Much time has been spent debating whether a breakout was feasible in the second half of December, yet even panzer commanders acknowledged that ‘the chances of a successful breakout diminished with every week’. The infantry had even fewer illusions. ‘We survivors’, a corporal wrote home, ‘can hardly keep going owing to hunger and weakness.’ Dr Alois Beck, quite rightly, disputed the ‘legend’ that ‘a breakout would have succeeded’. The Russians would have shot the ‘half-frozen soldiers down like hares’, because the men in their weakened state could not have waded through over a foot of snow, with its crust of ice on the surface, carrying weapons and ammunition. ‘Every step was exhausting,’ observed a staff officer from Sixth Army headquarters. ‘It would have been like the Berezina.’
The whole ‘Breakout or Defence’ debate is thus a purely academic diversion from the real issues. In fact one suspects that the formidably intelligent Manstein recognized this at the time. He made a great play of sending Major Eismann, his intelligence officer, into the Kessel on 19 December to prepare the Sixth Army for Operation Thunderclap. Yet Manstein knew by then that Hitler, who had again reaffirmed his determination not to move from the Volga, would never change his mind.
In any case, Manstein must have realized by then that the relief attempt was doomed. Hoth’s panzer divisions were being fought to a standstill on the Myshkova, with heavy casualties, even before the bulk of Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army had deployed. And Manstein, who had kept himself well informed of developments within the Kessel and the state of the troops, must have realized that Paulus’s men could never have walked, let alone fought, for between forty and sixty miles through the blizzards and deep frosts. The Sixth Army, with fewer than seventy under-supplied tanks, stood no chance of breaking through the 57th Army. Most important of all, Manstein knew by 19 December that Operation Little Saturn, with three Soviet armies breaking through into his rear, was changing the whole position irrevocably.
Quite simply, Manstein sensed that, in the sight of history and the German Army, he had to be seen to make every effort, even if he believed, quite correctly, that the Sixth Army’s only chance of saving itself had expired almost a month earlier. His apparently uneasy conscience after the event must have been due to the fact that, with Hitler’s refusal to withdraw from the Caucasus, he had needed the Sixth Army to tie down the seven Soviet armies surrounding it. If Paulus had attempted a breakout so few of his men would have survived, and in such a pitiable condition, that they would have been of no use to him in the moment of crisis.
19. ‘Christmas in the German Way’
The argument about breaking out of the Kessel in the second half of December also overlooked one curiously important psychological factor. Christmas was coming. No formation in the Wehrmacht was more preoccupied with the subject than the beleaguered Sixth Army. The quite extraordinary efforts devoted to its observance in bunkers below the steppe hardly indicated an impatience to break out. Lethargy from malnutrition combined with escapist daydreaming no doubt played a part, and probably so did the ‘Fortress’ mentality which Hitler helped to cultivate. But none of these entirely explain the almost obsessive emotional focus which the prospect of Christmas held for those trapped so far from home.
Preparations began well before Hoth’s panzer divisions advanced north to the Myshkova river, and never seem to have slackened, even when soldiers became excited by the sound of approaching gunfire. From quite early in the month, men started to put aside tiny amounts of food, not in preparation for a breakout across the snow, but for a Christmas feast or for gifts. A unit in 297th Infantry Division slaughtered a packhorse early so as to make ‘horse sausage’ as Christmas presents. Advent crowns were fashioned from tawny steppe grass instead of evergreen, and little Christmas trees were carved out of wood in desperate attempts to make it ‘just like at home’.
The sentimentality was by no means restricted to soldiers. General Edler von Daniels decorated his newly dug bunker with a Christmas tree and underneath a cradle with a snapshot of his ‘Kesselbaby’, born soon after their encirclement. He wrote to his young wife describing his plans to celebrate Christmas Eve ‘in the German way, although in far-off Russia’. The military group had clearly become the surrogate family. ‘Each man sought to bring a little joy to another,’ he wrote after visiting his men in their bunkers. ‘It was really uplifting to experience this true comradeship of the front line.’ One festive banner proclaimed ‘Comradeship through Blood and Iron’, which, however appropriate to the circumstances, rather missed the message of Christmas.
One person who certainly did not miss the message was Kurt Reuber, the doctor in the 16th Panzer Division. The thirty-six-year-old Reuber, a theologian and friend of Albert Schweitzer, was also a gifted amateur artist. He converted his bunker in the steppe north-west of Stalingrad into a studio and began to draw on the back of a captured Russian map—the only large piece of paper to be found. This work, which today hangs in the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church in Berlin, is the ‘Fortress Madonna’, an embracing, protective, almost womb-like mother and child, joined with the words of St John the Evangelist: ‘Light, Life, Love’. When the drawing was finished, Reuber pinned it up in the bunker. Everyone who entered, halted and stared. Many began to cry. To Reuber’s slight embarrassment—no artist could have been more modest about his own gifts—his bunker became something of a shrine.
There can be little doubt about the genuine and spontaneous generosity of that Christmas. A lieutenant gave out the last of his cigarettes, writing paper and bread as presents for his men. ‘I myself had nothing,’ he wrote home, ‘and yet it was one of my most beautiful Christmases and I will never forget it.’ As well as giving their cigarette ration, men even gave their bread, which they sorely needed. Others laboriously carved equipment racks for each other.
On Christmas Eve, Reuber’s pianist battalion commander gave his last bottle of sparkling wine to the soldiers in the sickbay, but just after all the mugs were filled, four bombs exploded outside. Everyone flung themselves to the floor, spilling all the Sekt. The medical officer grabbed his first-aid bag and ran from the bunker to see to the casualties—one killed and three wounded. The dead man had been singing the Christmas carol ‘O du fröhliche’. The incident, not surprisingly, put an end to their celebrations. In any case, both the 16th Panzer and the 6oth Motorized Infantry Division soon found themselves under full attack in the early hours of Christmas morning.
The traditional, and favourite, song that night was ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, which soldiers sang ‘with husky voices’ in bunkers by the light of hoarded candle stubs. There were many stifled sobs as men thought of their families at home. General Strecker was clearly moved when he made a tour of front-line positions. ‘It is a “Stille Nacht” amid the turmoil of war… A Christmas that shows the true brotherhood of soldiers.’ Visits by senior officers were also appreciated for their accompanying benefits. An NCO in a panzer division recorded that ‘the divisional commander gave us a swig from his bottle and a bar of chocolate’.
In positions which were not attacked, men crowded into a bunker which had a wireless to hear ‘the Christmas broadcast of Grossdeutsche Rundfunk’. To their astonishment, they heard a voice announce: ‘This is Stalingrad!’, answered by a choir singing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, supposedly on the Volga front. Some men accepted the deception as necessary in the circumstances, others were deeply angered. They felt it was tricking their families and the German people as a whole. Goebbels had already proclaimed that this should be a ‘German Christmas’, a definition intended to convey notions of duty and austerity, and perhaps already a way of preparing the nation for news of the tragedy of Stalingrad.