In Europe (68 page)

‘The campaigns against Holland, Belgium and France were quite different from what I'd heard about the First World War. I never sensed among my men the hatred for the enemy that was apparently so common in 1914. We were proud of our victories, but no one even dreamed of torching French villages. And I didn't sense much hatred among our adversaries either, at least not during those first few weeks. The French didn't cheer us along, of course, but we also never came across a waiter who refused to serve us. At least, I never encountered anything like that. We didn't have to post extra guards, we could sleep easily at night.

‘There are all kinds of theories these days that say the French Army was better equipped in May 1940 than most people thought, and that
the Germans would have run into great trouble if only the French had been willing to fight. I can't say anything about that. Personally, I never ran into anything like really pronounced resistance, not of the sort I ran into later in Russia, in any case. During that whole campaign only three men in my entire company were wounded, including myself: a bullet nicked the back of my neck. That was all.

‘It all went so quickly and easily during those weeks in May that even my father began doubting his own judgement. “My boy,” he told me one evening, “I'm too old, I don't understand the way things go any more. What Hitler's done now is truly unbelievable. In four weeks, he's done what we failed to do in four years!”

‘That elation lasted less than two weeks. Right outside Dunkirk, we were suddenly ordered to halt. All our division could do was ask ourselves why, in heaven's name, we were being forced just to stand there for three days. It gave the British the chance, with the help of countless private boats, to evacuate almost their entire expeditionary force, that became clear afterwards. Why Hitler let that happen is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. People who had been close to him told me later that he was actually hoping to sign a peace treaty with England. For him, England was something to love from afar; the British were, and remained in his eyes, a Germanic people.

‘I also experienced something which shows that, in late May 1940, Hitler actually thought peace was coming soon. While I was still in training at Potsdam I helped to arrange a few parades, including one by the Condor Legion that had just come back from Spain. Because of that experience, I was suddenly assigned to the group that was preparing for a huge peace parade in Paris. It was my job, for example, to make sure that the German tanks could actually take the corners at the Place de l’Étoile and the Place de la Concorde, and to see whether certain street lamps should perhaps be moved aside, that sort of thing. Our parade group was disbanded after only a few days, though: as it turned out, there was not going to be peace after all. And my father began saying again that things were going to backfire badly under this half-baked painter.

‘In winter 1940–1 we received new orders: we were to be sent to North Africa. First by train to Naples, then by ship across the Mediterranean to Tripoli. Back in those days you could simply walk into an Italian hotel and
ask the switchboard operator to put you through to any telephone number in England. That was typical of the situation. During the African campaign there was a sort of mutual code of chivalry. You see, we, the Germans and the British, formed lonely little tank groups out there in that enormous void. We raced around in the desert, we tried to outsmart the Tommies, we could intercept each other's messages, we knew each other's names. Sometimes we would leave a crate of beer behind for them, or they would leave a few bottles of whisky for us. Of course people were killed or wounded. But the war didn't have the kind of stark horror that it did later on.

‘Did I have any doubts at that point about the outcome? I don't think so. We were very optimistic. Our tanks and armaments were, at first at least, much better than those of the British. Germany wanted to conquer Egypt and reach the Suez Canal from the other side as well, by way of the Caucasus and Turkey. But when we realised how dependent we were on our overseas supply lines, and when we saw how those were being cut off by the British submarines, that is actually when we started to worry.

‘Rommel scavenged for his own supplies by attacking British fuel dumps. We got away with that a few times, but of course you can't run a campaign on that basis. Even that early in the proceedings we started wondering out loud among ourselves whether this would all turn out all right in the longer term. I still clearly remember crowding around a short-wave receiver in the middle of the desert at 5 a.m. and hearing that German troops had crossed the Russian border. “This is the end of our successes,” I said to the soldiers around me. “This is a decisive day. Now we are getting into a war on two fronts again, and, just like Napoleon, we will get caught in it.” I said that out loud, and no one contradicted me. Everyone was thinking the same thing: the Führer has gone mad. That was on 22 June, 1941.

