Stalingrad

camps in the area, although they varied greatly in distance. Those from the northern pocket, for example, were marched over twelve miles to Dubovka, north of Stalingrad. It took two days. During the night, they were shepherded into the roofless remains of buildings – destroyed by the Luftwaffe, as their guards did not fail to remind them.
    Thousands, however, were taken on what can only be described as death marches. The worst, without food or water in temperatures of between twenty-five and thirty degrees below zero, followed a completely zigzag route from the Tsaritsa ravine, via Gumrak and Gorodishche, finally ending up on the fifth day at Beketovka. From time to time, they heard shots in the freezing air, as another victim collapsed in the snow, unable to walk any further. Thirst was as great a threat as weakness from hunger. Although surrounded by snow, they suffered the fate of the Ancient Mariner, knowing the dangers of consuming it.
    Shelter was seldom available at night, so the prisoners slept in the snow together. Many woke to find close comrades dead and frozen stiff beside them. In an attempt to prevent this, one of the group was designated to stay awake ready to wake the others after half an hour. Then they would all move as briskly as they could to reactivate the circulation. Others did not even dare to lie down. Hoping to sleep like horses, they stood together in a group with a blanket over their heads to keep in some warmth from their breath.
    Morning brought not relief, but dread of the march ahead. ‘The Russians had very simple methods,’ observed a lieutenant who survived. ‘Those who could walk, were marched off. Those who could not, either through wounds or sickness, were shot or left without food to die.’ Having quickly grasped this brutal logic, he was prepared to barter his woollen pullover for milk and bread from a Russian peasant woman at the night stop, because he knew that otherwise he would collapse from weakness the next day.
    ‘We set out with 1,200 men,’ recounted a soldier from the 305 th Infantry Division, ‘and only a tenth, about 120 men, were left alive by the time we reached Beketovka.’
    The gateway to the main camp at Beketovka was another entrance which deserved the superscription: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    On their arrival, the guards searched prisoners for valuables once again, then made them stand for ‘registration’. The prisoners soon discovered that standing out in the freezing weather for hours and hours, parading in groups of fives for ‘counting parade’, would be a daily penance. Finally, after the NKVD had carried out an initial processing, they were led off to the wooden huts, where they were packed in, forty or fifty men to a room, ‘like herrings in a barrel’, recorded a survivor. On 4 February, an NKVD officer complained to Don Front headquarters that the situation was ‘extremely critical’. The camps at Beketovka had received 50,000 prisoners, ‘including also sick and wounded’.
    The NKVD camp authorities were overwhelmed. They had no motor transport at all and tried to beg the army for a single truck. Water was eventually brought to the camp in iron barrels on carts towed by camels. A captured Austrian doctor noted his first impression: ‘Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, filthy snow and urine-yellow ice offered the only relief for an unbearable thirst… Every morning more corpses.’ After two days, the Russians provided some ‘soup’, which was no more than a sack of bran tipped into warm water. Anger at the conditions led to prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off their own bodies and throwing them at their guards. Such protests provoked summary execution.
    Right from the start, the Soviet authorities set out to divide the prisoners of war, first on national lines, then political. Romanian, Italian and Croat prisoners of war were given the privilege of working in the kitchens, where the Romanians in particular set out to gain revenge on their former allies. The Germans had not only got them into this hell, they believed, they had also cut off their supplies in the
Kessel
to feed their own troops better. Gangs of Romanians attacked individual Germans collecting food on behalf of their hut and seizedit. The Germans retaliated, by sending escorts to guard their food carriers.
    ‘Then came another shock,’ recorded a Luftwaffe sergeant-major. ‘Our Austrian comrades suddenly ceased to be Germans. They called