The surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, marked the first time one of Hitler's field armies capitulated during World War II. After five months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, the exhausted German forces ran out of ammunition and food. The battle proved a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward.
The Soviets were fully aware of the atrocities in which the 6th Army was complicit. These included the mass shooting at Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev, where on September 29 and 30, 1941, 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children were massacred. For this reason, the Soviets showed no mercy to their prisoners.
As the remnants of the 6th Army laid down their arms, tens of thousands of German soldiers became prisoners of war. Out of the 91,000 captured, only 5,000 to 6,000 would ever return to Germany after the war. The rest would die.
The road to Stalingrad began long before. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he swiftly began preparing the nation for war. His primary focus was rebuilding Germany's military strength, which had been severely restricted by the Treaty of Versailles.
By 1935, Hitler openly violated the treaty by reintroducing conscription and significantly expanding the German Army. He also established the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and expanded the Navy. His ambitions extended beyond military build-up as he sought strategic alliances to solidify Germany's position.
In 1936, Hitler formed the Rome-Berlin Axis with Italy, aligning with Mussolini's fascist regime. That same year, he signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, creating a unified front against the Soviet Union. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was a direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles that went unchallenged by European powers.
This emboldened Hitler to further his territorial ambitions, leading to the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The Second World War started on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The early stages of the war saw rapid German advances in Europe, with the fall of Poland, the invasion of France, and the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk in 1940.
Following the successful campaign in France, Hitler set his sights on the Soviet Union. On Sunday, June 22, 1941, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Three million German soldiers were supported by Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Croatian troops. Within weeks, German divisions conquered the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
For Nazi Germany, this attack was not an ordinary military operation. The war against the Soviet Union was a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism, a racial war between German Aryans and those the Nazis deemed subhuman Slavs and Jews. Following the invasion, the Nazi regime unleashed an unparalleled campaign of brutality.
As the German military pushed eastward, Nazi forces including the SS and Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads, systematically targeted civilians, particularly Jews, communists, and other groups labeled undesirable by Nazi ideology. Entire villages were annihilated in mass executions, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war faced starvation, forced labor, and execution without trial.
The siege of Leningrad, along with atrocities in cities like Kiev and Minsk, highlighted the Nazis' ruthless disregard for human life. Methods of mass murder included mass shootings, starvation, forced deportations, and the destruction of homes and infrastructure to break the Soviet people's resistance. These brutal occupation policies aimed not only to decimate the population but also to clear the way for German colonization, aligning with Hitler's vision of Lebensraum, or living space, in the east.
Soldiers of the German 6th Army were also involved in war crimes. They cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen in the massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar and assisted with other crimes against humanity in areas under the command of Walter von Reichenau, then the commander of the 6th Army.
One such crime occurred in July 1941, while conducting operations in Right Bank, Ukraine, when the 6th Army bloodlessly captured the Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva. Two weeks after the occupation, members of the Einsatzgruppen marched the Jews out of the town, 800 men and women in all, to be shot. The 6th Army provided logistical support for this massacre, supplying drivers, guards, weapons, and ammunition.
Afterwards, 90 children aged 12 and under were left behind, their parents having been killed the night before. When Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent the killing of the 90 Jewish children who were left in an abandoned building, Reichenau ordered that the children were also to be shot. The 90 children were executed separately a few days later. Many children were hit four or five times before they died. All the children were murdered by 6th Army regulars.
Walther von Reichenau never paid for his crimes, as he died in January 1942 in an aircraft accident while being transported to a hospital after a heart attack. He was succeeded by his former chief of staff, General Friedrich Paulus.
The turning point in the Nazis' campaign against the Soviet Union came with the Battle of Stalingrad, where the German 6th Army found itself locked in a brutal and unforgiving struggle against the Red Army. Initially confident in their advance, the 6th Army under General Friedrich Paulus quickly found that Stalingrad would not fall as easily as other Soviet cities.
The battle, which began in August 1942, soon descended into a bitter street-by-street fight, with neither side willing to concede an inch of ground. At its height, the German 6th Army had over 300,000 soldiers committed to the fight for Stalingrad. These troops were supported by artillery, tanks, and air support, but the Red Army's tenacious defense neutralized much of the German advantage.
The Soviet strategy, which included relentless counterattacks and the clever use of the city's ruins as natural fortifications, forced the Germans into a costly and exhausting battle of attrition. As the battle dragged on into the harsh Russian winter, the situation for the 6th Army deteriorated rapidly.
The Red Army launched Operation Uranus in November 1942, a massive counteroffensive that encircled Paulus's forces, cutting them off from supplies and reinforcements. Trapped within the frozen and devastated city, the 6th Army faced unimaginable suffering. Temperatures plunged to as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, and the German troops, ill-prepared for such extreme cold, struggled to survive.
Their summer uniforms were no match for the bitter Russian winter, and many soldiers succumbed to frostbite, losing fingers, toes, and even entire limbs to the cold. The soldiers were also plagued by hunger. As Soviet forces cut off the supply lines, the 6th Army's rations dwindled to almost nothing.
Men were forced to survive on meager portions of bread made from sawdust, soup that was little more than water, and whatever scraps of food they could scavenge from the ruins. Starvation weakened them to the point where they could barely stand, let alone fight. The once proud soldiers of the German Army were reduced to emaciated shadows, their bodies wasting away as the battle dragged on.
Disease ran rampant through the ranks as sanitation broke down and medical supplies became nonexistent. Dysentery, typhus, and other illnesses spread like wildfire among the troops, claiming thousands of lives. With no medicine or proper care available, the sick and wounded were left to die in makeshift hospitals that offered little more than a place to lay down and wait for the end.
