Stalingrad Holdouts - German Resistance After the Surrender

On the morning of February 2, 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad came to an end after the

surrender

of the last group of German troops in the northern part of the city. At least that is what the history books tell us, it may come as a surprise. some when I tell them that a considerable number of German troops did not lay down their arms at that time; In fact, Soviet records indicate that a staggering eleven thousand German soldiers continued fighting long after Field Marshal Paulus and the 91,000 survivors of the German Sixth Army. The army was taken into Soviet captivity and would continue to resist for weeks, prompting the Red Army to mount military operations through the ruins of Stalingrad to eradicate and, in their words, liquidate counter-revolutionary elements.

This part of the Battle of Stalingrad has been completely ignored by historians. but more than 11,000 German soldiers is not an insignificant number and the omission is extraordinary. Stalingrad is correctly labeled as a major turning point in the history of World War II. What seemed like an assured German victory in the summer of 1942 would end as a graveyard for the German armies in the east when the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941. The campaign had been very successful until the Russian winter and

resistance

halted the advance. On Moscow in the spring of 1942 the Germans resumed offensive operations but instead of attempting again to capture Moscow Hitler ordered a shift of focus to the south and a two-pronged assault through the Army Group Passes to southern Russia.

It attacked south toward the Caucasus and the Soviet oil fields whose product was vital to German war plans, while Army Group B, which included the Sixth Army, moved toward the Volga River at the industrial city of Stalingrad. In the summer of 1942 new posters appeared on the streets of Moscow greeting and welcoming their Allied allies whose help was already arriving at the Allied Russian ports whose kindness had sent drugs, food and warm clothing to help sustain them in their darkest hour, but despite all this, the Red Army staff knew that they were still facing the most powerful enemy in history and that enemy would attack again, but when this attack came, the entire German force was going to be concentrated on one objective, the Caucasus and oil, the Caucasus Mountains represent one of the most difficult military obstacles in the world, towering peaks rising to heights of up to eight thousand feet, with only one practical road passing through them and Baku , the largest oil field, is in the other.

To reach Baku, the only feasible military route was along the Caspian Sea coast, but the map shows the dangerous extension of the supply line that this would entail for the operation to be a success for the Germans. The first need was control of the north center of the country. railway lines in the area and a new base of operations that center was a port on the Volga River that we have come to know well, Stalingrad, named after the current leader of Russia, the pride of this generation of Russians because it was their city built in their time with the capture of

stalingrad

the nazis would have a base from which to launch a flank attack against moscow in a single masterstroke the russian armies in the south would be left without help and in the factories of northern russia the russian farms and the russian armies would be left practically isolated from the Caucasus oil and also from American and British supplies that were sent to Russia through Iran and Iraq.

German control of the entrance to the Volga and its two main ports, Astrakhan and Stalingrad, would be a devastating blow to Russia, but the Volga is the vital artery through which it flowed. The lifeblood of supplies The Germans' first mistake was to have the Luftwaffe pound the city into ruins, resulting in a difficult landscape for German motorized forces to penetrate and a defender's dream The German spearheads They reached the city on August 23, 1942, encountering disorganized but fanatical

resistance

from the small garrison. The Soviets began rushing toward Stalingrad as many units as they could after realizing their importance to Hitler's plans.

In early September, the Germans had surrounded Partially Stalingrad the Soviets could only supply and reinforce their units fighting within the city across the Volga River and a The constant air and artillery attacks, street fighting was intense, with many casualties on both sides and the sea of ​​battle was rose above the ruins; For example, in a single day, the train station changed hands 14 times in just 6 hours of combat. Soviet resistance was incredibly tenacious and the close proximity of German and Soviet forces to each other took away much of the German advantage in fire support. Soviet static defenses and apartment blocks ruined department stores and of course the famous factories were incredible, along with very active snipers.

Stalingrad became a chopping machine for both sides. they introduced more and more units into the battle without achieving a complete victory; However, after three months of this terrible fighting, the Germans had managed to capture 90 units of Stalingrad and reach the Volga River in the city. The fighting had cost the Sixth Army over sixty thousand men, including fifteen thousand dead and missing, however the Soviets realized that the German manpower shortage had offered them the opportunity to protect the army group's flanks. b. The Germans used Italian, Hungarian and Romanian forces to reinforce German defenses, for example, a 120 mile sector north of Stalingrad was very loosely controlled by the Hungarian Second Army, these access troops lacked training in armed vehicles and, at times, Often, of the motivation of the German forces, the southern flank was equally exposed, protected by the weak Romanian Fourth Army, on November 19, 1942, the Soviets attacked with a huge pincer by launching Operation Uranus. attack north and south of Stalingrad that broke through the weaker Hungarian and Romanian armies and their overstretched German support, by November 23 having surrounded 265,000 German, Romanian, Italian and Croatian troops, including the entire Sixth Army, the Soviets began to compress the Stalingrad pocket while the Germans launched a desperate relief operation to fight to Stalingrad.

The commander of the Sikh army, Colonel General Friedrich Paulus, requested permission to withdraw from the city and make his way west, but Hitler refused. Instead, the Germans attempted to keep the Sixth Army supplied by air until relieved, the Luftwaffe failed to bring in the required daily tonnage of supplies and the still vigorously defending Sixth Army began to run out of ammunition, food and medical supplies, the relief operation failed and Hitler left the sick army to continue fighting for political reasons condemned to destruction paulus He was denied permission to

surrender

on several occasions and Hitler told him to fight to the last man and the last bullet.

