Paulus (left), and his aides Col. Wilhelm Adam (right) and Lt.-Gen. Arthur Schmidt (middle), after their surrender in Stalingrad.
Paulus did not initially cooperate with the Soviets until he heard about the execution of his friends, Generals Erich Hoepner and Erwin von Witzleben, after the abortive assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. He joined the League of German Officers in Captivity, participating in radio surrender appeals, for which Hitler imprisoned his family. Paulus appeared for the prosecution during the Nuremberg War Trials in 1946, but was not released until 1953.
From 1953 to 1956, he lived in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked as the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute and not, as often wrongly described, as an inspector of police. In late 1956, he developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and became progressively weaker. He died within a few months, in Dresden, on 1 February 1957, 14 years after the surrender at Stalingrad. As part of his last will and testament, his body was transported to Baden, West Germany to be buried next to his wife, who had died eight years earlier in 1949, not having seen her husband since his departure for the Eastern front in the summer of 1942.
