On June 22, 1941, more than three million soldiers crossed the Soviet border as Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history. Adolf Hitler presented the campaign as a war against the Soviet state, communism, and Jews, while pursuing Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe. The soldiers moving east carried orders that permitted executions, starvation, and violence against civilians and prisoners of war. Among the armies advancing into Soviet territory was a formation that would become deeply involved in this war of annihilation, supporting mass killings and helping enforce policies that left thousands to die of hunger.
Just over a year later, that same army would find itself trapped at Stalingrad, where most of its 250,000 to 300,000 men would be killed, captured, or left to die from starvation and cold. That notorious formation was the German Sixth Army. The Sixth Army was founded on October 10, 1939, five weeks after World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1. Its commander was General Walther von Reichenau, an early and public supporter of Hitler who had argued for years that the military should abandon its claim of standing above politics.
Under his command, the Sixth Army fought in Western Europe in May 1940, advancing through the Netherlands and Belgium into France in a campaign that remained largely conventional compared to what followed on the Eastern Front. In June 1941, the Sixth Army crossed into the Soviet Union as part of Army Group South, advancing toward Soviet Ukraine, whose grain, coal, and industry made it a major German objective. The nature of this war was entirely different from the campaigns in Western Europe, and the orders issued before the invasion made that clear. The Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, required the execution of captured Soviet political officers rather than treating them as prisoners of war, while another decree lifted judicial immunity for German soldiers regarding crimes committed against Soviet civilians.
The Sixth Army implemented both orders and soon became directly involved in mass killings after entering the city of Bila Tserkva, about 80 kilometers south of Kyiv, in July 1941. After occupying the city, the military police forced the Jewish population into a ghetto. In August 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe C, one of the mobile killing units made up of SS and police personnel that followed the German armies, killed around 800 Jewish men and women. The Sixth Army supported the massacre by providing guards, drivers, weapons, and ammunition.
About 90 children, all aged twelve or younger, were left behind after their parents were killed and were locked in a building in terrible conditions. Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth of the 295th Infantry Division tried to stop their planned execution and appealed to the army command, but the final decision was made by Reichenau, who personally approved the killings and later criticized Groscurth for questioning the order. The children were taken outside the town and shot. Groscurth was so horrified that he wrote to his wife: “We cannot and must not be allowed to win this war.
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Bila Tserkva was not an isolated case. Just weeks later, the same cooperation between the Sixth Army and SS killing units reached a much larger scale in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The city fell to German forces on September 19, 1941, after weeks of fighting. On September 24, explosive charges and remotely controlled mines planted by withdrawing Soviet troops began detonating across the city center, destroying buildings already occupied by Germans.
German authorities blamed the Jewish population for the destruction, and on September 28, notices appeared throughout Kyiv ordering all Jews to report the following morning with their documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing, supposedly for resettlement. Instead, they were marched to Babi Yar ravine, where Sonderkommando 4a, a special killing unit of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children on September 29 and 30, with support from German police units and local auxiliaries. The shootings were carried out primarily by the SS and police, but the Sixth Army again helped carry out the massacre by supporting its preparation and providing military assistance. Major General Kurt Eberhard, the military commander of Kyiv within the Sixth Army’s area of command, took part in the meeting with senior security and police officers where the massacre was planned.
Days after the massacre, on October 10, 1941, Reichenau explained the ideology behind these acts in his own order titled “Conduct of Troops in the Eastern Territories,” later known as the “Severity Order. ” The order told soldiers they were not just fighting a military enemy but taking part in an ideological struggle, and called for severe revenge against what Reichenau called “human scum. ” It also prohibited feeding Soviet civilians and prisoners of war from army field kitchens. Reichenau’s superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, approved the document and distributed it to other army commanders as a model, while Hitler ordered it circulated across the entire Eastern Front.
On October 24, 1941, the Sixth Army captured Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Soviet Ukraine, and became responsible for its occupation. In mid-November, Soviet remotely controlled mines and explosives destroyed many buildings used by German troops and command headquarters, killing German personnel. The occupation authorities responded by taking hostages and carrying out public executions. Civilians were hanged on main streets and from balconies of large buildings, and their bodies were left there to terrorize the population and warn against any further resistance.
