Inferno - Max Hastings [114]
Franz Peters and some comrades wandered into a church in a little town; the communists had ripped out its altar, but the Germans clustered around the hole where this had stood, and began carolling. “I have never heard ‘Silent Night’ sung with such fervour … Many of us were moved to tears.” Karl-Gottfried Vierkom read aloud to his comrades a card which accompanied a marble cake sent by his mother from Germany: “When I finished, there was complete silence. Far away from this terrible disaster—which no one imagined possible when we first entered Russia—something else still existed. Was there still a Christmas somewhere, where people peacefully exchanged gifts, gathered around the tree and went to Midnight Mass?”
In Berlin there was no place for such sentimentality, which was anyway grotesque at a time when systemic barbarism was being perpetrated by the same German soldiers in Russia who sang carols and nursed self-pity. Hitler, enraged by the repulse before Moscow, appointed himself to replace Walther von Brauchitsch as army C-in-C. He repeated to Model his draconian injunctions against yielding ground. General Hoepner, one of many advocates of a strategic disengagement, wrote: “There is a serious cost to one’s nerves fighting against the enemy and one’s own supreme commander at the same time.” A few days later Hoepner joined a long list of commanders in the east, including von Rundstedt and Guderian, sacked for alleged lack of steel.
Model, a blunt soldier’s general and dedicated Nazi, addressed the threat of disaster with energy and success. By mid-January, the Soviets had ceased to win ground; on the twenty-first, to the amazement of his demoralised officers Model launched a counterblow at the Russian flank west of Moscow. His staff asked what reinforcements he could deploy. “Myself!” he declared irrepressibly—and this sufficed. Everywhere he improvised, dashing from unit to unit, often under fire, urging local commanders first to stand, then to strike back. Desperate expedients were employed to enable men to keep fighting in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit: heated shelters were established, for recuperation between the few hours of exposed activity that were all a soldier could endure; “snow shacks” were built around aircraft engines, to warm them through the night so the Luftwaffe could fly once more. In the last days of January and the first of February, Model’s troops inflicted repeated repulses and heavy casualties on the Russians, still seeking to push forward in the Rzhev salient.
Horrors afflicted both sides. War correspondent Vasily Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots. Fritz Langkanke of the SS Das Reich Division described how a dead Russian, frozen stiff, became wedged between the wheels of his armoured car: “I grabbed a saw, wriggled underneath and began cutting away his arms. As I did this, our two faces came close together and with the sawing motion he suddenly began to move. I froze in horror. It was only in response to the saw’s action, but it seemed for a moment he was shaking his head at me.”
Wolf Dose, a German soldier supervising a POW work detail outside Leningrad, described with bleak detachment the fate of a Russian who collapsed while gathering wood outside a dugout: “He lay for a while in the frozen snow, at –20 degrees Celsius. He recovered somewhat … lifted himself up. But the cold had a strange effect on him. He threw himself forward [into the dugout] with such sudden vigour that he landed right on top of the stove. He just lay there, stunned, his skin burning away. Someone managed to pull him off and laid him on the ground. His head was resting on some of the wood he had gathered; his charred hand was soldered onto one of the pieces. He groaned quietly.” Then someone hauled the man to his feet. “Because of the shock of the sudden movement, he emptied the contents of his intestines into his trousers, which swelled