Friedrich Paulus

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Friedrich Paulus bigraphy, stories - German general

Friedrich Paulus : biography

23 September 1890 – 1 February 1957

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus (23 September 1890 – 1 February 1957) was an officer in the German military from 1910 to 1945. He attained the rank of Generalfeldmarschall (field marshal) during World War II, and is best known for commanding the Sixth Army in the Battle of Stalingrad, including the successful advance toward the city and the less successful attack in 1942 (Case Blue) stopped by the Soviet counter-offensives during the 1942-43 winter. The battle ended in disaster for Nazi Germany when about 265,000 soldiers of the Wehrmacht, their Axis allies, and the anti-Soviet Hilfswillige Russian volunteers were encircled and defeated. Of the 107,000 captured, only 6,000 survived the captivity and returned home by 1955.

Paulus surrendered to Soviet forces in Stalingrad on 31 January 1943, a day after he was promoted to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall by Adolf Hitler. Hitler expected Paulus to commit suicide, citing the fact that there was no record of a German field marshal ever being captured alive. While in Soviet captivity during the war, Paulus became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime and joined the Soviet-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany. He moved to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1953.

After Stalingrad and postwar

Although he at first refused to collaborate with the Soviets, after the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944, Paulus became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime while in Soviet captivity, joining the Russian-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany and appealing to Germans to surrender. He later acted as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. He was allowed to relocate to the German Democratic Republic in 1953, two years before the repatriation of the remaining German POWs who were held under the pretext that they were war criminals and were used for forced labor.

During the Nuremberg Trials, Paulus was asked about the Stalingrad prisoners by a journalist. Paulus told the journalist to tell the wives and mothers that their husbands and sons were well.Craig, William (1973). Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad New York: Penguin Books (paperback, ISBN 0-14-200000-0) p.280 Of the 91,000 German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, half had died on the march to Siberian prison camps, and nearly as many died in captivity; only about 6,000 returned home.Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, page 322, They put the number of POW captured at Stalingrad at 100,000 of whom 6,000 survived

From 1953 to 1956, he lived in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked as the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute and not, as often wrongly described, as an inspector of police. In late 1956, he developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and became progressively weaker. He died within a few months, in Dresden, on 1 February 1957, 14 years after the surrender at Stalingrad. His body was transported to Baden, to be buried next to his wife, who had died eight years earlier in 1949, not having seen her husband since his departure for the Eastern front in the summer of 1942.On one of the final Luftwaffe flights out of Stalingrad, Paulus had sent his wedding ring to his wife (Commanders at War, on the Military Channel, 28 May 2010).

Stalingrad

Paulus was promoted to General of the Armoured Troops and became commander of the German Sixth Army in January 1942 and led the drive on Stalingrad during that summer. Paulus’ troops fought the defending Soviet troops holding Stalingrad over three months in increasingly brutal urban warfare. In November 1942, when the Soviet Red Army launched a massive counter-offensive, code named Operation Uranus, Paulus found himself surrounded by an entire Soviet Army Group.

Paulus followed Adolf Hitler’s orders to hold the Army’s position in Stalingrad under all circumstances, despite the fact that he was completely surrounded by strong Russian formations. A relief effort by Army Group Don under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was launched in December. Following his orders, Paulus refused to cooperate with the offensive and kept his entire army in fixed defensive positions. Manstein told Paulus that the relief would be unlikely to succeed without assistance from Sixth Army, but Paulus remained absolutely firm in obeying the orders he had been given. Manstein’s forces were unable to reach Stalingrad on their own and their efforts were eventually halted due to Soviet offensives elsewhere on the front. Kurt Zeitzler, the newly appointed chief of the Army General Staff, eventually got Hitler to allow Paulus to break out—provided they held onto Stalingrad, an impossible task.