I noticed in one of those “Today in History” news reports that the Battle of Stalingrad began 64 years ago today. In the article it says that 250,000 German troops were encircled and captured. What became of these men? Did they all perish in POW camps? Were they executed? Did any survive and make it back to Germany after the war?
There’s a good book, just called Stalingrad, that details the battle. Enemy At The Gates is the other one everybody cites.
Essentially, the ones that didn’t freeze to death were marched off to POW camps, where they… froze to death. Very few (<10,000) of those troops made it back to Germany alive, IIRC.
It’s been a couple years since I read it; any one have a clearer memory of the details?
From wiki:
An excellent read on the subject is Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Despite the atrocities of participants on both sides, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for those involved, and the hell they endured. Most of them were just kids, caught up in awful times, pawns of insane leadership.
am not defending the Russians (PLEASE READ THAT TWICE)
However when this story is told it is always with a Cold War bent. Rarely is it mentioned that on January 8, 1943 after they pushed the relief force back from the Don and there was no way out, the Soviets sent Paulus an ultimatum, offering the alternative of “*honorable surrender or complete * annihilation.” No heavy guns were fired by the Russians nor were any advances attempted, at all, on January 9th while the terms were considered. It is assumed that Paulus consulted Hitler; as there was a direct radio link – but it is lost to history (or in the Soviet Archives) as to what was said. In any event, what happened was Paulus refused to surrender, and Hitler promoted him to Field Marshal (no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered) and Paulus’ pocket collapsed and he surrendered a few days later after heavy fighting. Just a bit of background that explains a bit – not saying it makes anything “right”.
Three other points:
A.
The numbers are fluid but in Hitler’s Generals by Correlli Barnett (where the above was taken/learned/quoted from) : the numbers in the Stalingrad Garrison are :
107,800 prisoners 16,800 in the fighting and 91,000 in the final surrender. 42,000 mostly wounded were evacuated by air.
B.
There were “some” Hungarians trapped in Stalingrad at the time of the surrender though most of the Hungarian units had been destroyed (utterly destroyed) in the fighting to surround the pocket at Stalingrad. In the fighting, Soviet troops killed an estimated 40,000 Hungarians and wounded 70,000.—which for all intents and purposes led directly to the removal of Hungary from the War
C.
About 6% of the 91,000 surrendered prisoners were Romanians – who also had played a huge role in the Battle of Stalingrad (though not the end game) – in which ~158,854Romains were killed, wounded and missing between 19 November 1942 and 7 January 1943.
To answer your question up front, the estimates I’ve read varied from approx. 2% eventual repatriation to 4%, with the rest having perished at some point. But this demands a fuller explanation, with way too many parenthetical asides…
The winter of '42-'43 was extraordinarily harsh, one of the coldest on record. (Observers compared it to the storied winter which doomed Napoleon’s march on Moscow.) As the Soviets steadily encircled the greater Stalingrad area, trapping the Germans in the “Kessel” (cauldron), the Germans lost first their tenuous supply lines on the land (and yes, they were reliant on draught horses to schlep their material to battle and the Ukraine didn’t have a modern road network, so when it turned wet and muddy come spring and fall, transport was paralyzed) and by air, as one small airfield fell after another (there were nominally seven, although most popular histories of Stalingrad pay attention to only three, making it clear that only Pitomnik resembled a real airport, with night-flying capability; Pitomnik fell on Jan. 16, leaving only the tiny Gumrak airfield for incoming supplies and outgoing evacuation of the wounded; the Luftwaffe also dropped lots of materiel via canisters).
One of the *opera buffo * aspects of the German war was that of an increasingly obese and grandiose Hermann Goering (the head of the Luftwaffe) repeatedly making unrealistic promises to adequately supply the Stalingrad forces by air. This was never feasible, given the paucity of first-rate airports near Stalingrad, the limitations of Luftwaffe flights, the attrition rates of said flights (esp. by Soviet AA battalions near the airfields, where they could pick off the planes on their vulnerable landings and takeoffs), and the sheer size of the forces in question and their ever-increasing needs for ammo, medical supplies and personnel, and food and proper winter clothing (which the Germans weren’t issued; and given the sub-zero winter conditions, men required twice the calories they did during the summer march across the steppes).