The winter greatly exacerbated the suffering once the airfields fell to Soviet troops. The only supplies that arrived were intermittent parachute drops. The Sixth Army starved to death, but they still fought stubbornly because German soldiers greatly feared Soviet captivity and knew they could expect little quarter from the Soviets after the Germans had treated Soviet prisoners of war with contempt, killing hundreds of thousands. and leaving millions to starve or die from disease and exposure. From the first two years of the war in the east, the overriding fear of Soviet reprisals and a slow death in one of Stalin's feared gulags kept German soldiers fighting until the end and beyond.

On January 22, 1943, the Soviets made another request to be stopped. The surrender Paulus informed Hitler that command was almost impossible and his men were without food or ammunition Hitler again refused to surrender on January 24 Paulus communicated by radio to 18,000 wounded without the slightest help of bandages and medicine on January 26 The German defense was divided by the Soviet attacks into a northern zone and a southern zone. The northern zone lost telephone communication with Paulus, who was in a bunker in the center of the city, now the sick and wounded Germans were around 40,000 men, For the Nazis, Stalingrad had become a symbolic fight and a warning.

That every German should do everything possible to support the war effort On January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power, the Führer promoted Paulus to field marshal, since no German field marshal had never given up. Hitler hoped that Paulus would continue fighting until the end. last man and then he shot himself, but it didn't happen that way. On January 31, the German's southern stock collapsed and he was left powerless and his staff was captured in his headquarters in the basement of the Gum department store. He helplessly claimed that he had not given up but that he had given up.

He was taken by surprise and therefore refused to order the other German forces to surrender. The Northern Pocket continued to resist. General Carl Strecker commanded the 11th Corps of the 6th Army that formed the Northern Pocket in Stalingrad. Strecker's call was at the end of January 1943 Largely isolated from the rest of the 6th Army he was determined to hold out as long as possible and forbade any member of his staff to commit suicide. He issued the order that any soldier seen separating from his unit or advancing toward the Soviets was to be shot at the scene of the battle.

On February 1, 1943, after confirmation came that Paulus and all other combat commands had surrendered, Strecker gathered his staff and told them that the military situation was desperate and that all troops under his command had the freedom to act as his conscience saw fit on the second of In February, after further Soviet attacks, Strecker rendered the 11th Corps powerless and 22 generals were separated from the other prisoners and held in tolerable conditions as VIPs due to the fact that Most German prisoners were captured in starving conditions and often sick. The Soviet treatment condemned most of them. until death they were forced to march in winter conditions to work camps where they died from malnutrition, wounds received in battle, diseases such as typhus, cold and overwork, of the 91,000 who were captured, only about 5,000 saw again.

Germany, it was this justified fear of Soviet captivity that kept more than 11,000 German soldiers in the ruins of Stalingrad after the surrender of General Strecker on February 2, 1943. In small units or groups or as individuals, large numbers of troops Germans hid in the ruins, living in basements or sewers. hiding during the day, scavenging for supplies they could find at night, armed and dangerous fugitives with no command to report to and no hope of rescue, but subsisting in the remains of a snow-laden city was preferable for many to the fields of work and these desperate men. They remained dangerous opponents, Soviet units under the leadership of the NKVD were ordered to expel these last German soldiers and kill or capture them.

It was a process that lasted well into March 1943. The NKVD's 10th Division had been present in the Stalingrad area since the previous summer capturing Soviet deserters and suppressing banditry and criminality in the rear areas, the NKVD was helped until on March 1 by the veteran 252nd Rifle Division. Records are incomplete, but the nkvd reported that 2,418 Germans were liquidated by security forces after the surrender. During the first week after the final German surrender on February 2, Soviet troops searched the city for Germans who For example, on February 5, the Don Front headquarters reported that its 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade had located what it called 18 SS soldiers in a position in the basement after they refused to surrender, they were all killed during an exchange of fire, as there were no significant SS units involved in the battle of Stalingrad, they were German army troops, constant mop-up operations resulted in many more prisoners. being separated from the 2418 German dead after the final surrender and some of these Germans who were still fighting tried to reach the German lines in March 1943 a directive was sent to the district department of the nkvd in the Stalingrad region reporting cases of murders German officers and soldiers hide and try to cross Soviet lines and reach German mountainous territory.

They cite the way they engage in robberies and murders. They read the report. they quote some of the Germans penetrate thevillagers where they acquire civilian or military clothing from the population. and changing clothes to make it more convenient to hide without quotes it was ordered to comb the Stalingrad region to find those men there were even some cases, according to the nkvd, of Germans who escaped from nearby prisoner of war camps the nkvd reported that even March 1943 8,646 Germans had been captured. More work needs to be done in the Russian archives to fully tell the story of the Stalingrad redoubts, but what I have outlined here certainly gives some idea of ​​the desperate situation of the remains of the Sixth Army trapped for eleven years. a thousand stories that were never told about the forgotten conclusion of the battle of

stalingrad

thanks for watching, subscribe and share also visit my new audiobook channel war stories with mark Felton and you can also help support my two channels on paypal and patreon details on the description box below