Germans surrender at Stalingrad - Feb 02, 1943 - HISTORY.com Germans surrender at Stalingrad Publisher A+E Networks On this day, the last of the German forces fighting at Stalingrad surrender, despite Hitler’s earlier declaration that “Surrender is out of the question. The troops will defend themselves to the last!” The Battle of Stalingrad began in the summer of 1942, as German forces assaulted the city, a major industrial center and a potential strategic coup. But despite repeated attempts, the German 6th Army, under Friedrich von Paulus, and part of the 4th Panzer Army, under Ewald von Kleist, could not break past the adamantine defense by the Soviet 62nd Army, despite pushing the Soviets almost to the Volga River in mid-October and encircling Stalingrad. Diminishing resources, partisan guerilla attacks, and the cruelty of the Russian winter began to take their toll on the Germans. On November 19, the Soviets made their move, launching a counteroffensive that began with a massive artillery bombardment of the German position.

The Soviets then encircled the enemy, launching pincer movements from north and south simultaneously, even as the Germans encircled Stalingrad. The German position soon became untenable. Surrender was their only hope for survival. But Hitler wouldn’t hear of it: “The 6th Army will hold its positions to the last man and the last round.” Von Paulus held out until January 31, 1943, when he finally surrendered. Of more than 280,000 men under Paulus’ command, half were already dead or dying, about 35,000 had been evacuated from the front, and the remaining 91,000 were hauled off to Soviet POW camps. Pockets of German belligerence continued until February 2. Hitler berated Von Paulus for not committing suicide. Von Paulus, captured by the Soviets, repaid Hitler by selling out to the Soviets, joining the National Committee for Free Germany, and urging German troops to surrender on other battlegrounds in the USSR.

Related Videos 31st January 1943: German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad January 1943 German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad Soviet troops in one of the last attacks inside Stalingrad advance over the bodies of German troops left amidst the frozen debris. The man on the right carries a Red flag. The Red flag is raised over Stalingrad, finally the bitter struggle was over. The newly promoted Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, surrendered on January 31, 1943, against Hitler’s orders. This photograph shows Paulus with his chief of staff, Lieutenant Arthur Schmidt, and his adjutant, Colonel Wilhelm Adam, as they arrive at the headquarters of the 64th Soviet Army at Beketovka to surrender. As a POW, Paulus joined the “National Committee for a Free Germany” [Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland], which called upon German troops on the Eastern Front to defect and thus bring the war to an end as soon as possible. During the Nuremberg Trials, he testified as a witness for the Soviet Union.

He was released from captivity in 1953 and lived in the GDR until his death in 1957. Finally the end had come. As soon as he had sent his personal congratulations to Hitler on his 10 years in power, on the 30th January Paulus ordered that contact be made with the Soviet forces. The Soviet delegations entered the basement of the ruined Univermag Department store where the 6th Army had established its HQ. Fighting was still continuing only 500 yards away. It was a dimly lit warren of corridors with rubbish lying around, but the German guards were heavily armed and the Swastika banners were prominently on display. Jonathan Bastable has pieced together several accounts of how the surrender was conducted, including that of the Soviet General Mutin. They were not allowed to go directly to Paulus at first: From the outset, General Schmidt came across as an inveterate fascist.

All his clothes were ironed and polished to a sparkle, he was clean-shaven, his hair was combed and greased, he had a little black Hitler moustache, thin lips and small, black, round eyes that kept darting about, and his pronunciation was clipped like a dog’s bark. Outwardly, he was all pomposity, but on the inside he was trembling in some kind of agony, as if in his death throes, waiting for something terrible to happen. Colonel Adam was very quiet, and did not join in the conversation. He was taciturn and worried-looking, and as soon as the introductions were out ofthe way he went off to his room on the pretext of gathering some things that he needed. … We insisted that Lieutenant-General Schmidt notify Field Marshal von Paulus of the arrival of our delegation for negotiations, and that von Paulus himself receive us and sign the order for the capituladon of the German forces. Lieutenant-General Schmidt immediately carried out our demand, and reported everything to von Paulus.

Von Paulus confirmed, through General Schmidt, that he was no longer in command of the army, that he was a private citizen and would therefore not sign the capitulation order, He refused to receive our delegation, but asked that, as a field marshal, he be personally taken prisoner and escorted by one of our generals. General Laskin was therefore bought in to personally arrest Paulus. He was accompanied by General Mutin. Together they decided that they had to search Paulus: … The reason this had to be done was that some German generals had committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner. So we had to take all precautions to stop von Paulus doing the same thing. Although he seemed a little put out by the search, he did not offer any resistance or objection. And then, when General Laskin asked von Paulus whether he was ill, he replied that he was well but had been affected by the poor diet and the long drawn-out, agonizing experience of the ignominious capitulation of his army. And then he took out of his trouser pocket some small cubes of baked bread, like we used to make with oil.

He showed them to us and said: ‘A hundred and fifty grams a day – that`s all I’ve had to eat for many days now. I’ve been sharing my starvation rations with my soldiers, who only get fifty grams a day.’ Not every unit obeyed the order to surrender and more Soviet troops would die in the next few days dealing with fanatical defenders. For several accounts see ‘ Voices from Stalingrad ‘. Some of the 91,000 German troops taken prisoner at Stalingrad. Within a matter of weeks over a quarter of them would be dead. Less than 6,000 survived the Soviet labour camps and returned to Germany in the early 1950s. { 1 comment… read it below or add one } BBC ON THIS DAY | 2 | 1943: Germans surrender at Stalingrad Search ON THIS DAY by date About This Site | Text Only 1943: Germans surrender at Stalingrad The Soviet Government has announced the final defeat of the German 6th Army at the port of Stalingrad, in southern Russia.

