In Europe

in the same direction. The only possible conclusion is that the Russians will be attacking soon from over here, and that they are going to grind us to a pulp.” That was in early October 1942.
    ‘Meanwhile, our superiors were assuming that the Russians were done for, that their reserves had been exhausted, and that the winter would be a quiet one for us. The good Lord himself must have struck them blind. In actual fact, the Russians had 2,000 tanks at Stalingrad, T-34s, while we had no more than 80. And even those only had enough fuel to run for a hundred kilometres. I remember thinking even then: havethey all gone mad? But it was clearly a matter of keeping up appearances. No one was interested in the facts any more.
    ‘The Russian attack started on 19 November. Our command bunker was about ten kilometres from the front, in the middle of an area that had been surrounded by the Russians. I drove all over the place, staying in contact with the troops who were doing the fighting. Paulus wanted me to keep him up to date on how his men were doing, no matter how bad the news. The cold was infamous, but the strong winds were actually what finished us off. There were about thirty centimetres of snow on the ground, with this hard crust of ice that you broke through at every step. Maybe you can imagine how that was for those infantrymen, running away from the enemy across a field of crusty snow like that, carrying a machine gun. People kept talking about how we should break through the enemy lines, but it was almost impossible – physically too – to take the offensive, let alone break through Russian positions that had been set up all around us.
    ‘On 20 December I went to the field hospital. I'd been having problems with a wisdom tooth and the dentist was going to help me. I stepped in out of the cold and was struck by this enormous heat, mixed with a pestilential stench. I saw a big, long barrack and about thirty doctors, covered in blood like workers in a slaughterhouse, sawing off feet and fingers. That's all they did, all day long, just amputate frozen limbs.
    ‘When I left from Pitomnik airfield on 13 January, 1943, I was one of the last ones out, they were lying … you know how they stack wood in the forest? Well, there were stacks of frozen bodies like that everywhere, the bodies of the sick and wounded who had been dragged to the airfield and then died anyway. Thousands of them lying there like that, the ground was too hard to bury anyone. By that time the airfield was already under constant artillery attack. It was complete chaos. You heard people crying and screaming everywhere. The
Feldgendarmerie
showed me to one of the last planes, a Heinkel 111. I was the only passenger who wasn't badly wounded. Hundreds of others tried to board the plane, some of them crawling, it was their only chance of escape. They had to be held at bay with sub-machine guns. For three days after that, planes left from the airstrip at Gumrak. Then the air connection was cut off for good.
    ‘I had some amazingly good luck. They sent me to Hitler, but first they wanted me to inform Field Marshal Manstein, at his headquarters on the Sea of Azov, of the hopelessness of the situation. He said: “Here we see it the same way you do over there. But go to the Führer yourself. It's bound to make more of an impression if he hears it from you, instead of from some overly ambitious general.”
    ‘That's how I arrived the next evening at Hitler's headquarters, the
Wolfsschanze
. When I saw all those prim officers sitting around in their tidy uniforms, my mood became grim, almost communist. Those headquarters weren't really all that posh, but when you've just come back from the bitterest misery you get angry at anyone who sleeps well at night. I was brought in right away. Hitler welcomed me, then we went to the big war room. In the middle there was this table that must have been two metres wide and ten metres long, showing the various theatres of war, all these little flags everywhere. Those were the armies and divisions. To my amazement, I saw that there were little flags all around Stalingrad as well, even though I'd seen with my own eyes that only a few units were left of all those divisions. The rest had been wiped out.
    ‘I knew that Hitler was not fond of receiving bad news, and that he often twisted such conversations to fit one of his endless theories. That's precisely what he did this time too. He quickly began thanking me for my