.

Cpl. Heinz Neist rode into the city on a sleigh dragged by friends. Totally exhausted, Neist shivered under a thin blanket while Russian artillery knocked down what buildings were left standing. To Neist it seemed that "everything had been annihilated." The world was dead. He was in a state of despair.

Quartermaster Karl Binder had burrowed into the
Schnellhefter Block,
a series of workers' houses just west of the tractor factory. Still the efficient organizer, Binder was trying to establish a food
360
sharing program in his sector, but his problems defied solution. Although the Ju-52s and He-111s still were dropping supplies by parachute, most of them drifted inside Russian lines and were lost. The few that landed among the Germans were supposed to be brought immediately to central points for equal distribution, but the soldiers frequently hid them away for their own use. German military police held summary courts-martial for those found stealing and executed the offenders.

A few hundreds yards away from Binder's refuge, in the tangled wreckage of the tractor works, tailor Wilhelm Alter was busy working on a "thing of beauty." With a piece of brown cloth and fur from a coat collar, he was making a Cossack hat for an officer who was looking ahead to the rigors of captivity. Besides having the chance to pass the time doing something creative, Alter was especially pleased about the payment due for his labor. The officer had promised him an extra piece of bread.

In the same sector, veterinarian Herbert Rentsch had assumed command of a machine-gun company. He had also made a heartrending decision about his horse, Lore. Forced out of a
balka
toward the city, Rentsch went to the black mare, led her into a tunnelled-out bunker and tied her to a post. As Lore stood patiently beside her master, Rentsch patted her neck and gently stroked her emaciated flanks. When she turned her head to nuzzle his hand for food, he choked back a sob and ran away. His one hope was that the Russians would find her quickly and treat her with tenderness.

In central Stalingrad, Sgt. Albert Pflüger, despite his broken arm, set up a machine gun to interdict some side streets, then sat back to think about the future. Fully aware that the Russians had already won the battle, he conjured up the possibility that Hitler and Stalin had reached an agreement on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Pflüger also "dreamed" that the Americans were going to intervene with Stalin to prevent the mass killings of captives.

These delusions helped immensely as he prepared himself for the ordeal he knew was coming.

"Hold out for the next few days? For what?" asked an increasing number of German officers and men as they scurried for shelter in the broken-down houses of Stalingrad. They had finally begun to question the purpose of fighting for a thousand cellars at the edge of Asia.

With the fall of Pitomnik and Gumrak, all but a tiny hard core of Nazis faced the ghastly truth. Stalingrad would be their tomb. Abandoned to a miserable fate, they vented their rage in their letters, and one of the last planes leaving the
Kessel
carried seven sacks of mail scribbled on toilet paper, maps, anything that passed for stationery.

At Taganrog, German military censors analyzed the letters, sorted them into appropriate categories and forwarded a report on to Berlin and the Propaganda Ministry, where Dr. Joseph Goebbels read the findings.

1. In favor of the way the war was being conducted                      2.1 percent

2. Dubious                                                                                   4.4 percent

3. Skeptical, deprecatory                                                             57.1 percent

4. Actively against                                                                        3.4 percent

5. No opinion, indifferent                                                             33.0 percent

Nearly two out of every three writers now complained bitterly against Hitler and the High Command. But their protest was tardy and irrelevant. Fearful of the effect of these letters on the German population, Goebbels ordered the letters destroyed.*