The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army

      A German anti-tank gunner, Henry Metelmann, was supporting the Romanians when the Russian offensive struck. ‘The whole place trembled, bits of earth fell on us and the noise was deafening. We were sleep-drunk, and kept bumping into each other, mixing up our boots, uniforms and other equipment, and shouting out loudly to relieve our tension. We went out from one bedlam into another, an inferno of noise and explosions…Everything was in utter turmoil and I heard much shouting and crying from the Romanian forward line…Then we heard the heavy clanging of tracks. Someone further along quite unnecessarily shouted: “They are coming!” And then we saw the first of them, crawling out of the greyness.’ The Russian armour rolled over Metelmann’s gun, all of its crew save himself, and two Romanian armies, whose soldiers surrendered in tens of thousands. Many were shot down, while survivors in their distinctive white hats were transported downriver by barge to prison camps. A Russian sailor, gazing upon a crowd of POWs staring listlessly at the ice floes, observed that the captives had been eager to glimpse the Volga: ‘Well, they’ve seen the Volga now.’ Romania paid dearly for its adherence to the Axis, suffering 600,000 casualties in the course of the eastern campaigns.

      On 16 December the river froze, and the ice quickly became thick enough to bear trucks and guns. In the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting ebbed – the critical battles were now taking place south and westwards. Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements. Many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat. Paulus was ordered to continue his assault on Stalingrad, while Manstein began an attack from the west, to restore contact with Sixth Army. By the 23rd, his spearheads had battered a passage to within thirty miles of Stalingrad. Then they stuck. The field marshal urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. He refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.

      Along the entire German front in the east, the approach of Christmas prompted a surge of sentimentality. Every Sunday afternoon, most men within reach of a radio listened to the request programme Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht, broadcast from Berlin to provide a link between soldiers and families at home. Relentlessly patriotic, it highlighted such numbers as ‘Glocken der Heimat’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’) and ‘Panzer rollen in Afrika vor’ (‘Panzers Roll in Africa’). Soldiers loved to hear Zarah Leander sing ‘Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’, a special favourite of German civilians: ‘I know, one day a miracle will happen/And then a thousand fairy tales will come true/I know that a love cannot die/That is so great and wonderful.’

      Many Germans, especially the young, were gripped by a paranoia no less real for being rooted in Nazi fantasies. Luftwaffe pilot Heinz Knoke succumbed to emotion on Christmas Eve, listening to ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’: ‘This is the most beautiful of all German carols. Even the British, the French and the Americans are singing it tonight. Do they know that it is a German song? And do they fully appreciate its true significance? Why do people all over the world hate us Germans, and yet still sing German songs, play music by such German composers as Beethoven and Bach, and recite the works of the great German poets? Why?’ Paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote in the same spirit from Russia:

      Our thoughts and conversations turn towards home, to our loved ones, our Führer and our Fatherland. We’re not afraid to cry as we stand to remember our Führer and our fallen comrades. It’s like an oath binding us together, making us grit our teeth and carry on until victory…At home, they’ll be sitting under the Christmas tree as well. I can see my brave old Daddy, see him stand and drink with reddened eyes to the soldiers. And my courageous mother, she’ll certainly be crying a bit, and my little sister too. But one day there’ll be another New Year when we can all be together, happily reunited after a victorious end to the mass slaughter of the nations. That superior spirit which moves the young people must lead us to victory: there is no alternative.

      The sentiments of these young men, cogs in a war machine that had wreaked untold misery, reflected the triumph of Goebbels’ educational and propaganda machine, and the tragedy of Europe to which it contributed so much. That Christmas of 1942 in Russia, millions of German soldiers approached a rendezvous with the collapse of their leader’s insane ambitions that would hasten many to their graves.

      Goering professed the Luftwaffe’s ability to supply the German forces isolated in the Stalingrad pocket – though the most rudimentary calculation showed that such airlift capacity was lacking. Through December, as ammunition and rations dwindled, Paulus’s men lost ground, men, tanks, and soon hope. On 16 January 1943, a Wehrmacht officer at Stalingrad wrote in a valedictory letter to his wife: ‘The implacable struggle continues. God helps the brave! Whatever Providence may ordain, we ask for one thing, for strength to hold on! Let it be said of us one day that the German army fought at Stalingrad as soldiers never before in the world have fought. To pass this spirit on to our children is the task of mothers.’ To most of those trapped in Paulus’s pocket, however, such heroic sentiments represented flatulence.

      On 12 January, four Russian fronts struck at Army Group Don, north of Stalingrad, driving back the Axis forces in disarray. The Pasubio Division, part of the Italian Eighth Army in the Don pocket, found itself struggling westwards. Without fuel, the hapless troops were obliged to ditch heavy weapons and take to their feet. ‘Vehicles complete with loads were being abandoned along the road,’ wrote artillery Lieutenant Eugenio Corti. ‘It broke my heart to see them. How much effort and expense that equipment must have cost Italy!’ If exhausted men sought to snatch rides on German vehicles, they were thrown off with yells and curses.

      Corti made ineffectual efforts to preserve discipline in his unit. ‘But how can you expect people who are unused to being well-ordered in normal civilian life to become orderly…simply because they find themselves in uniform? As enemy fire rained down, the rabble quickened its stumbling pace. I now witnessed one of the most wretched scenes of the whole retreat: Italians killing Italians…We had ceased to be an army; I was no longer with soldiers but with creatures incapable of controlling themselves, obedient to a single animal instinct: self-preservation.’ He cursed his own softness, in failing to shoot a man who defied orders that only the wounded should ride on the few sledges. ‘Countless instances of weakness like mine accounted for the confusion in which we found ourselves…A German soldier in our midst was beside himself with contempt. I had to admit he was right…we were dealing with undisciplined, bewildered men.’

      At a dressing station, ‘the wounded were lying atop one another. When one of the few orderlies tending them appeared with a little water, to the groaning was added the cries of those he inadvertently trod upon. Outside, straw had been laid on the snow, on which several hundred men were lying…it must have been –15 or –20 degrees. The dead lay mingled with the wounded. One doctor did the rounds: he himself had been twice wounded by shell splinters while performing amputations with a cutthroat razor.’

      Whichever of the warring armies held the ascendant, Russian sufferings persisted. In a peasant hut, Corti came upon a stricken family. ‘I was greeted by the corpse of a gigantic old man with a long whiteish beard lying in a pool of blood…Cowering against a wall, terror-stricken, were three or four women and five or six children – Russians, thin, delicate, waxen-faced.