A statement late this evening said: "Our forces have now completed the liquidation of the German Fascist troops encircled in the area of Stalingrad. "The last centre of enemy resistance in the Stalingrad area has thus been crushed." The declaration brings to an end five months of heavy fighting for the city. The battle has been described as among the most terrible of the war so far. We were all cheered by the Great Russian victory at Stalingrad in January of '43 People's War memories » Another 45,000 German soldiers have been taken prisoner in the last two days, bringing the total in custody to over 90,000 officers and men. The prisoners are understood to be in an appalling condition after enduring months of starvation in temperatures down to -30�C. They are the remains of the 330,000-strong German force sent to take Stalingrad. The rest - about a quarter of a million men - have died, as many from illness, starvation and frostbite as from the fighting itself. The 6th Army has been trapped inside the city, completely surrounded by the Red Army, for almost three months during the harshest part of the Russian winter.

They have had to rely totally on air drops by the Luftwaffe for food. Atrocious weather conditions have reduced the amount getting through to just 90 tonnes a day - less than a third of what they needed. The German commander of the 6th Army, Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus, gave himself up two days ago. He had been in a hopeless position since early December, when a last-ditch rescue attempt was driven back by Soviet troops. He was given one earlier chance to surrender, on 8 January, by Soviet Regional Commander, Marshal Rokossovsky. But Hitler repeated his order to the 6th Army that surrender would not be contemplated, and two days later the final Soviet offensive began to flush the Germans out of Stalingrad. Paulus lost his last German-controlled airfield ten days later, on 22 January, and with it the last hope of any more regular supplies. By 29 January the desperately weak 6th Army was split into two pockets of men. The surrender of Field-Marshal Paulus brought the ordeal to an end for one of the groups. The defeat of the second remnant today closes at last one of the most horrific chapters of the war so far.

Surviving German Forces, now Starving, Sick, and Low on Ammunition, Surrender at Stalingrad | World History Project Surviving German Forces, now Starving, Sick, and Low on Ammunition, Surrender at Stalingrad The Germans inside the pocket retreated from the suburbs of Stalingrad to the city itself. The loss of the two airfields, at Pitomnik on 16 January 1943 and Gumrak on either 25 January, or the night of 21/22 January, meant an end to air supplies and to the evacuation of the wounded. The third and last serviceable runway was at the Stalingradskaja flight school, which reportedly had the last landings and takeoffs on the night of 22–23 January. After daybreak on 23 January, there were no more reported landings except for continuous air drops of ammunition and food until the end. The Germans were now not only starving, but running out of ammunition. Nevertheless, they continued to resist stubbornly, in part because they believed the Soviets would execute any who surrendered.

In particular, the so-called "HiWis", Soviet citizens fighting for the Germans, had no illusions about their fate if captured. The Soviets were initially surprised by the number of Germans they had trapped, and had to reinforce their encircling troops. Bloody urban warfare began again in Stalingrad, but this time it was the Germans who were pushed back to the banks of the Volga. They fortified their positions in the factory districts and the Soviets encountered almost the same tooth-and-nail ferocity that they themselves displayed a month earlier. The Germans adopted a simple defense of fixing wire nets over all windows to protect themselves from grenades. The Soviets responded by fixing fish hooks to the grenades so they stuck to the nets when thrown. The Germans now had no usable tanks in the city. Those tanks which still functioned could at best be used as stationary cannons. The Soviets did not bother employing tanks in areas where the urban destruction restricted their mobility.

A Soviet envoy made Paulus a generous offer on honourable terms: if he surrendered within 24 hours, he would receive a guarantee of safety for all prisoners, medical care for the sick and wounded, prisoners allowed to keep their personal belongings, "normal" food rations, and repatriation to whatever country they wished to go to after the war—but Paulus, ordered not to surrender by Adolf Hitler, did not respond, ensuring the destruction of the Sixth Army. Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus (right) and his aides, Generalleutnant Arthur Schmidt (middle) and Wilhelm Adam (left) after their surrender. On 30 January 1943, the 10th anniversary of his coming to power, Hitler promoted Paulus to Generalfeldmarschall. Since no German Field Marshal had ever been taken prisoner, Hitler assumed that Paulus would fight on or take his own life. However, when Soviet forces closed in on his headquarters in the ruined GUM department store the next day, Paulus surrendered.

The remnants of the Axis forces in Stalingrad surrendered on 2 February; 91,000 tired, ill, and starving prisoners were taken, including 3,000 Romanians, the survivors of the 20th Infantry Division, 1st Cavalry Division and “Col. Voicu” Detachment. To the delight of the Soviet forces and the dismay of the Third Reich, the prisoners included 22 generals. Hitler was furious and confided that Paulus "could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow." The German public was not officially told of the disaster until the end of January 1943, though positive media reports had stopped in the weeks before the announcement. Stalingrad marked the first time that the Nazi government publicly acknowledged a failure in its war effort; it was not the first major setback of the German military, but the crushing defeat where German losses were almost equal to those of the Soviets was unprecedented. Prior losses of the Soviet Union were generally three times as high as the German ones.

On 31 January, regular programming on German state radio was replaced by a broadcast of the somber Adagio movement from Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, followed by the announcement of the defeat at Stalingrad. On 18 February Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels gave his famous Sportpalast speech in Berlin, encouraging the Germans to accept a total war which would claim all resources and efforts from the entire population. Red Army soldier marches a German soldier into captivity. According to the German documentary film Stalingrad, over 11,000 soldiers refused to lay down their arms at the official surrender, presumably believing that fighting to the death was better than a slow end in Soviet camps. They continued to resist, hiding in cellars and sewers, but by early March 1943, the remaining small and isolated pockets of resistance had surrendered. According to Soviet intelligence documents shown in the documentary, 2,418 of the men were killed and 8,646 captured. Of the more than 500,000 Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians taken prisoner, few ever returned to their homes.

