SS General (21 page)

Cheers and shouts and wild outbreaks of handclapping were followed by voices raised in a jubilant
"Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles . . ."

Ten days after this speech, the commander in chief of the Sixth Army received the following telegram from Berlin:

SIXTH ARMY WITHDRAW STALINGRAD. ESTABLISH AND HOLD NEW POSITIONS. I ORDER YOU FIGHT LAST MAN LAST BULLET. SURRENDER OUT OF QUESTION. ANY ATTEMPTING RETREAT REGARDED AS TRAITORS. I COUNT ON MY GENERALS. FIGHT LIKE CONQUERORS. LIKE WAGNERIAN HEROES.

ADOLF HITLER

Traitors

It was a cold, bright January day. Stalingrad, that astonishing city, Oriental-European, swarmed with life beneath cloudless blue skies with a hint of winter sunshine. Its streets were thronged with soldiers, German, Hungarian, Italian, Rumanian, Slovakian, many of them taking the air with their girl friends on their arm. It might almost have been a garrison town in peacetime. Farther north the war was still unfolding, but here in Stalingrad there was a lull.

In a house facing the Isles of Sarpinski, some officers were holding a secret conference. They were all Austrians and belonged to the Viennese Division.

Major General Lenz held up his tenth glass of champagne and proposed a toast to the vanquished Austro-Hungarian empire. All the officers solemnly drank.

"It was a bad day for Austria when Hitler's soldiers marched into the country." Lenz shook his head and swallowed the rest of his champagne. "I never did like the damned Prussians."

There was a general mumbling and muttering of agreement. Back in 1938, these very same men, in their first mindless enthusiasm, had been only too anxious to throw off their old Austrian uniforms and adopt the gray-green of the Germans. But they had forgotten that now. They had forgotten with what eagerness they had compiled lists of their friends and acquaintances who were not of pure Aryan descent, or who seemed to them to be politically dubious. They had forgotten how readily they had welcomed the chance of becoming a part of Germany. Or, if they had not quite forgotten, they had at any rate rationalized it.

"It was forced upon us," said Lenz with a sigh. "What else could we have done?"

"What else could we have done?" they repeated.

There was a long, reminiscent pause.

"So much for the past, gentlemen! Let us get down to the business of the present." General Taurog cleared a space amid the champagne bottles and spread out a map. "The fact of the matter is, the situation here in Stalingrad is pretty desperate. I don't think anyone would dispute that?" He stared around, but the statement passed unchallenged. "Hoch got himself butchered at Kotelnikovo, so we needn't expect any help from that quarter. As for all the rumors about an SS division being sent out here, I think we can dismiss those as pure fantasy. We have to face it, gentlemen: in our hour of need, Adolf Hitler has abandoned us." He looked slowly around the table. "Are we all in agreement?"

There was a nodding chorus of heads.

"Our one hope, therefore," continued Taurog, "lies in the Russians themselves." He tapped a briefcase on the table before him. "I have here complete details of all our defense positions. Once they are in Russian hands, it should not be difficult for the enemy to break through our lines--with our continued collaboration, of course."

"Of course, of course," they murmured in unison.

"I think we may safely assume that such a gesture on our part would not pass unrewarded by our Russian friends. Indeed, I'm sure they could do with the help of people like ourselves in combating the scourge of Nazism."

"Quite," said General Lenz.

It was debatable at what stage General Lenz had actually become a committed anti-Nazi. Possibly only within the last few hours. Or even minutes. Certain it was that the day before, he had carried out Nazi orders and condemned to death four young soldiers caught deserting.

"These papers," he said, indicating the briefcase. "They'll have to be handed over to General Rokossovski. He's the one to deal with them. I've already made out a list of all the officers I know who have expressed anti-Russian sentiments. That way he can be assured of our wholehearted collaboration."

