Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (38 page)

The East Saxons of the 24th Infantry Division were simply not prepared for what they encountered as they entered Stalingrad from the south. They and the other divisions of 11th Army’s LIV Corps thought they knew what the siege and destruction of a fortress city looked like. The men of the 24th Division were, after all, veterans of the epic siege of Sevastopol. Had they not finally broken the formidable Fort Stalin?

Sevastopol had fallen in the bright July sunshine of the Crimea framed by the blue water of the Black Sea. Stalingrad was not like that at all. Winter had left the blackened ruins sprinkled with filthy snow under dull, leaden skies. The destruction was far more thorough, and everywhere among the broken brick and concrete were the bodies, frozen excrement, and the detritus of countless used-up divisions. The few people they saw were civilians scavenging through the ruins. They fled as soon as they saw Germans. The East Saxon regiments filed up in awe past the grain elevator, all scorched and with huge, jagged holes.

Eventually, they met a patrol in SS uniform whose men spoke with a thick Danish accent and claimed to be from SS
Wiking.
They guided them to an outpost of that division. The commander of the lead regiment was put in touch with the senior SS officer, who excitedly told him that air reconnaissance just reported large numbers of Soviet troops marching back up the west end of the pocket towards the city. On his own authority the commander changed the direction of march to the northwest. His decision was immediately confirmed by his division, corps and army commanders. The rest of the corps was turned in that direction as well.

They were in a race to intercept the enemy’s 64th and 299th Rifle Divisions of 66th Army, directed by Stalin himself to retake the city from the German contingent that had occupied it. Stalin would have been far less satisfied with this action had he known that the army commander had selected the 64th Rifle Division for the mission. Given Stalin’s obsession with treason, the knowledge that this division was being trusted to retake the city that bore his name would have enraged him. As well it should: the men of the 64th were still disaffected from their suppressed mutiny in August and now bore a deep and abiding hatred for the ‘justice’ meted out to so many comrades.

Hitler’s face turned red. His eyes glowed with rage. His staff knew the signs of an impending tirade. In his hand was the message from Manstein that finally had answered his constant stream of precise orders, every one of which had been disobeyed.

Stauffenberg was ready. An aide hustled in a young soldier dressed in the black uniform of the
Panzertruppen,
his arm in a sling. At his throat hung a Knight’s Cross.
‘Mein Führer,
allow me to introduce a front soldier straight from the Kalach pocket, Hauptmann Bruno Detweiler. He has a message for you from the men of the 6th Army.’

If there was anything that tempered Hitler’s conduct it was a front soldier - he imagined he had a bond with the combat veterans dating to his own service in the trenches of the First War. Here was one who had been wounded in battle and wore the Knight’s Cross, proof of his valour. The fires in Hitler’s eyes banked, and he suddenly looked kindly.

The young man was plainly awestruck. He pulled himself together, saluted, and began his report. He described the conditions of the fighting, the state of the men and their morale. Then he said,

Hitler was greatly affected by the speech. He took the Hauptmann’s hand in both of his and warmly shook it. When the man had departed, he grumbled to Stauffenberg, ‘I will give Manstein enough rope to hang himself.’
¹⁸

Manstein had no intention of measuring himself for a noose. He was preparing one for Zhukov. He had also had one in mind for the
GröFaZ
himself with the help of the other
Gerichten.
But the battle was reaching that point when all the previous actions, both German and Russian, suddenly presented opportunities. Most of those opportunities were now tumbling into the hands of the Germans.

The 11th Army was wheeling in on the Soviet flank and rear as well as breaking into the Kalach Pocket. It was for this reason that he had fought Hitler tooth and nail to retain it as a powerful operational reserve. Now his Sevastopol veterans were flooding through the ruins of Stalingrad. The reports kept streaming in:

Manstein did not know that the men of 6th Panzer as they broke into the pocket were shouting their division motto to the benumbed survivors of Seydlitz’s army,
‘Raus zieht heraus!’

