Stalingrad

at night that they could hear the guns of an advancing army. They were the least likely to survive the years ahead in the prisoner-of-war camps, constructed according to NKVD standards with perimeter fences consisting of ten horizontal strands of barbed wire.
    Captivity was almost as uncertain a fate as fighting. It also had its share of the ironies of war. Dibold, the Austrian doctor from the 44th Infantry Division, was astonished when three new patients reached his prison hospital. This trio, who looked Jewish, wore German uniforms with eagles and swastikas. One of them smiled at his confusion. ‘Doctor, the miracle of the twentieth century: a Jew as one of Adolf Hitler’s soldiers.’ They were from a Hungarian labour battalion. Their Russian captors had clothed them from captured stores.
    Although prison camp rations had improved in the summer of 1943, they were still uneven, varying from camp to camp. Rations were often stolen by corrupt quartermasters who exchanged them for vodka, or by guards whose own families received little more than the German prisoners. Most of the ill-treatment came from a lack of imagination, monumental incompetence, and above all, that Russian tolerance of suffering which Marxist-Leninist doctrine had managed to exploit so successfully. Nothing, however, was predictable. Prisoners testified how guards, on seeing a photograph of their children, would soften. At a prison hospital outside Stalingrad, after inmates had become used to the idea of men being shot or left to die on the march, Russian guards inexplicably spared three prisoners recaptured after a futile attempt to escape.
    Even when conditions improved in the spring of 1943, the death rate in most prison hospitals was at least one per cent per day. The problems were still enormous, especially in the Stalingrad region, with pellagra, tuberculosis, dropsy and scurvy added to the other diseases. A Soviet woman doctor told her German counterparts that Stalingrad civilians were suffering more from scurvy than the German prisoners, but she gave permission for foraging parties to be sent outto collect herbs and other greenstuff, from which the German doctors, in their dispensary, made vitamin concentrates. The inventiveness of prisoner-of-war doctors produced brilliant improvisations. One created out of scrap metal a sphygmomanometer for testing blood pressure. Doctors manufactured their own inoculation against typhus, which consisted of injecting an extract of lice guts. Any article of silk was unpicked to provide surgical thread and scalpels were made out of sharpened tin lids.
    Prisoners, suddenly transformed into an underclass, had to learn quickly. They pilfered and fashioned numerous ingenious gadgets. They also learned to make the most of their rations, for example, roasting fish bones from the soup on the stove, and then crushing them up. Some made terrible mistakes. At Ilmen, prisoners reduced to eating reeds and water-hemlock died rapidly as a result. And one prisoner who managed to grab a handful of butter in the kitchen died in agony because his stomach was so unused to fats.
    The bad diet on top of the weeks of starvation in the
Kessel
was the main reason for patients in the prison hospitals failing to recover. They lost nearly all their hair, and their neck muscles became too feeble to raise their heads. Those dying shunned the daylight, as if preparing themselves for perpetual darkness.
    Death could often be a deliverance, almost like sleep for the exhausted. A number slipped away quite suddenly, just when doctors thought them over the worst. Sick men would share beds for warmth, even though a number woke up to find themselves next to a corpse. Some had succumbed rapidly. Helmuth Groscurth died of typhus on 7 April 1943 in the officers’ camp of Frolovo where 4,000 inmates died out of 5,000. It was three years before his family received news of his death. Kurt Reuber died on 20 January 1944, in Yelabuga camp only a few weeks after he had drawn another Madonna for Christmas with the same words: ‘Light, Life, Love’.
    A few, after having survived the worst, suddenly killed themselves unexpectedly. In a prison hospital, one officer woke to find a friend in the next bed sitting up motionless. He had managed to kill himself by ‘thrusting a long thin shard of glass from a broken window straight up into the heart’.
    Even the comparatively healthy had little hope of surviving. Their rations – such as unground millet