Meanwhile, food was seized for German forces while the city’s residents were increasingly left to fend for themselves to survive. In mid-December, the remaining Jewish residents were forced into overcrowded barracks on the eastern edge of Kharkiv. Over the following weeks, thousands were taken to Drobytsky Yar, a ravine outside the city, and killed. Estimates vary, but between 15,000 and 20,000 Jews were murdered there.
Witnesses later claimed some young children were thrown into the pits alive to save ammunition, expected to die from freezing temperatures. Reichenau did not remain in his position long enough to witness the full consequences of his actions. On December 1, 1941, he was ordered to command Army Group South, but just six weeks later, on January 14, 1942, he suffered a stroke. He died on January 17, 1942, while being flown to Germany for medical treatment after his plane crashed in Lemberg, today’s Lviv in Ukraine.
It remains unknown whether he died from the stroke or from injuries sustained in the crash. Reichenau was given a state funeral in Berlin and never faced trial for his crimes. Command of the Sixth Army passed to General of Panzer Troops Friedrich Paulus, a respected staff officer who had never led an army in the field. In the summer of 1942, the Sixth Army became the main strike force in Operation Blue, the German summer offensive toward the oil fields of the Caucasus and the Volga River.
The industrial city of Stalingrad, today’s Volgograd in Russia, was one of its main targets. On August 23, 1942, as German troops reached the Volga north of the city, the Luftwaffe launched a massive air raid that destroyed large parts of Stalingrad and killed tens of thousands of civilians. During the autumn, the Sixth Army fought its way through the city’s ruins, suffering losses on a scale neither side had expected. On November 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus around Stalingrad.
Instead of attacking the German forces inside the city, it struck the Romanian armies defending the northern and southern flanks across the steppe between the Don and Volga rivers. Both fronts collapsed within two days, and on November 23, Soviet spearheads met about 70 kilometers west of Stalingrad, closing the ring. Between 250,000 and 300,000 soldiers were trapped inside the pocket, but Hitler refused to allow them to withdraw. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, assured him the army could be supplied by air, a promise that quickly proved impossible to fulfill.
A German relief attack launched on December 12 also failed. As the weeks passed, rations were reduced and thousands of men died from hunger, cold, and untreated wounds. The Sixth Army, which a year earlier had helped strip food from occupied cities like Kharkiv and received orders not to feed Soviet prisoners of war, was now starving inside a Soviet ring it could not escape. On January 30, 1943, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal, the highest rank in the German army, a clear signal that he was expected to die rather than become the first German field marshal ever taken prisoner alive.
But Paulus refused to commit suicide and surrendered the next day, while the remaining German forces in the northern part of Stalingrad held out until February 2, 1943. By the end of the battle, roughly 150,000 men of the Sixth Army had been killed or wounded, and the Red Army had captured about 91,000. For those 91,000 prisoners, surrender was only the beginning of another ordeal. Already exhausted by hunger, disease, and wounds, they marched away from Stalingrad in icy conditions, and tens of thousands perished in the following weeks.
The survivors were dispersed to labor camps across the Soviet Union, where exhaustion, mistreatment, and harsh conditions claimed many more lives. The Stalingrad disaster ended the history of the original Sixth Army, but not its name. In March 1943, just one month after the surrender, the same designation was given to another German formation. That formation withdrew west across Ukraine into Romania, where it was largely destroyed during the Soviet Jassy–Kishinev offensive in August 1944.
After being rebuilt once more, the Sixth Army fought in Hungary, failed to relieve the trapped German and Hungarian forces in Budapest, and then withdrew through western Hungary into Austria, where its remaining units surrendered to American forces on May 9, 1945, one day after the end of World War II in Europe. Few of those responsible for the original Sixth Army’s crimes were ever prosecuted. Reichenau died in 1942 before he could be brought to trial, while Major General Kurt Eberhard, the military commander of Kyiv during the Babi Yar massacre, committed suicide in American custody in Stuttgart in 1947. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus survived, later testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, and was released from Soviet captivity in 1953.
For the ordinary soldiers, reckoning came through Stalingrad and its aftermath. Of the roughly 91,000 men who surrendered there, only about 5,000 to 6,000 ever returned to Germany, with the last prisoners released in 1955.