Stalingrad

men to the German rear to win over formation commanders to our side and to organize joint action against Hitler’s regime’. Seydlitz would send messages to ‘his personal friends, the commander of the Central Front, von Kluge, and General Thomas who is responsible for Hitler’s headquarters staff’.
    Seydlitz, accompanied by Generals Lattmann and Korfes, and Colonel Günter van Hooven, presented his plan on 22 September. He expected the Soviet authorities to help them form ‘a small army from prisoners of war which could be used by a new German government to seize power.’ They called for one army staff, two corps staffs, four full divisions, and a supporting aviation force with three bomber squadrons, four fighter squadrons and an air reconnaissance group: in all seven generals, 1,650 officers and 42,000 soldiers. Seydlitz appears to have had no idea of the death rate of Stalingrad prisoners after the surrender.
    At a subsequent meeting, Seydlitz recommended ‘that all the contingents should be flown into Germany, perhaps Berlin’. The NKVD officer present pointed out ‘the technical difficulties of flying such a number of troops into Germany but von Seydlitz replied that it was up to the Russians to sort out the details’. General Korfes, however, did not conceal his exasperation with such a pipe dream. ‘It’s utterly Utopian’, he said, ‘to think that all the units could be carried by air.’ He added: ‘Russian air force commanders would consider such a proposal to be proof that German generals are fantasists.’ *
    Seydlitz appears to have been oblivious to the anger and ill-feelings which he and his colleagues stirred up. Officers bitterly opposed to the anti-fascists set up a court of honour, sentencing those who collaborated with the Russians to be shunned in perpetuity. As agesture of defiance, they began to use the raised-hand salute. This polarization made life very hard for those who wanted nothing to do either with ‘anti-fascists’ or with Hitler loyalists. One lieutenant found himself forced to sleep on the floor for weeks because the rival groups would not allow him a bunk.
    In February 1944, Russian aircraft started dropping leaflets over Germany and front-line troops, signed by Seydlitz and his colleagues. The Gestapo provided an urgent report for Himmler verifying that Seydlitz’s signature was genuine. General Gille of the Waffen SS, whose troops in the Cherkassy salient were showered with leaflets from the National Committee, sent copies back to Germany. He also passed back personal letters addressed to him from Generals Seydlitz and Korfes, who had been sent to his part of the front by Shcherbakov. The handwriting was again analysed by the Gestapo and confirmed as accurate.
    The leaflets caused panic. Hitler summoned Himmler for a meeting, then sent General Schmundt off with a declaration of loyalty for field marshals to sign. Even this was not enough to reassure him. On 19 March, Rundstedt, Rommel, Kleist, Busch, Weichs and Manstein were summoned from their duties to the Berghof to read out a message condemning General von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, ‘the contemptible traitor to our holy cause’, and emphasizing their support for Hitler.
    Melnikov’s department, on the other hand, started to have doubts. Recruitment had tailed away, while the propaganda efforts had not won over a single major unit, even when the Wehrmacht was suffering massive defeats. Seydlitz attributed ‘the absence of significant success’ to ‘the lack of inclination in Germans for revolution, a system of police violence and the complete suppression of opinion, the absence of any capable resistance organization, and the total fear of defeat and its consequences, fanned for so long by the fear of bolshevism’. Despite these failures, he still wanted the Soviet Union to ‘recognize officially’ the National Committee as a government in waiting. But Dmitry Manuilsky, in a typically Stalinist twist, warned that Seydlitz’s memorandum, ‘compiled in a devious way’, was a ‘provocative attempt’ to ‘exacerbate our relations with our allies’. ‘There is no doubt’, he wrote, ‘that the recognition of the National Committee bythe Soviet government would provoke in Great Britain and the United States a whole campaign directed to show the position of the Soviet Union as pro-German.’ The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact clearly cast long shadows in Soviet memories. Manuilsky suspected that Seydlitz was