Of the 91,000 German prisoners, only about 5,000 ever returned. Already weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, they were sent to labour camps all over the Soviet Union, where most of them died of disease (particularly typhus), cold, overwork, mistreatment, and malnutrition. Some were kept in the city to help with rebuilding. In March 1943, 40,000 Germans were buried in a mass grave, victims of a typhus epidemic. A handful of senior officers were taken to Moscow and used for propaganda purposes, and some of them joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. Some, including Paulus, signed anti-Hitler statements which were broadcast to German troops. Paulus lived in the Soviet Union until 1952, then moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he spent the remainder of his days defending his actions at Stalingrad and was quoted as saying that Communism was the best hope for postwar Europe. General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach offered to raise an anti-Hitler army from the Stalingrad survivors, but the Soviets did not accept.

It was not until 1955 that the last of the handful of survivors were repatriated after a plea to the Politburo by Konrad Adenauer. Battle of Stalingrad - a summary - History in an HourHistory in an Hour On 2 February 1943, in what is considered the turning point of the Second World War in Europe, the final remnants of the German Sixth Army surrendered at the Battle of Stalingrad. Stalin’s City The city, originally called Tsaritsyn, was renamed Stalingrad, Stalin’s city, in April 1925, in recognition of Joseph Stalin ‘s leading role in saving the city from the counterrevolutionary ‘Whites’ during the Russian Civil War. (The fact that Leon Trotsky was more instrumental in saving Tsaritsyn was quietly forgotten). Considered important because of its supply of oil, the symbolic significance of Stalingrad, bearing the name of the Soviet leader, soon outweighed its strategic importance. ‘Not One Step Back’ The Germans started their attack on Stalingrad, Operation Blue, on 28 June 1942.

Led by the Sixth Army, Germany’s largest wartime army commanded by General Friedrich Paulus (pictured), the Germans were fully expecting a total victory as they pushed the Soviet forces back. The swift German advance alarmed Stalin so much, he issued his infamous ‘Not One Step Back’ directive of 28 July, ordering execution for the slightest sign of defeatism. Behind the Soviet frontlines roamed a second Soviet line ready to shoot any retreating ‘cowards’ or ‘traitors of the Motherland’. As Georgy Zhukov , one of Stalin’s top generals, said, ‘In the Red Army it takes a very brave man to be a coward’. By 23 August, the German advance had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and, with 600 planes, unleashed a devastating aerial bombardment. Entering the city, the Germans, along with their Axis comrades, comprising of Italians, Romanians and Hungarians, fought the Soviets street for street, house for house, sometimes room for room.

This, as the Germans called it, was rat warfare, where a strategic stronghold changed sides so many times, people lost count, where the front lines were so close one could throw back a grenade before it exploded, where snipers took their toll on the enemy, and where a soldier’s life expectancy was three days – if lucky. Stalin charged Zhukov to defend the city and formulate a plan to repulse the invader. (It’s worth noting here the difference between Stalin and Hitler as military leaders. After a series of blunders earlier in the war, Stalin, although he always like to take the credit, learnt to defer and listen to the experts, men like Zhukov. Hitler however always insisted he knew best and only canvassed the opinion of others if they agreed with him.) On 19 November 1942, the Soviet Red Army launched Zhukov’s meticulously-planned counteroffensive, attacking and sweeping in from two separate directions, a pincer movement. Within four days, the two-pronged Soviet attack had met in the middle and had totally encircled the beleaguered German forces.

Their objective was achieved so quickly that the Soviet camera crews missed the moment, and battalions of soldiers had to re-enact the essential scenes for the benefit of the cameras. The Soviets squeezed the 250,000 Germans and their Axis comrades tighter and tighter. As the feared Russian winter set in and temperatures dropped to the minus forties, starvation, frostbite, disease and suicide decimated the Germans. Medical facilities were, at best, crude. Unshakeable confidence On Christmas Day 1942, with the temperature at –25 degrees Fahrenheit, Paulus received a message from Hitler: ‘You should enter the New Year with the unshakeable confidence that I and the whole of the German Wehrmacht will do everything in our power to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad.’ Whether Paulus and his staff believed it and took any comfort from Hitler’s promise is doubtful. Either way reinforcements, although sent, were easily repulsed and the already hideous conditions only got worse. As one German officer put it, Stalingrad had become a ‘mass grave of the Wehrmacht’. Even the cats and dogs had fled the city.

But the Germans refused, at this point, to surrender for fear they’d be executed by the Russians. A few German planes did manage to land within the city and were able to get troops out amidst scenes of panic, with hundreds of men fighting for the few remaining places whilst being shot at by the Soviets. (On one of the last flights out, Paulus sent his wedding ring back to his wife. He hadn’t seen her since mid-1942 and would never see her again. She died in 1949). Hitler continued to dictate strategy from far away in Berlin, waving his hand vaguely over a map with no sense of the reality on the ground, and sacking generals who’s opinion differed from his. Hermann Goering , his chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, promised Hitler that his planes could drop 500 tons of supplies each day into Stalingrad. But with Soviet antiaircraft guns and poor weather against them, only a fraction, perhaps up to ten per cent, got through. The starving Germans resorted to eating rats and raw horse flesh. Frozen German corpses and dead horses were piled up and used as sandbags.

