On Jan. 25, 1943, Gen. Friedrich Paulus, commanding the German 6th Army at the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, thought he saw the time had come to speak of surrender.
Paulus was a 52-year-old career officer of an undistinguished background. After spearheading the German invasion of southern Russia and great effusions of blood, suffering, privation, and freezing to death, Paulus was bound for the history books that day 77 years ago, but the how of it had escaped his mastery.
On that day, he and more than 200,000 of his soldiers were encircled by Soviet forces. It was a hinge, the end of the biggest battle of World War II, and it was creaking shut for the Nazis and the German war effort.
Paulus contacted Adolf Hitler by radio. They had communicated two weeks before; then, the commander of the Red Army had offered surrender on terms which included giving badly needed food and medical treatment to Paulus’ men.
But Paulus was told by German Army High Command that capitulation was out of the question: Fight to the death.
Three weeks before, Hitler had given a New Year’s speech to the Wehrmacht: Addressing the “fighters of the eastern front,” he said, “you know how difficult this struggle is and will be, and how often the scales will appear to tilt in favor of our enemy, but the German victory will stand at the end, because during this year the German homeland has forged new weapons, and more so than ever before. ... As fighters, you are already superior to every enemy.”
In general orders to the 6th Army, Paulus wrote: “We have only one option left: to fight until the last cartridge.”
Now the Russians were giving Paulus another chance.
Paulus told Hitler the collapse of his position was “inevitable.” He was out of food and ammunition. Let us surrender, he said.
Never, Hitler said.
Five days later, Paulus told Hitler he and his troops were hours from collapse.
So Hitler gave promotions to Paulus’ officers.
Early on the morning of Jan. 31, Paulus was awakened in his headquarters, the cellar warehouse of a department store, by his chief of staff, Gen. Arthur Schmidt, who informed him he had been promoted to field marshal, the German army’s second-highest rank.
Not one German field marshal has ever been taken prisoner, Hitler said.
“One can’t help feeling it’s an invitation to suicide,” Paulus told his adjutant. “However, I’m not going to do them the favor.”
“At the same time,” Schmidt said, “I have to inform you that the Russians are at the door” – and he opened it to reveal Soviet Gen. Mikhail Shumilov.
So, in short order, Paulus became a captured field marshal.
“À la guerre comme à la guerre,” he said, in French – all’s fair in love and war.
If it was in a theater, he said, no one would believe it.
Hitler vowed never again to appoint a field marshal, as though that were the point.
Paulus bided his time as a prisoner of war for over a year before he became a spokesman for the Soviets’ National Committee for a Free Germany. After serving on the German side and inflicting almost unimaginable losses – including more than two million casualties at Stalingrad – Paulus switched.
“Germany must renounce Hitler,“ he said in a radio broadcast in German. In 1946, he testified for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, stating the German attack on the Soviet Union, which he helped plan and command, was unprovoked and criminal. He was Stalin’s prize.
Paulus eventually was allowed to settle peacefully in East Germany after the war, in a handsome villa in Dresden. He was appointed the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute, another propaganda factory. He died after a brief illness in 1957 and was buried with military honors, having served two great powers, two despots, and somehow never having known what it was like to be on the losing side.
