Stalingrad

to them by either a German or a Russian soldier, depending on the front line. Women were often forced to offer their emaciated bodies to survive or to feed an infant. There are even reports of improvised brothels in the ruins. In several instances, love of a sort grew in the unpromising circumstances between Russian women and German soldiers. It was almost invariably a fatal liaison. A Stalingrad woman accused of ‘signalling to the enemy with a white handkerchief, was found to have ‘hidden three fascists’ in her cellar. She was handed over to the NKVD. The three German soldiers were shot on the spot.
    On the sectors away from the city itself, fewer German prisoners seem to have been killed on capture, once Soviet military intelligence started to become more sophisticated. Their need for accurate information from prisoners grew rapidly in October, while Zhukov and his staff were planning the great counterstroke.
    The Soviet interrogation of German prisoners of war, which usually took place on the day after capture, followed a fairly set pattern. The chief objective was to identify their formation and assess its current strength, supply situation and morale. German prisoners were also asked such questions as: Had they been a member of the Hitler Youth? What did they know of preparations for chemical warfare? What partisan actions had they heard about or witnessed? How effective were Soviet propaganda leaflets? What did their officers tell them about Communists? What had been their division’s route of advance since June 1941? (This was to see whether they could be linked to war crimes reported in any areas through which they had passed.) If the prisoner had come from a farming family, did they have Russian prisoners of war working for them at home? What were their names? Letters from home were confiscated to see if they gave any indication of civilian morale back in Germany. During the late summer and autumn of 1942, after the RAF’s ‘thousand-bomber raids’, NKVD interrogators were particularly interested in their effect on civilian morale and also on soldiers at the front. Later, when the NKVD was shaken to discover that so many Soviet citizens, mainly former Red Army soldiers, were attached to the German Army, interrogators tried to discover from prisoners how many had been with each company.
    Out of an instinct of self-preservation, prisoners often said what they expected the Russians to want to hear. In some cases it also happened to be the truth. ‘Older soldiers’, said another corporal, ‘do not believe the propaganda stuffed into our heads by Goebbels. We remember the unforgettable lessons of 1918.’ By mid-September, captured Germans soldiers were openly admitting to their Russian interrogators that they and their comrades were ‘afraid of the approaching winter’.
    Many of the prisoner interviews were carried out by Captain N. D. Dyatlenko of the NKVD, a German speaker transferred to the 7th Department of Stalingrad Front. Lieutenant-Colonel Kaplan, the 62nd Army’s deputy chief of intelligence, on the other hand, had to interrogate prisoners through his interpreter Derkachev. Kaplan clearly wasted little time when he got to work. After a badly woundedcorporal revealed that 24th Panzer Division was reduced to sixteen tanks, Kaplan noted at the bottom of the page: ‘The interrogation was not completed because the man soon died of his wounds.’
    Already aware of the tensions between the German and Romanian armies, Kaplan was also interested in strained relations within the Wehrmacht. Austrian prisoners, perhaps in the hope of better treatment, complained of the behaviour of German officers who discriminated against them. A thirty-two-year-old Czech in the 24th Panzer Division, who was captured on 28 September, even volunteered to fight for the Soviet Union. Red Army intelligence’s main priority at this time, however, was to form an accurate assessment of the Germans’ dependence on allied divisions along the Don Front and in the Kalmyk steppe.
    A number of German regimental commanders at this time were horrified at the replacements they were being sent. One in the 14th Panzer Division wrote that ‘very energetic measures’ were needed to correct the ‘absence of strength of will and bravery’.
    The greatest weakness, however, remained the allied troops, represented as full armies on Hitler’s situation map. The morale of Italians, Romanians and Hungarians alike had been shaken by