Ach, so many questions about Paulus! Let see if I can answer them in a coherent fashion (my money is on no).

First off, the issue of the missing men in Stalingrad is a highly politicized one and figures like 91000 captured, 6000 returned are inseparable from the politics that surrounded the division of Germany in the aftermath of the Cold War. The return of POWs in the Soviet Union was one of the cornerstones of the early Adenauer government and it made conscious efforts to keep the issue alive during first decade of the FRG. The Western state sponsored various days of remembrance and other ceremonies to keep this issue alive. When the Soviet news agency TASS announced on 5 May 1950 that there were only 13,536 German POWs left in the USSR, Adenauer himself interrupted a Bundestag debate to protest that the Soviets had not accounted for the fate of 1.5 million POWs. This position that there was a vast shadow army of POWs found much support in the FRG because the Third Reich had kept the number of MIAs and other casualties deliberately vague. The Soviets did not help their case because while they would consistently trump the size and scale of Red Army victories both during and after the war, they were noticeably secretive about the actual status of POWs. The USSR held onto a number of POWs partly for security reasons. The Soviets did not want to let unreformed NSDAP members back into the German populace. Secondly, the Soviets often instrumentalized the ideological reform of POWs and made much of the POWs' public proclamations of a new found brotherhood with the Soviet Union.

Adenauer's policy meshed well with his larger policy of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past) which was a selective memory of participation in the crimes of National Socialism. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) assumption was that the German people as a whole were themselves victims of the Third Reich and its crimes were the result of Hitler and a cabal of a few collaborators. This fed into the larger public perception that fighting men of the Wehrmacht were themselves victims and had fought a clean war. This sanitized vision of the armed forces was not just limited to Adenauer's government. OMGUS surveys of Nuremberg trials noted that while many Germans in the American zone approved of trying the "Golden Pheasants" of the NSDAP, a number took umbrage at trying Wehrmacht officers. Their continued captivity of German soldiers added yet another layer into this victimization narrative. There were many stories in the FRG press about the Communist maltreatment of these men and this gelled well with the strident anti-communism of the FRG political establishment.

This narrative of victimization filtered out into the press and popular culture of the early FRG. There were a number of advice columns and other press articles about "re-manning" the returning POWs after their captivity. This spoke to a major concern that somehow these men had lost fundamental components of their masculinity and would need to recover it to adjust to postwar society. Other depictions of the plight of the POWs were more prosaic. Novels and films like Der Artz von Stalingrad, Taiga, and Der Teufel spielte Balalaika emphasized the struggle to survive in the camps and sidestepped their actions during the war. One of the darker sides to this narrative of martyrdom was that the FRG sought to prosecute German POWs that were Kameradenschinder (torturers of their comrades). The FRG conducted some one hundred trials of POWs between 1948 and 1956. These trials sometimes went beyond holding individuals responsible for their actions. One witness for the prosecution of a Stalingrad camp claimed he testified because of "the worldwide dangers of communism," and it was imperative to "observe and eliminate such unscrupulous mercenaries of communism."

The GDR and the SED did not passively observe these developments in the FRG and here is where Paulus came in. The Soviets had kept Paulus and other prominent prisoners on reserve for use in its propaganda. During the war Paulus had reluctantly joined the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (NKFD) and Bund ehemaliger Offiziere (BDO), both anti-fascist organizations of German officers and political figures and run under Soviet control. As one of the more prominent surviving anti-Hitler flag officers, the SED saw Paulus as a means to confront the FRG's remilitarization and reintegration into Western security structures like the abortive European Defense Community (EDC).

The SED trumpeted Paulus's return to the GDR in 1953 and publicized his January 1955 First All-German Conference of Officers. SED head Ulbricht had hoped that a figure of Paulus's stature would counteract the growing popularity of Erich von Manstein, whose bestselling revisionist book Lost Victories celebrated both the Wehrmacht's brilliance and its apolitical nature. The Conference invited German veterans from both Germanies to participate, but its overarching goal was to denounce German armies fighting under a foreign flag (now the US-led NATO) and castigate the actions of the FRG as creating the conditions for a permanent German division.

Why Paulus relented to this use in propaganda by the GDR is a bit nebulous. His adjutant Wilhelm Adam, who constantly shadowed his superior in public events, maintained that the Field Marshal genuinely felt that FRG rearmament was again pushing Germany off a precipice. However, Adam was very much a true believer and would later become one of the firebrands of the National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDPD), a political party the SED set up to appeal to veterans in the GDR. Western reporters of the Conference reported that Paulus seemed rather tired and uncoordinated. Paulus himself was a reluctant collaborator during the war and only joined the NKFD and BPO after the 20 July plot and much hectoring from the German-born NKVD staff officer for POWs Wolf Stern. Paulus's poor health also likely influenced his decision to return to the GDR and certainly impacted his poor performance at the Conference. Aside from what was now becoming shrill boilerplate anti-Western agitprop, the Conference achieved little of note. Paulus noted in a report to Ulbricht that the inability to come to a meaningful consensus reflected the residual strength of National Socialist ideals in the FRG. Whether or not Paulus was playing to his SED audience or genuinely believed this is difficult to ascertain.

With regards to Paulus's family life the matter is a little clearer. His surviving son Ernst disapproved of his embrace of the GDR, but did visit him a few times before his father's death. Obviously, neither Soviets nor the GDR would not have let Paulus reunite with his wife in the western zone. Like other prominent Wehrmacht veterans, the SED's security apparatus kept Paulus under tight surveillance. Paulus's Soviet captivity was the subject of many rumors within the FRG ranging from his torture to produce propaganda to the rather outlandish idea that he was raising an ideologically-indoctrinated army of the missing German POWs to act as cannon fodder for a Soviet invasion and his family had to deal with these rumors. When Paulus did emerge in the public eye in 1953, his typically taciturn behavior added a further level of mystery to his behavior.

Sources

Biess, Frank. Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Moeller, Robert G. War Stories The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Niven, William John. Germans As Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Searle, Alaric. Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament, 1949-1959. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003.