Paulus Surrenders at Stalingrad: Germany's Turning Point

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the highest-ranking German officer ever to surrender, walked out of the ruins of a Stalingrad department store basement and gave himself up to the Soviet 64th Army on January 31, 1943. Hitler had promoted him to field marshal the day before—a pointed hint, since no German field marshal in history had ever surrendered. Paulus chose captivity over suicide, and in doing so signaled the end of the most catastrophic military defeat in German history. The Battle of Stalingrad had raged since August 1942, when the German 6th Army under Paulus reached the Volga River and pushed into the city that bore Stalin''s name. The fighting devolved into a brutal house-to-house, floor-to-floor urban battle that consumed entire divisions. Soviet snipers, factory workers, and militia fought for every room. The Soviets called the devastated cityscape the "Rattenkrieg"—the Rat War. At its peak, newly arrived German reinforcements had a life expectancy measured in hours. On November 19, 1942, the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, a massive double envelopment that smashed through the weak Romanian armies protecting the German flanks. Within four days, 290,000 German and Axis soldiers were encircled. Hitler forbade any breakout, promising an air resupply that never came close to delivering the 300 tons per day the trapped army needed. Hermann Göring''s Luftwaffe managed an average of only 90 tons daily, and even that dwindled as Soviet anti-aircraft fire intensified and airfields fell. The final German pocket collapsed in early February. Of the roughly 290,000 soldiers encircled, about 91,000 surrendered—starving, frostbitten, and many suffering from typhus. Only approximately 5,000 would survive Soviet captivity to return home, most not until 1955. The German dead at Stalingrad exceeded 150,000. The Soviet Union lost over 1.1 million killed, wounded, and captured in the broader Stalingrad campaign. The defeat destroyed the myth of German invincibility, handed the strategic initiative permanently to the Soviet Union, and marked the point from which the Third Reich could only retreat.