The Germans also suffered one of their heaviest casualty rates that summer. No fewer than six battalion commanders were killed in a single day, and a number of companies were reduced to only forty or fifty men each. (Total casualties on the Ostfront had now just exceeded one and a half million.) The interrogation of Soviet prisoners indicated the determination which they faced. ‘Out of one company,’ ran a report, ‘only five men were left alive. They have received orders that Stalingrad will never be given up.’
Red Army soldiers felt that they had fought hard and well during the first ten days of the battle. ‘Hello my dear ones!’ wrote a soldier to his family. ‘Since the 23rd of August, we have been constantly involved in hard battles with a cruel cunning enemy. The platoon commander and commissar were badly wounded. I had to take over command. About seventy tanks came towards us. We discussed the situation between comrades and decided to fight to the last drop of blood. When the tanks rolled over the trenches, we threw grenades and bottles filled with petrol.’ In a very short space of time, most Russian soldiers became fiercely proud of fighting at Stalingrad. They knew that the thoughts of the whole country were with them. They had few illusions, however, about the desperate fighting which still lay ahead. Stalingrad at this moment had fewer than 40,000 defenders to hold off the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army. No commander forgot that ‘the Volga was the last line of defence before the Urals’.
The Germans were full of confidence during that first week of September. The fighting had been hard, a soldier wrote home, ‘but Stalingrad will fall in the next few days’. ‘According to what our officers tell us’, wrote a gunner in the 305th Infantry Division, ‘Stalingrad will certainly fall’. And the sense of triumph at Sixth Army headquarters was undisguised when, on 3 September, a staff officer recorded the link-up between the southern flank of LI Army Corps and the left flank of Fourth Panzer Army: ‘The ring round Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga is closed!’ From the crossing of the Don on 23 August up to 8 September the Sixth Army claimed to have taken ‘26,500 prisoners, and destroyed 350 guns and 830 tanks’.
Paulus received a letter from Colonel Wilhelm Adam, one of his staff officers, who was on sick leave in Germany and bitterly regretted his absence at such a historic moment. ‘Here, everyone is awaiting the fall of Stalingrad,’ he wrote to his commander-in-chief. ‘One hopes it will be a turning point in the war.’ Yet on the edge of Stalingrad, the nights suddenly became colder, to the point of finding frost on the ground in the morning and a skim of ice in the canvas buckets for the horses. The Russian winter would soon be upon them again.
Only a very few, however, foresaw the worst obstacle facing the Sixth Army. Richthofen’s massive bombing raids had not only failed to destroy the enemy’s will, their very force of destruction had turned the city into a perfect killing ground for the Russians to use against them.
Part Three
‘THE FATEFUL CITY’
9. ‘Time is Blood’: The September Battles
The first time the German people heard of the city of Stalingrad as a military objective was in a communiqué of 20 August. Just over two weeks later, Hitler, who had never wanted his troops to become involved in street-fighting in Moscow or Leningrad, became determined to sieze this city at any price.
Events on the Caucasus Front, supposedly his main priority, played a major part in his new obsession with Stalingrad. On 7 September, a day when Haider noted ‘satisfying progress at Stalingrad’, Hitler’s exasperation at the failure to advance in the Caucasus came to a head. He refused to accept that Field Marshal List did not have enough troops for the task. General Alfred Jodl, having just returned from a visit to List’s headquarters, observed at dinner that List had only followed the Führer’s orders. ‘That is a lie!’ screamed Hitler, and stormed out. As if to prove that he had been misquoted, instructions were sent back to Germany by teleprinter, ordering Reichstag stenographers to be sent to Vinnitsa to take down every word at the daily situation conference.
After the triumphs in Poland, Scandinavia and France, Hitler was often ready to despise mundane requirements, such as fuel supplies and manpower shortages, as if he were above the normal material constraints of war. His explosion on this occasion appears to have brought him to a sort of psychological frontier. General Warlimont, who returned after a week’s absence, was so shocked by Hitler’s ‘long stare of burning hate’ that he thought: ‘This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over, that Soviet Russia is not going to be beaten in this second attempt.’ Nicolaus von Below, the Führer’s Luftwaffe adjutant, also returned to find ‘a completely new situation’ ‘The whole of Hitler’s entourage made a uniformly depressing impression. Hitler suddenly was completely withdrawn.’
Hitler probably did sense the truth—he had, after all, told his generals that a failure to take the Caucasus would mean having to end the war—but he still could not accept it. The Volga was cut and Stalingrad’s war industries as good as destroyed—both of the objectives defined in Operation Blue—yet he now had to capture the city which bore Stalin’s name, as though this in itself would achieve the subjugation of the enemy by other means. The dangerous dreamer had turned to symbolic victory for compensation.
One or two spectacular successes remained to sustain the illusion that Stalingrad would be the crucible in which to prove the superiority of German might. In continued fighting on the north front, Count von Strachwitz, the star commander of 16th Panzer Division, had shown that in a prolonged tank battle success depended on a cool head, straight aim and rapidity of fire. The Russians sent in wave after wave of T-34s and Lend-Lease American tanks. The American vehicles, with their higher profile and thinner protection, proved easy to knock out. Their Soviet crews did not like them. ‘The tanks are no good,’ a driver told his captors. ‘The valves go to pieces, the engine overheats and the transmission is no use.’
‘The Russians attacked over a hill,’ recalled Freytag-Loringhoven, ‘and we were on the reverse slope. Over two days they kept coming in exactly the same way, exposing themselves on the skyline.’ More than a hundred were destroyed. ‘As far as the eye could see,’ a pioneer corporal wrote home, ‘there were countless shot-up and burned-out tanks.’ The forty-nine-year-old Strachwitz received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross, and was posted back to Germany soon afterwards on account of his age. He handed over command to Freytag-Loringhoven.
The Russian attacks at this point may have been appallingly wasteful and incompetent, but there could be no doubt about the determination to defend Stalingrad at any cost. It was a resolve which more than matched the determination of the invader. ‘The hour of courage has struck on the clock…’, ran Anna Akhmatova’s poem at that moment when the very existence of Russia appeared to be in mortal danger.
Since the fall of Rostov, any means of arousing resistance had become permissible. A picture in Stalinskoe znamiay the Stalingrad Front newspaper, on 8 September showed a frightened girl with her limbs bound. ‘What if your beloved girl is tied up like this by fascists?’ said the caption. ‘First they’ll rape her insolently, then throw her under a tank. Advance warrior. Shoot the enemy. Your duty is to prevent the violator from raping your girl.’ Such propaganda—almost a repeat of the theme in Konstantin Simonov’s poem ‘Kill Him!’—was undoubtedly crude, yet its symbolism closely reflected the mood of the time. Alexey Surkov’s poem ‘I Hate’ was equally ferocious. The German violation of the Motherland could only be wiped out with bloody revenge.[5] On 9 September, an advance unit from the Fourth Panzer Army came across copies of Red Star with Ilya Ehrenburg’s appeal to Soviet soldiers, which ended: ‘Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German—this is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.’
5
There can be little doubt that the ‘violation’ propaganda in the late summer of 1942 contributed significantly to the mass rape committed by the Red Army on its advance into German territory in late 1944 and 1945.