That tank battle was the epic clash between the panzers of Raus, Hörnlein and Kempf and those of Vatutin’s 26th Tank Corps and 8th Cavalry Corps. Overhead the air forces filled the sky and rained down disintegrating or flaming aircraft as the struggle in the air was as intense as that on the ground. Zhukov took personal command of this battle and committed the Southwest Front reserve, 1st Mechanized Corps. Even that was not enough.

The German panzer commanders had thrust into the Soviet positions and then gone over to the defence. The enemy threw in wave after wave of tanks backed by entire rifle divisions. Raus never forgot the scene:

Here the superior gunnery skills and optics as well as the powered turrets made the German T-34s such killing machines that they never were in Soviet hands. Artillery from 6th Army’s replenished guns joined the fight as well while the war lover Rudel showed up with his squadron to join the battle as did other squadrons of Stukas and Ju 88s.

Sergeant Alexei Petrov was overwhelmed by the massive shelling and air attack:

It was the upper torso of a body of a Red Army man. His hips and legs had been severed by a shell burst and lay beside him:

Into this chaos 6th Panzer lurched forward with 150 tanks, cutting through the Russian masses. Raus’s assault-gun battalion attacked on a parallel axis cutting off large numbers of the enemy between them:

As the panzers sliced through the collapsing Soviet forces, 11th Army was completing its wheel northwestward to cut the supply lines of Don Front and pushing its 65th and 24th Armies back towards the Don, joining the broken 5th Tank Army and 21st Army of Southwest Front.
²²

By the next morning there was a massive traffic jam as the Soviet armies were feeding into the single bridge over the Don at Kalach, desperate to escape the Germans. German artillery and the Luftwaffe followed the horde, killing large numbers and sowing more panic. They were packed so tight that every shell and bomb found a target. NKVD troops trying to control the roads to the bridge were shot down as men rushed to cross. All this time the bridge received the unrelenting attention of the Luftwaffe’s dive-bomber squadrons. Between their attacks, the Me 109s would make strafing runs, their bullets stitching a bloody trail through the crowds packing the bridge, exploding supply trucks, until no one could get through. But the mobs heaved and pushed their way over the dead, pushing burning vehicles over the side to crash through the ice in the Don with a loud crack and hiss as they sank. The end to escape came when finally a well-aimed bomb dropped a span. Still the crowds pushed forward spilling the men in front over the broken edge of the bridge to splatter on the ice below.

Along the banks thousands of men attempted to cross the ice. Hundreds fell through, but many more found ways across where the ice had frozen thickly enough to carry their weight. To the north more thousands followed the bank itself to find the bridge at Akimovka, where the German XI Corps had streamed across in the other direction in the same sort of panic flight.

But for the four armies packed into the approaches to Kalach, there was no escape. Over the next few days, the Germans would count over 200,000 prisoners.

Stalin knew the game was up and sank into that same depression that had sent him to his
dacha
after the German invasion of 22 June the year before. Now he just sat in his Kremlin office and stared at the walls. Frantic calls from Zhukov and Rokossovsky went unanswered. Abakumov and the delegation from the Politburo found him there. He said, ‘I did not summon you.’

Khrushchev answered, ‘No, that is not the normal procedure when someone is about to be arrested.’

Stalin jerked upright. The old look of overwhelming malevolence filled his face, that look that had quailed so many others, that look that spoke death. Khrushchev’s jaw dropped. Another man simply voided himself in terror. A shot made them all jump. Stalin flew backwards into his chair and fell like a rag doll onto the floor. Abakumov held a smoking pistol. ‘I warned you all. A bullet is much safer than an arrest warrant.’ He turned his own cruel face on them, then went over to Stalin’s desk, kicked the body aside, righted the chair, and sat down.

Vyacheslav Molotov’s stony expression masked an acid hatred. That he, the Soviet Foreign Minister, had to come to beg terms from the fascists was enough to make him gag. But the Germans, being what they were, could not help but heap indignity on the Soviet delegation. The gloating expression of his counterpart, Joachim Ribbentrop, that loathsome bully, made him want to leap across the table and throttle him.

