Friedrich Paulus
Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus (
23 September 1890,
Breitenau –
1 February 1957,
Dresden) was a
German general, later promoted to
field marshal, during
World War II.
Paulus was the son of a schoolteacher. He tried, unsuccessfully, to secure a cadetship in the
German Navy, and briefly studied law at
Marburg University. When that failed, he left the university to join the 111th Infantry Regiment as an officer cadet in February
1910. He married Elena Rosetti-Solescu on
4 July 1912.
When
World War I began, Paulus's regiment was part of the thrust into
France, and he saw action in the
Vosges and around
Arras in the autumn of
1914. After a leave of absence due to illness, he joined the
Alpenkorps as a staff officer, serving in
Macedonia, France, and
Serbia. By the end of the war, he was a
captain.
Paulus remained in the scaled-down
Reichswehr that came into being after the
Treaty of Versailles and was assigned to the 13th Infantry Regiment at
Stuttgart as a company commander. He served in various staff positions for over a decade (
1921-
1933) and then briefly commanded a motorized brigade (
1934-
1935) before being named chief of staff for the Panzer headquarters in 1935. He remained in that post until
1939, when he was promoted to
Major General and became chief of staff for the
German Tenth Army, with which he saw service in
Poland, the
Netherlands, and
Belgium (by the latter two campaigns, the army had been renumbered as the
Sixth Army). He was named deputy chief of the German General Staff in
1940, and in that role he helped draft the plans for the invasion of the
Soviet Union. He became commander of the German Sixth Army in January
1942 and led the drive on
Stalingrad.
Against his better judgment, he followed
Adolf Hitler's orders to hold the Army's position in Stalingrad under all circumstances, even after his forces were completely encircled by the enemy. A relief effort by
Don Army Group under Field Marshal
von Manstein failed, inevitably, because Paulus was refused permission to break out of the encirclement. The 6th Army was defeated together with its
Romanian allies and Russian auxiliary troops by the
Red Army under Marshal
Georgy Zhukov in January
1943. The battle was fought with terrible losses on both sides and the most unimaginable suffering, scarring the Russian and German nations for several generations.
Paulus' inability or unwillingness to save his men by taking a decision against the will of Hitler to extricate the army from an impossible position puts him in an historically unfavourable light. However, he also refused to take his own life as Hitler had suggested. Paulus was expected to hold Stalingrad to the death. On 30 January 1943, Hitler promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal, after the Sixth Army's fate was sealed. Since no German field marshal in history had ever surrendered, the implication was clear.
Paulus surrendered on January 31, 1943. He became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime while in Soviet captivity, joining the Russian-sponsored
National Committee for a Free Germany and appealing to Germans to surrender. He later acted as a witness for the prosecution at the
Nuremberg trials. He was released in
1953, two years before the repatriation of the remaining German POWs (mostly other Stalingrad veterans) who had been designated war criminals by the Soviets.
Paulus remains a controversial historic figure, due to his late conversion to the anti-Nazi cause and behaviour towards Hitler. He is frequently unfavourably compared with
Erwin Rommel, who came from a similar background of a family with no great military distinction, who was also much favoured by Hitler, and whose resistance to his patron led to his being forced to end his own life by swallowing cyanide.
Friedrich Paulus died in
East Germany, as an inspector of police.
Antony Beevor,
Stalingrad, The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (New York: Penguin, 1998).
