The Stalingrad pocket split

In the last week of January 1943 the Sixth Army, encircled at Stalingrad, ceased to exist as an organised fighting force. After two weeks of the Soviet Operation Ring its soldiers had lost both airfields, most of their artillery and almost all the ground on the steppe west of the city. What remained to them were the ruins of Stalingrad along the Volga, cellars full of wounded and the last of their ammunition. In these days General Friedrich Paulus asked several times for permission to surrender – and was refused every time.

Requests and refusals

On 22 January, when Soviet troops broke through the defences at Voroponovo, Paulus reported to the Army High Command that the food had run out, ammunition was nearly exhausted, and further fighting threatened the disintegration of the army. Adolf Hitler rejected his request for freedom of action that same day: surrender was out of the question, and the army was to fight “to the last soldier and the last round”, because – so the explanation went – every day of resistance helped to rebuild the German front in the south.

On 24 January Paulus repeated his report. According to the surviving text of the signal, there were 18,000 wounded in the pocket “without the slightest help in the form of bandages and medicines”, the troops were exhausted, and further resistance meant pointless death. He proposed that he be allowed to cease fighting wherever the ammunition had run out. The answer was again no. Hitler forbade surrender and ordered the army to defend its positions to the end. This day – 24 January – is sometimes described as the final phase of the disintegration of the German forces at Stalingrad; it was indeed the moment when the fate of the Sixth Army was sealed not only on the battlefield but also at the Führer’s headquarters.

From Berlin’s perspective the army had one more task – a propaganda one. The leadership of the Third Reich was already preparing the story of the “heroic sacrifice on the Volga”, and the image of an army fighting to its last breath could not be spoiled by a surrender. For many weeks German war communiqués concealed the scale of the disaster from the public.

The pocket cut in half

By the end of January Soviet troops were attacking from the west straight towards the city. On 25 January General Ivan Chistyakov’s 21st Army broke into the western outskirts of Stalingrad. Facing it, from the Volga side, General Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army attacked; since September it had been defending a narrow strip of ruins along the river. On the morning of 26 January the leading units of the 21st Army linked up with men of General Alexander Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division and Colonel Nikolai Batyuk’s 284th Rifle Division near the Red October workers’ settlement, north-west of Mamayev Kurgan.

The meeting had a symbolic dimension. The soldiers of the 62nd Army had fought for more than four months cut off from the rest of the front, supplied only across the Volga; now for the first time they were joined by land with the troops advancing from the west. Participants’ memoirs describe tears, embraces and the exchange of red flags.

Militarily it meant that the pocket had been cut in two. In the southern part, which included the city centre, was Paulus with his staff, who had moved into the basement of the department store on the Square of the Fallen Fighters. In the northern part, around the Tractor Factory and the Barrikady works, General Karl Strecker’s XI Army Corps and the remnants of other units held out. The only link between the two parts was now the radio. On 28 January Soviet troops also split the southern group, separating the city centre from the districts further south.

Hunger, frost and typhus

Conditions in the pocket became catastrophic in these days. Since the collapse of the airlift – after the loss of Pitomnik on 16 January and of Gumrak during the night of 21/22 January – supplies arrived only in containers dropped by parachute, many of which fell into ruins beyond German reach or onto Soviet positions. Rations, at starvation level since December, in practice ceased to exist; men ate the remains of horses, dogs and anything that could be found in the rubble. As early as December army doctors had recorded deaths of soldiers who were neither wounded nor sick but simply died of exhaustion; in January this became a mass phenomenon.

Estimates of the number of wounded and sick in the last days of the battle vary considerably. Paulus himself spoke on 22 January of more than 12,000 wounded without care, and on 24 January of 18,000; historians, including the sick and frostbitten, give figures of the order of 20,000–40,000 for the end of January, and some as many as 50,000. The wounded lay crammed into cellars, unheated bunkers and ruins, often without dressings or painkillers. Dysentery spread, as did typhus carried by lice, and with night temperatures falling to minus 20–30 degrees, frostbite took as heavy a toll as wounds. The wounded who could not be taken along during withdrawals met a fate of their own: they were left at their posts, and many of them froze to death.

More and more soldiers – especially Romanians and the Wehrmacht’s Soviet auxiliaries, the so-called Hiwis, for whom captivity meant particular danger – left their positions or surrendered against orders. Soviet figures state that between 17 January and 1 February nearly 40,000 German and Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner.

The last aircraft and the generals’ quarrels

The last aircraft left the pocket on 23 January from a makeshift strip by the flying school on the edge of the city. They carried out the last wounded, the mail and some of the Sixth Army’s records. Earlier, on 18 January, General Hans-Valentin Hube, commander of XIV Panzer Corps, had been flown out of the pocket on Hitler’s orders to help organise supplies from outside; individual staff officers and specialists were also flown out. For those who stayed behind, this was a clear sign of whom the command still considered necessary.

Within the army command itself, quarrels were growing. General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, commander of LI Army Corps, who as early as November had demanded a breakout from the encirclement against Hitler’s will, decided on 25 January that further fighting was pointless and left it to his division commanders to decide whether to cease resistance. Paulus then took his divisions away from him and placed them under General Walter Heitz, commander of VIII Corps, who announced that anyone attempting to surrender would be shot. The army’s chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt, was among the most uncompromising advocates of carrying out Hitler’s orders to the end. Paulus himself, exhausted and, according to witnesses, increasingly apathetic, could not bring himself to defy the Führer.

Place in the war

The splitting of the pocket on 26 January decided the battle, although the fighting went on for another week. On 30 January, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal – no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner, so the promotion was read as a hint to commit suicide. The next day, 31 January, Paulus surrendered with his staff and the southern group in the basement of the department store; Seydlitz and Schmidt went into captivity with him. On 2 February Strecker’s northern group capitulated. Some 91,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, emaciated, sick and frostbitten; most died in the first months of captivity of hunger, disease and exhaustion, and only about 5,000–6,000 returned home after the war.

The week from 22 to 31 January showed that for Hitler the Sixth Army had ceased to be a force to be saved and had become a myth to be created. For the Red Army it was the end of a battle which, from the encirclement of the Sixth Army in November 1942, had become the turning point of the war in the east.