Had it perhaps slipped his memory that it was he himself who had been instrumental in arranging the transport of eight thousand Russian women from Sebastopol to the German concentration camps? Had General Taurog forgotten that on his own estate in Austria he had thirty-five Polish slaves, otherwise known as servants? Those slaves had cost fifty marks apiece. The market price was officially thirty-five marks for an able-bodied male, but in practice a substantial tip always had to be included for the supplier and his subordinates in the transit camps. As for the pious, red-faced Colonel Kurz, he had conveniently expunged from his memory the four hundred and seventy-six Russian prisoners in the Karpovka camp whom he had recently had shot for the theft of a few pounds of potatoes.

The noble conspirators did not themselves physically set in motion the wheels of treachery, which were ultimately to crush beneath them several thousand unsuspecting soldiers. Their rank precluded the actual soiling of hands. They confided the task instead to a Feldwebel of the military police, this Stalingrad Judas driving off to meet the enemy in a sumptuous Mercedes, waving a special pass which opened all barriers.

A mile or so to the north of Kachlinskaya the big black car was stopped by a Russian reconnaissance group who, taking no notice whatsoever of the white flag, tore open the doors, pulled out the driver and Feldwebel Bram, and proceeded to steal everything they could lay hands on. In vain did Bram protest his mission; none of the group understood a word of German. It was not until the pair had been stripped of all valuables, watches, rings, cigarette cases and lighters, that a lieutenant appeared and took charge of the situation. Bram and the driver were marched off, minus their possessions, to be interrogated by four Russian staff officers. Despite the briefcase and its valuable information, a trap was suspected. They looked up grimly at Bram.

"A trick like this," one of them said, "will cost your countrymen their lives. Thousands of them will die."

Bram shrugged his shoulders. "Thousands must die in order that a handful can go on living," he said cynically. "That's the way it goes. First come, first saved."

The Russians looked at him with distaste, but with a growing inclination to believe his story. His attitude seemed plausible. They had plenty of Feldwebel Brams among their own number.

They checked the papers carefully against the information they already had, and once they were satisfied it was genuine, they conducted the two men to General Rokossovski and Marshal Yeremenko at Alexandrovna.

The Germans had suggested that by way of signifying their agreement the Russians should drop green flares from an airplane at a given time and place; the conspirators would then give the go-ahead by replying with red-and-yellow rockets. Not until then would Bram and his driver be allowed back through the German lines to make their report to General Taurog.

The following day, at five o'clock in the afternoon, an Ilyushin set off with a supply of green flares, and two days later the Russians began a massive buildup of troops outside Dubovka, where General Vasilevski was in command of three thousand tanks and sixty thousand Cossacks, the regular infantry regiments having been judged too slow for the anticipated attack. Six infantry divisions and one armored division were also moved into the area. It made a total of a hundred thousand men; in addition, motorized divisions of the Third Army were called up to halt the movements of German troops along the length of the Volga.

Meanwhile, the conspirators put the finishing touches to their plans. Taurog organized his military police, the prison staff, the hygiene personnel and the engineers and armed them against the day when they would be shooting their fellow countrymen in the back and moving over to the other side.

It was Lieutenant Colonel Hinze, of the 100th Rifles, who proved the weak link in the chain. Having plotted and planned with the best of them, he now attempted to salve his own conscience by pouring out the whole miserable story in what he thought was the inviolable secrecy of the confessional. Unfortunately for the conspirators, Hinze's confessor was a Nazi soldier first and a Roman Catholic priest second, and he lost no time in racing off with the story to General Latt-mann, the officer commanding the 14th Panzer Division. Hinze was arrested within the hour and betrayed his fellow conspirators during the course of his first interrogation.

Generals Taurog and Lenz were hanged in the Alexandra Basilica. The others were shot in the streets and their bodies kicked into the gutter with large placards around their necks: "I AM A TRAITOR WHO SOLD MY COUNTRY TO THE ENEMY."

The following day, the Russian offensive began. The massed hordes of troops and vehicles burst upon us like waters from a broken dam, swarming down on us, crushing everything and everyone in their path as they surged on, wave after wave after wave. In most cases, there was no opportunity to fight back. One entire division was wiped out of existence in less than an hour. The carnage was swift and terrible. It came upon you, sweeping out of nowhere, and was gone almost before you had time to draw breath. And in its wake it left a rolling sea of fire and a patchwork of bodies and blood, stray limbs and pieces of machinery. Those few who survived an attack frequently lost their sanity and went howling and raging into the flames.

