In Europe (69 page)

‘Thirdly, almost all our troops had to move on foot, because there was no other transport. And they had to drag their own equipment along through that icy wind. It would have been as much a debacle as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

‘I wanted to go back to Stalingrad, to my comrades. But when I got to Taganrog three days later, the airfield commander there said I was not allowed to fly on to Stalingrad. Instead I was detached to Field Marshal Erhard Milch's staff, as special liaison officer for Stalingrad. Looking back on it, I thank the good Lord that I was kept from flying out.

‘As it was, I was the one who received that famous last report, in the
early morning of 31 January, 1943: “Russians at the door. We are going to break the connection.” A few seconds later they sent another transmission: “We are breaking.” After that, nothing more.

‘By the end of the war I had served under three field marshals: Rommel, who committed suicide on Hitler's orders, Kluge, who killed himself as well, and Model, who shot himself just before Germany capitulated.

‘The messenger bearing news of my death never came to my parents’ door in Berlin. At the end, though, the war still dealt my father a severe blow. When the Russians entered the city, a feisty old gentleman in their neighbourhood was foolhardy enough to fire his shotgun at them, one last time. By way of retaliation, the Russian commander had all the men in the surrounding area brought out, lined up and blindfolded. My father didn't need a blindfold, of course. Then the commander chose a firing squad, counted to two, and on three he said: “Russian soldiers don't shoot old men.” That left my father a broken man.

‘Of my hundred classmates in Munich – I was from the class of 1937 – seventy-five did not live through the war. Of the twenty-five who did, ten were too traumatised afterwards to lead a normal existence. Fifteen of the hundred actually made it through in one piece.’

Only the river has remained the same. The slow river flowing endlessly past this stretch of city, this river broad as a lake in which city children bob around like corks, and across which great paddle steamers move day and night, from town to town.

In the centre of Volgograd, one of those ships is now waiting at the quay. Girls are walking along the waterfront, on the top deck a few women in bikinis are lying in the evening sun, grandmothers sit at the railings with their knitting, the final passengers drag their suitcases up the gangplank, the ship's horn blasts, everyone clambers on board and off it goes, across this endless, glistening water.

Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, has something grim about it, and at the same time something lethargic. You can cross the street here while carrying on a conversation, for the only traffic is the occasional black car. At the airport, the worn wooden check-in desks are deserted. Sparrows
fly around in the big departure hall, twittering and chirping. Luggage is piled up beside the loading platform: here, baggage handling is apparently self-service.

There is only one recreational vessel on the Volga this evening, for the rest every boat has its Rhyme and Reason. For the first time since the start of my trip, my mobile blacks out: GSM has not arrived in Volgograd. There is almost no advertising to be seen. The city is full of encouraging slogans and portraits, as though nothing has changed in the last few decades.

Volgograd is the ideological bulwark of communism, the fortress of the old order amid advancing decadence. Here the party leaders are still firmly in the saddle. The red flags wave, the parks and lawns are immaculate, black marketeers get around by bike. Every evening Comrade Lenin rises up on the Volga, in gigantic neon letters. Like cawing phantoms, hundreds of crows skim the treetops of the big memorial park.

Canned partisan anthems bray from the loudspeakers. But, a little further along, the Pepsi Cola café fights back with music of its own. A girl is being chased around by a few boys there, they catch her, drag her to the fountain, a little later I see her walk away, dripping, laughing bravely, a girlfriend in her wake. The house music throbs across the rippling water – this, too, is Volgograd.

For this city the war began one unexceptional Sunday in summer. Dozens of families were picnicking on the Mamayev Kurgan, the huge Tartar burial mound by the river, where the war memorial now stands. The air-raid sirens sounded, but almost no one paid any attention; they had sounded so often before, and for no good reason. It was only when the anti-aircraft guns began to rattle that the picnickers became startled. And once the Luftwaffe had begun its attack, there was nowhere for them to go.

The bombardment of Stalingrad on Sunday, 23 August, 1942 was one of the severest in the Second World War. The Heinkels laid a carpet of bombs across the whole city. The factories and wooden houses along the western edge went up like torches; the tanks at the oil depot exploded into huge pillars of fire; the modern white apartment complexes, the pride of the city, were blown apart. Anyone who was not in a bomb shelter did not survive. Around 40,000 men, women
and children were burned alive, suffocated or buried beneath the rubble.

Meanwhile, the 16th Armoured Division of General Paulus’ 6th Army moved almost unchallenged across the surrounding steppe. The photos and film clips speak for themselves: blond and tanned soldiers, laughing faces, flashy sunglasses as though on a holiday outing, commanders standing straight as ramrods in the turrets of their tanks, their troops impatiently waving their arms onward.‘As far as the eye can see, armoured cars and tracked vehicles are rolling across the steppe,’ an eyewitness wrote of that summertime advance. ‘Pennants wave in the dusky evening light.’

The landscape through which the German soldiers moved was of unmatched rustic charm: white houses with straw roofs, little cherry orchards, horses at pasture. In every village they could glean an armful of chickens, ducks or geese. Every kitchen garden and every house they passed was plundered. ‘I have never eaten as much as I have here,’ a company commander wrote. ‘We eat honey by the spoonful, until we are sick of it, and in the evening we have boiled ham.’

