Stalingrad

over three months later by Red Army troops. ‘On the best days we received a little rye in boiled water. Meat from a dead horse was a delicacy. We were constantly beaten with rifle butts, sometimes without any reason. Each day, dozens of people died from starvation or beating.’ Although the NKVD was highly suspicious of any Red Army soldier taken by the Germans, Odiniktsev’s interrogator believed his story. ‘This man’, he scribbled in pencil at the bottom of the typed report, ‘looks like a skeleton covered with skin.’
    So rapid was the German advance at this time that, on 19 July, Stalin personally ordered the Stalingrad Defence Committee to prepare the city for war immediately. The Stavka feared that Rostov would not hold out for long. The Seventeenth Army was poised to cross the Don on the Black Sea side, First Panzer Army was advancing on the city from the north, and part of Fourth Panzer Army was about to strike across the Don to the east of it. On 23 July, 13th and 22nd Panzer Divisions backed by panzer grenadiers from the SS
Wiking
Division, struck right into the heart of Rostov as far as the main Don bridge. Fighting in the city was fierce, especially the defence by NKVD troops of their headquarters, but by the end of the following day, the last main pockets of resistance were crushed in an operation of systematic clearance, building by building. The Führer was exultant. The retaking of Rostov obliterated his bad memories of the previous winter.
    Hitler had arrived at his new advanced headquarters at the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa on 16 July. As an alternative to the
Wolfsschanze
at Rastenburg, it was code-named
Werwolf
. (The word Wolf, the old German version of Adolf, clearly gave the Führer an atavistic thrill.) He was no doubt reassured to know that Vinnitsa was ‘
fudenrein
’ – ‘cleansed of Jews’ – after mass executions by a police battalion the previous autumn. The town, it later transpired, had also been the site of Stalinist atrocities in 1938 when NKVD troops massacred over 10,000 Ukrainians, but the Germans did not discover the graves until 1943.
    The
Werwolf
complex of large and comfortable log cabins had been built in a pine wood north of the town. The deceptively simple‘Führer house’ was built round a private courtyard. Hitler, paranoid in enemy territory, also had a concrete bunker. His bodyguard, Rattenhuber, described the security precautions at Vinnitsa during his interrogation by SMERSH officers soon after the end of the war. Stalin, who was obsessed with every personal detail about Hitler, received a special report from Abakumov, the head of SMERSH.
    The effort and attention to detail, when serving the Führer’s needs and safety, were reminiscent of a Byzantine court. Before he arrived, Gestapo teams searched the walls for microphones and explosives. A large vegetable garden was organized by a German horticultural firm, Zeidenspiner, and dug by the Todt Organisation. Hitler’s personal chef, Hauptsturmführer Fater, had to go out to select the vegetables himself. Any other vegetable destined for the Führer’s plate had to be dug up under the eye of an appointed courier who then brought the produce direct to the kitchen. All the food was chemically analysed before cooking, and sampled by a taster before it reached his plate. Samples from the water supply also had to be checked several times a day. Mineral water was bottled in the presence of couriers, and brought in. Even the laundry was X-rayed to ensure that no explosive had been concealed. Oxygen tanks were stored outside the bunker ready to pump in air, because Hitler was afraid of noxious vapours from the ferroconcrete. The Gestapo supervised the filling of these tanks and tested them regularly.
    The Führer’s stay during the second part of July coincided with a period of great heat. The temperature was close to forty degrees. Hitler, sweating profusely, was most uncomfortable, especially in his state of feverish impatience during the advance on Rostov. Unable to bear the wait, he kept goading Haider to speed the operation. He had so convinced himself that the Red Army was in the final stages of collapse that on 23 July he rewrote Operation Blue, in Führer Directive No. 45. ‘In a campaign which has lasted little more than three weeks, the deep objectives outlined by me for the south flank of the Eastern Front have been largely achieved. Only weak enemy forces have succeeded in escaping