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The Sixth Army was now sealed off between Don and Volga.
In it, the boundaries of what Hitler now termed ‘Fortress Stalingrad’ were clearly laid down. The front on the Volga was to be held ’whatever the circumstances‘.
The probable figure, including allies and Hiwis, was nearly three and a half times greater: close to 290,000 men.
Dysentery soon had a debilitating and demoralizing effect, as weakened soldiers squatted over shovels in their trenches, then threw the contents out over the parapet.
Comrades who had gone on leave just before the encirclement were viewed with admiring envy, while those who had returned just before faced good-natured, but no doubt deeply provoking, jokes.
‘the morale of an army depends on the socially just and progressive order of the society it defends’.)
tango music, which was judged to convey a suitably sinister mood,
he spotted ‘a white mug with a rose’ on it. It seemed incomparably beautiful because he had not seen a completely civilian object for so long.
‘I saw him in my dreams for three weeks afterwards.’
‘A soldier felt that, having paid with his blood, he had the right to free speech.’
Each company was supposed to have at least one concertina for purposes of morale.
One even rammed a Junkers trimotor taxiing into position for take-off. The explosion and fireball consumed them both.
The Russian defenders of Stalingrad welcomed the cold as natural and healthy.
Then motor highways were constructed using branches and water poured over them, which froze and bound the surface.
He became convinced that the combination of exhaustion, stress and cold gravely upset the metabolism of most soldiers.
Lice are like the Russians. You kill one, ten new ones appear in its place.’
The German Communists under NKVD supervision consisted of Walter Ulbricht (later the East German president),
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.
almost obsessive emotional focus which the prospect of Christmas held for those trapped so far from home.
‘Fortress Madonna’,
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.
‘I drank 250 grams of vodka that night. The food wasn’t bad. In the morning to avoid a headache I drank 200 grams more.’
‘We are not high-school girls,’ Stalin retorted. ‘We are Bolsheviks and we must put worthwhile leaders in command.’
Khokhol, or ‘tufty’, was the insulting term for a Ukrainian, because Russians were often rude about their traditional style of haircut.
‘There is no room for illusions in my heart,’ said the German lieutenant, ‘because before a month is up, both you and I will be dead.’
General Zeitzler, in a gesture of solidarity with the starved troops in Stalingrad, reduced his own rations to their level. According to Albert Speer, he lost twenty-six pounds within two weeks.
Books had been passed round until they disintegrated or were lost in the mud or snow, but now few had the energy left to read. In a similar way, Luftwaffe officers running Pitomnik airfield had given up chess in favour of skat because any effort of concentration was beyond them.
Hube had dared suggest to Hitler that he might do better to hand over supreme command of the army to a general, so that he would not be damaged personally if the Sixth Army were lost.
‘Taking leave of those staying behind was hard. Each one wrote a letter home, which we took with us.’
‘The mood here is very mixed. Some take it very badly, others lightly and in a composed way. It is an interesting study in character.’
‘My dear parents,’ a corporal wrote home pathetically, ‘if it’s possible, send me some food. I’m so ashamed to write this, but the hunger is too much.’
‘In a gully, we found a large heap of corpses of Russian prisoners, almost without clothes, as thin as skeletons.’
‘Just a little bit more bread, Herr Pfarrer, then come what may.’ But the bread ration had just been reduced to seventy-five grams.
Then the Bolsheviks attacked in terrifying masses. Three waves of men rolled forward, never flinching. Red banners were borne aloft. Every fifty to a hundred yards there was a tank.’
‘From this day on, we had neither warm bunker nor warm food nor any peace!’ wrote Wallrawe.
‘Munitions coming to an end.’
Incapacitated patients who had been piled in trucks, which then ground to a halt, just froze to death in the open.
One member of Milch’s staff described this belated move as ’Hitler’s excuse to be able to say that he had tried everything to save the soldiers in the Kessel‘.
‘desperate about life, angry about death, and bitter about me, his brother’.
Nobody knows the names of all those unfortunate men who, huddled together on the ground, bleeding to death, frozen, many missing an arm or a leg, finally died because there was no help.’
‘On the operating table we had to scrape lice off uniforms and skin with a spatula and throw them into the fire. We also had to remove them from eyebrows and beards where they were clustered like grapes.’
‘I am thinking about you and our little son,’ wrote an unknown German soldier in a letter which never reached his wife. ‘The only thing I have left is to think of you. I am indifferent to everything else. Thinking about you breaks my heart.’
frozen solid, it was known as ‘Eisbrot’.
not because he was the chief intelligence officer, but because he had the most children of any officer on the staff.
‘crawling like wild animals on all fours, in the hope of finding some sort of help.’
A young German soldier, surveying the misery around, was heard to murmur: ‘They must never know at home what is happening here.’
‘Paulus is in a state of physical and moral disintegration.’
Hitler was indeed counting on a mass suicide, above all of senior officers.
‘That’s how Berlin is going to look!’
He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.’