Surrender On 24 January, Paulus requested permission to surrender: ‘Troops without ammunition or food. Effective command no longer possible. 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs. Further defence senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.’ Hitler refused, saying it was the Sixth Army’s historic duty to stand firm to the ‘last man’. By 26 January 1943, however, the Sixth Army were trapped within two small pockets of the city. Despite the hopeless situation, Hitler still forbade surrender. On the 30th, the tenth anniversary of his coming to power , Hitler promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal on account that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. On 31 January, however, Paulus did. Hitler, 1,000 miles away, was furious. Paulus, he shouted, ‘could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow … What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway … What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal.

I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last field marshal I shall appoint in this war.’ As a Catholic, however, ‘honourable’ suicide was not an option for Paulus. Later, during captivity, he explained ‘I [had] no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal’ (referring to Hitler’s highest army rank during the First World War ). Two days after Paulus’ surrender, on 2 February 1943, the remnants of his stricken army also surrendered; the Battle of Stalingrad was lost. Over a million soldiers on all sides had died in the city; over 90,000 Axis troops were taken prisoner of war, including, much to Stalin’s delight, 22 German generals, many later paraded through the streets of Moscow. Up to half the prisoners died on the marches to the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps, and most of the other half died in captivity; only about 6,000 returned home on their eventual release in 1955; about six per cent of those captured during the battle of Stalingrad. The Captive Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus was the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking capture of the war.

Later, during 1943, the Germans offered a swap – Paulus for Yakov Dzhugashvili , Stalin’s son. (Stalin’s real name was Dzhugashvili). Yakov had been serving as a lieutenant in the Red Army artillery when, on 16 July 1941, within a month of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union , he was captured by the Germans and taken prisoner. Stalin considered all prisoners as traitors to the motherland and those that surrendered he demonised as ‘malicious deserters’. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ he once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland’. So, in response to the German offer, Paulus for his son, Stalin refused. Following the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 , Paulus, still a prisoner-of-war, became a leading opponent of Hitler’s Germany, even going so far to join the German anti-Nazi organization, the ‘National Committee for a Free Germany’. Based in the Soviet Union, it called on Germans to desert Hitler for the sake of Germany’s future and surrender.

Post-war, Paulus appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. After ten years of captivity, he was released in 1953, and settled in the East German city of Dresden, where he died 1 February 1957, aged 66. 6/12/2006 • World War II The arrogance of Adolf Hitler and the German high command was heightened by the enemy’s stupendous losses in Operation Barbarossa. The great offensive of 1941 might not have destroyed the Soviet Union, but more than 3 million Russians were dead. Three million more were in German prison camps. Add to those grim statistics the tens of thousands murdered, or dead from deliberate starvation and mistreatment at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS. German flags flew over the Ukraine, Russia’s granary, and over the Donbas, industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. A third of the country’s rail network was in German hands; its heavy industrial production was down by three-fourths.

The Red Army had become a blunted instrument, its tanks and aircraft destroyed, its best divisions chewed up and spat out by the blitzkrieg, its winter 1941 counterattack met, then checked, by a German army at the very nadir of its own resources and fortunes. German damage to the Soviets, however, had not been achieved without cost. More than 900,000 Germans were dead, wounded or missing — almost a third of the invasion force. As late as May 1942, some German infantry formations were at little more than a third of their authorized strength. More than 4,200 tanks had been destroyed or damaged, and an overburdened industrial system no longer had any hope of replacing all of them. Roughly 100,000 trucks and other motor vehicles were gone, as were more than 200,000 horses — the latter arguably more important than the lost machines. Since June 1941, Nazi Germany had been at war with both the world’s largest land power, the Soviet Union, and its greatest mercantile empire, Great Britain.

In December it added the biggest industrial power, the United States, to its list of enemies. Hitler understood that his Third Reich did not possess anything like the resources to match such a coalition. He did not intend to try. On December 10, 1941, he had assumed personal command of the Eastern Front. Many of the key figures of Operation Barbarossa, such as Heinz Guderian, Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock, were relieved of command or transferred. In their places stood new men, with reputations and careers to make. Like Hitler, they viewed the winter setbacks as temporary. And in many ways he was right. A hundred thousand men, cut off in the Demyansk pocket south of Leningrad, had been supplied by air from January to the end of April 1942, and were then relieved. A month later, German and Romanian troops under Erich von Manstein completed the conquest of the Crimea, driving its last Soviet defenders literally into the sea in a series of frontal attacks.

Even when they operated on a shoestring, nothing seemed beyond the German Landser — the infantry in worn field-gray uniforms, the men who crewed the tanks and manned the guns, and the junior officers and NCOs who led them. The German army in the spring of 1942 remained a superbly tempered instrument, combining the best features of an ideologically motivated citizen army and a seasoned professionalized force. The months in Russia had pitilessly exposed weak human and materiel links. New tanks and weapons still existed mostly on drawing boards, but officers and men knew how to use what they had to best advantage. The 37mm anti-tank gun, so helpless against Russian armor that it was nicknamed the ‘army door-knocker,’ was giving way to a high-velocity 50mm piece. The Panzerkampfwagen (Pzkw.) Mk. III tank remained the mainstay of the armored divisions, but it too appeared in an upgunned version. Its longtime stablemate, the Pzkw. Mk. IV, was beginning to exchange its short-barreled 75mm gun for a high-velocity version that could match all but the heaviest Soviet armor.

