384 Hitler: “We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up…”—Warlimont, p. 285.
385 Teleprinter conversation between Paulus and von Manstein, 23 December 1942: “Good evening, Paulus… full authority today”—Abbreviated and slightly reworded from the original in Goerlitz, pp. 276-77 (“Documents and signals” section).
386 Schmidt to the teleprinter clerk: “Can aircraft still take off safely from Tatsinskaya?” —Teleprinter conversation from Schmidt to his opposite number General Shulz, the Chief of Staff at Army Group Don, 24 December 1942 (Goerlitz, p. 278).
387 Paulus to von Manstein: “Army can continue to beat off small-scale attacks…” —Abbreviated and slightly “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 351.
387 Paulus to Coca: “Christmas, naturally, was not very happy…”—Goerlitz, p. 80 (letter of 28 December 1942).
388 Note on German national character: “To regard the fulfillment of duty rather than personal responsibility…”—Count Hermann Keyserling, Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928; original German ed. n.d., Das Spektrum Europas), p. 121.
390 Paulus to Zitzewitz: “Everything has occurred exactly as I foretold…”—Goerlitz, p. 43.
390 Heim on Paulus: “The face of a martyr.”—Ibid., p. 48.
391 General Warlimont on Hitler: “Strategically he does not comprehend…”—Warlimont, p. 244.
391 Daily briefing of 4 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: Powerful enemy tank attack…”—Mehner, vol. 6: 1 Dezember 1942—31 Mai 1943, p. 71; my translation and abridgment.
392 Hitler to von Manstein: “The Russians never keep any agreements.”—Craig, p. 368.
393 Paulus to his staff officers: “I expect you as soldiers…”—Slightly altered from F. W. von Mellenthin, German General Staff Officer. (I presume this is the same Major-General who wrote Panzer Battles: German Generals of World War II As I Saw Them [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977], p. 115. Paulus was actually addressing only one man, Colonel Dingler of the Fourteenth Panzer Corps.)
394 Paulus: “History has already passed its verdict on me”—Goerlitz, p. 72.
394 Daily briefing of 16 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: On the W. and S. fronts…”—Mehner, vol. 6, p. 95; my. trans. and abr.
394 16 January 1943 as “the day that we lost the airstrip at Pitomnik”—von Manstein, however, gives this date as the twelfth.
394 Paulus: “Dead men are no longer interested in military history.”—Beevor, p. 370.
394 Hitler: “You must stand fast to the last man and the last bullet.”—After Warlimont, p. 286; Kershaw, p. 549.
395 “Now they’d split us into two mutually isolated sub-fortresses.”—von Manstein (p. 364) writes that there were actually three pockets formed on 24 January, a claim which I have not read anywhere else. Goerlitz asserts that Sixth Army was split into two on 26 January.
395 Paulus to OKW, 24 January 1943: “No basis left on which to carry out mission…” —Abridged and “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 358.
395 General Heitz’s slogan: “We fight to the last bullet but one”—Beevor, p. 382.
396 “The Jew Babel” on the Jews of Zhitomir—The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 380 (diary entry for June 3, 1920).
396 Von Reichenau on the liquidation of the Jewish children: “I have ascertained in principle…”—Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 153 (abridged and slightly altered).
400 Signal of 29 January 1943: “To the Führer!…”—After Beevor, p. 379, abridged.
400 Daily briefing of 30 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks…”—Mehner, vol. 6, p. 123; my trans. and abr.
400 Paulus to General Pfieffer: “I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal”—Beevor, p. 381.
400 The German surrender at Stalingrad—The Soviets are said to have captured 2,000 officers and 91,000 thousand men. Very few of those ever came home. In 1958 von Manstein wrote: “Of the 90,000 prisoners who finally fell into Soviet hands, not more than a few thousand can be alive today” (p. 360). The original strength of Sixth Army was about 300,000. Presumably the 200,000-odd men not captured had already been slain in the fighting. Mitcham (p. 239) cites “the commonly accepted figure” of 230,000 Germans killed or captured in the course of the siege, not counting the wounded who were lucky enough to get flown out. Von Manstein (p. 396) estimates that between 200,000 and 220,000 soldiers were in the pocket as of the beginning of the encirclement. “Altogether, the Axis must have lost over half a million men” (Beevor, p. 398). According to Beevor (p. 394), the Russians endured 1.1 million casualties at Stalingrad, 485,751 of which were deaths.
400 Regarding the necessity for Sixth Army’s ordeal at Stalingrad, the words of von Manstein (op. cit., p. 354) deserve to be quoted: “Every extra day Sixth Army could continue to tie down enemy forces surrounding it was vital as far as the fate of the entire Eastern Front was concerned. It is idle to point out today that we still lost the war in the end and that its early termination would have spared us infinite misery. That is merely being wise after the event. In those days it was by no means certain that Germany was bound to lose the war in the military sense. A military stalemate… would have been entirely within the bounds of possibility if the situation on the southern wing of the German armies could in some way have been restored.”
400 German eyewitness: “Sorrow and grief lined his face”—Craig, p. 372.
400 Major-General Schmidt to Paulus: “Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.”—Beevor, p. 388. These words were actually uttered a few hours later, immediately before Paulus’s interrogation.
401 Unnamed Russian general, to Paulus: “We now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga”—Closely after Vasili I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (Bristol, U.K.: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967; orig. Russian ed. ca 1964), p. 17. In the original, Chuikov was speaking neither to Paulus nor sarcastically.
401 Paulus to his captors: “That would be unworthy of a soldier!” and following conversation —After Beevor, p. 390; with some parts verbatim and some parts invented.
403 Paulus’s experiences in the USSR, 1943-53—Based on the occasional mentions of him in Bodo Scheurig, Free Germany: The National Committee and the League of German Officers, trans. Herbert Arnold (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan Press, 1969; original German ed. 1961).
403 The London Sunday Times correspondent A. Werth: “Paulus looked pale and sick…” —Werth, Russia at War, p. 549.
403 Hitler on Paulus’s surrender: “What hurts me the most personally…” and “So many men have to die…”—Warlimont, p. 306 (fragment no. 47: midday conference [transcript], 1 February 1943).
404 Field-Marshal Keiteclass="underline" “I always took his side with the Führer…”—Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, Back Bay Books, 1992), p. 310, slightly altered.
404 Rudenko: “Have I rightly concluded from your testimony…” and Paulus’s reply—Ibid., p. 311.
405 The defense attorney: “What about you, Field-Marshal Paulus?” and Paulus’s reply—Loc. cit., somewhat altered.