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.
Also known as: Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus · Friedrich von Paulus
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarCommand of the German Sixth Army at StalingradHe commanded the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and surrendered to Soviet forces on 31 January 1943.
- 1942–1943Battle of StalingradCommander of the German 6th ArmyHe led the 6th Army, was encircled at Stalingrad, and surrendered in 1943.
Nuremberg testimony and the problem of responsibility (1946)
Paulus was the staff officer who worked out the detailed operational plan for Barbarossa. On 3 September 1940 he took up the post of Oberquartiermeister I in the Army General Staff, becoming deputy to chief of staff Franz Halder, and elaborated the operational detail of an already existing plan of attack on the Soviet Union. He considered a rapid drive to seize Moscow necessary and, if that plan failed, the General Staff anticipated a long war. In the first half of 1941 he also took part in negotiations with Germany's allies for the war against the Soviet Union.
After the war the Soviet authorities used him as a prosecution witness at Nuremberg. He appeared in court on 11 February 1946 and was cross-examined by defence counsel Nelte the following day. Nelte pressed him on how the Barbarossa plan had been drawn up, on misgivings inside the General Staff, and on his acceptance of command of the Sixth Army despite those misgivings. The question of responsibility emerged directly. Paulus answered that no intelligence proving Soviet intentions to attack had ever reached him, and acknowledged that he and other informed staff officers understood the order to prepare the study as the first step toward an aggressive attack on the Soviet Union.
He nonetheless tried to avoid answering about his own responsibility. He asked to be relieved of questions concerning himself, saying that he was there as a witness for the events that had led to the indictment. When Nelte pointed out that he too belonged to the indicted organization of the High Command and the presiding judge ordered him to answer, he replied that he had shared misgivings about such a plan with Halder. He went on to claim that what became clear to him emerged only through his experience as commander of the Sixth Army, reaching its climax at Stalingrad, and that he had not then understood the war of aggression for what it was.
The testimony remained contested in later assessments. Surveillance files record that even in 1943 he still greeted his officers with "Heil Hitler" and refused socialist May Day celebrations, and that when Wilhelm Pieck invited him to join the anti-Nazi committee he insisted a soldier must obey unconditionally. He cooperated only after the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, signing an appeal on 8 August 1944 calling on the German people to renounce Hitler. His late turn was received with bafflement abroad too, precisely because this was the man who had obeyed Hitler's orders unconditionally to the last consequence. The gap between the awareness he admitted in the witness box and the duty of obedience he imposed on himself leaves open the question of a staff officer's responsibility for an aggressive war.