Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [212]
There were no huts to live in, only earth bunkers. But the worst surprise was a German corporal who had joined the Soviets as a guard commander. ‘No Russian ever treated me with such brutality,’ wrote the same prisoner.* Fortunately, movement between camps in this parallel Gulag was frequent. From Bekabad, many went to Kokant or, best of all, to Chuama, where there were much better medical facilities, and even a crudely improvised swimming pool. The Italian prisoners there were already well organized, catching sparrows to supplement the soup.
Those left behind in Stalingrad found that the collection camp at Krasnoarmeysk had been turned into a labour camp. The food at least improved with kasha (buckwheat porridge) and fish soup, but the work was often dangerous. When spring arrived, many of them were put to work retrieving Volga river craft sunk by the Luftwaffe and the German Army. One Russian shipyard manager, shaken by the number of prisoners who died on this work, swore his daughter to secrecy before telling her about it.
The NKVD’s grip on Stalingrad had not slackened. German prisoners working from both banks of the Volga had noticed that the first building in the city to be repaired was the NKVD headquarters, and almost immediately there were queues of women outside with food parcels for relatives who had been arrested. Former Sixth Army soldiers guessed that they too would be prisoners there for many years. Molotov later confirmed their fears, with his declaration that no German prisoners would see their homes until Stalingrad had been rebuilt.
25
The Sword of Stalingrad
In November 1943, one year after Operation Uranus, a Douglas transport plane flew low over Stalingrad. The Soviet diplomats on board were on their way from Moscow to meet the American and the British leaders at Tehran. One of the passengers was Valentin Berezhkov, who had been Dekanozov’s interpreter in Berlin on the eve of Barbarossa.
‘We pressed to the windows in silence,’ he wrote later. ‘First individual houses scattered in the snow came into view, and then a kind of unbelievable chaos began: lumps of walls, boxes of half-ruined buildings, piles of rubble, isolated chimneys.’ They could, however, distinguish signs of life. ‘Visible against the snow were the black figures of people and every now and then there was evidence of new buildings.’ Out over the steppe again, they spotted the rusty skeletons of tanks.
At the Tehran conference, Churchill presented the Sword of Stalingrad to ‘the Soviet people’. The blade bore the engraved dedication: ‘To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad, a gift from King George VI as a token of the homage of the British people.’ Churchill made the ceremony memorable by his oratory. Stalin, who accepted the sword with both hands, lifted it to his lips to kiss the scabbard. He then passed it to Marshal Voroshilov, who clumsily let the sword slide out of the scabbard. It clattered loudly on the floor.
That evening, Stalin raised his glass after dinner. ‘I propose a salute’, he said, ‘to the swiftest possible justice for all Germany’s war criminals… I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we catch them, all of them, and there must be quite a few of them.’ Some sources say that he proposed the execution of 50,000 Wehrmacht officers to destroy German military power for good. Churchill stood up angrily and declared that the British people would never ‘stand for such mass murder’. Nobody should be shot without a proper trial. He walked out. Stalin, amused at the reaction he had provoked, went after him. Placing both hands on