Ribbentrop greeted Molotov with a smirk, ‘We meet again, Herr Molotov.’ The Russian ground his teeth. Their last meeting had been to sign the notorious German-Soviet nonaggression treaty of 1939 that allowed Stalin to gobble up the Baltic republics and share in the conquest of Poland. Then they had been equals. Now, the Russians had come as supplicants.

The Germans could not help gloating, a national characteristic. They knew that the death of Stalin at the hands of the NKVD had cast the apple of discord among the Soviets, with Red Army and secret police units in open combat in Moscow itself. The war itself had ground to a halt as the Germans prepared to gather the fruits of victory from a broken foe and the Russians were consumed by a growing civil war. To stir the pot more they had released General Vlasov and his followers to wage his anticommunist crusade.
¹

Molotov was not even allowed to beg for terms. They were thrown in his face as the Celtic conqueror of Rome, Brennus, had thrown his sword on the tribute scales, saying
‘Vae victis!’
(‘Woe to the conquered’). Always one for cloaking an event in a precedent of the past, Hitler had chosen Brest-Litovsk as the site of the peace conference between Germany and the Soviet Union, or rather as the place where he would dictate terms. He had done the same at Compiègne in France, choosing the same railroad car in which the victorious allies of World War I had forced a humiliating armistice upon the Kaiser’s army in November 1918. Brest-Litovsk had been the place the Imperial German Army had dictated peace to a broken, revolution-convulsed Russia in the winter of 1917–18. Hitler savoured the fact that the second treaty was an even twenty-five years after the first act and on the same stage.

As to the terms, they were worse than 1917-18. The Soviet Union would lose the Ukraine, Belarus, the three Baltic states, Moldova, the Caucasus, the three Transcaucasian Republics, the Kuban, and the vast area from Stalingrad to the Caspian Sea. The Finns would recover all the territory that they had lost in the Winter War of 1939-40 and more, and Romania would receive Moldova. Turkey’s spoil would be large chunks of Georgia along the Black Sea coast, and all of Azerbaijan, but not the oilfields around Baku. Germany would keep the rest. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as the Crimea would be absorbed into the Reich proper. Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Kuban would be administered as conquered territories in accordance with Hitler’s
Lebensraum
policy. Georgia and Armenia would become German client states. A special demand that heaped the bitterest humiliation on the Russians was the surrender of Leningrad. Hitler was determined to deny a broken Russia an outlet on the Baltic. In any case, there would soon be no city there. He was going to level this symbol of Russia’s great power status established by Peter the Great when he built the city in 1712. More important by far was his vengeful will to smash utterly the cradle of Bolshevism.
²

Evil had triumphed.

Major Fölkersam enjoyed playing dress up. Perhaps it had something to do with the nature of the Brandenburgers’ special operations mentality. He had earned a promotion and a Knight’s Cross after the
coup de main
at Maikop for dressing up like an NKVD officer. For the Soviets it had been a very stylish uniform. But it did not hold a candle to the uniform of an SS officer that he now wore. He had to admit it was a splendid fashion statement. He actually preened himself in the mirror that morning, admiring himself in his black and silver.

Now he was standing by the roadside in the leafy outskirts of this French city looking every inch the SS Sturmbannführer. At least the Knight’s Cross at his throat was real. His detachment of Baltic Germans, also dressing the part, manned the checkpoint. Every man had been with him at Maikop. He looked at his watch. It had been more than convenient that Heydrich was a man of rigid pattern. It had nearly cost him his life when the British had sent their assassination team to Prague. Like clockwork he left his residence at precisely the same hour every day and drove down precisely the same route without escort. He was telling the Czechs he despised them. Only he had the devil’s own luck to be unexpectedly out of town that day they lay in wait for him. Heydrich was the living embodiment of the German saying,
‘Ordnung muss herschen’
(‘Order must rule’).

