Hitler's peace

My name is Heinrich Zahler and I was a lieutenant in the 76th Infantry Division of the German 6th Army that surrendered to the Soviets on January 31, 1943. I was born in Bremen, on March 1, 1921, but I don’t expect to live to see Bremen again or, for that matter, my next birthday. I am writing now in the hope that this secretly written letter (if these writing materials are discovered, I will be executed immediately) will reach my parents. My father, Friedrich, works for the docks and harbor board in Bremerhaven, and my mother, Hannah, is a midwife at the University Hospital in Bremen. I want to tell them how very much I love them both and to abandon any hope of ever seeing me again. Death is the only escape from this, the deepest pit in hell. Attempts to take POWs out of Stalingrad began immediately after we surrendered, when the Popovs had tired of beating us. But almost all the rolling stock was required to supply the Russian front at Rostov, and so most of us were obliged to march to the camp where we are now imprisoned. Some were loaded into cattle-trucks awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive that never came, and after a week the cars were opened again and it was discovered that all of the men inside, some 3,000 officers and private personnel, were dead. But thousands more died of typhus, dysentery, frostbite, and wounds received in the battle before they could even leave the provisional POW camp at Stalingrad. In retrospect, they were the lucky ones. The march to the camp that was to be our final destination took five days. We walked in all weathers, without food or water or any kind of shelter. Those who could not walk were shot or clubbed to death, or sometimes just stripped and left to freeze to death. Many thousands more died on the march here. And perhaps they were lucky, too. This is the largest of the Russian POW camps-Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. It is what the Russians call a katorga. That means hard labor, low rations, and no medical attention other than that which we can provide for ourselves, which is very little. The site of the camp was formerly a school, but it is hard to believe that children could ever have been educated in such a place as this. The school was partly destroyed during the battle for Stalingrad, which means that there are no windows, no doors, and no beds; there is no roof or furniture of any kind; anything made of wood was burned long ago to provide heat for Red Army soldiers. The only fuel we have is our own dried human feces. We sleep on the floor, without blankets, huddled together for warmth in temperatures as low as -35 degrees centigrade. When we arrived, there was no food or water, and many men died from eating snow. After two days they gave us a kind of watery bran that a horse or a dog would have ignored; even today, months after our arrival, none of us eats more than a few ounces of bread a day-if bread is what it is: this bread has more grit in it than the soles on a roadworker’s boots. Sometimes, as a special treat, we boil potato peelings for soup, and whenever we can, we smoke the dust off the floor-a Russian solution to the problem of the lack of tobacco, which they call “scratch.” Every morning when we pick ourselves off the floor we discover that as many as fifty of us have died during the night. A week after my arrival here I awoke to find that Sergeant Eisenhauer, a man who saved my life on more than one occasion, was dead and frozen hard to the ground, and hardly recognizable, for the rats feast on the extremities of the dead in the short time that remains before they become petrified with cold. It is not just the rats that eat human flesh in this place, however. Sometimes bodies disappear and are cooked and eaten. The cannibals among us are easily spotted by their healthier pallor and shunned by the rest of us. Otherwise, the morning always starts with bodies dragged out of the building where we sleep and, to ensure that death has not been feigned, the Popovs drive a metal spike into the skull of each corpse with a hammer. The clothes are then stripped off the body, any gold fillings removed with pliers and (for several months, until the ground unfroze) the bodies laid out on the styena -which is what the Popovs call the wall they have built from the naked corpses of our dead comrades. Our guards are not soldiers, all of them are needed for the front, but the zakone, common criminals who were serving sentences in other labor camps and whose brutality and depravity know no limit. I believed that I had witnessed all of the evil that men were capable of inflicting upon one another during the battle for Stalingrad. That was before I came to Camp 108. By the end of May, those of us who still remained alive at Beketovka were put to work rebuilding-first the camp itself, and then the local railway station. Winter had been bad, and many of us who survived it assumed that summer could only improve our lot-at least we would be warm. But with the summer came a heat that was no less intolerable than the cold. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. Whereas before I saw men stripped naked and forced to stand in the snow until they died (this is called oontar paydkant -“winter punishment”), now I see men bound naked to a tree and left to the mosquitoes until they screamed to be shot (this is called samap paydkant, “summer punishment”); sometimes they were shot, but mostly the mosquitoes were left to do their ghastly work, for a bullet is wasted on a German, say the zaks. In truth, however, I have seen my comrades die in all manner of revolting ways. A corporal from my own platoon was thrown into a cesspit and left to drown in excrement. His crime? He asked a zak for some water. A friend of mine, Helmut von Dorff, a lieutenant from the 6th Panzer Army, was executed for going to the assistance of a comrade who had fallen at work under the weight of the railway sleeper he was obliged to carry on his shrunken shoulder. The zaks tied von Dorff to a telegraph pole and rolled it down a steep hill into the river Volga, where, presumably, he drowned. Punishments other than death are rare indeed, but those that do exist are unusually cruel and often fatal anyway to men severely weakened by starvation, overwork, and dysentery. One man, so emaciated from lack of food his buttocks had virtually disappeared, was beaten on the bones of his behind until they were through the skin and flesh, and he died soon afterward from infection; but for the most part, beatings are so routine they hardly count as punishment, and the zaks like to devise new ways of enforcing their idea of discipline. This was the way they punished a Luftwaffe sergeant from the 9th Flak Division: they locked him inside a coffin-shaped box in which thousands of lice had been allowed to multiply and left him there for twenty-four hours; when they removed the lid, his body had swollen up so much from his bites that they could not pry him from the box and had to break off one side of it, much to the amusement of the zaks. Here is another: a staff officer from the 371st Infantry Division-I do not remember his name-they put a long piece of rope in his mouth, like a bridle, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his wrists and ankles; they left him on his stomach like that for a whole day, without water, and he has never walked since. Morality has no meaning in a place like this. It is a word that does not exist in Beketovka, perhaps nowhere in all of Russia. Even so, there are times when I cannot help but think that we brought these misfortunes on ourselves by invading this country. Our leaders took us here and then abandoned us. And yet I am still proud to be a German and proud of the way we have conducted ourselves. I love my Fatherland but I fear what is to come, for if the Red Army were ever to conquer Germany, who knows what sufferings might be inflicted on our kith and kin? It does not bear thinking about. There were 50,000 of us who marched from Stalingrad to Beketovka-since then as many as 45,000 have died. I have learned from Germans transferred from other camps that in these, too, it is the same story. Those who died were the best of us for, strange as it might seem, often the strongest died first. For myself, I will not survive another winter; already I am sick. There is a rumor that I am to be sent to another camp-perhaps Camp 93 at Tyumen, in Omsk Province, or Oransky Number 74 in Gorky Province; but I don’t think I will live to complete the journey. I would write more but cannot as I fear discovery; but there is no end to what could be written about this dreadful place. To whoever is reading this, I ask you, when the opportunity presents itself, please say a prayer for those like me whose deaths in this place will go unnoticed; and for those less fortunate souls who remain alive. God bless you, dear reader. And God bless the Fatherland. I ask forgiveness of all those I have wronged. They know who they are. I do not know the date, but I think it must be late September 1943. Heinrich Zahler