A field commander undone by the collision of orders and reality
After being told that no German field marshal had ever been captured alive, Paulus refused suicide and surrendered.
Friedrich Paulus was a German staff officer and general whose work included planning the invasion of the Soviet Union. As commander of the Sixth Army, he led the advance on Stalingrad, then became trapped between Hitler's order to hold the city and the army's collapse after the Soviet encirclement. He surrendered on 31 January 1943 and, in captivity, became a critic of the Nazi regime who joined anti-Nazi German officers' organizations sponsored by the Soviet Union. In postwar East Germany he researched military history, leaving a legacy shaped both by responsibility for an aggressive war and by his late break with Nazism.
Career Timeline
- 1910Officer candidate, 111th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial German Army
- 1914–1918Served in the First World War and as a staff officer
- 1935–1939Chief of staff, Panzer Troop Command, then Tenth Army
- 1939–1940Chief of staff of the Tenth Army, later redesignated Sixth Army
- 1940–1941Deputy chief of the German Army General Staff
- 1942–1943Commander of the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army
- 1943Generaloberst, promoted to field marshal on 30 January
- 1954–1957Military-history research and teaching in East Germany