Stalingrad

amounts of food, not in preparation for a breakout across the snow, but for a Christmas feast or for gifts. A unit in 297th Infantry Division slaughtered a packhorse early so as to make ‘horse sausage’ as Christmas presents. Advent crowns were fashioned from tawny steppe grass instead of evergreen, and little Christmas trees were carved out of wood in desperate attempts to make it ‘just like at home’.
    The sentimentality was by no means restricted to soldiers. General Edler von Daniels decorated his newly dug bunker with a Christmastree and underneath a cradle with a snapshot of his ‘Kesselbaby’, born soon after their encirclement. He wrote to his young wife describing his plans to celebrate Christmas Eve ‘in the German way, although in far-off Russia’. The military group had clearly become the surrogate family. ‘Each man sought to bring a little joy to another,’ he wrote after visiting his men in their bunkers. ‘It was really uplifting to experience this true comradeship of the front line.’ One festive banner proclaimed ‘Comradeship through Blood and Iron’, which, however appropriate to the circumstances, rather missed the message of Christmas.
    One person who certainly did not miss the message was Kurt Reuber, the doctor in the 16th Panzer Division. The thirty-six-year-old Reuber, a theologian and friend of Albert Schweitzer, was also a gifted amateur artist. He converted his bunker in the steppe north-west of Stalingrad into a studio and began to draw on the back of a captured Russian map – the only large piece of paper to be found. This work, which today hangs in the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church in Berlin, is the ‘Fortress Madonna’, an embracing, protective, almost womb-like mother and child, joined with the words of St John the Evangelist: ‘Light, Life, Love’. When the drawing was finished, Reuber pinned it up in the bunker. Everyone who entered, halted and stared. Many began to cry. To Reuber’s slight embarrassment – no artist could have been more modest about his own gifts – his bunker became something of a shrine.
    There can be little doubt about the genuine and spontaneous generosity of that Christmas. A lieutenant gave out the last of his cigarettes, writing paper and bread as presents for his men. ‘I myself had nothing,’ he wrote home, ‘and yet it was one of my most beautiful Christmases and I will never forget it.’ As well as giving their cigarette ration, men even gave their bread, which they sorely needed. Others laboriously carved equipment racks for each other.
    On Christmas Eve, Reuber’s pianist battalion commander gave his last bottle of sparkling wine to the soldiers in the sickbay, but just after all the mugs were filled, four bombs exploded outside. Everyone flung themselves to the floor, spilling all the Sekt. The medical officer grabbed his first-aid bag and ran from the bunker to see to thecasualties – one killed and three wounded. The dead man had been singing the Christmas carol ‘
O du fr
ö
hliche’.
The incident, not surprisingly, put an end to their celebrations. In any case, both the 16th Panzer and the 6oth Motorized Infantry Division soon found themselves under full attack in the early hours of Christmas morning.
    The traditional, and favourite, song that night was ‘
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht
’, which soldiers sang ‘with husky voices’ in bunkers by the light of hoarded candle stubs. There were many stifled sobs as men thought of their families at home. General Strecker was clearly moved when he made a tour of front-line positions. ‘It is a “Stille Nacht” amid the turmoil of war… A Christmas that shows the true brotherhood of soldiers.’ Visits by senior officers were also appreciated for their accompanying benefits. An NCO in a panzer division recorded that ‘the divisional commander gave us a swig from his bottle and a bar of chocolate’.
    In positions which were not attacked, men crowded into a bunker which had a wireless to hear ‘the Christmas broadcast of Grossdeutsche Rundfunk’. To their astonishment, they heard a voice announce: ‘This is Stalingrad!’, answered by a choir singing ‘
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht
, supposedly on the Volga front. Some men accepted the deception as necessary in the circumstances, others were deeply angered. They felt it was tricking their families and the German people as a whole. Goebbels had already proclaimed that this should be a ‘German Christmas’, a