Nothing spectacular — but enough to enhance the conviction among the German soldiers that they had the measure of their enemies and were still able to defeat them. From highest to lowest, the German soldiers believed that their mobility, shock power, communications and above all disciplined initiative, resting on the base of comradeship and confidence fostered by the bitter fighting of 1941, would bring victory in 1942. The losses suffered and the lessons learned during the previous year nevertheless structured planning for the next year’s campaign. Instead of three offensives moving in different directions, Hitler’s directive of April 5, 1942, projected only holding actions in the northern and central sectors. The focus for the spring campaign would be in the south, with a major drive toward the Caucasus. The objective would be the destruction of Soviet forces in the region and seizure of oil fields that were vital to the German war effort. A secondary objective was Stalingrad — not for its own sake, but in order to cut the Volga River and isolate the Russians south of the industrial city. Despite its reduced scale, the proposed offensive was risky. It would be launched on a 500-mile front.

If it gained the set objectives, it would create a salient of more than 1,300 miles. Hindering the drive was the fact that the road and rail networks would grow thinner the farther the Germans advanced. The main attack was scheduled to begin at the end of June — at best, four to five months before rain and snow would put an end to mobile operations. Even if the offensive succeeded, however, there was no guarantee that the Soviet Union would collapse. It had other major domestic sources of oil — not to mention the promise of support from its new ally, the United States, which was committed to keeping Russia in the fight at all costs. Such wider issues were not raised among German officers, who were focusing their energy on preparations for the upcoming campaign, which was dubbed Operation Blue. German planning staffs focused on the war’s operational and tactical levels. The army’s rapid expansion since Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 had left it so short of qualified staff officers that everybody was too immersed in details to have any energy left for evaluating the big picture.

For their part, Soviet concerns in early 1942 primarily involved buying time — time for American assistance to arrive, time to re-establish an industrial base physically transplanted east of the Ural Mountains, and time to reorganize and re-equip an army shaken by disaster. Stavka, the Soviet high command, advocated a defensive strategy. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin wanted to mount local offensives, designed in part to wear down the Germans and keep them off balance, and in part to restore Soviet domestic morale, which was far too low for the dictator’s peace of mind. It was increasingly clear that the security and propaganda apparatus that had intimidated and inspired the Soviet people through the privations and purges of the preceding decades was by itself insufficient to counter the pressures presented by the German invasion. Only the Germans’ bestial behavior in territory they had conquered and their reluctance to consider mobilizing opponents of the Soviet regime under their flag had kept disaffection with the Soviet regime from reaching explosive proportions. Stalin expected the revitalized Red Army to provide a safety valve by winning small-scale victories. Instead, the Germans checked and threw back its ill-prepared efforts.

In May, a Soviet attack briefly recaptured the city of Kharkov but collapsed when a German counterstrike surrounded and destroyed four entire armies. Then, on June 28, Germany’s Army Group South tore the Russian front wide open. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who had led Army Group Center almost to within artillery range of Moscow before being relieved of command in 1941, was getting a second chance. He had 68 divisions, nine of them panzer and five more motorized. He possessed 750 tanks. The Luftwaffe provided more than 1,200 aircraft, including the close-support specialists of the VIII Air Corps under General Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of World War I’s ‘Red Baron.’ Bock’s order of battle included 25 divisions from German allies and client states as well. Mostly Italian and Romanian, those formations were not as well equipped, trained, led or motivated as their German counterparts. Aware of that, Bock intended that they would simply play screening roles, serving as flank guards, and occupy less vulnerable sectors.

Nevertheless, their direct participation in the offensive indicated the weakness of the German army in 1942 relative to its responsibilities — and implied a promise of trouble should things not go according to plan. For the first few weeks, the German offensive was a repeat of the lightning advances of Operation Barbarossa. German mechanized spearheads rolled forward across the steppe under an air umbrella impenetrable to a Red air force still woefully short of skilled pilots. But the ground gained was not matched by Soviet losses. Frustrated, Hitler fired Bock and split Army Group South in two. Army Group A, under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, was to turn south, take Rostov and drive into the Caucasus. Army Group B, commanded by Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, would thrust east and cut the Volga while screening the left wing of the offensive. The new organization gained ground but produced no great tokens of victory. The Red Army’s abortive spring offensives had cost it more than a half-million casualties, which were suffered primarily among its best formations. Stavka’s officers argued that, temporarily at least, space must be exchanged for time. Stalin reluctantly concurred.

Even after he authorized a strategic retreat on July 6, some Soviet formations were cut off by the successive German pincers. While some of the trapped Russians fought on, others surrendered with only token resistance. Enraged, Stalin issued Order Number 227 on July 28. Distributed to all fighting units, it called for an end to retreat and demanded that each yard of Soviet territory be defended. The penalty for failure to comply ranged from summary execution to service in a penal unit. During the course of the war, more than 400,000 Russians were sentenced to penal battalions and another 250,000 were sentenced to be shot for failure to obey 227. Frustrated by a perceived lack of progress, Hitler became more deeply involved in the campaign’s operational aspects. On July 16, he diverted the Fourth Panzer Army, and with it the bulk of Army Group B’s mechanized forces, south to Rostov, hoping to encircle Soviet forces there. At the same time, he not only sustained Army Group B’s mission to drive toward the Volga but, on July 20, specifically ordered its Sixth Army to attack Stalingrad.

A week earlier, Stavka had established an independent Stalingrad Front, and on July 19 Stalin put the city on a war footing. At the time, both seemed little more than gestures. The Front’s three armies were an uneasy mixture of green troops and formations hammered in the earlier fighting. But Order 227 was more than a set of draconian threats. It was a reminder that there was nowhere else to go. The Russian people realized that not only the Soviet state was at stake. Despite the horrors of Stalin’s regime, the citizens responded, not merely by digging ditches and filling sandbags, but by reporting to work and finishing their shifts. On August 9, German troops captured the oil producing center of Maikop but found it completely wrecked. As supplies ran low and the Red Army’s resistance stiffened, the German advance stalled on August 28 — well short of its objective, the Grozhny oil fields. Hitler dismissed the responsible commander at the end of August and began directing Army Group A himself. Meanwhile, Army Group B found itself locked into increasingly bitter, close-quarters fighting as it clawed its way toward the Volga.

