Second Epistle to the Germans

STALINGRAD (357 pp.)--Theodor Plievier--Applefon-Century-Crofts ($3).

Germany's Theodor Plievier was one of that small, distinguished fraternity (including Arnold Zweig, Henri Barbusse, Remain Holland) who, after World War I, deemed it their duty to blow the gaff on military imperialism so thoroughly that a similar carnage could never come again. Plievier's main contribution was The Kaiser's Coolies, and after writing it, he fled into exile. Now, with an even more fearful war come & gone, 60-year-old Theodor Plievier has resumed his old theme song.

In its German editions, Stalingrad has sold more than a million copies. It is not likely to make such a dent in the U.S., because it is directed to the Germans. It calls itself a novel--but, in essence, it is not a novel at all; it is an enormous chart of case histories in a world of mass horror.

Plievier's setting is the area around Stalingrad, where Field Marshal von Paulus and his 330,000 men of the German Sixth Army were ordered to fight to the bitter end--and nearly half were obliterated in the space of seven weeks. Plievier describes, with ruthless exactness, just how they were obliterated--how snow and ice shattered their limbs like dry wood, how they starved on dried peas and hot water while suffering horribly from dysentery and typhus, how they committed suicide and fell under fire, until after ten weeks only some 50,000 human wrecks remained able at last to raise their arms in surrender.

The unquestionable heroism of these pincer-trapped soldiers is the sugar on Author Plievier's German pill. For, having aroused in every German heart a profound compassion for his glorious dead, he icily proceeds to ask: who caused them to die so horribly, and to what end? How does Nordic supremacy look when more than a quarter of a million of its devotees are hobbling and crawling, half-mad and half-dead, through an icy, foreign wasteland? How does the image of the divine Fuehrer look to his worshipers in the moment when they themselves have "become bridges and carpets for his foot to trample upon?"

Such questions carry their own answers, if, as is certainly the case with Author Plievier, the author's rhetoric is sufficiently apt and impassioned. Stalingrad is not much as fiction, but it has the impressiveness of a terrifying, twice-told lesson taught by an adamant professor of humanity.

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