Hitler forbids retreat, and an entire German army surrenders
What happened
Fighting for the industrial city that bore Stalin's name, German soldiers described house-to-house combat so brutal they called it Rattenkrieg, the war of the rats. When a Soviet counteroffensive encircled the German Sixth Army in November 1942, trapping around 250,000 men, its commander Friedrich Paulus asked Hitler for permission to break out; Hitler refused, repeatedly, promising an airlift that could never deliver anywhere near the 300 tons of daily supplies Hermann Göring had promised, and it fell to roughly a tenth of that. On 24 January 1943, Hitler radioed that surrender is forbidden... to the last man and the last round. Six days later he promoted Paulus to field marshal, a rank no German officer had ever surrendered while holding, a signal historians read as an unmistakable hint to commit suicide. Paulus refused, later telling a subordinate simply, I'm a Christian, I refuse to commit suicide, and surrendered on 31 January. Of the 91,000 men taken prisoner, only around 5,000 ever returned home.
Why it matters
The destruction of an entire German field army, the first time in the war a German field marshal had surrendered, was the clearest possible proof that Germany could not win a war of attrition against Soviet industrial capacity, and the Wehrmacht never regained the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front afterward.
How we know
German soldiers' own wartime letters and diaries, recovered from the battlefield and from postwar prisoner testimony, describe the fighting and starvation in granular detail, while Hitler's and Paulus's own radioed exchanges survive in German military archives.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Battle of Stalingrad: The Destruction of Germany's Sixth Army · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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