Information about the supply problems, which affected morale, particularly interested me. Everyone knew, without speaking about it, that the Soviet prisoners in our Stalag, whom we had virtually stopped feeding for some time, had sunk into cannibalism. “It’s their true nature that’s being revealed,” Thomas had snapped at me when I tried to discuss it with him. It was understood, though, that the German Landser, when in distress, would keep his dignity. So the shock caused by a report on a case of cannibalism in a German company posted at the western edge of the Kessel was all the keener in high places. The circumstances made the affair particularly atrocious. When famine made them resolve on this course, the soldiers in the company, still concerned with the Weltanschauung, had debated the following point: Should they eat a Russian or a German? The ideological problem posed was about the legitimacy of eating a Slav, a Bolshevik Untermensch. Couldn’t that sort of meat corrupt their German stomachs? But eating a dead comrade would be dishonorable; even if they couldn’t bury them anymore, they still had respect for those who had fallen for the Vaterland. Finally they agreed to eat one of their Hiwis, an entirely reasonable compromise, given the terms of the debate. They killed him and an Obergefreiter, a former butcher from Mannheim, proceeded to dismember him. The surviving Hiwis panicked: three of them were killed trying to desert, but another managed to reach the regiment’s HQ, where he had told the story to an officer. No one had believed him; after an investigation, they had been forced to face the facts, since the company hadn’t been able to dispose of the victim’s remains, and they had found his entire rib cage and some of the bits deemed unsuitable for consumption. The soldiers, when they were arrested, had confessed everything; the meat, according to them, tasted like pork, and was every bit as good as horse. They had discreetly shot the butcher and four ringleaders, then hushed up the affair, but it had created a stir in the various headquarters. Möritz asked me to write a general report on the nutritional situation of the troops since the Kessel had been sealed off; he had the numbers from the AOK 6, but suspected them of being mostly theoretical. I thought of going to see Hohenegg.
This time, I prepared my expedition a little better. I had already gone out with Thomas, to visit some division Ic/AOs; after my Croatian escapade, Möritz had ordered me, if I wanted to go out alone, to fill out an itinerary first. I made a phone call to Pitomnik, to the office of Generalstabsarzt Dr. Renoldi, the chief medical officer of AOK 6, where I was told that Hohenegg was based in the main campaign hospital in Gumrak; there I was told that he was traveling around within the Kessel, to make observations; I finally located him in Rakotino, a stanitsa in the southern part of the pocket, in the sector of the 376th Division. I then had to call the different HQs to organize liaisons. The trip would take half a day, and I would definitely have to spend the night either in Rakotino itself, or in Gumrak; but Möritz agreed to the expedition. There were still a few days left before the New Year; it had been twenty-five below zero since Christmas, and I decided to get out my shuba, despite the risk that lice would nest in it. I was already covered with them in any case—my vigilant hunt through the seams every night didn’t do any good: my belly, my armpits, the inside of my legs were red with bites, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching till I drew blood. I was also suffering from diarrhea, probably because of the bad water and irregular food, a mixture, depending on the day, of tinned ham or French pâté and Wassersuppe with horse. At HQ it was all right, the officers’ latrines were revolting but at least accessible, but on the move it could soon become problematic.
