Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [92]
Sixth Army headquarters established one Kommandantur for the centre and north of the city, and another for south of the Tsaritsa. Each had a company of Feldgendarmerie responsible, among other things, for guarding against sabotage and registering and evacuating civilians. Instructions were issued that anyone who failed to register would be shot. Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star on their sleeve. The Feldgendarmerie worked closely with the Secret Field Police under Kommissar Wilhelm Möritz. One Kommandantur officer, captured after the battle, admitted during interrogation that their tasks had also included the selection of ‘suitable’ civilians for forced labour in Germany and the handing over of Communist activists and Jews to the SD. Soviet sources claim that the Germans executed over 3,000 civilians during the fighting, and that more than 60,000 civilians from Stalingrad were transported back to the Reich, on Hitler’s order, as slave labour. The number of Jews and Communists arrested by the Sixth Army’s Feldgendarmerie and handed over to the SS is not given. Sonderkommando 4a, following the Sixth Army’s advance, had reached Nizhne-Chirskaya in the wake of XXIV Panzer Corps on 25 August, and promptly massacred two truck-loads of children, ‘the majority aged between six and twelve’. They had also executed a number of Communist officials and NKVD informers denounced by Cossacks, whose ‘Kulak’ families had suffered greatly at the regime’s hands. The Sonderkommando remained in the Stalingrad area until the fourth week of September.
A major evacuation of civilians took place on 5 October, and the last at the beginning of November. Batches of civilians were selected for loading on to cattle trucks at railheads to the rear. The misery of refugees was all too evident. The wise took every blanket they could carry to barter for food in the weeks ahead. These Stalingrad civilians were marched first to an improvised camp near the village of Voro-ponovo (now Gorkovsky), then on to other camps at Marinovka, Kalach and Nizhne-Chirskaya.
The treatment they received was still not quite as bad as that suffered by captured Russian soldiers. In the cage near Gumrak there were, by 11 September, over 2,000 prisoners of war, many of them from worker militia battalions. Soviet officers were left to keep order, if necessary with their fists, when the food was thrown in over the wire. No medical facilities were provided. A Soviet doctor did what he could for the wounded, but ‘in hopeless cases, he could only put them out of their misery’.
Subsequent round-ups were more brutal. Finally, ‘a huge black crowd’ was forced out into the first snows. This last and largest group of Stalingrad civilians was marched to Karpovka and other camps. Conditions were appalling. Even the name ‘camp’ was optimistic, since they were just a large encirclement of barbed wire on the open steppe. There were no huts. The prisoners tried to dig holes in the ground with their bare hands to escape the biting winds, then huddle together. On the night of 7 November, the anniversary of the revolution, the Russian prisoners celebrated, singing quietly among themselves, but that evening it began to rain heavily. Towards morning, the temperature fell rapidly, bringing a hard frost and they shivered uncontrollably in their sodden clothes. Many died. In one hole, the mother next to Valentina Nefyodova sat clasping an infant son and an infant daughter on her knees: the girl survived, but the boy died in her arms. Nefyodova’s teenage cousin also froze to death that night.
The guards in these camps were mostly Ukrainians in German uniform.* Many were bulbovitsi, extreme right-wing nationalists named after Taras Bulba, who treated their