The German War (57 page)

On Christmas Day, Fritz Probst wrote to his wife again, reminding her that, in spite of the privations at home, at least they could enjoy ‘a warm living room, a Christmas tree too and one is with the family’. For all of that, he continued, ‘you can only thank our dear Führer. That it remains so, that’s why we are standing here.’ For Wilhelm Moldenhauer, Christmas Eve brought an extraordinary surprise: two sacks of post, including five of his wife’s letters and a small parcel with liver sausage, preserved cherries and a torch battery. The dugout now had to accommodate nine men, but they had excavated it a bit more and brought in car seats to sit on. They had hung a rug and newspaper photos of pretty women on the wall, and turned a bottle with silver paper and old camouflage material into their ‘tree’. Cigarette papers made the decorations. A special bread ration and real coffee had put the lice-ridden men in the mood to sing carols. On 30 December, Moldenhauer also quoted Lale Andersen’s hit song: ‘After every December comes another May. With humour and good spirits we will also put this time behind us,’ he wrote. Five days later, on 4 January 1943, under heavy air and artillery bombardment from the west, Moldenhauer could still strike an optimistic note: ‘Thanks to our good leadership, we can be confident. We want to hope that the Russians’ great offensive turns into a great success for us. I don’t just hope that, but I am firmly convinced that’s how it will turn out.’ It was his last letter.
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Ursula von Kardorff’s brother wrote to her on 23 January, reminding her of the passage in Heinrich von Kleist ‘where the Prussian hussar of 1806 is depicted as representative of a soldiery which retains its splendour, independent of the failure of the whole enterprise’. ‘I want’, the 23-year-old went on, ‘to devote my own strength to the best of my ability like that, without asking about the possible outcome.’ By the time the letter reached Ursula in Berlin, his unit was being praised in the military bulletin, and ‘we know what that means’, Kardorff noted. The young woman asked herself where she should take spiritual refuge – ‘in Bach? Hölderlin? Kleist?’ – before concluding that she had to make his stance her own, ‘without illusions and [yet] loyal to one’s duty. Very hard.’
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As the Red Army pressed its advantage, it pushed the Germans and Hungarians back to the river Don. By 25 January, the city of Voronezh – captured by the Germans in early July at the start of ‘Operation Blue’ – was back in Soviet hands. Retreating westwards from the city, Lieutenant Eugen Altrogge was wounded in his right arm. A month earlier, he had written to Hans Albring about his latest drawings: in one, death clung to the shoulders of a sick soldier. A non-commissioned officer wrote to Altrogge’s family later to tell them that Eugen had been evacuated to the main dressing station and then westwards by plane after being wounded, but this may not have been the case. In the chaos of the winter retreat, his whereabouts unknown, Eugen Altrogge joined the growing number of men who were reported as missing in action.
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Information reaching the home front about Stalingrad slowed to a trickle, as the Soviet encirclement tightened. On 10 January 1943, the Wehrmacht report noted merely ‘local raiding parties’. Four days later the sparse military bulletins gave way to new and alarming reports of ‘heroic, severe battles in the area of Stalingrad’. The SD quickly picked up a new level of public anxiety and Goebbels himself wrote an article entitled ‘Total War’ in
Das Reich,
praising the heroism and sacrifice of the 6th Army as it tied down Soviet forces and protected the German armies in the Caucasus. The change of tone was no accident. Having accepted that defeat was now inevitable, the Propaganda Minister persuaded Hitler to let him prepare the ground for what he called a ‘heroic epic’.
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Saturday, 30 January 1943 marked the regime’s 10th anniversary. The main event was an address by Hermann Göring, whose Harvest Festival speech the previous October had made such a strong impression. Transmitted live on all domestic and armed forces’ radio stations, it was scheduled for 11 a.m. before a military audience, only to be delayed because six RAF Mosquito bombers appeared on their first daylight raid over Berlin. When Göring at last spoke, he pronouced a funeral oration over the 6th Army at Stalingrad. They would not only join the heroes of Germany’s past, from the Nibelungen and Ostrogoths of legend to the student volunteers who fought at Langemarck in 1914, but also Leonidas and his 300 Spartans who held ‘the narrow pass’ at Thermopylae against the Persian hordes: ‘even in a thousand years every German will still speak of this battle with religious awe and reverence and know that, despite everything, Germany’s victory was decided there,’ Göring declared. The scale of the 6th Army’s heroism was the same as that of the Spartans ‘two and a half thousand years ago’: ‘Then too it was an onslaught of hordes which broke against the nordic men.’
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Göring’s speech marked the climax of the nationalist cult of heroic death, a tradition which the Nazis inherited but certainly did not invent. Thermopylae resonated deeply with educated Germans, brought up on the poetry of Friedrich Schiller and that of the soldier-poet of the ‘liberation wars’ against Napoleon, Theodor Körner. The Reich Marshal’s pledge that ‘In days to come it will be said thus: when you come home to Germany, tell them that you have seen us lying at Stalingrad, as the law of the security of our people ordained’ deliberately echoed Schiller’s rendition of the classical epitaph of Simonides, the literary heart of the Thermopylae myth: ‘Wanderer, if you come to Sparta, tell them there, you saw us lying here, as the law ordained.’ Hölderlin and Nietzsche had believed that the Germans were descended from the Greeks. Now Göring pronounced the Spartans to be northmen.
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Brought up to venerate the dead of the First World War, young recruits knew what was expected of them. As one corporal stationed with Army Group Centre wrote home on 24 January 1943:

Here it is a matter of life and death. Russia is our fate – this or that outcome! The struggle has reached a harshness and implacability that beggars all description. ‘Not one of you has the right to return home alive!’ This motto has been repeated to us soldiers often enough and we know that it is meant seriously. We are completely prepared.

