The German War (38 page)

During the war several hundred other German deserters managed to cross the Swiss border, where, like Brandhuber, they were interrogated and interned by the Swiss military. Compared to the high stakes of appearing before a German military court, testifying to the Swiss gave these men the opportunity to craft just the kind of heroic account of themselves that Brandhuber eschewed. One such was Gerhard Schulz, who left his unit at Le Creusot and crossed the Swiss border on 15 March 1942 near St-Gingolph on Lake Geneva. He held the Swiss officers enthralled by a graphic tale of his flight, his military heroism on the eastern front and his disenchantment with Nazism. He described how the SS shot prisoners, and how they staged their fight against the partisans to provide material for the film crews of the propaganda companies. But his real ire was reserved for his own officers. Instead of eating the same food as their men, they ‘always kept the best pieces for themselves’. As the non-commissioned officer responsible for provisioning, Schulz had done his best to bring rations up to his front-line unit. He told a good story, and his account of assaulting concrete bunkers so impressed his interrogators that they had it distributed to all Swiss military trainers.
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It was all a story. At 19, Schulz was neither a non-commissioned officer, nor had he been on the eastern front through the winter. In fact, he had been sent back to the west to recover from an intestinal infection at the end of August 1941, and it was the prospect of returning to the eastern front which actually prompted him to desert. Yet Gerhard Schulz impressed the Swiss officers so much that they decided to train him as an agent. Equipping him with a new German identity and Wehrmacht uniform, they sent him back into Germany in the summer of 1942, with instructions to gather intelligence on German anti-aircraft defences near the border. Schulz promptly did something even more surprising. He deserted for a second time, turning himself in to the German military.

In making their unusual choices, both Anton Brandhuber and Gerhard Schulz were swayed by their families. As soon as Schulz recrossed the border, he broke his cover by going home and visiting his parents and fiancée in Freiburg. Interviewed in 2002 at the age of 81, Schulz claimed that his reappearance even prompted his mother to convert to Catholicism. But whatever their fears for him, his mother and fiancée were united in persuading him to turn himself in.

Lack of family support for desertion goes some way towards explaining why it never became a mass phenomenon in Germany during the Second World War. Where mass desertion did occur – in Italy in 1943, for example, or amongst recruits to the Wehrmacht from annexed regions of Poland, Luxembourg and Alsace and members of the Bosnian SS Division in 1943–44 – it depended on the willingness of civilian society to absorb and hide men en masse, rendering the authorities relatively powerless. In the heartlands of Germany and Austria, there were no cases of mass desertion until the final weeks of the war. Until it became a mass phenomenon, the apparatus of terror remained effective precisely because it only had to target relatively isolated individuals. But exhortations of loyalty and patriotism were not just external demands imposed by the regime; they were maxims repeated within civilian society at all levels, ending with the most powerful and primary appeals of all – from mothers, fathers, wives and lovers.
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Army Group Centre, to which Anton Brandhuber was being sent, had lost 229,000 men in the push to Moscow, only 150,000 of whom were replaced. By the start of February 1942, it had lost a further 378,000 men and received a mere 60,000 replacements. Morale had plummeted: a doctor in the 2nd Panzer Army warned in early February 1942 that the ‘hitherto unbounded trust of the troops in the leadership’ had sunk rapidly, and their ‘spiritual powers of resistance’ were cracking. That month, the High Command commissioned a special report on morale in the 4th Army. Its conclusion made uncomfortable reading: ‘The men [are] completely apathetic, incapable of carrying or servicing weapons; the remnants of companies are dispersed over kilometres; they hobble along in pairs using the rifles to prop themselves up, their feet wrapped in rags. When they were spoken to, they didn’t hear or they began to weep.’ By March, the Army High Command accepted that 104 of its 162 divisions on the eastern front were barely capable of defending themselves: no more than eight divisions were ready for offensive operations. Morale was disastrously low, and upbeat propaganda only made it worse. On 27 December, Fritz Farnbacher’s artillery unit tuned their radio in, ‘but you soon can’t listen any more to it; what rubbish they talk!’ As the High Command’s special report on morale noted, among senior officers, from commanders of divisions upwards, the mood remained ‘one of unanimous and intense bitterness’, and the ‘general tone of all criticism is: “The catastrophe this winter could have been avoided, if they had listened to us. Our warnings were as clear as they could have been. Nobody listens to us, either they are not reading our reports or they are not taking them seriously. Nobody wants to know the truth . . .”’ In particular, these commanders wanted to regain the power to take decisions in the field, rather than having to spend weeks negotiating with the High Command:

We know how to defend ourselves, but our hands are tied. We cannot act on our own initiative. The order to hold out at all costs, given solemnly to the troops and rescinded hours later under the force of circumstances, only means that instead of making an orderly withdrawal, we are being pushed back by the enemy. This results in heavy, irreplaceable losses of men and equipment.

What is most extraordinary about the winter crisis, however, is what did
not
happen. The ill-clad, frostbitten, demoralised men held their lines. Morale might be at rock bottom, but very few men followed Anton Brandhuber’s example. Instead, low morale expressed and dissipated itself in the world of bickering and petty conflicts, humour and violence. Helmut Paulus was irritated by his new officer, fresh from the regimental staff, ‘where he definitely never sat in a foxhole’, who made them do pointless inspections and drill when they were being rested from the lines in late October 1941. He told Helmut off for wearing a shabby uniform, while the sergeant major – another ‘hero of the rear’ – angered him by calling him, after four months’ uninterrupted service at the front, a ‘mummy’s boy’. Even receiving the Iron Cross 2nd Class was marred by the fact that the Master of Arms, who ‘himself never went on an attack but always stayed behind with the field kitchen’, was awarded the decoration at the same time. In his artillery regiment, Fritz Farnbacher often felt he was the unwanted junior staff officer, caught like a ‘maid of all work’ between his men and the demands of his superiors. He fretted too that men below him in rank had already been awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class while he was still wearing the 2nd Class medal.
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Helmut Paulus’s father, a veteran of the First World War, rushed to add Helmut’s name to the list of those awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class which was published in the local newspaper. Conscious of the social status to which his son ought to aspire, Paulus
père
kept urging Helmut to volunteer for officers’ training. Even his mother joined the fray. As the father of an infantryman, Dr Paulus resented the preferential treatment given to the other service arms. His letters describe meeting other people’s sons in the Luftwaffe and the artillery, showered with leave and decorations and given time to do specialist training or qualify in chemistry – Helmut’s chosen area of study – while his son sweated it out with the infantry in the trenches. Eventually, Helmut felt obliged to reply to his parents’ entreaties, explaining his refusal to take the route which his front-line service and high-school education opened up to him: ‘Above all, I don’t have any love of soldiering,’ he wrote; he was certain that ‘in time of peace, I would not make a good soldier at all’. Nor did he harbour any ambition to be promoted, preferring the egalitarianism of the trenches where he could appear ‘unsoldierly and [display a] petty bourgeois’ desire to be left in peace. But, he continued, the ‘only exception I make to the standpoint is in battle, where I don’t want anyone to have grounds to cast slurs on me’.
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The order of ranks may have been much the same as in the First World War but the populist ethos made it a different kind of army from the one Ernst Arnold Paulus had fought in. Helmut had become what soldiers affectionately called a ‘
Frontschwein
’ (front pig), and he prided himself on being a battle-hardened
Landser,
‘squaddie’. Whatever his problems with his superiors, Corporal Paulus could still write that ‘My comrades, whom I’ve lived through so much with, make me happy again.’
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In March 1942 – at the absolute low point of German morale on the eastern front – he proudly sent a long poem home, which one of his comrades had written about the capture of Dnepropetrovsk:

The City on the Dniepr

There, where a few days before

the city proudly on the Dniepr stood,

lies, as if it had to fail,

everything in ashes and sand.

Only buildings burning still

And smoking ruins is all you are now.

. . .

If comrades fall,

we take their place.

The enemy host will fall,

we will be victors.