Operating at its maximum effectiveness (that is, early on in the conflict, before the Kessel closed and increasing pressure was brought to bear on the airfields), the Luftwaffe alone could supply only about half of the required materiel. The Germans began to impose half-rations as early as October, IIRC; later on (December?) the rations were halved again. By November [IIRC], German field doctors were alarmed by what they began to find in their post-mortem examinations; soldiers were beginning to die of various causes (including typhus, cholera, and diptheria), but an underlying starvation was a complicating and hastening factor in their deaths.
Thus the dying in earnest was thus well underway at the moment of the Germans’ surrender (Jan. 31, 1943), which occurred only because they were utterly exhausted and had nothing with which to continue the fight. They were dying off at an alarming rate by this time, due to the soldier’s complex of starvation + disease + hypothermia + trauma… frostbite and war wounds both easily fostered gangrene, and many simply died in their sleep (the combined result of hypothermia and starvation). Then there were the suicides – and there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those. The Germans were under few illusions about what they had to look forward to in Soviet captivity; towards the end, they were killing themselves in suicide pacts.
When the Soviets captured Stalingrad, they weren’t prepared to care for a quarter of a million starving and diseased Germans and their (mainly Romanian) allies; nor were they predisposed to do so. Their own logistics and supply network left much to be desired, and Soviet command had no interest in diverting precious resources to save the lives of enemy POWs. Still, the general historical consensus is that it was due more to carelessness, incompetence, and callousness rather than out of an outright genocidal intent or policy (such as that of the Germans’ extermination of millions of Soviet POWs and European civilians) that the German POW mortality rate was so high initially, as the prisoners were forced on a march to be packed into trains (unheated cattle cars) for Siberia – during which time they were offered almost no rations. What ensued was a grisly struggle for survival, culminating in organized homicidal cannibalization of the weakest, both on those transport trains and in the work/death camps (where rations and medical care continued to be very meager). The cannibalizing gang activity continued in those detention camps in Siberia, even though the Soviet guards would summarily shoot any German caught red-handed [no pun intended]. The German POWs were subjected to further humiliations in the camps, such as the heavy-handed abuse by their former (and formerly put-upon) Romanian and Italian allies, who were bestowed a favored status vis-a-vis the Germans by the Soviets. Many of the German prisoners were held and forced to do heavy labor for years after the war ended; these were mostly veterans of the Stalingrad campaign. The last German POWs were repatriated to [in many cases, East] Germany in 1955.
Something most people fail to realize is that the Soviets considered the Stalingrad campaign to have been a defeat overall. They had not made plans just to encircle the city and destroy the Sixth Army; their plans had been to cut off the entire Caucasus front and destroy all six German armies there. They almost succeeded but the Germans were able to hold open a section of the front long enough to pull out all of these other troops (in part because of the ongoing resistance at Stalingrad). If the Red Army had been able to achieve their goal (and they almost did) Germany wouldn’t have just lost the battle, they would have lost the war in 1943.
I know a German woman whose father was in the 6th Army and fought at Stalingrad. He survived the battle by somehow sneaking out of the city (I have no idea as to how) and walking back - according to the story - all the way to Germany.
I don’t see how he could have walked all that way across enemy terrain by himself so I’m thinking he met up with some other German unit, fell in with them and then “walked” or more accurately retreated on foot with the other unit back to Germany over the course of years.
He was eventually captured by Americans on the western front.
Doing that walk in winter on your own sounds near-impossible. The ‘enemy terrain’ probably wasn’t that much of an issue - in an area the size of the western front one man would be like a grain of sand on a tennis court.