Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [214]
Prisoners, suddenly transformed into an underclass, had to learn quickly. They pilfered and fashioned numerous ingenious gadgets. They also learned to make the most of their rations, for example, roasting fish bones from the soup on the stove, and then crushing them up. Some made terrible mistakes. At Ilmen, prisoners reduced to eating reeds and water-hemlock died rapidly as a result. And one prisoner who managed to grab a handful of butter in the kitchen died in agony because his stomach was so unused to fats.
The bad diet on top of the weeks of starvation in the Kessel was the main reason for patients in the prison hospitals failing to recover. They lost nearly all their hair, and their neck muscles became too feeble to raise their heads. Those dying shunned the daylight, as if preparing themselves for perpetual darkness.
Death could often be a deliverance, almost like sleep for the exhausted. A number slipped away quite suddenly, just when doctors thought them over the worst. Sick men would share beds for warmth, even though a number woke up to find themselves next to a corpse. Some had succumbed rapidly. Helmuth Groscurth died of typhus on 7 April 1943 in the officers’ camp of Frolovo where 4,000 inmates died out of 5,000. It was three years before his family received news of his death. Kurt Reuber died on 20 January 1944, in Yelabuga camp only a few weeks after he had drawn another Madonna for Christmas with the same words: ‘Light, Life, Love’.
A few, after having survived the worst, suddenly killed themselves unexpectedly. In a prison hospital, one officer woke to find a friend in the next bed sitting up motionless. He had managed to kill himself by ‘thrusting a long thin shard of glass from a broken window straight up into the heart’.
Even the comparatively healthy had little hope of surviving. Their rations – such as unground millet which ran right through the stomach – gave them little strength for the heavy work which the NKVD intended to extract from them through Stakhanovite work programmes. Materialism, as one of them put it, meant that ‘man was just another material’ to be used and discarded. Prisoners were used as pack animals. They first had to build their own camps in almost virgin forest. They were not allowed huts, but underground bunkers, which flooded in spring and autumn. Once the camp was established, their life was one of heavy labour, cutting and dragging timber, and sometimes peat-cutting for winter fuel. Those kept in the Stalingrad area, rebuilding the city and recovering sunken ships from the Volga, were later put to work, along with other Gulag prisoners, digging that Stalinist showpiece, the Volga-Don canal.
Soon after its triumph at Stalingrad, the Soviet state made plans to undermine the Nazi regime and replace it with a puppet Communist state. Prisoners of all ranks were to be divided into ‘anti-fascists’ and ‘fascists’.
In the spring and summer of 1943, senior officers were moved from a camp at Krasnogorsk to the monastery at Suzdal, and then to what became their semi-permanent base: Camp 48 at Voikovo, an old inn and health spa, which was dubbed ‘the Castle’, because of its relative luxury. The NKVD moved the implacable Schmidt away from Paulus, because he was seen as a bad influence.
The NKVD department in charge of prisoners of war first organized an umbrella organization, the National Committee for Free Germany. To run it, Beria’s men used their tame German Communists. Two months later, another group, the League of German Officers, was set up to attract anti-Nazis unwilling to support the National Committee.
Major-General Melnikov, the vice-chief of the department, controlled these activities. Although