Stalingrad

straight across the ice to the field hospital. Guns were later trundled across to the west bank, including a 122-mm howitzer which was needed to break the deadlockin the Red October works. On minimum elevation, it was used at short range to blast the main office building, which the Germans had turned into a fortress.
    Most fortunate of all for the 62nd Army, the shortage of shells for the German artillery meant that the constant shelling of Volga crossing points was no longer possible. The bank itself often offered a peaceful scene. It resembled an early frontier mining settlement, with makeshift huts and tarpaulin shelters over holes in the bank. As men split logs, or sawed wood, a regimental postman walked past in the frozen sunshine to headquarters with his leather mailbag, hoping for a mug of hot tea from the copper samovar. Others went by bearing thermos containers with hot food for the troops in forward positions. Soldiers could now walk back in batches over the ice to steam baths set up on the east side of the river, to return clean and deloused the next night.
    On 19 December General Chuikov crossed to the east bank of the Volga for the first time since changing his headquarters in October. He crossed the ice on foot, and when he reached the far side, he apparently turned to gaze at the ruins which his army had held. Chuikov had come over for a party given by the commander of NKVD troops, Major-General Rogatin, in honour of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the Special Department of the Cheka. Chuikov on his return, when very drunk, fell through a hole in the ice, and had to be fished out of the freezing water. The commander of the 62nd Army nearly met an ignominious and anti-climactic end.
    While the Russians welcomed the low temperatures, the doctors in Paulus’s army dreaded them, for several reasons. The resilience of their patients, both the sick and the wounded, declined. Frost in an open wound could rapidly prove lethal. The hardness of the ground when shells,
Katyusha
rockets and mortar bombs exploded, seemed to be the only explanation for the great increase in stomach wounds with which they were faced. And from the middle of December there was ‘a steadily increasing number of serious frostbite cases’. The feet were not just swollen and purple – a degree treated with ointment, abandage and return to duty – but black and potentially gangrenous, often requiring rapid amputation.
    As early as the second week of December, doctors had started to notice a more disturbing phenomenon. An increasing number of soldiers died suddenly ‘without having received a wound or suffering from a diagnosable sickness’. Rations were indeed severely reduced, but for doctors, it still appeared to be far too early for cases of death by starvation. ‘The suspected causes’, wrote the pathologist entrusted with the inquiry, ‘included exposure, “exhaustion” [none of the approximately 600 doctors in the
Kessel
ventured to mention starvation] and above all a hitherto unidentified disease.’
    On 15 December, Dr Girgensohn, the Sixth Army pathologist then working in the hospital next to Tatsinskaya airfield, received the order to fly into the
Kessel
next day. ‘Unfortunately we don’t have a spare parachute for you,’ the pilot told him when he reported next morning at dawn, but they were forced to turn back. Finally, on 17 December, they reached the
Kessel.
The pilot told him they were over Pitomnik, and Girgensohn, peering through the small window, saw ‘in the white blanket of snow a brown cratered landscape’.
    Girgensohn found General Doctor Renoldi, the chief medical officer, in a railway carriage dug into the ground on the edge of the airfield. Renoldi pretended to know nothing about Girgensohn’s mission, because Dr Seggel, a specialist in internal medicine at Leipzig University, had requested his presence, and Renoldi, at that stage, considered the issue exaggerated. * From Pitomnik, Girgensohn was taken to the army field hospital next to Gumrak station and also close to Paulus’s headquarters. His base was a wood-lined bunker, dug into the steep side of a
balka.
This accommodation was indeed ‘luxurious’, since it contained an iron stove and two double bunk beds with, to his astonishment, clean sheets. It was a great contrast to the nearby accommodation for the wounded, which largely consisted of unheated tents in temperatures down to minus twenty.
    Girgensohn had preliminary