forcing Paulus to surrender; the remainder of the Ger-
man forces formally capitulated on 2 February 1943.
Paulus submitted directly to Rokossovsky, offering the
Soviet commander his personal weapon. In total, the
Germans had lost approximately 110,000 killed, and
nearly 100,000 were taken prisoner when the city fell;
of this latter number, only about 5,000 survived the war.
Paulus became so disillusioned by Adolf Hitler’s lack of
aid during the siege that he cooperated with his Soviet
captors and helped to make propaganda broadcasts to
destroy German morale.
Rokossovsky continued his push against the Nazis,
taking part in the famed tank battle at Kursk (3–13 July
1943). He led forces in the capture of Byelorussia in what
was called Operation Bagration (1944), where his troops
routed the German Ninth Army, and eastern Prussia and
Pomerania in the early weeks and months of 1945. For
his services to his homeland during this latter period,
he was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. His
forces crossed into Poland, where he captured Warsaw,
and then into Germany, stopping at the city of Wismar
when the Germans surrendered on 3 May 1945. The
Soviet forces linked up with troops of the British Second
Army, and Field Marshal Bernard Law montgomery,
the British commander, invested Rokossovsky as Knight
Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB). Rokoss-
ovsky subsequently returned to the Soviet Union, where
he was the leader of the Victory Parade held in Moscow’s
Red Square on 24 July 1945. The Second World War
had made him perhaps the most important Soviet mili-
tary commander aside from Marshal Georgi zhukoV.
Following the end of the war, in 1949 Rokossovsky
was named as Soviet defense minister as well as deputy
chairman of the Council of Ministers. That same year,
the Polish nationalist Władysław Gomułka, who was
secretary of the Communist Polish Workers’ Party, was
purged from power as deputy premier of Poland due
to his sympathy with the Yugoslav Communist leader
Josip Broz, known as Tito, who had differed with con-
trol of the Eastern European Communist states from
Moscow. In 1950, Rokossovsky was made commander
of Soviet forces in Poland, in essence controlling that
country, and a series of events followed which led to his
downfall. Starting in 1953, with Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Stalinist era, a period
of liberalization began in the Eastern European satel-
lite states controlled by the USSR. The following year,
Gomulka was released from prison and readmitted to
the Communist Polish Workers’ Party, now called the
United Workers’ Party. That October, he became the
first secretary of the party in obvious defiance of Mos-
cow’s and Rokossovsky’s wishes. Nonetheless, Gomulka’s
regime was highly popular, instituting a series of eco-
nomic reforms of which Moscow disapproved. On 28
October 1956, in a move to lessen Soviet control on his
country, Gomulka ordered that all Soviet military advis-
ers, including Rokossovsky, leave Poland on the pretext
that a pro-Soviet coup was being planned. Rokossovsky,
disgraced, returned to Russia, where he was named as
deputy minister of defense, serving in that office twice
from 1956 to 1962. He died in Moscow on 3 August
1968 at the age of 71.
Although it was his actions that in many ways won
victory for the Soviet Union on the eastern front, Ro-
kossovsky is often ranked well below Marshal Georgi
Zhukov in terms of military excellence. Nonetheless, he
played a vital part in the USSR’s defeat of the mighty
German army during its invasion of Russia in 1942, and
for this he helped to change the course of history.References: Rokossovsky, Konstantin K., A Soldier’s Duty,
translated by Vladimir Talmy. Edited by Robert Daglish
(Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1970, 1985);
Sevruk, Vladimir, comp., Moscow 1941/42 Stalingrad
(Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1970); Zhukov,
Georgil, et al., Battles Hitler Lost, and the Soviet Marshals
Who Won Them: Marshals Zhukov, Konev, Malinovsky,
Rokossovsky, Rotmistrov, Chuikov, and other Commanders
(New York: Richardson & Steirman, 1986); “Rokoss-
ovsky, Kontantin,” in Windrow, Martin, and Francis K.
Mason, “Rokossovsky, Konstantin,” in The Wordsworth
Dictionary of Military Biography (Hertfordshire, U.K.:
Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997), 249–250.Rommel, Erwin Johannes Eugen (1891–1944)
German general
Born in the village of Heidenheim, in Württemberg,
Germany, on 15 November 1891, Erwin Rommel re-
ceived his education in Stuttgart before he entered the
German army. In 1910, he became an officer cadet in
the 124th Infantry Regiment, and in 1912 he received
a commission as a second lieutenant. When the First
World War broke out, he was sent to the western front
in France, seeing action before being transferred to fight
against Italy and Romania. He helped in the seizure ofRommel, eRwin JohAnneS eugen