Chapter 944: Alive

“Don’t move! Yes! Don’t move!” For Rokossovsky, the most annoying thing was not shouldering the shame, but facing the seemingly endless horde of reporters from Germany, Italy, Romania, France, England, and so on.

“General Küchler, with all due respect, if you’d just stuffed all these reporters into the army earlier, you could have at least doubled your troop numbers,” Rokossovsky said, his face a stoic mask for the countless cameras, letting the flashes pop and crackle around him.

To deal with these reporters who had come from afar, Küchler had been forced to leave his original command post the day after the surrender. He had moved the entire army group headquarters into the one Rokossovsky had used, and now the two of them, like pets, were being posed and arranged by the Reich Propaganda Ministry.

The Germans had even found, from who knows where, a Soviet flag riddled with holes and burn marks, and had made Rokossovsky perform the scene of handing over the flag and bowing in salute over and over again.

“General Rokossovsky… you must understand, the capture of Stalingrad will have a major impact on the entire foreign policy of Germany. So it’s natural for the domestic reporters and the high command to be a little overly excited,” Küchler said, then smiled for the camera as he accepted the shabby battle flag from Rokossovsky for the tenth time.

What the capture of Stalingrad meant, both the Soviet and German high commands saw very clearly. As an important node in the German southern offensive, taking Stalingrad finally completed the patching of the broken Volga defense line. Now, apart from detaching some troops to reinforce the line along the river, Küchler seemed to have little else to do.

After completing the frontal defense along the wide Volga, the rear of the German heavy armored forces finally had a relatively secure environment. At least until Stalingrad was retaken by the Soviets, these German troops only needed to focus on dealing with the enemy in front of them.

The northward-advancing G Army Group would immediately receive reinforcements of about five divisions. For the exhausted Guderian, this was undoubtedly great news. At least his troops’ objective of advancing north had been achieved. All that was left was to trade blows with Zhukov.

And the most important issue was that the German army had solved the last hidden danger to the southward advance of M Army Group. At least General Manstein’s strategic objective of capturing the Baku oil fields was now more than half complete. The hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in the Baku region were surrounded in a vast Soviet exclave, having lost contact with Moscow. As for how long these troops could hold out, one would have to ask the tanks and cannons in General Manstein’s hands.

“No need to say more. You and I both know what the loss of the Baku oil fields means to the Soviet Union. But you should also know in your heart that it is impossible for the German army to occupy Baku without a scratch,” Rokossovsky said, rolling his stiff shoulders, cherishing the hard-won rest.

The reporters and officials from the German propaganda department had tested Rokossovsky’s self-esteem with countless questions, including his views on Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union. In any case, these cogs in the propaganda machine were determined to squeeze every last bit of news out of Rokossovsky before he was put to good use by the Führer.

As if with a unified voice, all the reporters turned a blind eye to the civilians burying bodies outside this underground command post. They seemed to have no interest in the pitiful women and children who were anxiously waiting with their buckets for the German water trucks.

The Germans here were no longer the enemies of this city. After a simple disinfection, one water tanker after another drove into the rubble-strewn city. Under the guard of armed Ukrainian soldiers, the local people were finally able to drink “potable water” that was slightly better than the river water.

“Don’t push! Line up!” a middle-aged man in a black woolen coat, with a German national flag armband, shouted, trying to maintain order. These people had originally been the administrators chosen by the Germans to maintain security in the occupied territory, the “traitors” and “turncoats” in the mouths of the local residents. But now time had proven their choice. They had become the few “respectable people” among the original inhabitants of this city.

Besides the local poor who were struggling for their lives, there were also more than 50,000 prisoners here, getting an early taste of their life of labor in the concentration camps. These men, under the guard of the German army, were clearing the rubble. It was because of their efforts that a portion of the streets had been quickly restored to a state where vehicles could pass.

Another reason they were made to clear the rubble was because countless deadly landmines were buried in these ruins, most of them booby traps laid by the infantry at the last minute, impossible to identify and mark on a map. So the Germans cruelly used the prisoners for the city’s restoration work, indirectly having them carry out the dangerous work of “mine clearing.”

