When did the 6th army finally surrender?? It was a shame because they had ample opportunities to make a fighting withdraw but Hitler wouldn’t allow it and condemned 100’s of thousands of the finest soldiers in the world to death by starvation and exposure in Russian gulags. I know they were our enemy also but what a waste of human life.
Paulus was made a Field Marshall on January 30th, 1943 (Hitler’s way of telling him to commit suicide as no German FM had ever been been captured alive before). Paulus was captured in his his Stalingrad bunker (the basement of a bombed out department store) the next day and was forced to surrender to the Soviets. All German troops ended fighting by February 2. 90,000 German troops were marched into captivity. Less than 6000 ever returned to Germany about ten years after the war ended. Many froze to death being marched to POW camps in Siberia.
The Soviets encircled Stalingrad on November 19th just as the brutal Russian winter was setting in. My own guess is that that the Sixth Army had no more than two weeks at most to break out of the trap. All of Hitler’s top military minds including Field Marshall von Manstein pleaded to allow a break out. But the morphine addicted RM Goering talked Hitler into keeping the entrapped army in the Stalingrad pocket arguing that the Luftwaffe could keep them supplied via an airlift-—this despite the fact that the awful winter conditions made such flights next to impossible. Hitler, too, was being supplied with an ample cocktail of bizarre drugs provided to him by his personal physician, the notorious quack Dr. Morell at the time, which no doubt impaired his decision making abilities, pumping him up with an air of invincibility, although more rational and sober minds studying the maps all agreed that a break out was necessary to save the 6th Army. But Hitler would have none of it and allowed the army to suffer a grisly fate which proved to be the decisive turning battle of WWII and which also encouraged many German officers to plot against Hitler which culminated in the July 20th 1944 Bomb Plot. By then, many Allied strategists, had come to believe that Hitler’s constant strategic blundering was their greatest asset and gave up on their own assassination attempts on him.