Completely convinced that the Sixth Army's
agony was in vain, Field Marshal von Manstein pleaded with Hitler to permit
Paulus to surrender. His efforts were wasted. Hitler would not face up to the
facts. Instead, he cast about for miracles and found absurdities. On January
23, in a meeting with several high-ranking officers at the Wolf's Lair, the
Fuhrer discussed in dead earnest an irrational scheme for forming a battalion
of new Panther tanks and using it to carry supplies through enemy lines to
Paulus' perimeter.
"I was flabbergasted," said Major
Coelestin von Zitzewitz, Hitler's liaison officer with the Sixth Army in Stalingrad.
"A single panzer battalion was to launch a successful attack across
several hundred miles of strongly held enemy territory when an entire panzer
army had been unable to do so. I used the first pause that Hitler made in his
presentation to describe the hardships of the Sixth Army; I quoted examples, I
read off figures from a slip of paper I had prepared. I spoke about the hunger,
the frostbite, the inadequate sup- plies, the sense of having been written off;
I spoke of wounded men and lack of medical supplies.
"I concluded with the words: 'My
Fuhrer, permit me to state that the troops at Stalingrad can no longer be
ordered to fight to their last round because they are no longer physically
capable of fighting and because they no longer have a last round.'
"Hitler regarded me with surprise, but
I felt he was looking straight through me. Then he said: 'Man recovers very
quickly.' With these words I was dismissed."
Hitler's final response to Zitzewitz'
argument was to send a radio message to Stalingrad: "Surrender out of the
question. Troops will resist to the end."
Next day in Stalingrad a German general
officer, depressed by news of his son's death in combat and unwilling to face
Siberian captivity, put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Another
general, named Hartmann, commander of the skeletonized 71st Infantry Division,
put down the book he was reading and observed to a fellow officer: "As
seen from Sirius, Goethe's works will be mere dust in a thousand years' time,
and the Sixth Army an illegible name, incomprehensible to all." With that,
Hartmann went out- side, rounded up a small group of men and led them to a railway
embankment. There, standing upright and deliberately exposing himself to the
enemy, he shouted, "Commence firing!" He blazed away with his rifle
until the Russians cut him down.
On that same day, Sixth Army headquarters
sent Manstein a signal that quivered with pain: "Frightful conditions in
the city area proper, where about 20,000 unattended wounded are seeking shelter
among the ruins. With them are about the same number of starved and frostbitten
men, and stragglers, mostly without weapons, which they lost during the fighting.
Heavy artillery is pounding the whole city area."
Hitler's reaction: "Surrender is
forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last
round, and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution
towards the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western
world."
This was the end. On January 30, Hitler
notified Paulus that he had been made a field marshal. The dictator's motive
was both macabre and transparent: Never before, in any war, had a German field
marshal surrendered his command, and Hitler hoped that Paulus would measure up
to that proud tradition-either by dying in battle at the head of his men or by
committing suicide. To Friedrich Paulus, the textbook soldier, the second
alternative was unthinkable; days before, he had issued an order denouncing
suicide as a "disciplinary infraction."
At 5:45 a.m. on January 31, 1943, an
operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a final message:
"The Russians stand at the door of our
bunker. We are destroying our equipment.
"This station will no longer transmit."
Minutes later, a young Soviet tank lieutenant named Fyodor Yelchenko entered
the headquarters in the Univermag basement with two other soldiers. From a side
room, Paulus stepped out to meet the lieutenant. "Well," said
Yelchenko, "that finishes it."
Paulus and his chief of staff Schmidt were
placed in a Soviet staff car and driven south past landmarks that had come to
have a grisly renown: the Tsaritsa Gorge, the grain elevator, the ruins of Dar
Gova. And at a farmhouse in the suburb of Beketovka, Paulus identified himself
to General Shurnilov, commander of the Sixty-fourth Army.
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