What order Friedrich Paulus shocked the officers of the 6th Army?
Since December 1942, the situation of the Sixth Army of the Wehrmacht surrounded by Soviet troops near Stalingrad, began to deteriorate catastrophically. Hermann Goering's promises to support the army with arms and food from the air had nothing to do with reality, as the air fleet forces were clearly insufficient. All the more so that transport U-52s were shot down on their approach to the airfields of Gumrak and Pitomnik. Hunger and cold became a real problem for the soldiers of the Sixth Army, let alone the Romanians, Hungarians and Italians, whose situation was much worse. If you are not badly wounded, there was no way to get out of the cauldron, so there was only one thing to do: die or surrender. Anticipating this state of affairs Friedrich Paulus had nothing left but to go to extreme measures. The order, which he issued on December 12, shocked all officers of the 6th Army. Here is what the former major of the Wehrmacht Helmut Welz recalls about it. That order said: it was a disgrace to surrender alive as a prisoner; when there was no more way out, an officer was obliged to shoot the soldiers!
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