An Intolerable Story
Paulus and Stalingrad. By Walter Goerlitz. (Methuen, 50s.)
l'itEv't,t be taken straight back to Moscow and handed over to the GPU; and they'll be issuing orders to the rest of the garrison to surrender,' shouted Hitler to his entourage at OKW's 'situation conference' on February 1, 1.943, the day following the 'surrender of Paulus and his staff at Stalingrad. This angry exclamation, re- corded in the conference stenographic report, the Lagebesprechungen, reflected the Fiihrer's annoyance at Paulus's ingratitude; created a Field-Marshal only a few hours before Russian troops arrived at his bunker, he had still un- reasonably refused to take the Roman way out. It was, in fact, well over a year before his voice was heard on the Soviet radio, although many Of his senior colleagues had joined the 'League of German Officers,' part of the Communist- sponsored 'National Committee of :Free Ger- many,' quite soon after the Sixth Army's debacle on the Volga.
Paulus's eventual adherence to the 'Free Ger- many' diversion was hardly surprising, as Herr Goerlitz brings out in this important study of an archetype of the professional German officer caste. Regrettably, however, considering the in- terest of the book's material, his story is badly constructed, with first a life of Paulus, followed by a fragmented collection of relevant correspon- dence, diaries and documents. Possibly it would have been better to have made a single sustained narrative; but in any case the two closely related main themes are projected vivIdly enough. For underlying the Wagnerian climax of Stalingrad is the question of the whole nature of Hitler's grand Russian strategy, and how professionals like Paulus became not only instruments of this strategy, but agents of their own destruction through blind obedience to the. Fithrer's often lunatic directives.
For from the .beginning the war in the East was fought in a different way from the war against the democracies. As Herr Goerlitz sees, Hitler regarded the Russian campaign as 'a 'war between— world ideologies.' In the pluralistic countries of the West the New Order of the NSDAP could be imposed through Lavals and Quislings, In the East, where there was another rival totalitarian society to be destroyed, other methods would have to be used, the notorious 'Commissar order,' the Sonderkommandos of the SD, the pitiless treatment of Russian pri- soners. Thus although in many parts of western• Russia the German invaders were at • first wel- comed as liberators, any attempts to exploit these centrifugal tendencies were forbidden by Hitler.
Although it appears that Paulus attempted to mitigate these draconian measures where pos- sible, the unpleasant truth, recognised by many Germans today, is that it was on questions of strategy, rather than on moral grounds. that the Army High Command really diSagreed with Hitler, True to his programme already laid down in Mein Kampf (and amplified in the geo- political and pseudo-philosophical rantings of the Lagebesprechungen), Hitler conceived the Rus- sian campaign as one where the primary objec- tives were economic, only with the resources of the Ukraine and Caucasus under his control would Bolshevism finally be eliminated. To the Army, of course, this was a dangerous aberra- tion from .Clausewitzian military orthodoxy. Which held that the destruction of the enemy's armed forces was paramount. Thus in 1941 t he .Nrmy's plan for an all-out drive on Moscow Was altered during August by Hitler in favour
of a broad-front advance against the Ukraine. Moreover, in 1942 the entire summer campaign from the very beginning was aimed at 'economic' objectives; and in the ridiculous frontages of what Goerlitz calls 'the unduly diverging offen- sives against the Caucasus and Stalingrad' lay the seeds of Von Paulus's defeat.
Paulus himself had left the Army High Com- mand, where he had served as Halder's deputy, for the Sixth Army at the beginning of 1942. As the Stalingrad campaign progressed he slowly realised that his reserves were insufficient for the task and that his northern flank was open. After the ferocious street-fighting in Stalingrad itself came the amazing Soviet counter-offensive in November, the encirclement of the Sixth Army, Hoth's unsuccessful relief attempt. Goerlitz here makes an important point when he states quite rightly that even if the Sixth Army had broken out, disaster might still have occurred, for the Soviet forces released from the Stalingrad front could then have cut off the German armies in the Caucasus. The crucial error lay in Hitler's 'incompetent and over-optimistic planning of the campaign. And so this decisive trial of strength between the two great criminal regimes of our age ended in the destruction of the Sixth Army; of 220,000 men in the Stalingrad cauldron, only 5,000 eventually returned to Germany. Not only had the myth of Nazi invincibility been de- stroyed, but German militarism itself had for ever been discredited. Small wonder that Goeb- bels refused publication of a semi-official account of Stalingrad with the words: 'Intolerable for the German people... .'.'
Paulus's papers reproduced here make it quite clear how ridiculous it was to have expected him, like Yorck in 1812, to change sides immediately after his capture and to appeal for an attentat:
The possibility of initiating a coup (fetal', of
deliberately inviting defeat, in order to bring about the downfall of Hitler and his National Socialist regime . . . never entered into my de-
liberations Such ideas not only played no part in my deliberations, but would have also been wholly out of keeping tA ith my charac- ter and outlook. I was a soldier, and I believed that it was by obeying orders that I could best serve my people. . .
Paulus was, in fact, quite incapable of any such action, caught in the trap of his personality as secure as any ring drawn round him by the Russians a personality fixated on implicit obedience to political authority, even if that authority were a criminal one. Not until Von. Witzleben was strung up on a butcher's hook by the SD after the events of July 20, 1944, did he make up his mind to join the 'Free Germany' movement. His country, he came to believe, had been wrong all along in its war of aggression, and in an attempt at expiation he volunteered as a prosecution witness at Nuremberg.
Even so, Paulus was doubly unlucky, ex- changing as he did one totalitarian society for another with his surrender. When he returned at last to Germany after a decade in the USSR, dying in 1957 as a rather odd guest of the DDR, he was convinced that his country's future lay in co-operation with the East; there can be little doubt that he was subject to some form of indoctrination during his long captivity. No, poor Paulus was not a Beck or a Stauffenberg; but neither was he a toady like Keitel or a hoodlum like most of the SS generals. Those of us who have never lived under a totalitarian regime should be slow to condemn others who willy- nilly serve such a system and in whom the con- science is slow to awake
DAS ID RI:I ti
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