Europe Central (63 page)

On 21.10 he sent in Seventy-ninth Infantry against the Red October and Barrikady factories. What he really needed to do was shore up General Dumitrescu of Third Romanian Army, but our Führer still had not responded to his request for reinforcements. For now he had to neglect Third Romanian, since the battle on the threshold of the Red October Works required full attention. Specifically, his boys were dying in unusual numbers—as were the Reds, of course. The orderly brought him fresh white gloves on the silver tray. Major-General Schmidt came just to say: We all believe in you, sir.—They were now approaching that moment in any close battle when the wills of attackers and defenders alike have been nearly broken, so that one great effort on one side or the other will suffice to decide the struggle. It was now that he especially regretted the loss of those forces which the Führer had redirected to the Caucasus. But Lieutenant-General Paulus was not a quitting sort of man. Opening his silver cigarette case, he lit a match, trying to work out everything thoroughly, keeping close account of frontage and distribution. It was quite complicated, actually; he almost called in Schmidt to help him. The Dzherzhinskii district was now essentially in our hands; the Red October Works couldn’t resist any longer; that day he called in seven hundred dive-bombing attacks on it; Spartanovka was about to cave in. In that month we find him writing to his old comrade Lutz:
The great thing now is to hit the Russian so hard a crack that he won’t recover for a very long time.
The sentiment was banal, the goal practical. Of such stuff are effective soldiers made. To Coca he wrote that Ernst’s tank regiment was performing very creditably; unfortunately, there was no time to pay the lad a visit, but she needn’t worry about him; if anything had happened he would have heard. He asked her to send Olga his kisses; he felt it incumbent on him to advise that young lady one more time of the dangers of exceeding one’s resources. To Friedrich, the other son, he wrote a brief letter of love and encouragement; Friedrich was in Africa now with Field-Marshal Rommel. First Beethoven on the gramophone, then a cigarette, then the enemy signals report, courtesy of Fremde Heere Ost, Gruppe I, Army Group B. He had to smile; Major-General Gehlen was so good at being plausible. The analysis of Red Army signals bore out Gehlen’s assertion that the productive capacity of what remained of Russian Europe had been essentially obliterated.

Shooting rockets out of windows, the Soviet enemy, their ammo belts slung across broken girders, popped up to hurl stick-grenades, then ducked back into jagged-toothed caves. Soviet factory workers charged with guns in their hands, dying almost uselessly, but not quite, because every time three or a dozen of them fell, a German did, too. There were always more Russians; his prisoners now everlastingly quoted to him the words of Zoya the Partisan, whom we’d executed for sabotage last winter:
You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us!
—There were only eighty million Germans. Last week he’d pointed that out to Schmidt, who merely smiled and replied: I’m sure we’ll manage one way or another, sir.

First the daily enemy situation report, then the signals intelligence report. Unfortunately, we no longer possessed enough Heinkel-IIIs to continue aerial reconnaissance on as frequent a basis as before. The enemy radio was saying:
Keep a tighter grip on your tanks.
But what tanks did they have? Toward the end of September, their transmissions had begun very occasionally to refer to some far-off Operation Uranus. Paulus, who had been justly credited for the complete success of Operation Shark, the plan which had tricked Russia with a buildup of forces on the western front just before we launched Barbarossa (even Coca had been impressed), scented danger, not on his own sector, to be sure, but it might well prove to be a threat to Army Group Center. Field-Marshal von Reichenau would have let Group Center take care of itself; Field-Marshal von Reichenau for that matter would not even have bothered to study those enemy transmissions, but Lieutenant-General Paulus, ever considerate and conscientious even to his own detriment, sent a message in cipher to Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B, to warn them about it. They never replied, which first bewildered, then offended him. He knew that behind his back many generals called him “the office assistant.” They found him womanish; they equated him with that laughably fat and bustling Field-Marshal Keitel at OKW; they said he had no dash, no experience, no right to command Sixth Army. Their opinions shamed him more and more. Nobody except Coca had ever expressed any appreciation for Operation Shark, although it must have saved thousands of German lives. Well, that was their business, but they really ought to be more careful. When Russians are involved, reconnaissance in force will invariably escalate into a general offensive if it succeeds. No one seemed to comprehend this, not even Schmidt. Anyhow, all mentions of Operation Uranus soon faded from enemy communications. Lighting another cigarette, he made a note to query Major-General Gehlen directly about it, just as soon as—

Mamayev Kurgan back in enemy hands, Herr Lieutenant-General!

Connect me with Air Fleet Four, please.

By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General!

He called in another bombing attack, but the bombs didn’t dislodge them. He stared at the map.

He changed his mind now almost as often as the railroad station changed hands.

The next day they excitedly told him: Attack, Herr Lieutenant-General! About two divisions, with one or two tank brigades—

On the Mamayev Kurgan?

Yes, Herr Lieutenant-General. They’re pushing us back—

They’re T-60s and T-70s, aren’t they?

I’ll check, sir.

No, take me there.

By your order, Herr Lieutenant-General . . .

No, we’ll send in armored support, he decided. And please tell Schmidt to report to me immediately.

Herr Lieutenant-General, what should we tell the men?

To press on toward the final victory, he replied, putting on his glasses.

In confidence, a certain Lieutenant-General asked him in a whisper whether he himself remained certain of this final victory.

So long as the Führer is kept precisely informed, he replied.

