At seven o’clock on Christmas morning, the Sixth Army war diary recorded: ‘No supply flights arrived in the last forty-eight hours [a slight exaggeration]. Supplies and fuel coming to an end.’ Later that day, Paulus sent a warning signal to Army Group Don to be passed back to General Zeitzler. ‘If we do not receive increased rates of supplies in the next few days, we must expect a greatly increased death rate through exhaustion.’
Although they realized that the snowstorms of the previous day must have hindered flying, they had not been informed that Badanov’s tanks had stormed on to Tatsinskaya airfield the previous morning. Manstein’s headquarters did not even pass on the news that the Soviet counter-attack with four armies against Hoth’s panzer divisions on the Myshkova river had been launched. When 108 tons of supplies finally arrived on 26 December, Sixth Army headquarters discovered that they had been sent ten tons of sweets for Christmas, but no fuel.
Most men, when they had the opportunity, sat apart to write a Christmas letter home in which they expressed their longing. ‘In our hearts we all keep hoping’, wrote a doctor with the 44th Infantry Division, ‘that everything will change.’ He spoke for many, but the better-informed commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army was not among them. ‘Christmas naturally was not very joyful,’ Paulus wrote to his wife a few days later. ‘At such moments, festivities are better avoided… One should not, I believe, expect too much from luck.’
Not surprisingly, the contrast between German and Russian letters home during the Christmas period becomes even more marked than usual. While German letters tended to be sentimental, aching for home and family, the Russian letters that have survived clearly reveal an inexorable logic that the Motherland took priority. ‘Darling!’ wrote a soldier to his wife on Christmas Eve. ‘We are pushing the serpents back to where they came from. Our successful advance brings our next meeting closer.’ ‘Hello Mariya,’ wrote a soldier called Kolya. ‘I’ve been fighting here for three months defending our beautiful [deleted by censor]. We have started pressing the enemy strongly. Now we have encircled the Germans. Every week a few thousand are taken prisoner and several thousand are destroyed on the field of battle. There are just the most stubborn SS soldiers left. They have fortified themselves in bunkers and shoot from them. And now I’m going to blow up one of those bunkers. Goodbye. Kolya.’
The temperature on Christmas Day fell to minus twenty-five degrees. The water in shell holes, however deep, was frozen solid. Flurries of snow hid much of the squalor in the balkas. Chaplains held field mass or communion in the snow to the sound of tarpaulins and tent canvas flapping and cracking in the wind, with half circles of men round a makeshift altar. In some cases, spiritual comfort and ideological justification became confused, as when Christian Germany was contrasted with godless Russia.
Even within the Kessel, Christmas did not prove entirely a season of goodwill. Dr Renoldi, the Sixth Army’s surgeon-general, forbade the evacuation by air of frostbite casualties, on the grounds that their injuries might have been self-inflicted to avoid combat. And worst of all, virtually no food, apart from some rotting corn from the Stalingrad grain elevator, had been given to the 3,500 Russian prisoners of war in the camps at Voroponovo and Gumrak, because they did not feature on any ration strength. This partly bureaucratic atrocity led to a death rate of twenty a day by Christmas, and it soon escalated dramatically. The quartermaster responsible for feeding them claimed that typhus was the cause, but when an officer from Sixth Army headquarters asked whether there had been deaths from undernourishment, he was evasive. ‘After reflecting for a moment, he denied it,’ wrote the officer. ‘I knew what he meant. Among our troops one was beginning to see similar things.’ But linking their fate with that of German soldiers was a worse evasion. The inmates had no choice—they could not surrender. Even when desperate prisoners began to resort to cannibalism, nothing was done to improve their conditions, because that meant ‘taking food from German soldiers’.
Christmas night was ‘a beautiful starry night’ and the temperature fell even further. Fighting, however, continued the next morning in the north-eastern sector of the Kessel defended by 16th Panzer Division and 60th Motorized Infantry Division. ‘Thus a dozen of our units’, reported the latter’s divisional chaplain, ‘were sent out to counterattack in icy winds and thirty-five degrees of frost.’ The two divisions, despite the terrible conditions and shortages of ammunition, managed to destroy some seventy tanks.
On that same morning of 26 December, Paulus sent another signal to Manstein, which began: ‘Bloody losses, cold and insufficient supplies have reduced fighting strength of divisions severely.’ He warned that if the Russians brought back their forces fighting Hoth’s divisions, and redeployed them against the Sixth Army, ‘it would not be possible to withstand them for long’.
An unexpected opportunity then arose. General Hube, the commander of XIV Panzer Corps, received an order to fly out of the Kessel on 28 December to Manstein’s headquarters at Novocherkassk. An aircraft would take him on to East Prussia to receive the Swords to his Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves from the Führer in person. Paulus told Schmidt to give him ‘all the necessary documents’ on all matters from fuel levels to shortages of medical equipment. The hopes of generals and staff officers leaped at the news of his visit to Rastenburg. Hube, the blunt, one-armed veteran, was one of the few generals whom the Führer respected. They still could not believe ‘that Hitler would abandon the Sixth Army’.
Hitler had no doubt convinced himself that he was doing everything to save the Sixth Army, but his grasp of reality had not improved. That day his headquarters signalled to Army Group Don, promising that in spite of the bad transport situation, it would be reinforced with ‘372 tanks and assault guns’. Manstein knew that this was wishful thinking.
In the city of Stalingrad, meanwhile, the remnants of Seydlitz’s divisions were on the defensive. They had to conserve ammunition to repel attacks. They sheltered deep in cellars and bunkers, for warmth as well as safety from the Soviet artillery. ‘There they sit like hairy savages in stone-age caves,’ wrote Grossman, ‘devouring horseflesh in smoke and gloom, amidst the ruins of a beautiful city that they have destroyed.’
The phrase ‘strong enemy storm troop activity’ appeared frequently in the Sixth Army war diary. Hans Urban, a twenty-eight-year-old police-station sergeant from Darmstadt, serving with the Hessian 389th Infantry Division, later provided a detailed report of this fighting in northern Stalingrad at the end of December.
The enemy used to attack at dawn and at dusk, after a heavy artillery and mortar preparation. If they captured two or three bunkers from us, we would try to get them back later. On 30 December, after many of these attacks, I was ordered to take my rapid-fire group forward. My nine men with their machine-guns were able to hold
off the next attack by about 300 men from Spartakovka. The twenty infantrymen left on this sector were so exhausted from all the attacks that they could not offer much help. Most were ready to abandon their positions. I had with my two machine-guns no field of fire. The enemy were able to make use of the terrain and the ruins. We had to let the Russians get to within twenty yards before opening rapid fire. At least twenty-two were left dead in front of our positions. The surviving Russians tried to flush us out with grenades. The Russians attacked again on the same sector at daybreak on New Year’s morning with three companies. It’s hard to make an accurate estimate because they were shooting from holes in the ground, from behind collapsed walls or piles of rubble. We got them in a cross-fire from the two machine-guns, and they suffered heavy casualties. A mortar-man was hit, and although I’d never trained with the weapon, we were able to use their own ammunition against them. After it was over, we were so weak and exhausted and there were so many dead lying around in the open frozen stiff, that we could not even bury our own comrades.