Stalingrad

man.
    Russian medical officers were appalled by the conditions. Some were sympathetic. The Russian commandant shared out his cigarettes with German doctors, but other Soviet personnel traded bread for any watches which had survived the earlier rounds of looting. Dibold, the doctor from the 44th Infantry Division, described how when a woman army surgeon, jolly and with the strong red face of peasant ancestors, came in to bargain for watches, a young Austrian from a poor family produced a silver pocket watch. He handed over this heirloom, no doubt given to him on going off to war, and in return he received half a loaf. This he divided among the other men, keeping the smallest portion for himself.
    Misery also brought the scum to the surface. Certain individuals exploited the helplessness of former comrades with a previously unimaginable shamelessness. Thieves robbed from corpses and from the weakest patients. If anyone had a watch, wedding ring or other valuable left, it was soon snatched in the dark. But nature had its own form of poetic justice. The robbers of the sick rapidly became typhus victims from infected lice transferred with the booty. One interpreter, infamous for his activities, was found to have a large bag of gold rings hidden on him when he died.
    At first, the Soviet authorities provided no rations at all. NKVD and Red Army files now show that, even though surrender was known to be imminent, virtually no preparation had been made to guard, let alone to feed, the prisoners. The German Communist, Erich Weinart, claimed that heavy snow had hampered the transport of supplies, but this is unconvincing. The real problem was a mixture of brutal indifference and bureaucratic incompetence, above all a lack of coordination between army and NKVD.
    There was also a deep reluctance to allow German prisoners rations when the Soviet Union was so desperately short of food. Many Red Army soldiers were badly undernourished, to say nothing of civilians,so the idea of giving any food at all to invaders who had plundered their country seemed almost perverse. Rations finally started to arrive after three or four days, by which time many men had eaten virtually nothing in almost two weeks. Even for the sick there was little more than a loaf of bread between ten men, plus some soup made from water with a few millet seeds and salted fish. It would have been unrealistic to expect better treatment, especially when one considers the Wehrmacht’s record on the treatment of its own prisoners, both military and civilian, in the Soviet Union.
    The greatest fear of doctors for their patients, however, was not death by starvation but a typhus epidemic. Many had expected an outbreak in the
Kessel
when the first cases appeared, but had not dared voice their concerns in case it started a panic. In the tunnel system, they continued to isolate the different diseases as they appeared, whether diphtheria or typhus. They begged the authorities to provide delousing facilities, but many Red Army soldiers and almost all the civilians in the region were themselves still infested.
    It was not surprising that so many died. There seemed to be little reason left to fight for life. The prospect of seeing families again was remote. Germany was so far away that it could have been another world, a world which now seemed to have more to do with pure fantasy. Death promised a release from suffering, and towards the end, drained of pain as well as strength, there was no more than a sense of floating weightless. The ones most likely to survive seemed to be those who fought on, either through religious faith, or an obstinate refusal to die in such squalor, or out of a determination to live for their family’s sake.
    A will to live played just as important a part in those marched off to prison camps. What Weinert described as ‘limping and shuffling ghosts in rags’ followed the back of the man in front. As soon as the exertion of the march warmed their bodies, they could feel the lice become more active. Some civilians grabbed blankets from their backs, spat in their faces and even threw stones. It was best to be close to the front of the column and, safest of all, to stay near one of the escorts. Some soldiers whom they passed, contrary to Red Armyorders, took pot shots for fun at the columns of prisoners, just as German soldiers had fired at columns of Red Army prisoners in 1941.
    The luckier ones were marched straight to one of the designated collection