Hello, first I want to salute all of you and to felicitate the administrators of this beautiful site. I'm new here and I hope I don't bother you too much,

I'm looking for photos of the sons of Generalfeldmarschall Paulus

Hauptmann Ernst-Alexander Paulus WIA in Kharkov (committed suicide in 1970. He was 52, same age as his father, when he surrendered with his 6. Armee in Stalingrad)

Hauptmann Friedrich Paulus KIA Anzio 1944 (was killed in February 1944 at Anzio in Italy)


Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus



Born: 23/09/1890, Breitenau Gers-Hagen, Hesse-Nassau, Germany
Died: 02.01.1957, Dresden, Saxony, eastern Germany

In 1912 Paulus met Constanze Elena Rosetti-Solescu.
She was a beautiful Romanian woman from a wealthy, aristocratic Romanian family.
Her two brothers were officers who served in Paulus regiment.(as trainees)
Paulus met her through them and they married on July 4, 1912.
Their first child, a daughter named Olga, was born in 1914.

The twins Friedrich and Ernst-Alexander were born on April 11, 1918.


After Stalingrad,
Paulus was soon asked to turn against Hitler.
Paulus refused for some time, until the Soviets told him about the failed attack on July 20, 1944. Horrified by the killings of several of his friends (Paulus was a close friend of von Stauffenberg), he finally admitted. He made anti-Nazi radio broadcasts and called for German soldiers to desert. On August 8, Paulus had signed a statement to the German people. The subsequent appeal to Army Group North to capitulate, was written by the NKVD, and on August 21 signed by Paulus and 29 captured generals.

Hitler responded by ordering that the family of Paulus was to be captured. That fall Paulus wife Elena, who was never trusted by the Nazis, was told by the Gestapo officers that she will be spared if she would renounce her husband's name.

She refused, and she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in a camp, with her son, Ernest Alexander, Hauptmann in the German army, who was wounded in Kharkov. Eventually they were freed by American soldiers from a prison in the Alps.

Paulus never saw his wife again, she died on Nov. 1949 in Baden-Baden in West Germany, after not have seen her husband since 1942.
One can only guess her feelings regarding the disaster that the Battle of Stalingrad meant for her native Romania and her own family.

Regards! ionionescu