Red Army units drove through the ruined city and split the trapped German Sixth Army into a northern and southern pocket, isolating tens of thousands of starving, frostbitten troops. With ammunition, food, and hope exhausted, the split made coordinated resistance impossible and sealed the fate of what had been one of the Wehrmacht's most formidable armies, forcing surrender within days.
By late January 1943, the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus was a shadow of the force that had driven deep into the Soviet Union eighteen months earlier. Encircled since November, soldiers were eating horses, then leather, then little at all; frostbite claimed more limbs than Soviet bullets. Hitler had forbidden any breakout attempt, insisting the army hold as a symbol of will, and had promoted Paulus to field marshal partly to remind him no German field marshal had ever surrendered.
On January 25, Soviet troops pushed through the last defensive lines around Mamayev Kurgan and the factory district, cutting the pocket into two isolated fragments. Communication between the northern and southern groups collapsed. German soldiers, many too weak to stand, huddled in cellars and ruined buildings amid corpses that couldn't be buried in the frozen ground.
Within a week the southern pocket, including Paulus himself, surrendered; the northern pocket held out a few more days before capitulating on February 2. Of roughly 91,000 Germans taken prisoner in the battle's final days, only about 5,000 would survive Soviet captivity to see home again. Stalingrad became the psychological turning point of the war in Europe, the moment the myth of German invincibility broke.