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September 2 - October 4, 2018
He even went a step further by introducing within Sixth Army Command what came to be known as the “Severity Order.” It read in part: … The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization.… In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception.… For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the
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Bombers came over, seeking out the steamers and tugs. German mortars behind Mamaev reached out for them, and Petrov cursed the slowness of the voyage as the river froze in a midday tableau. Feeling trapped and vulnerable, he crouched down to hide from shrapnel singing by his ears. Men slipped off the sides to drown. Bullets thudded into flesh and soldiers sagged against neighbors and died without a word. Petrov saw the Volga water clearly. It was a swirling mixture of water and bright red blood.
Already Russian newspapers had made the name Vassili Zaitsev famous. In but ten days’ time he had killed nearly forty Germans, and correspondents gloatingly wrote of his amazing ability to destroy his enemies with a single bullet.
From their vantage point on Mamaev Hill, the Germans always spotted these boats and called for artillery fire on them. As the shells whistled down, the political officers diverted the soldiers’ attention by reading newspapers loudly, or passing out mail from home. In this way the troops were somewhat distracted. When men were hit, screamed, and died, the politrook worked harder to keep the rest of the group from succumbing to mob fear. Sometimes they failed, and soldiers leaped into the Volga. The politrook emptied their guns into these swimmers.
Fog and a light snow began to obscure vision but the aggressive Mues pushed on. Fearless, revered by his men as “immortal,” he was tracked by a Soviet sniper, who put a bullet in his brain. The attack stopped abruptly as Mues’s troops gathered around the stricken officer, now unconscious and near death. They ignored the bullets and cried over the man they loved.
“My son, I can do nothing for you,” he said softly. “You must be brave.” As the boy stared back, a shell splinter cut off the top of his head, spraying brains and blood over the doctor’s face and uniform. For several long seconds, Capone held tightly to the crimson gray mask in his hands. Then the boy sagged onto the ground. Capone collapsed beside him and threw up.
More and more men were losing hope. One Bersaglieri threw himself under a passing truck. Another sat down on a hump of snow and started to cry. Still clutching his submachine gun, he sobbed his torment to Bracci, who tried to get him on his feet. The man refused and sat there while the column continued on out of sight.
“And from Stalingrad!” Goebbels suddenly said. While thousands of soldiers inside the Kessel stared at each other in disbelief, a joyous melody burst from the radio to assure the homefront that all was well at the Volga River.
Some of his friends had contracted gangrene from frostbite and screamed without letup. Italian doctors amputated the worst limbs with homemade knives and the moans of the patients, operated on without anesthesia, drove everyone to despair.
A surgeon writing to his wife was brutally frank with her about life in the Kessel. He described how he had just taken off a man’s leg at the thigh with a pair of scissors, and how the patient endured the hideous surgery without anesthesia.
In the midst of this offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a steppe village, the inhabitants—men and women—ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.
The Kazakhs screamed insults and shouted: “We don’t want any Russians here!” while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: “Destroy them all.” In the general bombardment that followed, Petrov fired high-explosive shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off anyone who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.
While Thiel stood mute, someone else shouted, “Can you imagine what it is like to see soldiers fall on an old carcass, beat open the head and swallow the brains raw?”
They had shot themselves in order to reach safety and surgeons who operated on them failed to detect evidence of their self-inflicted injuries. The reasons were twofold. First, the malingerers had fired through a loaf of bread to eliminate close-range powder burns. Secondly, none of them followed patterns normally associated with such cases. Instead of aiming into a leg or arm, areas less dangerous as well as less painful, these men blasted holes in their stomachs and chests to guarantee a successful escape. Since no doctor dared accuse a man of inflicting so grievous a wound on himself, the
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He ordered a shower of promotions on Sixth Army’s senior officers, most notably one that made Paulus a field marshal. Knowing that no German field marshal had ever surrendered, Hitler hoped that Paulus would take the hint and commit suicide.
On Red Square, two little girls, separated since September, hopped over corpses to meet in a joyful embrace. Their innocent laughter, carrying far in the still air, brought smiles to Russian soldiers, who were tossing dead Germans onto a roaring bonfire.
Prisoners who refused to eat human flesh used other tricks to survive. At Krinovaya, a group of Italian entrepreneurs retrieved excrement from huge latrine ditches and with bare hands picked out undigested corn and millet, which they washed and ate. German prisoners swiftly improved the process. Setting up an assembly line of sieve-like tin cups, they strained the feces through them and trapped so much grain that they started a black market in it.
Out of 107,000 Sixth Army soldiers herded into prison camps in 1943, he has found less than five thousand survivors.
