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10 per cent of what he knew he needed for survival. A German soldier, Wilhelm Hoffman of the 267th Regiment of the 94th Infantry Division, made a last entry in his diary, writing: ‘The horses have already been eaten. I would eat a cat; they say its meat is also tasty. The soldiers look like corpses or lunatics, looking for something to put in their mouths. They no longer take cover from Russian shells; they haven’t the strength to walk, run away and hide. A curse on this war…’67 It was about this time that Dingler and his comrades ‘began to discuss what to do if the worst came to the worst. We talked about captivity. We talked about the question of committing suicide. We discussed the question of defending what we held to the last bullet but one… There was no compulsion from above in any direction. These things were left to be decided by the individual himself.’68

On 8 January 1943, the commander of the Don Front, General Konstantin Rokossovsky, dropped leaflets offering the Germans an honourable surrender, sufficient rations, care for the wounded and repatriation to Germany after the war, all on the condition that their military equipment be handed over undamaged. Tempting as it was, this was refused, because – so Dingler told Mellenthin – they did not trust the Russians, still hoped against hope that they might escape and wanted to give Army Group A enough time to withdraw from the Caucasus. Rokossovsky therefore opened up a major offensive against the southern and western parts of the perimeter on 10 January, codenamed Operation Ring. ‘The cover of the tomb is closing over us,’ was the perceptive judgement of a Colonel Selle at that time, and so many German soldiers were now committing suicide that Paulus had to issue an order forbidding it as dishonourable.69 As the so-called Marinovka nose, the south-western protuberance of the Kessel, came under Russian attack, some German troops found that their fingers were so badly swollen from frostbite that they could not fit inside their rifles’ trigger guards. Summary execution was resorted to in order to keep the German troops fighting, in conditions so cold that mortar shells ‘rebounded off the frozen earth and exploded as air bursts, causing more casualties’.70 Yet once the Marinovka had fallen, it was even worse for the defenders, as they were now forced out into the open. ‘There were no trenches and no places for the riflemen,’ recalled Dingler; ‘the decimated troops, overtired, exhausted, and with frostbitten limbs, simply lay in the snow.’ All heavy weaponry had to be disabled – often by means of a grenade down the barrel – and then abandoned. The Kessel’s last contact with the outside world came on 23 January when Gumrak airfield – ‘a snowy desert filled with aircraft and vehicles’ – fell to the Russians. ‘Everywhere lay the corpses of German soldiers too exhausted to move on,’ Dingler wrote. ‘They had just died in the snow.’

Saturday, 23 January also saw the Führer issuing another rather predictable order to Paulus: ‘Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round, and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution to the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.’71 One week later, Hitler appointed Paulus a field marshal, in order to prevent him from surrendering, because no German field marshal had ever before surrendered his forces in the field. There’s a first time for everything, however, and at 07.35 hours on Sunday, 31 January Paulus was captured in his bunker, and his (southern) pocket of forces in the Kessel collapsed. The basement under the 1937-built Univermag (central department store) where Paulus and his chief of staff General Arthur Schmidt made their makeshift headquarters, is one of the few places where Germans did not suffer from chilblains and frostbite. On display there today are Paulus’ drawings dated November 1942 of red elephants outside the city trampling on the German flag in their march to Stalingrad, pictures which imply a severe lack of confidence