In Croatia, a lieutenant on the regimental staff of the 721st Grenadier Regiment applauded Göring’s words. ‘Never before in this war has such a heroic battle been fought. From this raging cauldron no one will ever see his homeland now!! It is very true that we really do not match these immortal Stalingrad fighters.’ At this time, his infantry division was embroiled in the largest dragnet operation of the war so far, ‘Operation White’, involving some 90,000 German, Croatian and Italian troops, who torched the villages of the Biha
region. It was a matter, he reflected, ‘not of the individual but of the whole’, and in that consciousness ‘we can attain victory!’ To young Heinrich Böll, the supreme sacrifice of the Stalingrad fighters left him uncomfortably conscious of his own physical frailties, prompting him to write, ‘I feel ashamed that I’m going in for several days’ medical treatment for headaches and sore eyes tomorrow.’
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For Peter Stölten, attending a specialised tank-training course in Eisenach, only Attila’s defeat on the Catalaunian Plains seemed to compare with the heroic event, a battle in which ‘Germanic’ tribes had fought alongside Roman legions to stem the ‘Asiatic’ Huns. But he feared that the meaning of Stalingrad was in danger of ‘sinking into a bloody darkness’, its spiritual expression lost. ‘I believe that in a quiet, ordered time we will feel it as an enormous loss,’ Stölten wrote to his parents, ‘that out of these last days not a single letter reached a family. Here in the continuous face of death a true response to our time must have been found, offering an ideal standard.’ While the battle was still raging Goebbels entrusted the chief reporter with the 6th Army, Heinz Schröter, with collecting and editing excerpts of soldiers’ letters to satisfy exactly this kind of spiritual demand.
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At the time when Göring gave his address, it looked to the Nazi leadership as if events at the front might accord with the choreography they had chosen. On 29 January, General Paulus had telegraphed Hitler to offer the 6th Army’s congratulations on the anniversary and to assure him that the flag was still flying over the city: ‘May our battle be an example for the current and future generations never to capitulate, even in their hopes: then Germany will be victorious.’ According to Nazi beliefs, a responsible commander would have to commit suicide if defeat was inevitable, and, to make quite sure Hitler promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal, well aware that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Paulus would earn Hitler’s lasting contempt for being the first to do so. German radio did its best to give the end a different gloss, announcing merely that his southern group ‘has been overwhelmed in battle by the superiority of the enemy, after more than two months of heroic defence’. On 30 January, news that the last German position had fallen at the tractor works was bathed in instransigent imagery: ‘During the heroic fighting every man, up to the General, fought in the most advanced line with fixed bayonets.’
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Then, on 3 February, preceded by slow marches, German radio announced that the battle was finally over:

The sacrifice of the 6th Army was not in vain. As the bulwark of the historic European mission it has broken the assault of six Soviet armies for several weeks . . . Generals, officers, non-commissioned officers and men fought shoulder to shoulder to the last bullet. They died so that Germany may live.

These words were followed by muffled drum rolls and three stanzas of the soldiers’ song ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’ – ‘The Good Comrade’ – then the national anthems of Germany, Romania and Croatia, and, following the format of great victories, a three-minute silence. Three days of national mourning were declared, during which all theatres, cinemas and variety halls in the Reich would remain closed. More sombre marches and a broadcast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony followed. Goebbels had requested a military bulletin which would stand comparison with the proclamations of Caesar, Frederick the Great and Napoleon and stir Germans’ heart for centuries to come.
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During the three days of official mourning, the Catholic bishops responded to Stalingrad by ordering masses for the dead in all diocesan churches. Archbishop Frings of Cologne intensified his appeal to the Virgin Mary. Galen of Münster, so recently the thorn in the regime’s side, penned a pastoral letter: ‘Full of inner love we remember our distant soldiers, who block the onslaught of the enemy from the homeland, the violent penetration of Bolshevism.’ Turning for inspiration to Thomas Aquinas, he blessed those who died ‘the soldier’s death in loyal fulfilment of duty’ as ‘near in value and worth to the martyrdom of the faithful’.
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The ‘heroic epic’ Goebbels and Göring had carefully crafted unleashed a public relations disaster of unparalleled proportions. There had been no emotional preparation for the extent of the defeat. With many of its sons serving in the 6th Army, the city of Nuremberg was seized by a paroxysm of grief. Grabbing papers from the news vendors, weeping and angry crowds turned on their leader for the first time: ‘Hitler has lied to us for three months,’ people railed, remembering his proud boast of 8 November that Stalingrad was virtually conquered. Across Germany, the population reacted with utter shock, dismay and an anger made all the greater by the optimistic reports which had circulated so recently. The notion that Stalingrad had been a mere battle for prestige may have concealed the full scale of the strategic defeat from many, but in the short term it also made the death of a whole army appear frivolous. To others, just as in the previous January, it now seemed as if the war had turned decisively against Germany. Goebbels realised that what might appeal to idealistic, Gymnasium-educated young men did not provide a viable myth for the whole nation: it was ‘unbearable for the German people’, he admitted to his diary, and he put the whole project of publishing a heroic epic of highly selected ‘last letters’ on ice. Stalingrad was the first and last defeat which the Nazi regime mythologised in this manner. When a quarter of a million German soldiers surrendered at Tunis a few months later the reporting was low-key and matter-of-fact; the same would hold true of the far greater defeats still to come. When Hitler finally addressed the German people for Heroes Memorial Day on 21 March, he would not mention Stalingrad at all.
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Goebbels realised that he needed to rally the living. At the start of the new year he had begun to rethink his own propaganda effort, telling the key media managers gathered at his ministerial conference in early January that

Since the beginning of the war our propaganda has followed the following erroneous path:

First year of the war: we have won.

Second year of the war: we shall win.