German soldiers’ optimism had reached a peak in October 1941, fuelled by the prospect of a rapid victory. In November, as the advance slowed, fewer letters home expressed such confidence. As the prospect of an early end to the war receded, soldiers still needed to believe in a duration they could bear – usually no more than another year. In place of the imminent capture of Moscow, the dream of leave acquired a new intensity. During November and early December, the High Command remained so confident in victory that it began pulling divisions out of the eastern front in order to ‘refresh’ them in the west, only to have to rush troops back to meet the Soviet counter-offensive. As a result both the armies and the home front were awash with rumours about leave and replacements. Erna Paulus became so convinced that Helmut might return unexpectedly on leave and not be able to get in at night that she left a key for him outside the toilet window on the ground floor. Helmut was more downbeat: he explained to his parents that as an unmarried man he would have to wait a long time before his number came up. He confirmed that ‘conversation always revolves around food, post and leave’, and, in the absence of leave, letters would have to do.
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The crisis of supply on the eastern front also impacted on the military post. Parcels, delivered to the front for free, were limited first to 2-kilo and later 1-kilo packets. By late October, Erna Paulus was sending her son up to three packets a day, containing a warm jumper, winter underwear and apples. As the mail became more erratic, she started listing the parcels she had sent him and begged Helmut to tell her which ones had arrived. Despite the interruptions and delays, the flow of sustenance from home continued: jars of honey and plum and strawberry jam; a pair of boots resoled by their trusted cobbler; the broken watch mended; the infantry campaign medal and the Iron Cross 2nd Class issued for him in Pforzheim, along with home-made Advent biscuits. By early November, Erna Paulus was sending woollens, long johns and mittens, as well as a scarf and chest warmer she had sewn.
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This stream of small parcels may have further burdened military transport, as the Wehrmacht attempted to streamline goods traffic and concentrate on getting munitions to the front, but it was absolutely critical to morale. Helmut was hugely appreciative. He loved the food, especially the plum spread. His mother’s provisions interrupted the tedium of having ‘mainly just lard or tinned sausage’ to spread on his bread, and recreated maternal nurture. By early November, he confessed to his parents, he had ‘turned into a pure materialist with no other interests than food and now and then the mail’.
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December 1941 found Helmut Paulus in a dugout in the front line of Army Group South, guarding the far bank of the river Mius. As darkness fell on Christmas Eve, he and his comrades lit the candles on the little tree which his aunt had sent, draping it with his mother’s decorations. One of the men played carols on the mouth organ. Despite the enormous disappointment of not being relieved from the front line on 23 December, as promised, the men had cheered up on Christmas Eve. The post had arrived, bringing a deluge of letters and parcels. Helmut had received ‘numerous parcels from home with biscuits, jam, brandy, lemons, [his sister] Irmgard’s notebook, the new fountain pen, goose fat’. The new pen was particularly welcome, for just two days earlier the old one had burst when the ink froze. In addition, Helmut was inundated with offerings from friends, relatives and the pastor in Pforzheim, alongside special military rations – ‘a mass of baked items, chocolate and spirits’. His second Christmas away at war Helmut preferred to the previous one, spent in St-Aubin in France, where the enforced leisure had made the separation from his family harder to bear. Although the soldiers had to take turns at sentry duty every three hours and expected the ‘godless Bolsheviks’ to disrupt the celebrations, the night passed quietly. On Boxing Day, they finally withdrew across the river Mius, as the last of the rearguard, to half-finished lines near Krasnyi Luch, where they would stay for the next few months.
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While Helmut guarded the retreat to the Mius Line, at home his family made their ritual Christmas visit to their friends the Prellers to play with their model railway. Throughout the autumn and winter, while Helmut was deepening trenches with hand grenades, his father had a garage built on to the side of the house in Pforzheim. By the early spring, Dr Paulus could consider buying a car and taking driving lessons, only to find that restrictions on engine size aimed at limiting petrol use forced him to purchase a small, overpriced, old Hansa. Far from resenting this apparent extravagance, Helmut urged him not to hesitate: as a GP, his father needed the car in order to visit his patients and was risking his health by riding the moped he had relied on throughout the winter.
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