Weichs initially intended to use the pincer movements that had served the Germans so well for a year. The Sixth Army from the north and the Fourth Panzer Army from the south were to break through the front and cut off the Soviet forces west of Stalingrad. Both met determined resistance in terrain that handicapped the small-unit tactical maneuvers that often gave the Germans an advantage over their numerically superior foes. When it was man to man and tank against tank, casualties were higher and advances shorter. Nevertheless, the little flags on the map tables of both sides kept moving in the same direction, toward the Volga and Stalingrad. On August 21, the tide seemed suddenly to turn. German infantry crossed the Don River, the first waves in rubber boats. Pioneers built bridges under Luftwaffe air cover. The next day, a panzer corps moved through the breach, and on the 23rd the spearheads of the 16th Panzer Division reached the Volga. As they advanced, however, the Germans found themselves under counterattack by everything the Soviets could throw at them, including civilians with rifles and armbands, and tanks fresh off Stalingrad’s production lines.

Most of them were T-34s, whose gunpower and mobility the Germans had learned to respect earlier in the summer. But the German crews were better trained and more experienced, and they picked off the green Russians by the dozens as the Luftwaffe set Stalingrad ablaze and German reinforcements pushed toward the river. Still determined to complete his pincer movement, Weichs ordered both his armies forward, setting their junction point at the town of Pitomnik, 10 miles west of Stalingrad. Instead of staying in place to be destroyed, however, the Russians retreated into the city — whether on their own initiative or under German pressure depends on the nationality of the analyst. Convinced that this movement symbolized the end of significant resistance, Weichs ordered an advance into Stalingrad’s suburbs. The German commander was less inhibited at the prospects of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad than his armor commanders, most of whom were dubious about committing to a fight that denied their panzers freedom of movement. Their opposition ended, however, when one panzer corps commander was relieved for recommending withdrawal in his sector. The man directly responsible for that relief had assumed command of the Sixth Army in January.

General Friedrich Paulus had a good record as a staff officer and a corresponding image as a soft-shoe type rather than a muddy-boots commander. Nevertheless, he had taken the Sixth Army across the steppe, and by August 31 most of his divisions were closing on the Volga, clearing what seemed to be Red Army die-hards holding out in Stalingrad’s rubble. At this stage Paulus and Stalin had a common perspective: Both believed Stalingrad was doomed. On August 26, the Soviet leader played his trump card. He appointed Georgi Zhukov his deputy supreme commander in chief. Zhukov typified a new breed of Soviet general: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything required to crush the Germans and not inhibited by threats, actual or implied. Arriving at Stalingrad on August 29, he insisted that further counterattacks with the available resources were futile. Stalingrad must and would be held — but in the context of a wider strategic plan.

Even as the situation around Stalingrad worsened and Zhukov busied himself with putting together a workable defensive plan, Stavka’s strategists insisted that the Red Army must not merely respond to enemy attacks, but concentrate its own strength and seize the initiative. In Zhukov’s absence, staff officers began developing plans for a winter campaign involving two major operations. Uranus involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, then encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed by Saturn, which would cut off and annihilate whatever remained of Army Groups A and B. Mars was the other half of the plan. With all eyes focused on the south, this operation would go in against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto quiet front of German Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. Described for years in Soviet literature as a diversion, Mars now appears to have been instead a complement to Uranus, intended like its counterpart to be followed by a second stage that would shatter Army Group Center and put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin.

It was an ambitious strategy for an army still improvising its recovery from the twin shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold out. That critical mission was, in turn, the responsibility of Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov. On September 12, he was appointed commander of the Sixty-second Army, the city’s principal operational formation. On one level his mission seemed obvious: hold or die, with the threat of army firing squads and the pistols of the secret police keeping his men on the line as long as any remained standing. Chuikov, however, was also a student of tactics. The Germans, he argued, had prevailed through complex combined-arms attacks. The broken terrain of an urban warfare environment like Stalingrad worked against that kind of sophistication. The Soviet commander used that to his advantage. Rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the Germans to batter him, Chuikov ordered his troops to ‘grab them by the belt’ and engage them as closely as possible, to fight not merely street by street and building by building, but floor by floor and room by room.

Such tactics would neutralize the Germans’ firepower and would deny them even the limited maneuvering space they needed for tactical initiatives. It would also cost lives, but the Soviet Union had lives to spend. On September 14, the final German drive for the Volga began. By that afternoon Chuikov’s command post had been silenced and the fight was decentralizing to rifle-company level as German spearheads flicked toward the landing areas along the Volga that were Stalingrad’s last hope. With the fate of the city in the balance, a desperate Chuikov secured a single division from Zhukov, Aleksandr Rodimstev’s 13th Guards. That night the division crossed the Volga, clawed out a bridgehead and held it for five days. It was long enough for further reinforcements to reach the city. It was also long enough to create doubts on the German side about the wisdom of clearing the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the river that were becoming the focal points for a defense whose ferocity surpassed anything they had ever experienced. Stalingrad became a city of rubble, smoke and ash, where seeing and breathing became chores and movement invited anything from a sniper’s bullet to an artillery barrage.

