February 2 marks the 80th anniversary of the surrender of German forces in the battle of Stalingrad. Most of the surviving 91,000 troops (of the original 330,000) surrendered to Soviet forces at the end of a battle that had been raging since August 1942. Only days before, Adolf Hitler had promoted the German commander, Friedrich von Paulus, from General to Field Marshal. Knowing that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered, Hitler clearly made the gesture as a way of informing von Paulus that he was expected to take his own life rather than serve as the object of national humiliation at the hands of the Red Army. Hitler’s ploy failed.
Overall, German forces and their Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian allies lost an estimated 800,000 killed, wounded, missing, and captured in the battle. Only about 5,000 of the surrendered Axis soldiers ever returned home alive. Estimates are that the Soviet Army lost 1.1 million dead, wounded, missing, or captured.
When he announced the defeat in Stalingrad to the German public, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels declared a period of mourning. The radio was filled with military funeral dirges. Goebbels went on to demand mobilization for “total war” by the German populace. Although the Wehrmacht conducted some offensive operations–for example, the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943–it never again had the capacity for a large-scale, sustained offensive that threatened to overwhelm Soviet defenses. From a strategic standpoint, German forces in the East would be on the defensive until the Red Army reached Berlin.
In Faces in the Window, Franz Maedler grapples with the news of the catastrophic defeat
in Stalingrad in the hospital, where he and other military convalescents are stunned into bitter silence
as Greater German Radio declares, “the Sixth Army is no more.”
