Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [157]
Perhaps the most effective piece of propaganda was to persuade German soldiers that they would not be shot on capture. Many of their officers had relied on the argument that surrender was out of the question because the Russians would kill them. One leaflet ended with a declaration by Stalin which began to convince even junior commanders that Soviet policy had changed: ‘“If German soldiers and officers give themselves up, the Red Army must take them prisoner and spare their lives.” (From Order No. 55 by the People’s Commissar for Defence, J. Stalin.)’
The first encirclement of a large German army, trapped far from home, ordered to stay put and finally abandoned to its fate, has naturally created an intense debate over the years. Many German participants and historians have blamed Paulus for not having disobeyed orders, and broken out. Yet if anybody was in a position to give Paulus, who was deprived of vital information, a lead in the matter, it should have been his immediate superior, Field Marshal von Manstein.
‘Can one serve two masters?’ Strecker noted when Hitler rejected Operation Thunderclap, the breakout plan to follow Operation Winter Storm. But the German Army only had a single master. The servile record since 1933 of most senior officers had left it both dishonoured and politically impotent. In fact, the disaster and humiliation of Stalingrad were the price which the army had to pay for its hubristic years of privilege and prestige under the National Socialist umbrella. There was no choice of master, short of joining the group round Henning von Tresckow and Stauffenberg.
Much time has been spent debating whether a breakout was feasible in the second half of December, yet even panzer commanders acknowledged that ‘the chances of a successful breakout diminished with every week’. The infantry had even fewer illusions. ‘We survivors’, a corporal wrote home, ‘can hardly keep going owing to hunger and weakness.’ Dr Alois Beck, quite rightly, disputed the ‘legend’ that ‘a breakout would have succeeded’. The Russians would have shot the ‘half-frozen soldiers down like hares’, because the men in their weakened state could not have waded through over a foot of snow, with its crust of ice on the surface, carrying weapons and ammunition. ‘Every step was exhausting,’ observed a staff officer from Sixth Army headquarters. ‘It would have been like the Berezina.’
The whole ‘Breakout or Defence’ debate is thus a purely academic diversion from the real issues. In fact one suspects that the formidably intelligent Manstein recognized this at the time. He made a great play of sending Major Eismann, his intelligence officer, into the Kessel on 19 December to prepare the Sixth Army for Operation Thunderclap. Yet Manstein knew by then that Hitler, who had again reaffirmed his determination not to move from the Volga, would never change his mind.
In any case, Manstein must have realized by then that the relief attempt was doomed. Hoth’s panzer divisions were being fought to a standstill on the Myshkova, with heavy casualties, even before the bulk of Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army had deployed. And Manstein, who had kept himself well informed of developments within the Kessel and the state of the troops, must have realized that Paulus’s men could never have walked, let alone fought, for between forty and sixty miles through the blizzards and deep frosts. The Sixth Army, with fewer than seventy under-supplied tanks, stood no chance of breaking through the 57th Army. Most important of all, Manstein knew by 19 December that Operation Little Saturn, with three Soviet armies breaking through into his rear, was changing the whole position irrevocably.
Quite simply, Manstein sensed that, in the sight of history and the German Army, he had to be seen to make every effort, even if he believed, quite correctly, that the Sixth Army’s only chance of saving itself had expired almost a month earlier. His apparently uneasy conscience after the event must have been due to the fact that, with Hitler’s refusal to withdraw from the Caucasus, he had