Episode 33 - Field Marshal Paulus surrenders but the northern pocket fights on

General Paulus had moved his headquarters right into the city as we heard last episode, setting them up in the basement of Stalingrad’s department store called Univermag. That was a multi-story building that overlooked the Square of the Fallen Soviet Heroes.

By the late afternoon of the 25th January 1943, the Russians had driven a wedge through the middle of the German pocket.

At dawn on the 26th January ranks of the 21st Army met up with Rodimtsev’s 13 Guards Rifle Division north of the Mamaev Kurgan, near the Red October workers’ settlements. The scenes were emotional, especially for Chuikov’s 62nd Army which had been fighting on its own for five months. Bottles of Vodka were passed back and forth as usual.

The Kessel was now split in two, with Paulus and his senior officers bottled up in the smaller southern pocket and General Streckers 11 corps in the northern part of the city around the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.

Strecker had one radio left and had no intention of surrendering.

At the central military hospital a mile north of the Univermag, three thousand German wounded lay under a merciless wind that whipped through the building’s shattered walls. There was no medicine so doctors placed the most gravely wounded on the perimeter so they would die first and quickly and then their bodies would shelter the others.

Around all four sides of the building was a stack of bodies six feet high a macabre kind of frozen human windbreak.

Soldiers who arrived from other sectors earned food by stacking newly dead on top, almost like railway sleepers. There was a quota to stack before the cook splashed watery soup in their outstretched mess tins. Such is life when all around is death.

The Russians spotted this infirmary from hell – and decided to mortar the building with incendiaries. The spotters were extremely accurate and the bombs landed directly on the block.

As medics screamed to the wounded to run, the flames were fanned by the high winter wind and raced through the hallways. Wounded hobbled away on fire, then lay dying on the snow sizzling.