Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Last letters home confirmed the worst fears. ‘Please don’t be sad and weep for me, when you receive this, my last letter,’ wrote one captain to his wife in mid-January. ‘I’m standing here in an icy storm in a hopeless position in the city of fate, Stalingrad. Encircled for months, we will tomorrow begin the last fight, man against man.’³⁴² Another soldier compared the miserable reality of death in Stalingrad with the imagery of heroism: ‘They’re falling like flies, and no one bothers and buries them. Without arms and legs and without eyes, with stomachs ripped open, they lie around everywhere.’³⁴³ ‘We’re completely alone, without help from outside,’ ran another last letter home. ‘Hitler has left us in the lurch. This letter is going off while the airfield is still in our possession. We’re in the north of the city. The men of my battery guess it, too, but don’t know it as certainly as I do. This, then, is what the end looks like.’³⁴⁴ Some clutched vainly, even now, to final strands of belief in Hitler. ‘The Führer solidly promised to get us out of here. That’s been read out to us and we firmly believed it. I still believe it today, because I have to believe in something… I have believed my entire life, or at least eight years of it, always in the Führer and his word. It’s horrible how they’re in doubt here, and shameful to hear words spoken that you can’t contradict because they’re in line with the facts.’³⁴⁵ Such sentiments were by this time rare indeed among those fighting, suffering, and dying in the hell-hole of Stalingrad. Far more typical was the wretchedness expressed in the last letter of another despairing soldier: ‘I love you, and you love me, and so you should know the truth. It is in this letter. The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and horrible dying… I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery than to die for such point-lessness, not to say crime… Don’t be so quick to forget me.’³⁴⁶

A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once commenting inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’.³⁴⁷ Below had the impression that Hitler realized by this time that victory in a two-front war against the Russians and the Americans could not be won. But Hitler betrayed no outward sign of weakening. He felt obliged to maintain the charade, even in his inner circle, that the war would be won — and he was able still to convey his optimism to those around him. What he really thought, no one knew.³⁴⁸

After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy — though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.³⁴⁹

By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’.³⁵⁰ After Goebbels had visited the Wolf’s Lair on 22 January, and obtained Hitler’s backing for a radicalization of the home front in a drive for ‘total war’, the press was immediately instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’. This was now to be brought into the direct context of mobilizing the population for ‘total war’.³⁵¹