The German General Who Switched Sides Inside a Soviet Prison Camp.

He broke open the Demyansk pocket when half the German command said it couldn't be done. A year later he commanded the largest corps trapped inside Stalingrad, and became the loudest voice in the encircled army demanding a breakout Hitler had forbidden. Then he was captured. And Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach did something almost no German general of his rank ever did. In a Soviet prison camp, he switched sides. As president of the League of German Officers and a leader of the National Committee for a Free Germany, he broadcast to his own men across the snow, urging them to abandon Hitler while there was still a Germany left to save. For it, the Nazi state sentenced him to death and imprisoned his wife and daughters. And then the side he chose betrayed him too. Stalin's Soviet Union sentenced him to twenty-five years and left him to rot in solitary until 1955. This is not a story of a clean hero. Before his conversion, Seydlitz served the war of annihilation loyally. We deal with that record honestly, alongside the myth of the phantom "Seydlitz Troops," the truth about his motives, and the strange final verdict: condemned by two dictatorships, cleared by both their successors. Selected sources: Antony Beevor, Stalingrad; David Glantz and Jonathan House, the Stalingrad trilogy; Julia Warth, Traitor or Resistance Fighter?; Bodo Scheurig, Free Germany; Joachim Wieder, Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments; Manfred Kehrig's Stalingrad documentation; Leonid Reschin on the Soviet captivity records; Felix Römer on the Commissar Order.