‘After that our Afrika Korps began running into trouble. The British had received reinforcements, they had a brilliant new commander, Montgomery, and they had new tanks: American Shermans. During a reconnaissance mission we were taken by surprise by the first column of Shermans we had ever seen, and we barely got out of there alive. We were hit badly. I had some shrapnel in my chest, so I was taken back to a German hospital. Once I'd been patched up again, I went back to Potsdam for further military training.

‘In Berlin, I saw Jews walking around wearing stars. But I had absolutely no idea how bad the situation was for them. As young, up-and-coming officers, everyone wined and dined us, including the diplomats. But we never heard a thing about the mass murder of the Jews, which by that time was already going on in the East. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself, but, unlike many other officers, I had not personally attended mass executions on the Eastern Front. Those kinds of things were not going on in Africa. And when I got to Stalingrad later there were almost no civilians left, never mind Jews. Don't forget, staff officers like us lived in a fairly isolated world of our own. None of us belonged to the Nazi Party, we weren't even allowed to.

‘I spent almost a year in Berlin. I went through training, there were lots of parties, I met my future wife. But in October 1942 that was all over. I was ordered to join the staff of General Paulus, the commander-in-chief of the 6th Army at Stalingrad. I was in charge of updating the maps that showed our positions and those of the enemy. I knew exactly how the supplies were running, how many tons had been flown in, how many tons were dropped, etc. The person who is in charge of that is one of the best-informed officers in the whole army. That's why they chose me to tell Hitler the truth.

‘When I arrived at Stalingrad I was given a detailed briefing by the person in charge of enemy-troop reconnaissance, a man by the name of Niemeyer, a very pleasant fellow. He showed me his maps, they were covered with red lines. “Take a good look,” he said. “We're in big trouble. That's what we tell headquarters every day, but no one up there wants to listen. Look here: 2,000 Russian vehicles, with their lights on, have been sighted over here, and over there we've spotted hundreds of tanks, all moving in the same direction. The only possible conclusion is that the Russians will be attacking soon from over here, and that they are going to grind us to a pulp.” That was in early October 1942.

‘Meanwhile, our superiors were assuming that the Russians were done for, that their reserves had been exhausted, and that the winter would be a quiet one for us. The good Lord himself must have struck them blind. In actual fact, the Russians had 2,000 tanks at Stalingrad, T-34s, while we had no more than 80. And even those only had enough fuel to run for a hundred kilometres. I remember thinking even then: have
they all gone mad? But it was clearly a matter of keeping up appearances. No one was interested in the facts any more.

‘The Russian attack started on 19 November. Our command bunker was about ten kilometres from the front, in the middle of an area that had been surrounded by the Russians. I drove all over the place, staying in contact with the troops who were doing the fighting. Paulus wanted me to keep him up to date on how his men were doing, no matter how bad the news. The cold was infamous, but the strong winds were actually what finished us off. There were about thirty centimetres of snow on the ground, with this hard crust of ice that you broke through at every step. Maybe you can imagine how that was for those infantrymen, running away from the enemy across a field of crusty snow like that, carrying a machine gun. People kept talking about how we should break through the enemy lines, but it was almost impossible – physically too – to take the offensive, let alone break through Russian positions that had been set up all around us.

‘On 20 December I went to the field hospital. I'd been having problems with a wisdom tooth and the dentist was going to help me. I stepped in out of the cold and was struck by this enormous heat, mixed with a pestilential stench. I saw a big, long barrack and about thirty doctors, covered in blood like workers in a slaughterhouse, sawing off feet and fingers. That's all they did, all day long, just amputate frozen limbs.