In one of modern history’s great examples of leadership, Chuikov kept his men fighting by the force of his character. He offered no rhetoric and made no promises. Instead, he projected a dour fatalism that linked the fate of the city and its garrison. German generals and colonels also led from the front, hoping that inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, however, the German army in Stalingrad was ‘demodernizing,’ losing the capacity to fight anything but a close-quarters battle of attrition. German Chief of Staff Franz Halder warned of the risks and was dismissed on September 24. The message was clear. To meet Paulus’ calls for reinforcements in the face of mounting casualties, Weichs began stripping less active sectors north and south of Stalingrad of German formations and replacing them with Romanians and Italians. The gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had somehow been able to recapture the initiative. Instead, the most capable German formations were being chewed up in fruitless attacks in Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe never designed for sustained operations was suffering from increasing maintenance problems. Artillery pieces were wearing out.

Tanks were breaking down. The Soviets by contrast had succeeded in systematizing their reinforcement and resupply system across the Volga. More and more heavy guns were supporting the infantry. On September 30, Hitler had announced Stalingrad’s imminent capture. Instead, it was the Germans who were pinned in place, able to drive forward only locally and episodically, with losses far out of proportion to either military or propaganda gains. As the October rains heralded winter’s approach, the Fhrer hinted at great rewards for Paulus when the city was finally secured. The Sixth Army launched its final coordinated attack on October 14. It broke into and through Chuikov’s lines, once again driving spearheads to the Volga’s banks, halting the movement of reinforcements across the river. The German plan called for an urban encirclement, a battle of maneuver and annihilation following Stalingrad’s street network. It almost worked. Chuikov, as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, talked about an inexplicable force driving the Germans forward.

It was, however, merely a last brilliant flash of the fighting power, skill and spirit that had taken the Wehrmacht across Western Europe, North Africa and into the heart of Russia. Pressed against the riverbank, the Soviets rallied and held, fighting the Sixth Army to a standstill. On October 31, Chuikov counterattacked. His force was only a division strong and gained less than 200 yards of polluted rubble, but it thrust at the heart of six weeks’ worth of denial on the part of the Germans. Twenty of the German army’s best divisions were packed at the tip of an immense salient hundreds of miles inside Russia. The salient’s flanks were held by troops for whom ‘dubious’ was a compliment. The main supply route was a railroad that at one point ran barely 60 miles from the front line, and winter was setting in. It was at this moment that Zhukov unleashed Operation Uranus. For a month Stavka had held its hand, building up forces in the face of Stalin’s demands for action, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze.

Those forces now numbered a million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft and 14,000 guns — all of it undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures, and by its own conviction that the Soviets were as locked into Stalingrad as were the Germans. On November 19, a new Southwest Front, commanded by one of Zhukov’s protgs, General Nikolai Vatutin, hit the Romanian Third Army. A day later, another tank-tipped sledgehammer struck the Romanian Fourth Army on the Stalingrad salient’s southern flank. Hopelessly outgunned, the Romanians in both sectors collapsed. On November 23 the Soviet spearheads met near the town of Kalach, 50 miles from Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement. It took a week to complete the encirclement of the 20-odd divisions and 330,000 men caught in what soon became known as the ‘Stalingrad pocket.’ Within days, internal friction among Soviet commanders slowed the advance and stiffened German resistance.

Nevertheless, by November 30 a 100-mile gap existed between the Sixth Army and the rest of the Wehrmacht. Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have argued that Paulus erred in not breaking out immediately, with or without orders. His best chance, the argument runs, was before the Soviets could consolidate the envelopment. Weichs ordered him to cease offensive operations the same day that Uranus began. But the Sixth Army was locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. Breaking contact at the front was only the first step in what would have been an incredibly complex maneuver. Even had Paulus acted to break out, there was no guarantee that the army’s fuel and ammunition reserves would be sufficient for a fighting retreat across the steppe in midwinter. The response to the unfolding disaster among the Sixth Army’s command structure was conditioned by the decline of the maneuver-war mentality after two months of static operations. Too many of the German sergeants, captains and colonels who knew how to fight in the open were dead, or had been promoted to replace other casualties. The new hands — so far as replacements had been forthcoming — were conditioned to moving a few yards at a time, and very cautiously.

When Hitler proposed to relieve Stalingrad from outside, he reinforced an attitude held by many in the Sixth Army. The Fhrer’s plans called for Weichs to stabilize the front and to launch the new Army Group Don toward Stalingrad. The new army group’s commander was Erich von Manstein, who since the start of Barbarossa had established a record as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions. Manstein’s command, however, was scraped together from various bits and pieces. It was not until December 12 that he was able to concentrate a half-dozen divisions for Operation Winter Storm, the projected grand advance to relieve what Hitler now proclaimed Fortress Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the garrison was dependent on supply from the air. There is strong evidence that on November 20, alluding to the earlier success at Demyansk, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek told Hitler that under the right conditions Stalingrad could be supplied from the air — not Reichsmarshall Hermann Gring, as has so often been asserted. Hitler used that information as a springboard for discussions with Gring, who assured the Fhrer of the Luftwaffe’s ability to successfully conduct the mission.

By that time Jeschonnek had investigated further and concluded that the Sixth Army’s bare-minimum requirements of 500 tons of supplies a day could not be met by the available aircraft. Gring ordered him to keep his data to himself. Doomed to failure from the start, hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots and aircrews soon set off on an operation to supply Paulus’ army. In the end nearly 500 aircraft were lost to weather and to a sophisticated Soviet defense system combining rings of guns and ground-controlled fighters. Only a steadily diminishing fraction of the required supplies arrived in a pocket under constantly growing pressure on the ground from increasingly superior Soviet forces. An increasing proportion of the reduced deliveries was necessarily ammunition. When Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s successor as chief of staff, reduced his food intake to the level of Stalingrad rations as a gesture of solidarity with the besieged troops, he lost more than 25 pounds in two weeks. The situation soon worsened even further. Operation Mars began on November 25, under Zhukov’s personal command. Its initial successes were countered by German armored reserves, and after losses appalling even by Soviet standards, Zhukov broke off the operation in mid-December.

