After nearly six months of house-to-house fighting in freezing ruins, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus's encircled Sixth Army capitulated to Soviet forces. Some 91,000 starving German soldiers were taken prisoner; fewer than 6,000 would ever see Germany again. The defeat shattered the myth of Wehrmacht invincibility and turned the tide of World War II.
By early February 1943, the men trapped inside Stalingrad's shattered factories and cellars were eating horses, then boot leather, then nothing. Hitler had forbidden retreat and promoted Paulus to Field Marshal on the assumption no German officer of that rank had ever surrendered — a not-so-subtle order to die fighting or take his own life. Paulus surrendered anyway.
The battle had consumed nearly two million casualties on both sides since it began in August 1942, fought over a city reduced to rubble and named for Stalin himself, which made its defense a matter of Soviet propaganda as much as strategy. Soviet troops finally captured Paulus in the basement of a department store, still in his pajamas.
Of the roughly 91,000 Germans marched into captivity, most died in the brutal trek to POW camps or in the camps themselves from typhus, starvation, and exhaustion. Only about 5,000 returned home, the last not until 1955. For the Soviet Union, Stalingrad became the emotional and strategic pivot point that made ultimate victory over Germany conceivable for the first time.