Stalingrad

conquest of France, General Haider summoned Paulus to Berlin to work as chief planner on the general staff. There, his most important task lay in evaluating the options for Operation Barbarossa. Once the invasion was well under way, Reichenau asked Haider to let him have his chief of staff back again.
    Paulus’s ‘fantastic leap’ to army commander, as friends described it in letters of congratulation, was marred exactly a week later. On 12 January 1942, his patron, Field Marshal von Reichenau, went for his morning run at Poltava. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero. Reichenau felt unwell during lunch, and suddenly collapsedfrom a heart attack. Hitler, on hearing the news, ordered Dr Flade, the Sixth Army’s senior medical officer, to bring him straight back to Germany. The unconscious Reichenau was strapped to an armchair fastened inside the fuselage of a Dornier.
    The pilot insisted on landing at Lemberg to refuel, but he crash-landed some distance from the field. Doctor Flade, despite a broken leg, fired signal flares to attract help. By the time the party finally reached the hospital in Leipzig, Reichenau was dead. Flade reported to Paulus afterwards that the ill-omened crash had been almost like a film. ‘Even his field marshal’s baton had been broken in two.’ Hitler ordered a state funeral, but did not attend. He gave Rundstedt the distinction of representing him.
    Although Paulus’s rather aloof manner made him appear cold, he was more sensitive than many generals to the well-being of his soldiers. He is also said to have cancelled Reichenau’s order of 10 October 1941, encouraging the ‘severe’ treatment of Jews and partisans, yet when the Sixth Army reached Stalingrad, its Feldgendarmerie was apparently given the task of arresting Communist activists and Jews to hand them over to the SD Sonderkommando for ‘punitive measures’.
    Paulus certainly inherited a heavy legacy. From the very start of Barbarossa, the massacres of Jews and gypsies had been deliberately mixed in, whenever possible, with the execution of partisans, mainly because the phrase ‘
jüdische Saboteure
’ helped to cloud the illegality of the act and to bolster the notion of a ‘judeo-bolshevik’ conspiracy. The definition of partisan and saboteur was soon widened far beyond the terms of international law, which permitted a death sentence only after a proper trial. In an order of 10 July 1941, Sixth Army headquarters warned soldiers that anyone in civilian clothes with a close-cropped head was almost certain to be a Red Army soldier and should therefore be shot. Civilians who behaved in a hostile fashion, including those who gave food to Red Army soldiers hiding in woods, were also to be shot. ‘Dangerous elements’, such as Soviet officials, a category which extended from the local Communist Party secretary and collective-farm manager to almost anyone employed by the government, should, like commissars and Jews, be handed over tothe Feldgendarmerie or the SD-Einsatzkommando. A subsequent order called for ‘collective measures’ – either executions or the burning of villages – to punish sabotage. According to the evidence of SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner, Field Marshal von Reichenau himself gave the order early in July 1941 for 3,000 Jews to be shot as a reprisal measure.
    The behaviour of many soldiers in Army Group South was particularly gruesome. Reichenau’s Sixth Army headquarters issued the following order on 10 August 1941: ‘In various places within the army’s area of responsibility, organs of the SD, of the Reichsführer’s SS and chiefs of the German Police have been carrying out necessary executions of criminal, bolshevik and mostly Jewish elements. There have been cases of off-duty soldiers volunteering to help the SD with their executions, or acting as spectators and taking photographs.’ It was now forbidden for any soldiers, ‘who have not been ordered by a superior officer’, to take part in, to watch or to photograph any of these executions. Later, General von Manstein’s chief of staff passed the message to the
Offizierkorps
of the Eleventh Army in the Crimea that it was ‘dishonourable for officers to be present at the execution of Jews’. German military logic, in another of its distortions of cause and effect, does not appear to have acknowledged the possibility that officers had already shamed themselves by furthering the aims of a regime capable of such