Stalingrad

only nine were reunited with their parents. The vast majority were sent off to state orphanages or given work clearing the city. The report says nothing of their physical or mental state, witnessed by an American aid worker, who arrived very soon after the fighting to distribute clothes. ‘Most of the children’, she wrote, ‘had been living in the ground for four or five winter months. They were swollen with hunger. They cringed in corners, afraid to speak, to even look people in the face.’
    The Stalingrad Party Committee had higher priorities. ‘Soviet authorities were immediately reinstalled in all districts of the city’, it reported to Moscow. On 4 February, Red Army commissars held a political rally for the ‘whole city’, both civilian survivors and soldiers. This assembly, with its long speeches in praise of Comrade Stalin and his leadership of the Red Army, was the Party’s version of a service of thanksgiving.
    The authorities did not at first allow civilians who had escaped to the east bank to return to their homes, because of the need to clear unexploded shells. Mine-clearance teams had to prepare a basic pattern of ‘special safe paths’. But many soon managed to slip back over the frozen Volga without permission. Messages appeared chalked on the side of ruined buildings, testifying to the numbers of families broken up by the fighting: ‘Mama, we are all right. Look for us in Beketovka. Klava.’ Many people never discovered which of their relatives were alive or dead until after the war was over.
    A large contingent of German prisoners, many of whom were too weak to stand, were also forced to attend a political rally in the centre of Stalingrad, and listen to long harangues from three of the leading German Communists: Walter Ulbricht, Erich Weinert and Wilhelm Pieck.
    The state of most prisoners at the time of the surrender was sopitiful, that a considerable death rate was predictable in the weeks and months to follow. How far this was exacerbated by ill-treatment, casual brutality, and above all logistic deficiencies is impossible to calculate. Of the 91,000 taken prisoner at the end of the battle, almost half had died by the time spring arrived. The Red Army itself acknowledged in subsequent reports that orders for the care of prisoners had been ignored, and it is impossible to tell how many Germans were shot out of hand during or soon after their surrender, often as vengeance for the deaths of relatives or comrades.
    The death rate in the so-called hospitals was terrifying. The tunnel system in the Tsaritsa gorge, redesignated ‘Prisoner of War Hospital No. 1’, remained the largest and most horrific, only because there were no buildings left offering any protection against the cold. The walls ran with water, the air was little more than a foul, sickly recycling of human breath, with so little oxygen left that the few primitive oil lamps, fashioned from tins, flickered and died constantly, leaving the tunnels dark. Each gallery was not much wider than the casualties lying side by side on the damp beaten earth of the tunnel floor, so it was difficult, in the gloom, not to step or trip on feet suffering from frostbite, provoking a hoarse shriek of pain. Many of these frostbite victims died of gangrene, because the surgeons could not cope. Whether they would have survived amputation in their weakened state and without anaesthetic is another matter.
    The condition of many of the 4,000 patients was pitiful in the extreme, and the doctors were helpless as fungus spread on rotten flesh. They had almost no bandages left and no medicaments. Ulcers and open sores provided easy entry points for tetanus from the filth around. Sanitary arrangements, which consisted of a single bucket to scores of men suffering from dysentery, were unspeakable, and at night there were no lamps. Many men were too weak to raise themselves from the ground and there were not enough orderlies to answer the constant cries for help. The orderlies, already weak from undernourishment and soon fever-ridden themselves, had to carry polluted water up from the ravine.
    The doctors did not even have a reliable list of patients’ names, let alone proper medical notes. Second-line Russian troops, and alsomembers of ambulance units, had stolen their medical equipment and drugs, including analgesics. The Protestant chaplain of the 297th Division was shot in the back of the neck by a Soviet major when he bent over to help a wounded