That he would be travelling down this road today was something that had not been overlooked. Canaris had kept a finger on his every movement, something he kept Fölkersam constantly aware of. The major looked at his watch again just as the black car with its SS flags turned round a bend in the road. ‘Just like clockwork, indeed.’ he said to himself. The car was without escort, an act of bravado Heydrich had used as he had driven through the streets of Prague. ‘You make this too easy.’

The car slowed as it approached the checkpoint. Fölkersam’s men jumped to attention, as the major met the car just as it stopped. He gave a terrific
Hitler Gruss
stiff-armed salute.
‘Herr Obergruppenführer,
my apologies . . .’

The rear passenger window unrolled. Heydrich’s long face coldly looked at him. Fölkersam never forgot the look he saw on that face in the moment before he shot it between the eyes.

Evil now walked through the ruins of Stalingrad savouring his victory. Around him stretched a vast sea of broken brick and concrete, with only the department store shell in any recognizable form. From its balcony flew a huge swastika. The only thing to mar Hitler’s triumph was the smell of rotting corpses, though the snow had done much to cover it. In an act of personal cruelty, he had ordered that the captured commander of the Soviet defence be there to watch him strut his triumph and rub it in the abject man’s face. Manstein had been appalled and personally offered Chuikov his apologies.

Hitler motioned his SS bodyguard and the flock of sycophants to stand back as he walked into the square in front of the building. It was obvious that Goring, Himmler and Bormann were disappointed that they could not share this historic moment and be photographed at his side. It was not sentiment, but the opportunity to be seen as sharing in the victory and ultimately inheriting it.

It could have been lucky for them, though, if they had taken their chance to hang well back in the crowd. Oberjäger Pohl’s instructions were to take out as many of these others as he could after killing Hitler. His presence had been passed off to the SS security detail as cover for any Soviet snipers who might have been left behind. He had a clean shot now from a rubble pile 300 yards away as Hitler conveniently stepped out from the crowd.
³

That same thought occurred to Zaitsev. He was hiding in a large pipe about the same distance from Hitler but to the north. Now his sights centred on the forehead of the Fascist beast. He adjusted for the cold wind that was whipping through the ruins. The image of one of his mother’s icons flashed through his mind. It was St George spearing the dragon.
⁴

The cold wind, Russia’s last desperate resistance, cut through Hitler’s greatcoat. But for Hitler it only served to excite the Wagnerian moment as it drove grey clouds through the sky. He could picture the Valkyries riding through the storm-tossed sky with the bodies of the new German heroes thrown over their saddles being borne to Valhalla. Again he had been right, and all his generals had been wrong. He could feel the power surge in him.

Then nothing. His head exploded. Two bullets were fired at the same instant. Pohl’s hit him in the forehead, and Zaitsev’s through the right temple. Blood and brains sprayed over the rubble.

The crowd heard the double crack and watched as Hitler’s body twisted and jerked and then fell to the ground. For that stunned instant no one moved. In that suspended time Pohl’s sight centred on Himmler, who stood out with his flock of retainers. He fired at the moment when the crowd surged forward. It was a hard shot as bodies flowed around him, but the Reichsführer threw his arms back as a bullet went through his right eye.
⁵

Zaitsev, less familiar with the Nazi hierarchy, merely kept firing at the gaudiest of the uniforms milling around. Goring was conspicuous with his white overcoat and flashing baton; his peacock preening was his undoing. A Russian bullet struck him in the chest, and he fell with such a thud that he made the rubble bounce and brought down two of his aides. Manstein stepped aside as another Nazi party bigwig in his flashing uniform fell in front of him. He felt strong arms on him as Stauffenberg and his own aide pulled him back to the shelter of the building as the horde of courtiers fled for their cars. Major von Boeselager caught one of them by the arm, put a pistol to his stomach and fired. Martin Bormann screamed and careered off to stumble and fall amid the rubble.

Chuikov, with the instinct bred in the
Rattenkrieg,
bolted in the confusion. He paused at the corner of a ruined building, took a deep breath, and laughed. ‘Zaitsev! God bless you, my boy!’
⁶