By late January 1943, the German 6th Army was collapsing inside Stalingrad. The Luftwaffe had promised to supply the pocket by air, but that promise fell apart almost immediately. Transport aircraft couldn’t deliver enough food, fuel, or ammunition for over 200,000 trapped men. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm, had stalled in December, 30 miles short of the encirclement.
Inside the city, wounded men filled every cellar, and ammunition ran lower by the day. On January 30th, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal by radio. No German or Prussian field marshal had ever been captured alive—this was a clear signal that Paulus should take his own life rather than surrender. But on January 31st, Paulus surrendered.
Major Anatoly Soldatov, among the first Soviet officers to enter, described the conditions as filthy beyond belief. In the hours that followed, Soviet troops sorted the prisoners. The remaining soldiers, roughly 91,000 men, began the long march to prisoner of war camps scattered across the Soviet Union. Weakened by months of starvation and cold, most of the Stalingrad prisoners did not survive the first months of captivity.
Of those captured at Stalingrad, only around 6,000 would ever return home. Paulus, Schmidt, and more than 20 other senior officers were taken to a special camp near Moscow, where they lived under close NKVD surveillance. Its real function was producing propaganda aimed at undermining Wehrmacht morale. Two months later, in September 1943, a more targeted body emerged: the League of German Officers, known by its German acronym BDO.
Under Soviet supervision, the BDO produced radio broadcasts, leaflets, and written appeals urging German soldiers to desert. General Walther von Seydlitz went further, proposing a 40,000-strong army of German prisoners to fight alongside the Red Army and be airlifted into Germany to spark an uprising. Moscow never approved the plan, but the very idea alarmed the Nazi leadership. Paulus, however, initially refused all cooperation.
The execution of officers he had known personally, including Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, shook his resolve. On August 8th, 1944, Paulus addressed German officers on Free Germany radio, saying: “Germany must renounce Hitler. ” In response, the Nazi government placed his wife, Elena, and his daughter under Sippenhaft—collective punishment. The field marshal who had once obeyed every order from Berlin had now turned against the regime entirely.
On February 11th, 1946, the courtroom at Nuremberg held its breath. For months, defense attorneys for Nazi leaders had dismissed Paulus’s earlier written testimony as fabricated under Soviet pressure. They demanded he appear in person, confident the Soviets would never produce him—a man they considered a prized captive. But Paulus appeared.
His testimony contributed to the conviction of both men, who were later executed. Meanwhile, other Stalingrad generals faced sharply different outcomes. General Arthur Schmidt, Paulus’s chief of staff, remained defiant. When interrogators offered better conditions in return for statements against the regime, Schmidt reportedly told them he would rather stay in prison than break his oath.
He held that line for 12 years until his release in 1955. General Ernst Walter Heitz, who had ordered his men to fight to the last bullet, died in Soviet captivity on February 9th, 1944, barely a year after being taken prisoner. Other generals who had cooperated with the NKFD went on to build the new East German state. Otto Korfes, who had commanded the 295th Infantry Division at Stalingrad and was among the first senior officers to join the committee, took charge of military archives at the East German Interior Ministry after his release in 1948.
Paulus himself was held in the Soviet Union for years. In 1953, he was sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, but the sentence was commuted within hours. He served five of those years before a diplomatic breakthrough changed his fate. In September 1955, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer traveled to Moscow and negotiated the release of the last approximately 10,000 German prisoners of war still held in the Soviet Union.
The event became known as the Heimkehr der Zehntausend—the return of the 10,000. Paulus was among them. His Nazi-era death sentence was overturned in 1956, but the stigma remained. Russia posthumously pardoned him in 1996.
Paulus died in Dresden on February 1st, 1957—exactly 14 years after his surrender at Stalingrad. Karl Rodenburg, who had commanded the 76th Infantry Division, outlived them all. Of the roughly 91,000 men who had surrendered with Paulus, only some 6,000 ever made the journey home. The generals who returned faced a divided Germany and a world that struggled to understand their choices.
Their fates were shaped by the same forces that defined post-war Europe: ideology, survival, and the long shadow of choices made under impossible pressure.
