A German Field Marshal surrenders

31st January 1943: With his HQ surrounded Friedrich Paulus, the 6th Army commander, personally surrenders but the remainder of his army just disintegrates

A subsequently colourised version of the newly promoted Field Marshal Paulus surrendering at Stalingrad

The Red Army had broken into Stalingrad and was mopping up pockets of resistance.

This was not a comprehensive surrender of the whole of the 6th Army. Some Wehrmacht units were determined to fight to the end.

There are several accounts of how the 6th Army came to surrender at Stalingrad, some suggesting that Field Marshal Paulus would only surrender to a Soviet General.

But British journalist Alexander Worth¹ flew into Stalingrad on the 4th February. His escorted delegation of journalists were met with apocalyptic scenes. There were many frozen and dismembered corpses lying around, alongside dead horses that still had a few scraps of meat still hanging to them. He saw an emaciated German emerge from a basement to use an open-air cesspit. The Red Army told him there were still hundreds of wounded in the basement “dying of hunger and frostbite” - that they had not had time to deal with.

Then Worth was introduced to a young officer, Lieutenant Fyodor Mik­hailovich Elchenko, and got an account of the final hours around Unimag department store building: