Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [175]
‘Mein Führer,’ replied the Luftwaffe general, ‘I have here the list of planes and cargoes dispatched per day.’
‘But mein Führer,’ Behr interrupted. ‘For the Army, what is important is not how many planes were sent out, but what we actually receive. We are not criticizing the Luftwaffe. Their pilots really are heroes, but we have received only the figures I have told you. Perhaps some companies retrieved odd canisters and kept them, without notifying their headquarters, but not enough to make a difference.’
Some senior officers tried to deflect Behr’s criticisms with ‘idiotic questions’, but Hitler proved surprisingly helpful, probably because he wanted to appear to defend the interests of the Stalingradkämpfer against the general staff. But when Behr came to the situation facing the Sixth Army, Hitler turned back to the great map dotted with little flags as if nothing had changed. Behr knew that these flags, ‘the same as months before’, now represented ‘divisions with only a few hundred men left’. Yet Hitler once again resorted to his message of reversing the whole situation by a brilliant counterstroke. He even proclaimed that a whole SS Panzer Army was already grouping round Kharkov, poised to strike towards Stalingrad. Behr knew from Field Marshal von Manstein that the SS formations being brought eastwards would need several more weeks. ‘I saw then that he had lost touch with reality. He lived in a fantasy world of maps and flags.’ For Behr, who had been an enthusiastic and ‘nationalistic young German officer’, the revelation came as a shock. ‘It was the end of all my illusions about Hitler. I was convinced that we would now lose the war.’
Behr was not sent straight back to the Kessel as planned. He saw Hitler again the next day at noon, with Field Marshal Milch, who was ordered to galvanize Luftwaffe relief efforts to Stalingrad. Behr was later summoned by Hitler’s senior military aide, General Schmundt, and subjected to a long and searching, although friendly, interview. Schmundt, one of Hitler’s most loyal admirers (he was to die eighteen months later from Stauffenberg’s bomb), quickly sensed that the young panzer captain had lost his faith. Behr admitted this openly when the question was put. Schmundt therefore decided that he should not be sent back to Paulus, in case he passed on his misgivings. Behr would return to the Black Sea coast, and work there at Melitopol as part of the new ‘Special Staff’ to be set up under Field Marshal Milch to help Fortress Stalingrad hold out to the last.
At Rastenburg, General Stieff and also Lieutenant-Colonel Bern-hard Klamroth, who knew Behr well from before the war, took him aside and asked – ‘in a coded manner’ – whether he would join a movement to oust Hitler. Behr, who had only just seen the truth
‘about Hitler’s disastrous leadership, felt that he could not do a complete about-turn. Klamroth understood, but warned him to be careful with Manstein. ‘At table he is very much against Hitler, but he just shoots his mouth off. If Hitler were to order him to turn left or right, he would do exactly what he was told.’
Klamroth’s criticism was not exaggerated. For all the disrespect Manstein showed for the Führer in private among trusted subordinates and with his dachshund’s trick of raising its paw in the Nazi salute, he did not want to risk his own position. In his memoirs, he used what might be