Porta, Tiny and I were buried at the bottom of a pit beneath a mass of dead men. What had happened to the rest of the company we had no idea; we did not dare push our heads out to have a look.

A couple of hours after the Russians had swept over us, we heard approaching tanks and recognized them by the sound of their engines as Tigers. But still we remained hidden. We were taking no chances, not even with our own side. The tanks ground onward, shaking the earth and dislodging several bodies. We rearranged ourselves in our ditch, with corpses beneath us and all around us and a narrow channel of air for breathing. We stayed there all through the night. The stench was atrocious and the touch of the cold, lifeless limbs was a constant reminder that one false step on our part and we should soon be in that same state ourselves.

Early in the morning we crept cautiously out of our stinking trench and took a look around. There was no visible sign of life. We didn't hang about in search of familiar faces; we left the graveyard behind us and set off toward Stalingrad, in the hope that the Russians had been kept out by the 16th Division and that we should meet up with our own regiment--or the tattered remnants of it.

On the road we were joined by a solitary, downcast Russian. He had been taken prisoner a few days before and had survived the previous day's massacre but was now too scared to make his way back to his own side. It was the old story: to be taken prisoner was a disgrace punishable by death.

"How would they know you'd been with us?" I said.

"They'd know," he assured us. "And Tovaritch Stalin himself forbade anyone to become a prisoner."

"Stalin is a turd," said Porta.

The man looked at us inquiringly. We graphically explained the word to him and he nodded in silent acquiescence.

All along the road the bodies were piled high, their limbs frozen into grotesque shapes. The snow was spotted crimson with the spilled blood of the dead, and black with the leaking oil from overturned vehicles. We saw the charred wrecks of cars and tanks, a trail of abandoned weapons, helmets without heads, heads without bodies, mutilated stumps of arms and legs. We helped ourselves as the fancy took us to spare clothing, a new pair of boots here, a fur coat there, until we looked quite uncommonly presentable. The Russian stood by and watched. It seemed to be his morale rather than his morals which prevented his joining in the pillage. It had reached such a low ebb that warm clothes and comfortable footwear held no further attractions for him.

Toward dusk we came upon a German field hospital. It was a shambles, filled to overflowing with the sick, the wounded and the totally disoriented. Food was scarce, medication almost nonexistent. Even the doctors were thin on the ground. Nevertheless, it was a haven of sorts and we found it easy enough to mingle with the crowd. We stayed there for three days, enjoying the rest. After the nightmare of twenty-four hours spent in a ditch full of dead bodies, that verminous, stinking hole of a so-called hospital was as good as a luxury hotel. The Russian silently disappeared. We invited him to stay--the chances are that no one would ever have noticed him--but he was uneasy in company and he wandered off alone into the dusk.

Unfortunately, on our third day Porta disgraced himself. He was caught eating a dying man's rations and was promptly dragged down to a cellar and held there pending a court-martial. As he indignantly pointed out to us, there was no room for sentiment in the middle of a war; the dying man had had no further use for his rations, while he himself desperately needed them to keep his strength up so that he could go on fighting for the Fuhrer. It was surely more logical to sustain a fit man than one whose hours were numbered? But indignation was hot against him and Porta was shut away.

"What'll we do?" said Tiny. "Leave the stupid bastard to stew in his own juice?"

"They'll shoot him," I said.

Tiny shrugged his shoulders. "They'll shoot us if they catch us trying to spring him. And why press your luck? It's cozy enough here, I wouldn't mind staying on."

"But it can't last," I said. "The Russians will be arriving any day now. We'll have to get out sooner or later."

In fact, the place was in such chaos that it proved simple enough to free Porta from his cellar. Tiny put the guard out of commission--no very difficult task, since the man was on crutches--and the three of us fled into the comforting darkness of the surrounding woods.

Toward dawn we were offered a lift by a passing padre driving an amphibious VW. We hadn't even time to ask him where he was going before three enemy aircraft swooped low out of the clouds and raced along the road strafing everything in sight. The car blew up and that was the last we saw of the obliging padre.