One day after having been promoted to the rank of Field Marshal, and also having been ordered to go down fighting with his command, Friedrich von Paulus surrendered that command to the Red Army. 90,000 men of the original 250,000 of the German 6th Army remained alive, a surprisingly large number in context. Only 5,000 would return to Germany, many having died due to the Soviet's inability to take care of such a large number of prisoners.
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-F0316-0204-005 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5362815
Most were German, but not all, at the end. One of the last Axis anti tank guns to stop firing in the battle was one manned by a Russian crew.
By most measures, the Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in human history, although that title could be contested. By the same token, by most measures, it was the largest battle in modern history, and of World War Two. Often missed in the story of the epic contest, and German defeat, the Soviets had taken higher casualties than the Axis forces had, with an overall 1,129,619 compared to a potential Axis high of 868,374. 478,741 Soviet combatants were killed, more than the entire number of Germans in the 6th Army. Axis casualties were rounded out, however, by 114,520 Italian losses, 158,854 Romanian losses, 143,000 Hungarian losses and 52,000 Soviet citizens supporting the Axis forces losses. The battle was one whose character was defined by it being fought by two totalitarian combatants who had no regard for human life. The Soviets had the ability to lose more men than the Axis did, and had no real option in regard to retreating further.
The battle had been taken on and fought stupidly by the Germans. Taking the city was unnecessary and engaging in ongoing house to house fighting pointless. Defending the city, from the Soviet prospective, made a great deal more sense as it served to sap up German resources and arrest German progress.
With the fall of Stalingrad, the war entered a new and more bizarre, indeed sickening, phase.
The first phase of the war had seen the United Kingdom become Germany's principal enemy, and the German war aims had been to consolidate "German" lands in the Reich, subjugate and begin to destroy the Polish people, humble France, and to defeat the UK such that parts of the British Empire could be transferred to Germany. The first two goals had been achieved, but the UK proved impossible to defeat and in fact was giving nearly as good as it was getting, if not more so, after the withdrawal from the Continent. The British Empire could not defeat the Germans, but they clearly also could not be defeated by the Germans.
Faced with this, the Germans had toyed with Soviet assistance, and in fact the Soviet Union had been a German ally in this phase, which ran from 1938, with the Austrian Anschluß, to June 22, 1941. During this phase of the war, the USSR had joined with Germany in the dismemberment of Poland and the murder of Polish elites. It had also attacked the Baltic States and Finland, with only Finland proving impossible to defeat. Like the Germans, the Soviets engaged in widespread murder wherever they went, with in this phase of the war the real difference being that the German atrocities, visited upon mass populations for the first time, unlike the Soviet ones which had been going on for two decades, were racial in nature to a much larger degree than the Soviet ones.
Nazi Germany, it is often noted, always had an expressed goal for Lebenstraum in the East, but often missed in that as well is that the Germans were able to put that aside, and on the shelf, as long as it appeared that there was a realistic chance of acquiring British possessions. Ultimately, it is hard not to imagine the Germans and the Soviets going to war, but up until late 1940, it was not imminent. After that, it became so as the Germans became increasingly desperate for raw materials for the war against the British Empire, the Soviet Union being the principal source of them. The Soviets overplayed their hands in this after being invited by the Germans to join in the war against Britain by demanding more of British possessions than the Germans were willing to give. Confident in their abilities in a land war, the Germans set their sites on the Soviet Union.
June 22, 1941, brought about the second phase of the war, the German Soviet phase. The Germans expected to rapidly advance, and in fact did at first. With this they brought murder on a wide scale to Ukraine, the rest of Poland, and Belorussia. Their murderous intent towards the Jews rapidly evidenced itself wherever they went, and they began their planned colonization of Eastern lands almost immediately. At the same time, their goals remained, in that phase, the defeat of the Soviet Union.
In the fall of 1942 the German advance stalled out, and the Germans became grossly overextended. Even with the support of Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian allies, they could no longer cover all of the front. The Red Army could. Early in 1943 the German battlefield fortunes began to rapidly decline.
With the fall of Stalingrad, a new phase of the war began. The Germans did not concede defeat, either intellectually or militarily, but internally the central Nazi leadership seems to have grasped it.Thereafter, the goal of the war turned in an unexpressed way towards murder of the Jewish nation as its principal goal, and the mass murder of Jews accelerated and took first place in their war effort.
Franklin Roosevelt returned to the White House after attending the Casablanca Conference. The conference had arrived upon a declaration, yet to be released, providing that the Germans and the Japanese would have to unconditionally surrender, a phrase borrowed from Ulysses S. Grant.
The wisdom of that declaration has been debated, principally in regard to Japan. As a practical matter, there was no other way to approach the war against Germany at this time, and the declaration served to address Soviet fears that the Western Allies would arrive on a separate peace with Germany. In reality, while it may not have been obvious to the Germans or the general public, the Western Allies regarded an Axis defeat at this point inevitable. The real fear was that Stalin would arrange a separate peace with the Germans, which while it has been discounted by many historians, was in fact much more likely and not even unlikely. Soviet military performance had been poor in 41 and most of 42, and the Soviet Union, as the then Bolshevik Russia, had in fact done just that in 1917.
Interestingly, its rarely noted that the US, and then everyone else, violated the unconditional surrender provision of the Casablanca agreements as to Japan. The Japanese surrender, if not conditional, saw the Western Allies, for their own reasons, agree to keep the Japanese monarchy on the throne. And it was also violated in regards to Italy, which negotiated its way out of the Axis and into the Allied powers, while dumping Mussolini, as a condition to the end of the Allied war against it.
The Allies prevailed in the Battle of Wau.