By the end of the afternoon on 23 August the advance guard had reached Rynok, a northern suburb of Stalingrad. The soldiers could barely believe their eyes: suddenly they were standing at the Volga. They photographed each other on their armoured cars, in the background the river and Stalingrad in flames. They took out the last of the Russian anti-aircraft positions, sank a few ships on the river – not knowing they were full of fleeing civilians – and then they dug in amid the vineyards, the oleander and the fruit trees. The headquarters of the army engineers was tucked away beneath a huge pear tree, the soldiers ate of the fruit till they grew nauseous. This little paradise had become the Reich's new eastern border.

That Sunday was a historical moment for the Soviets as well: from now on, they realised, this war was going to be a life-or-death struggle. They had never imagined that Paulus’ troops would be able to break through so quickly and reach the Volga so easily. Enraged, Stalin gave the order to defend ‘his’ city – which had been named after him back in 1925 – at any price. He forbade the undermining of factories or any other activities ‘that could be seen as a sign that Stalingrad is being surrendered’.
His Ukrainian confidant Nikita Khrushchev was given command over the underground headquarters.

For Hitler, too, this battle was largely one of prestige. The original objectives of the German march on Stalingrad – to destroy the arms industry and block all traffic on the Volga – had already been achieved in late August, but Hitler suddenly decided that, despite the risk of over-extending his supply lines, the city was also to be taken and held.

Stalin's determination was shared by the people of Stalingrad. The majority of the city's population reported for duty. Schoolgirls were put to work as medics – to bring back the wounded they often had to crawl under heavy fire to the front lines. An eighteen-year-old girl medical student was put in charge of an entire hospital company. A whole female bomber-support squadron was set up, led by the young and lovely Marina Raskova.

Within two weeks the Soviets had launched their first counterattack. They landed on the German side of the Volga, drove the enemy away from the railway station there, suffered enormous losses, but held their positions in the centre of town. In the neighbouring tractor plant, which had been converted for the production of T-34s, volunteers climbed into the turrets even before the paint was dry. They drove straight off the production line into battle. The
Red Star
army gazette published a poem by Ilya Ehrenburg, written for the occasion:

Stalingrad – Volgograd since 1961 – stretches out like a Dutch peat-mining village; equally boring, but many times bigger. It is a typical, elongated, riverside town, a narrow strip of buildings along the waterfront, only a
few streets deep but almost a hundred kilometres long, an endless row of apartment districts, factories, power plants, dullness piled upon dullness. On all sides of that strip, stretching far into the horizon, is the steppe, a hot dusty plain reminiscent of Texas or Arizona: huge fields of grain, an occasional tree, telephone wires, a few barns, an unlatched door banging in the wind. Every once in a while a group of colossal bulldozers and excavators will loom up, working on a new road, digging a new irrigation canal. The mentality is that of Las Vegas: build it up, break it down and get out.

I take a ride on the municipal railway, examine the frown of the woman whose job it is to mark each and every ticket by hand – the stamping machine has not yet reached Volgograd – and walk around the streets and through the parks. Particularly noteworthy is the bearing of its young people: nowhere else in the former Eastern Bloc have I seen so much home-made elegance, so many women in such conspicuously beautiful apparel. Creations that would catch the eye in Paris, London or Milan pass by on the street here every couple of minutes.

Later that evening in my quiet, sedate Intourist hotel, an underground existence begins, most of which eludes me. The lobby fills with girls in their Sunday best, and the phone beside my bed rings no less than three times: ‘You need girl?’ When I say no for the last time – I was just dreaming of Katyushas and tank manoeuvres – the voice says in surprise ‘Why not?’, as though I were suffering from some disease.

An old woman is standing near the station. She is wearing sturdy boots, heavy stockings, a dark-grey skirt and knitted vest. Her grey head is a little bowed, she covers it with a brown cloth, her skin is red, her teeth almost gone. Once – in 1955 perhaps, or in 1942 – she must have been pretty, very pretty in fact, you can tell by her eyes. Now she's been standing here all afternoon. She's trying to sell five bunches of onions and two bottles of Fanta.

That winter in Stalingrad she may have been a nurse, or one of those spirited girls at the anti-aircraft guns, or one of the few thousand mothers with children who, hidden away in cellars and shafts, lived through the whole struggle from beginning to end.

The fighting in the city soon had nothing more to do with matters
of strategy or the art of warfare. It was, as the Germans put it, a
Rattenkrieg
. The Soviets fought with commando groups of six to eight men, armed with sub-machine guns, but also with knives or sharpened spades, all the better to kill without a sound. At one point, in a huge brick warehouse on the Volga, there were both Russians and Germans, a different foe on each floor, piled up on top of each other like a wedding cake. The Russians stacked frozen corpses around their foxholes to serve as sandbags. Commandos from both armies fought each other in the sewers with flame-throwers. At night, Soviet soldiers in white camouflage suits crept outside to lay antitank mines. They were very successful at it, even though their losses were the highest among all the specialists. Their motto was: ‘One mistake, and you'll never eat with your hands again!’