Friedrich Paulus

Friedrich Paulus was a German field marshal who commanded the Sixth Army during the Battle of Stalingrad. Encircled by Soviet forces in late 1942, he obeyed orders to hold the city until the army was destroyed and surrendered in February 1943.

Paulus was a career staff officer before taking command of the Sixth Army in 1942. At Stalingrad he repeatedly sought freedom to withdraw after Soviet forces encircled his army, but Adolf Hitler ordered him to hold his position and promoted him to field marshal shortly before the surrender. In Soviet captivity Paulus later denounced Hitler, appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg trials and spent his final years in East Germany.

Gordon Corrigan’s The Battle of Stalingrad follows the struggle through street fighting, Soviet reinforcement across the Volga and Operation Uranus, the counter-offensive that surrounded Friedrich Paulus’s army and cut it off from effective relief. In William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, Across thirty-seven linked narratives, Germany and the Soviet Union become rival centres of surveillance, propaganda and war. Real and fictional lives are paired across the two regimes: Käthe Kollwitz attempts to preserve humane art under Nazism; Kurt Gerstein enters the SS and tries to expose mass murder; Friedrich Paulus is trapped with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and Andrey Vlasov crosses from Soviet command into collaboration with Germany.