Stalingrad

down; what was a natural slope, or what was the side of a dozen bomb-craters that had merged into one, no one could say. Trenches ran through the factory yards; through the workshops themselves; at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shape, and there were tin helmets, German and Russian, lying among the brick debris, and the helmets were half-filled with snow. There was barbed wire here, and half-uncovered mines, and shell cases, and more rubble, and fragments of walls, and tortuous tangles of rusty steel girders. How anyone could have survived here was hard to imagine.’
    The morning of 2 February began with a thick mist, which was later dispersed by sun and a wind which whipped up the powdery snow. As news of the final surrender spread among the 62nd Army, signal flares were fired into the sky in an impromptu display. Sailors from the Volga flotilla and soldiers from the left bank crossed the ice with loaves of bread and tins of food for the civilians who had been trapped for five months in cellars and holes.
    Groups and individuals walking about embraced those they met in wonder. Voices were subdued in the frozen air. There was no shortage of figures in the colourless landscape of ruins, yet the city felt deserted and dead. The end was hardly unexpected, or even sudden, yet the Russian defenders found it hard to believe that the battle of Stalingrad had finally come to an end. When they thought about it, and remembered the dead, their own survival astonished them. Out of each division sent across the Volga, no more than a few hundred men survived. In the whole Stalingrad campaign, the Red Army had suffered 1.1 million casualties, of which 485,751 had been fatal.
    Grossman looked back over the last five months. ‘I thought of the wide dirt road leading to the fishermen’s village on the bank of the Volga – a road of glory and death – and the silent columns marching along it in the choking dust of August, in the moonlit nights of September, in the drenching rains of October, in the snows of November. They had marched with a heavy step – anti-tank men, machine-gunners,simple infantrymen – they had marched with a grim and solemn silence. The only sound that had come from their ranks was the clank of their weapons and their measured tread.’
    Very little that was recognizable remained from the city which had existed before Richthofen’s bombers appeared on that August afternoon. Stalingrad was now little more than a battered and burned skeleton. About the only landmark left standing was the fountain with statues of little boys and girls dancing round it. This seemed an unsettling miracle after so many thousands of children had perished in the ruins all around.

23
‘
Stop Dancing! Stalingrad Has Fallen
’
    At midday on 2 February a Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft circled over the city. The pilot’s radio message was immediately passed to Field Marshal Milch: ‘No more sign of fighting in Stalingrad’.
    After Voronov and Rokossovsky’s first interview with Paulus, Captain Dyatlenko returned to interrogating the other captured generals. Contrary to his expectations, they reacted in very different ways. General Schlömer, who had taken over command of XIV Panzer Corps from Hube, arrived limping on a stick and wearing a Red Army padded jacket. He won over his interrogator with an easy charm and remarks about ‘the Corporal uneducated in military problems’ and the ‘untalented careerists in his entourage’. General Walther von Seydlitz, on the other hand, whom the NKVD ‘later discovered to be the most energetic defender of disobedience to the Fürer during the encirclement’, conducted himself ‘in a very reserved way’.
    For Stalin, 91,000 prisoners, including twenty-two German generals, were better trophies than flags or guns. Paulus, still in a state of shock, at first refused to appear in front of the journalists brought down from Moscow. ‘We have our own rules,’ retorted Colonel Yakimovich of Don Front headquarters, with Lieutenant Bezyminsky interpreting. ‘You are to do what you are told.’ One compromise was, however, permitted. Paulus would not have to answer questions from the journalists, he only had to show himself to prove that he had not committed suicide.
    The foreign correspondents were rather surprised by the appearance of the German generals. ‘They looked healthy, and not in the least