That ended Stavka’s original ambitious plan. As Manstein’s forces began assembling and advancing, Operation Saturn was in turn modified to Little Saturn, aimed at checkmating Manstein’s breakthrough by enveloping and crushing its left flank. Little Saturn’s preliminary stages had already absorbed much of Manstein’s projected relief force by the time the main attack began on December 16. Soviet armor destroyed the Italian Eighth Army and temporarily overran the air base at Tatsinkaia, which was vital to the German airlift. Manstein drove forward with a single panzer corps on an ever-narrowing axis of advance in steadily worsening weather. Thirty-five miles from Stalingrad, the attack bogged down against Soviet armor. On December 19, Manstein informed Hitler that it was impossible to break through to Stalingrad and sustain a corridor. He recommended that the Sixth Army break out to meet him. Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the pocket to go over details of the plan and found the Sixth Army staff unwilling to risk such an attack until spring. Whatever Winter Storm’s odds, it was the last chance to salvage the Sixth Army.

In refusing to order the breakout, Manstein and Paulus showed an absence of the moral courage that is the principal requirement of high command. Instead they temporized, deferring to Hitler’s well-known and increasingly determined refusal to ‘abandon the Volga.’ For three days the debate among the German commanders continued as the Soviets drove into the German flank and rear. Then, on December 22, the question became moot. The newly arrived Second Guards Army opened an attack that drove Manstein’s slender spearhead back toward its start line. To an officer who subsequently flew into Stalingrad as Hitler’s emissary, Paulus said simply, ‘You are talking to dead men.’ With Soviet tanks and cavalry running wild in its virtually undefended rear areas, Army Group Don fell back and the Germans’ attention focused not on the fate of the Sixth Army but on the survival of their position in southern Russia. Hitler initially refused to make reinforcements available and shorten the front by withdrawing from the increasingly untenable Caucasus salient. Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of brilliant tactical-level ripostes between January and March 1943, he enabled most of Army Group A to escape.

In doing so he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted an operation already suffering from Stalin’s determination to pursue the offensive beyond the Red Army’s capacity to sustain it. Stalingrad, hopelessly isolated, was now expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible — a mission the Soviets initially sought to deny by negotiating a surrender. When Paulus refused, the final offensive began. On January 10, more than 7,000 guns and mortars began firing on every corner of the pocket within range. Tanks and infantry advanced simultaneously in all sectors, against resistance whose initial determination amazed even veterans of the earlier fighting. Even before the few remaining airfields were overrun, the Germans were living on rations measured in ounces, supplemented occasionally by horsemeat and the occasional rat. Conditions in the hospitals were beyond medieval. By January 17, the pocket had been reduced to half its size. Once again Paulus was summoned to surrender; once again he refused. German die-hards fell back into the city’s ruins, using tactics learned from the Russians to prolong the end as ammunition ran out and men sought terms at bayonet point. On January 31, Paulus’ headquarters was overrun.

The field marshal, newly promoted by Hitler, was lying on his bed when a Russian lieutenant burst in and captured him. Organized resistance continued until February 2. The Soviets took longer than that to sort out their 90,000 prisoners and start them on their long march into captivity. In Germany, radio stations played the funeral march from Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. In Russia, the propaganda machine tooled up to publicize the triumph of the Soviet motherland. Stalin and his generals began plans for a new campaign to crush the invaders once and for all. And from Alsace to Vladivostok, families waited for news of their missing men. In June 1942, Nazi Germany was looking forward to victory. Six months and a million casualties later, the Reich had barely averted catastrophe. This article was written by Dennis Showalter and originally appeared in the January 2003 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today! Stalingrad To see this content you need to install Flash player 10 or above. To see this content you need to install Flash player 10 or above.

Stalingrad The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the biggest of WW2, as Germany and the Soviet Union fought over the city for over five months. It is considered by many to be one of the 'turning points' of the World War Two, although as you will see use of that term has to be tempered somewhat. Eastern Front | August 1941 A different kind of war Why was the war against the Soviets a 'different kind of war'? Hitler had ordered that the war in the Soviet Union would be a war of ‘annihilation’. What motivated that terrible demand, and what were the consequences of it? Click here to read more in 'A different kind of war'. Eastern Front | January 1943 Stalingrad How did the Soviets win at Stalingrad? The battle of Stalingrad is believed by many to be one of the iconic events of the Second World War. But how did the Red Army gain victory? Click here to read more in 'Stalingrad'.

Eastern Front | 23rd August 1942 Child at Stalingrad Valentina Krutova She was just eleven years old when she, her youngest sister and elder brother were trapped behind enemy lines at Stalingrad. Click here to read more in 'Child at Stalingrad'. Eastern Front | November 1942 German soldier, Stalingrad Helmut Walz The brutality of the house to house fighting in Stalingrad almost defies imagination. Helmut Walz was one of those who took part in this struggle, and he vividly reveals just what it was like. Click here to read more in 'German soldier, Stalingrad'. Eastern Front | 31st January 1943 After the failure of Manstein’s relief effort – Operation Winter Storm – in December, it was clear that the Sixth Army was doomed. 90,000 German troops were taken prisoner. Click here to read more in 'Surrender of Stalingrad'. Eastern Front | 19th November 1942

Question: In what year of WW2 did the German forces surrender at Stalingrad?
Answer: 1943