The last official evacuation was chaotic and tragic. The crowd was huge. It included many families that had been refused permission to leave until the last moment, often without any good reason. The steamer became dangerously overloaded, so no more people were allowed on board. Those left behind on the jetty stood watching the ferry leave. They despaired for themselves, but then, ‘only fifty yards out from the jetty, it was hit by a bomb’ and sank, blazing, in front of their eyes.
Many civilians could not even get near the river’s edge, having been trapped behind German lines by the Sixth Army’s rapid advances. Hitler, on 2 September, had ordered Stalingrad to be cleared of civilians, yet the first exodus was more spontaneous than organized. A large column of refugees left the city heading west into German-occupied territory on 14 September, with their few remaining possessions piled on handcarts or carried in cardboard suitcases. A German correspondent saw civilians caught by shellfire turned into a bloody mess of torso and torn clothes, with a severed hand stuck in telegraph wires overhead. Yet those who escaped to safety in German territory had little hope of finding food. Detachments from the Sixth Army were already at work, requisitioning and harvesting any crops in the region for their own use. Even Cossack farmers, some of them former White Guards, who had welcomed the Germans as liberators with bread and salt, were robbed of all livestock and grain.
The sight of refugees could produce strange confusions of thinking, as a senior ΝCO from the 295th Infantry Division unintentionally revealed in a letter home. ‘Today I saw many refugees coming from Stalingrad. A scene of indescribable misery. Children, women, old men—as old as grandpa—lie here by the road only lightly clothed and with no protection from the cold. Although they’re our enemy, it was deeply shocking. For that reason we can’t thank our Führer and the Good Lord enough, that our homeland has still been spared such terrible wretchedness. I have already seen much misery during this war, but Russia surpasses everything. Above all Stalingrad. You won’t understand this—one has to have seen it.’
The many thousands of women and children left behind in the city sought shelter in the cellars of ruins, in sewers and in caves dug into steep banks. There were apparently even civilians cowering in shell holes on the Mamaev Kurgan during the worst of the fighting. Many, of course, did not survive. Simonov, on his first visit, was astonished. ‘We crossed a bridge over one of the gullies intersecting the city. I shall never forget the scene that opened out before me. This gully, which stretched to my left and right, swarmed with life, just like an anthill dotted with caves. Entire streets had been excavated on either side. The mouths of the caves were covered with charred boards and rags. The women had utilized everything that could be of service.’
He wrote of the ‘almost incredible’ suffering of all those in Stalingrad, whether soldier or civilian, but then quickly dismissed any notion of sentimentality—‘these things cannot be helped: the struggle being waged is for life or death’. He then went on to describe the body of a drowned woman washed up on the Volga shore holding on to a charred log ‘with scorched and distorted fingers. Her face is disfigured: the suffering she underwent before death released her must have been unbearable. The Germans did this, did it in front of our eyes. And let them not ask for quarter from those who witnessed it. After Stalingrad we shall give no quarter.’
Although shelter was the first priority, civilians faced the virtual impossibility of finding food and water. Each time there was a lull in the bombardments, women and children appeared out of holes in the ground to cut slabs of meat off dead horses before homeless dogs and rats stripped the carcass. The chief foragers were children. Younger, smaller and more agile, they presented less of a target. They sneaked down at night to the badly burned grain elevator south of the Tsaritsa, which the Germans had finally captured. There, they often managed to fill bags or satchels with scorched wheat and scamper away, but German sentries, protecting the silos for their own army’s use, shot a number of them. Those who attempted to steal German Army ration tins were also shot on the spot, both in Stalingrad itself, and in the rear areas.
German soldiers made use of Stalingrad orphans themselves. Daily tasks, such as filling water-bottles, were dangerous when Russian snipers lay in wait for any movement. So, for the promise of a crust of bread, they would get Russian boys and girls to take their water-bottles down to the Volga’s edge to fill them. When the Soviet side realized what was happening, Red Army soldiers shot children on such missions. A precedent for such ruthlessness had been set during the early stages of the siege of Leningrad, when civilians had been used by German troops as a shield. Stalin had immediately issued an order that Red Army troops were to kill any civilians obeying German orders, even if they were acting under duress. This instruction was implemented in Stalingrad. ‘The enemy’, reported the 37th Guards Rifle Division, ‘forced civilians forward to drag back dead German soldiers and officers. Our soldiers opened fire no matter who tried to carry away the fascist corpses.’ Other children were much luckier. They attached themselves to Soviet regiments and headquarters. Many were used as runners, scouts or spies, but the smaller orphans, some as young as four or five, were just mascots.
Sixth Army headquarters established one Kommandantur for the centre and north of the city, and another for south of the Tsaritsa. Each had a company of Feldgendarmerie responsible, among other things, for guarding against sabotage and registering and evacuating civilians. Instructions were issued that anyone who failed to register would be shot. Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star on their sleeve. The Feldgendarmerie worked closely with the Secret Field Police under Kommissar Wilhelm Möritz. One Kommandantur officer, captured after the battle, admitted during interrogation that their tasks had also included the selection of ‘suitable’ civilians for forced labour in Germany and the handing over of Communist activists and Jews to the SD. Soviet sources claim that the Germans executed over 3,000 civilians during the fighting, and that more than 60,000 civilians from Stalingrad were transported back to the Reich, on Hitler’s order, as slave labour. The number of Jews and Communists arrested by the Sixth Army’s Feldgendarmerie and handed over to the SS is not given. Sonderkommando 4a, following the Sixth Army’s advance, had reached Nizhne-Chirskaya in the wake of XXIV Panzer Corps on 25 August, and promptly massacred two truck-loads of children, ‘the majority aged between six and twelve’. They had also executed a number of Communist officials and NKVD informers denounced by Cossacks, whose ‘Kulak’ families had suffered greatly at the regime’s hands. The Sonderkommando remained in the Stalingrad area until the fourth week of September.
A major evacuation of civilians took place on 5 October, and the last at the beginning of November. Batches of civilians were selected for loading on to cattle trucks at railheads to the rear. The misery of refugees was all too evident. The wise took every blanket they could carry to barter for food in the weeks ahead. These Stalingrad civilians were marched first to an improvised camp near the village of Voro-ponovo (now Gorkovsky), then on to other camps at Marinovka, Kalach and Nizhne-Chirskaya.
The treatment they received was still not quite as bad as that suffered by captured Russian soldiers. In the cage near Gumrak there were, by 11 September, over 2,000 prisoners of war, many of them from worker militia battalions. Soviet officers were left to keep order, if necessary with their fists, when the food was thrown in over the wire. No medical facilities were provided. A Soviet doctor did what he could for the wounded, but ‘in hopeless cases, he could only put them out of their misery’.