Friedrich Paulus - After Stalingrad and Postwar

After Stalingrad and Postwar

Although he at first refused to collaborate with the Soviets, after the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944, Paulus became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime while in Soviet captivity, joining the Russian-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany and appealing to Germans to surrender. He later acted as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. He was released in 1953, two years before the repatriation of the remaining German POWs (mostly other Stalingrad veterans) who had been designated war criminals by the Soviets. Paulus settled in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

During the Nuremberg Trials, Paulus was asked about the Stalingrad prisoners by a journalist. Paulus told the journalist to tell the wives and mothers that their husbands and sons were well. Of the 91,000 German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, half had died on the march to Siberian prison camps, and nearly as many died in captivity; only about 6,000 returned home.

From 1953 to 1956, he lived in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked as the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute and not, as often wrongly described, as an inspector of police. In late 1956, he developed motor neurone disease and was eventually left paralyzed. He died in Dresden on 1 February 1957, exactly 14 years after he surrendered at Stalingrad. His body was brought for burial in Baden next to that of his wife, who had died in 1949 having not seen her husband since his departure for the Eastern front in the summer of 1942.