10

Silhouettes on the dark front struggled with one another in hatred, grief and anguish, while munitions rushed overhead like glowing planets. At 0800 hours on a morning as cold and damp as a trench, the third assault failed. The left side of his face twitched. Some of his officers dared to imply that he should have led the charge, as Field-Marshal von Reichenau would have done; he coldly remarked that the commander of an army can accomplish more with maps than by dancing like a madman in the forefront. (Major-General Schmidt smiled politely but did not laugh.) He’d injected eleven divisions and eighty tanks into the battle; now these were bent and blunted: His running low-bent troops ran no more. His duty at the moment was to restore confidence to the front line. Soon winter would come, and then they would be filling the radiators of their vehicles with alcohol as they had done last year outside Moscow. First Stalingrad, then Baku. They would be shivering; they would be wrapping socks around their woolen gloves. There was no hope for Germany if she failed to continue forward in every direction. No doubt at OKW they were now murmuring in the Führer’s ear: Before he got Sixth Army, he never even commanded a regiment!—But Lieutenant-General Paulus was too well bred to speak ill of anyone, no matter what he might think. In Colonel Heim’s assessment, he was
a slender, rather over-tall figure, whose slight stoop seemed somehow to be a gesture of goodwill toward those of lesser stature.
This was true, and so was Coca’s eternal characterization: Sweetheart, you’re simply too good for those people.

He didn’t swim rivers, the way von Reichenau used to in Poland. Perhaps that was why they didn’t respect him.

They said to him: This defensive mission is contrary to the German soldier’s nature.

He explained that Sixth Army was still making progress, although, to be sure, that progress had become as slow as a charge through heavy snow. From the east bank of the Volga, enemy artillery kept murdering his troops. The bombers couldn’t do anything about that.

General von Schwederer sought to argue with his strategy. Paulus relieved him of his command.

He pointed out to Schmidt that the ammunition situation might soon get urgent. Schmidt replied, reproachfully smiling: I telephone them about it every day, sir, and all they ever say is,
when will you fellows take Stalingrad?

First Beethoven, then a cigarette. He composed another message to the Führer, warning of Sixth Army’s declining infantry strength. The front was now very sparsely manned; he thought it best to consolidate the positions of Army Group B against the human vectors of that Bolshevist ideology which had the power to corrode and decompose everything.

11

Thanks to our Führer’s standing orders he could prepare no defense in depth; the front line could never be abandoned, so practically every man had to hold the front line. One enemy breakthrough anywhere, and his forces could be encircled. And such breakthroughs were inevitable. A German general who survived the war and found haven in the apartheid of South Africa has recalled:
Practically every Russian attack was preceded by large-scale infiltration, by an “oozing through” of small units and individual men. In this kind of warfare the Russians have not yet found their masters.

What was he supposed to do? At last he was summoned again to the presence of the Führer, who would surely give him the appropriate operational recommendation.

12

In the first and most glorious year of Operation Barbarossa, Paulus, then Deputy Chief of Staff for the Army High Command, found himself flown to Wolf’s Lair, which was then, as it was now and would again be intermittently, the Führer’s headquarters. I have already told you that Wolf’s Lair was a series of clammy concrete bunkers, sometimes four of them, sometimes ten, all half-sunk in the earth of East Prussia, their interiors softened with wooden paneling. Wolf’s Lair smelled of cooking and of boots. With its thirty-odd antiaircraft guns and its arsenal of light machine-guns, antitank guns, smart new flamethrowers of the latest make, Wolf’s Lair was very, very safe; they even had guards at the private cinema. Wolf’s Lair was, in a very real sense, the soul of Germany.

On several occasions, Paulus had met with General Warlimont and Colonel von Lossberg to plan what should be seized after the capture of Moscow. It was generally agreed that the bulk of our armed forces could then be withdrawn from the Ostfront, for deployment in Africa or England. Afterwards, he’d been invited for an evening of listening to records in the tea-house car, the Führer calling: “Siegfried,” first act! He’d seemed to enjoy almost everything in those days; it wasn’t just all the not yet undone victories, but he hadn’t yet suppressed the Austrian in him, the charming compliments, the hand-kissing of women, etcetera. Paulus, expecting another uncomfortable evening of being slighted, had fallen in love with the man’s self-confidence, which Field-Marshal von Reichenau had also possessed, to be sure, but in a lesser allotment; for when the Führer began speaking about the future, whatever he described seemed to come close and embody itself into something far more alluring than our sweetest fantasy; Moscow
would
be captured; we had both the will and the superiority; therefore, Moscow was nearly, in effect, captured. Only through the Führer could any of this come into being.

But now he’d begun to be afraid, and so he relied all the more upon the Führer to set him right, to help him see how in fact these conquests could still be accomplished. Without the Führer, it was hard to imagine that we would ever, for instance, take Moscow.

This time there was no
escort; instead, they gave him a day pass, and a single S.D. man led him around the casino to make a right turn at Martin Bormann’s bunker (whose blinds writhed slightly as he passed; he saw an eye staring angrily at him out of darkness), but then it turned out that the S.D. man had made a mistake; our Führer expected him at the communications center. There’d just been a practice gas alert, which hadn’t gone well; the gong failed to ring on time.

They permitted him to freshen up in the bathhouse, where he met Field-Marshal von Manstein. With the water-pressure as loud upon the concrete as an artillery barrage, the other man whispered in his ear: Paulus, it’s hopeless here, unfortunately. Don’t expect to find any real discussion. He no longer shakes anyone’s hand . . .

Terrified, Paulus replied: And he won’t permit me to withdraw! If I’d at least receive the reserves I’ve been promised!

Ah, whispered Field-Marshal von Manstein with a compassionate smile, this policy of covering everything and surrendering nothing usually leads to the defeat of the weaker party.

But don’t most strategies lead to the defeat of the weaker party?

If that were true, strategy would be no science. There’s the soap.