Psychologically, the men of the 6th Army were devastated. The constant bombardment, the screams of the dying, and the knowledge that no help was coming took a severe toll on their morale. Despair set in as they realized the hopelessness of their situation. Letters from home went unanswered, and the soldiers knew that surrender meant either death in battle or a grim fate in Soviet captivity. Some resorted to suicide, unable to bear the suffering any longer.
Despite these conditions, Hitler refused to allow a retreat, ordering Paulus to hold Stalingrad at all costs. On January 30, 1943, during the final days of the battle, Hitler promoted General Friedrich Paulus to the rank of Field Marshal. The promotion was meant as both an honor and a message. No German Field Marshal had ever been captured alive, and it was widely understood that Hitler expected Paulus to either continue fighting to the death or to commit suicide rather than surrender.
Realizing that the situation was hopeless and that his 6th Army was facing annihilation, Paulus surrendered to the Russian forces just one day after receiving the promotion. After all the formalities had been settled and Paulus received guarantees of his personal safety, he was led out of the basement along with his staff officers. Paulus and his staff were captured on the morning of January 31, 1943.
When Adolf Hitler learned that Friedrich Paulus did not obey his orders and instead had surrendered, his reaction was one of intense anger and disbelief. He was quoted as saying that Paulus could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality if he had but taken his own life. In response to Hitler's incompetence and catastrophic military decisions, Paulus is believed to have said, "I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal."
The 6th Army, regarded as the field army in the Wehrmacht, surrendered between January 31 and February 2, 1943. German casualties were 147,200 killed and wounded, and over 91,000 captured, including 24 generals and 2,500 officers of lesser rank.
At the time of surrender, the Red Army soldiers were well-nourished, full of vigor, and dressed in fine winter uniforms. The German soldiers, ragged in thin gray coats over threadbare uniforms, as thin as skeletons, presented emaciated figures exhausted half to death with sunken features. Unwashed, with unkempt beards, they wore comical-looking makeshift snow boots and were wrapped in towels and women's head scarves. These men were exhausted, ill, wounded, and starving after months of brutal combat and encirclement.
Their ordeal, however, was far from over. A small number of senior officers, including Paulus, were taken to Moscow, where they were used for Soviet propaganda purposes. Some of these officers, including Paulus, joined the National Committee for a Free Germany, a group that opposed Hitler's regime and sought to encourage German soldiers to surrender.
After the war, Paulus remained in the Soviet Union until 1952, when he moved to Dresden in East Germany. He spent the rest of his life defending his actions at Stalingrad and expressed the belief that communism was the best hope for post-war Europe. In 1946, Paulus even testified for the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials, during which one journalist asked him about the Stalingrad prisoners. Paulus told him to tell the wives and mothers that their husbands and sons were well. However, they were not.
The Soviet Union never signed the Geneva Conventions, which meant that captured soldiers were often subjected to brutal forced labor with minimal food rations. Because of the atrocities the Germans had committed on the Soviet civilian population, the Russians considered them as murderers, and most of the German prisoners captured at Stalingrad perished in Soviet captivity.
Already weakened by disease, starvation, and a lack of medical care during the encirclement, these men faced further horrors. They were subjected to forced marches to prisoner camps and later to labor camps scattered across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. The remnants of the German 6th Army were eventually dispatched to more than 20 camps, from the Arctic Circle to the southern deserts.
The journey to these camps was deadly in itself. Some prisoners marched on foot, whilst others were crammed into overcrowded trains with little food or water. One train carrying thousands of German prisoners from Stalingrad to Uzbekistan became a death trap, with men resorting to killing each other for scraps of food. Another train bound for the Pamir Mountains saw almost half of its passengers dead upon arrival.
For those who remained in Stalingrad to assist in the city's reconstruction, the conditions were equally dire. Typhus and other diseases spread rapidly, and by March 1943, it was recorded that the Russians buried 40,000 corpses in a mass grave in Beketovka, a prisoner of war camp located several kilometers from Stalingrad.
Those prisoners of war who made it alive to separate camps in Siberia and elsewhere in the western Soviet Union were forced into slave labor and endured frequent beatings, brutal torture, poisoning, and execution. Upon arrival at the camps, they were stripped of any remaining personal belongings and subjected to the harsh realities of camp life.
The camps were severely overcrowded, and the infrastructure was rudimentary, with inadequate shelter from the elements. The prisoners were forced to live in poorly insulated barracks, often with insufficient heating during the brutal winters with temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius, leading to frostbite and other cold-related illnesses.
Food was scarce and of poor quality, typically consisting of thin soups, bread made from sawdust and flour, and occasionally rotten vegetables. Malnutrition was rampant, with daily rations often insufficient to sustain health, leading to widespread starvation and a weakened ability to work. There were even instances of cannibalism amongst the former German soldiers.
Forced labor was the primary occupation of prisoners of war, with tasks including logging, mining, construction, and agriculture. The work was grueling, often carried out under extreme weather conditions with little regard for the prisoners' health or safety. The combination of overwork, malnutrition, and inadequate medical care resulted in a devastating mortality rate.
In total, it is estimated that up to 3 million German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Soviet Union and more than 1 million of them died in captivity. Out of the German prisoners from Stalingrad, only 5,000 to 6,000 survived and would return to Germany after the war.
On the other hand, by the end of the war, approximately 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war ended up in German captivity. Nearly 60 percent of them died, mainly of starvation, as the Nazis, due to racist and ideological reasons, deliberately let them starve to death. This made Soviet prisoners of war, second only to Jews, the largest group of victims of Nazi racial and genocidal policies during the Second World War.