Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [201]
Very little that was recognizable remained from the city which had existed before Richthofen’s bombers appeared on that August afternoon. Stalingrad was now little more than a battered and burned skeleton. About the only landmark left standing was the fountain with statues of little boys and girls dancing round it. This seemed an unsettling miracle after so many thousands of children had perished in the ruins all around.
23
‘Stop Dancing! Stalingrad Has Fallen’
At midday on 2 February a Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft circled over the city. The pilot’s radio message was immediately passed to Field Marshal Milch: ‘No more sign of fighting in Stalingrad’.
After Voronov and Rokossovsky’s first interview with Paulus, Captain Dyatlenko returned to interrogating the other captured generals. Contrary to his expectations, they reacted in very different ways. General Schlömer, who had taken over command of XIV Panzer Corps from Hube, arrived limping on a stick and wearing a Red Army padded jacket. He won over his interrogator with an easy charm and remarks about ‘the Corporal uneducated in military problems’ and the ‘untalented careerists in his entourage’. General Walther von Seydlitz, on the other hand, whom the NKVD ‘later discovered to be the most energetic defender of disobedience to the Fürer during the encirclement’, conducted himself ‘in a very reserved way’.
For Stalin, 91,000 prisoners, including twenty-two German generals, were better trophies than flags or guns. Paulus, still in a state of shock, at first refused to appear in front of the journalists brought down from Moscow. ‘We have our own rules,’ retorted Colonel Yakimovich of Don Front headquarters, with Lieutenant Bezyminsky interpreting. ‘You are to do what you are told.’ One compromise was, however, permitted. Paulus would not have to answer questions from the journalists, he only had to show himself to prove that he had not committed suicide.
The foreign correspondents were rather surprised by the appearance of the German generals. ‘They looked healthy, and not in the least undernourished,’ wrote Alexander Werth. ‘Clearly, throughout the agony of Stalingrad, when their soldiers were dying of hunger, they were continuing to have more or less regular meals. The only man who looked in poor shape was Paulus himself. He looked pale and sick, and had a nervous twitch in his left cheek.’
Attempts to put questions were not very successful. ‘It was rather like being at the zoo,’ wrote Werth, ‘where some animals showed interest in the public and others sulked.’ General Deboi was clearly keen to please, and immediately told the foreign journalists – ‘as if to ask us not to be frightened’ – that he was Austrian. General Schlömer was the most relaxed. He turned to one of his captors and, patting the officer’s shoulder boards, which had just been reintroduced by Stalin, exclaimed with a comic look of surprise: ‘What – new?’ General von Arnim, on the other hand, was chiefly preoccupied with the fate of his luggage and what he thought of Red Army soldiers as a result. ‘The officers behave very correctly,’ he announced, but the soldiers he described as ‘impudent thieves!’
The strain of capture also made for undignified behaviour in the two peasant houses at Zavarykino. Adam deliberately provoked Senior Lieutenant Bogomolov one morning with a Nazi salute and a ‘Heil Hitler’. Schmidt, however, was the officer most disliked by the Russians. Bogomolov forced him to apologize to a mess waitress whom he had reduced to tears as she served their lunch. A few days later, trouble broke out across the way in the izba which housed the other generals. Lieutenant Spektor of guard group No. 2 telephoned Bogomolov, begging him to come quickly. A fight had broken out. ‘When I opened the door of the house,’ wrote Bogomolov, ‘I saw that a German general was grasping the wrist of a Romanian general. When the German saw me, he let go, and then the Romanian hit him in the mouth. It turned out that the quarrel was about the Romanian’s knife, fork and