Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich

Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich (1890–1957),German Army officer who served as Halder's deputy chief of the Army General Staff (OKH) and chief of its operations section before commanding Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

Paulus spent all but the first few months of the First World War as a staff officer and by the start of the Second had risen to become Chief of Staff to Reichenau who commanded Tenth Army during the Polish campaign (renamed Sixth Army after it) and then in the fighting which preceded the fall of France in June 1940.

Paulus, a great admirer of Hitler, finalized the OKH plan for the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) and in January 1942 Reichenau, who had just replaced Rundstedt as C-in-C Army Group South, requested that Paulus take over Sixth Army which took part in Hitler's spring offensive into the Caucasus (seeGerman–Soviet war, 4).

After an uncertain start Paulus had some successes, particularly at Kharkov in May 1942, and by August was poised to attack Stalingrad. But his appointment was seen by many as being an ill-advised one considering he had virtually no combat experience. However, by October 1942 he had taken most of Stalingrad but then found himself surrounded. Instead of acting to save his Army, by breaking out when it was possible to do so, he obeyed Hitler's orders to stay put. His promotion to field marshal on 30 January 1943, when capitulation was inevitable, was Hitler's invitation for him to commit suicide—no German field marshal had ever surrendered—but the next day his HQ was overrun, and he and his staff were taken prisoner. During the following days, in one of the turning-points of the whole war, 110,000 German troops, including 20,000 wounded, went into captivity.

After the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler (see Schwarze Kapelle) Paulus joined the Federation of German Officers (Bund Deutscher Offiziere). This had been formed the previous summer by captured Sixth Army officers as part of the National Committee of Free Germany (Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland), a Soviet-inspired anti-Nazi propaganda organization of German Communist emigrants. Paulus made a number of propaganda broadcasts which resulted in his family being arrested by the Gestapo, and he was a witness for the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. Released in 1953, he became a resident of Dresden in the German Democratic Republic.

Bibliography

Goerlitz, W. , Paulus and Stalingrad (London, 1963).