One after another, the already unrecognizable bodies were carried out of the ruins by the silent civilians. Many had starved to death in the few hours before the resistance had stopped. The hiding places where the Soviet soldiers had committed mass suicide were everywhere. Opening the door from the outside, a disgusting smell of decay would pour out.

The local civilians, wearing masks or with handkerchiefs wrapped around their faces, walked silently into these rooms piled high with corpses and then laboriously dragged out the bodies of those who had committed suicide with their guns or some other weapon. The walls were splattered with dark red liquid, which had dried and sealed everything in that eternal moment.

From time to time, the sound of weeping could be heard, low and faint. At least in front of the German soldiers, few dared to wail openly. After all, a day’s labor was rewarded with food, and no one would go against their own family’s stomach for the sake of the dead.

On some of the slightly cleaner streets, mischievous children were already laughing and running about. Not far from where they were playing was a huge, deep pit, already half-filled with corpses. A few months had made these children accustomed to the “thing” that was a corpse. They were not afraid of blood, nor of the sound of gunfire. They even curiously sized up the passing German patrols, their bright eyes looking at these victors who had come from afar.

The older, more sensible children had started to sit on the side of the road and shine the Germans’ shoes. These children were all very experienced shoeshiners. After all, in the hardest of times, they had relied on this skill to bring home German chocolate and potato powder, which was even more timely than the relief grain provided by the Soviets.

A city that had once been dead, yet in the instant the battle had just ended, it began to show signs of life. Although life here seemed so fragile and insignificant, it was also proving to everyone its stubbornness and tenacity. It was as if the people had crawled back from the cracks of hell. Although this place had become broken, in an instant, it had returned to the world of the living.

“One bag! Yes! Just one bag of potato powder!” In the ruins, a German soldier with a gun on his back was making some kind of deal with two elderly local residents. He held up his hand, gesturing the quantity, while a Ukrainian soldier beside him did some muddled translation work.

The two elderly civilians finally took out the jewelry from their pockets. It was golden and sparkling and looked to be worth a lot of money. But in this place, which had been forged by the flames of war, all valuable things were nothing more than food and life. A priceless work of art here was, at most, worth only a few bags of moldy potato powder.

“These Germans don’t seem as terrible as I imagined. They trade their own things for valuable items, greet the old people they pass with politeness, take care of the children’s business, and give candy and chocolate to the shoeshine boys,” a Soviet officer in charge of counting the prisoners with the German army lamented to his aide. A few days ago, he had ordered his men to fire with all their might, to finish off every one of these enemies in gray-green uniforms.

Of course, not everything was so prosperous, nor was everything so friendly and harmonious. In some dark corners, one could still hear the occasional distant gunshot. Complaints of German robbery and murder were not uncommon, and it was no news that the Soviets would ambush German patrols with gunfire. Hundreds of people died inexplicably every day. This place was, in the end, still a desolate ruin, not a metropolis of bright lights and fine wine.

Just as Rokossovsky and Küchler were once again standing before the cameras, providing ammunition for the German propaganda machine, in a city block just a short distance away, a dozen or so Soviet soldiers who had refused to lay down their arms were finally surrounded in a building.

The Germans did not politely invite them out to praise their courage and will to resist to the end. Instead, they found a sapper with a flamethrower and sprayed a jet of searing flame, hundreds of degrees hot, into the building through a window. The immense pressure caused the flames to instantly spew out from all the windows around the building, accompanied by the heart-rending screams of the people inside.

Amidst the cruel laughter of the German soldiers, everything returned to calm. But when the people who came to clear the bodies arrived, they discovered that there were a full 40 bodies of various kinds inside. It was clear that there were many civilians among them, because one body was still holding a child. They had been herded into a group by the charging Soviet soldiers. Those Soviet soldiers had clearly wanted to put up a fight… but the result was that what had charged in was not the German army, but flames.

German records show that the last resistance in Stalingrad occurred one month after Rokossovsky had ordered the surrender.

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