‘When I left from Pitomnik airfield on 13 January, 1943, I was one of the last ones out, they were lying … you know how they stack wood in the forest? Well, there were stacks of frozen bodies like that everywhere, the bodies of the sick and wounded who had been dragged to the airfield and then died anyway. Thousands of them lying there like that, the ground was too hard to bury anyone. By that time the airfield was already under constant artillery attack. It was complete chaos. You heard people crying and screaming everywhere. The
Feldgendarmerie
showed me to one of the last planes, a Heinkel 111. I was the only passenger who wasn't badly wounded. Hundreds of others tried to board the plane, some of them crawling, it was their only chance of escape. They had to be held at bay with sub-machine guns. For three days after that, planes left from the airstrip at Gumrak. Then the air connection was cut off for good.

‘I had some amazingly good luck. They sent me to Hitler, but first they wanted me to inform Field Marshal Manstein, at his headquarters on the Sea of Azov, of the hopelessness of the situation. He said: “Here we see it the same way you do over there. But go to the Führer yourself. It's bound to make more of an impression if he hears it from you, instead of from some overly ambitious general.”

‘That's how I arrived the next evening at Hitler's headquarters, the
Wolfsschanze
. When I saw all those prim officers sitting around in their tidy uniforms, my mood became grim, almost communist. Those headquarters weren't really all that posh, but when you've just come back from the bitterest misery you get angry at anyone who sleeps well at night. I was brought in right away. Hitler welcomed me, then we went to the big war room. In the middle there was this table that must have been two metres wide and ten metres long, showing the various theatres of war, all these little flags everywhere. Those were the armies and divisions. To my amazement, I saw that there were little flags all around Stalingrad as well, even though I'd seen with my own eyes that only a few units were left of all those divisions. The rest had been wiped out.

‘I knew that Hitler was not fond of receiving bad news, and that he often twisted such conversations to fit one of his endless theories. That's precisely what he did this time too. He quickly began thanking me for my visit, asked me to extend his regards to General Paulus and wish him lots of luck, etc. So I mustered all my courage and told him that I couldn't leave while there was any risk of a misunderstanding, that General Paulus had given me explicit orders to inform him of the real situation at Stalingrad. And he actually let me tell my story; he listened carefully, asked a couple of good questions and didn't interrupt me.

‘But the generals did: “Listen, there's an SS armoured corps headed for Stalingrad to help you break free, isn't that right?” But I knew that that SS army was not only far too small, but that it had already been torn apart by Russian T-34s close to Charkhov anyway. What Hitler and his generals were completely unwilling to see was the change the Russians had undergone. They had observed the Germans carefully, they had quickly switched to wartime industry, they had built enormous tank factories 1,000 kilometres back from the Volga, and were now beating us with our own weapons and tactics. At that moment I realised that Hitler lived
only in a fantasy world of maps and little flags. It was then that I knew for certain that we would lose the war.

‘So did my plain speaking, at the age of twenty-three, actually change anything? I believe it did. But the difference it made was not at all what I had been expecting. No reinforcements or other help came. But, two days later, the tone of the propaganda changed. They no longer talked about “victories”, but about the “heroic battle at Stalingrad” and the “twilight of the gods in the face of Russian communism” … well, anyone with ears to hear knew enough then.

‘After that, Goebbels began skilfully developing his theatre of heroics. General Paulus’ promotion to field marshal should be seen in that light: he was to go down fighting at the head of his troops, banner in hand, the quintessential hero's death. But Paulus didn't seem to understand his role very well. He let himself be taken prisoner, appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, then spent the rest of his days in a villa close to Moscow, playing cards and writing his memoirs. He didn't die until 1957, in the DDR, in Dresden, in bed.

‘Today there are historians who say that any general but Paulus would have tried to break through the Russian lines; who claim that doing that would probably have saved 100,000 men. I wonder about that. While it was still possible, to have done that would have been in violation of all of Hitler and Manstein's orders. So it would have been outright insubordination. The rest of the Eastern Front would probably have collapsed.

‘Secondly, the eighty tanks we still had were almost out of fuel. Our artillery couldn't move up or pull back, the soldiers had eaten most of the horses. And we were facing 2,000 Russian T-34 tanks.