If Paulus had not been captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, his next position would have been "Chief of Operations of the High Command", which meant that he would have been at the top of the War Decision-Making position of the Nazi Wehrmacht, rather than suffering from barrage of artillery fire or ice on the Eastern Front.
According to the latest declassified historical evidence, because of his opposition to Hitler's dismissal of The Chief of the General Staff Halder, General Jodl, who was then the chief of operations of the Supreme High Command, was no longer welcome, and Hitler even refused to dine with him, and was ready to dismiss him at the end of January 1943 and transfer Paulus back to succeed him.
The 6th Army, organized into the German "Army Group South" on the Soviet-German battlefield, was a well-equipped and highly successful unit and the vanguard of the Nazis' launch of World War II. In the 1939 Polish Campaign, the name was the 10th Army, the commander was Lieutenant General Reichenau; in the French campaign, it belonged to the "Army Group B", under the command of 2 armored divisions and 14 infantry divisions, and the command number of Reichenau, which was promoted to general, was changed to the 6th Army, which swept through the Dutch and Belgian lines, and the campaign command performance was extremely outstanding, flexible and decisive, and after the war, Reichenau was promoted to field marshal.
Reichenau
Reichenau was one of the most staunch Nazi supporters in the Wehrmacht, and he became Hitler's favorite among the Wehrmacht, almost becoming Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in 1938, only to be scrapped by the collective opposition of the Wehrmacht hierarchy. From the Polish Campaign to the French Campaign, he and the 6th Army had been fighting under the command of Lundstedt, an old subordinate of the latter, and Paulus had been the chief of staff of the Major General of the Reichenau Army Group since the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, and was promoted to deputy chief of the General Staff of the Army in May 1940, the main architect of the Barbarossa Plan, and on the eve of the great war, he was again transferred back to the 6th Army as chief of staff, at this time promoted to the rank of lieutenant general.
After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, the Sixth Army of Reichenau and Paulus was still under the command of Marshal Lundstedt, and in the Battle of Kiev, the Soviet army was destroyed, during which Reichenau, who was fanatically loyal to Hitler, issued the order "The Action of the Army in the Eastern Front" to his troops, in which he asked the officers and men to "ruthlessly eradicate the conspiracies and atrocities of the enemy and completely eliminate Bolshevik thought", in fact, ordering the mass massacre of Soviet political work cadres.
This atrocity was particularly resented by the other Wehrmacht generals, but it amply illustrated Reichenau's political stance and the reasons for becoming Hitler's favorite general.
Paulus
On 30 November 1941, Reichenau succeeded Lundstedt as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South, who refused to carry out Hitler's orders and withdrew without permission at the Battle of Rostov. Before Reichenau was promoted, he recommended his chief of staff Paulus to take over the post of commander of the Sixth Army, after all, the two were very comfortable during their time together, and the cooperation from Western Europe to the Eastern Front was very pleasant, and it is undeniable that Paulus was indeed a good staff officer, and of course Helm Hitler's nomination of Reichenau was approved.
Paulus became commander of the elite 6th Army on New Year's Day 1942, promoted to general on the same day, and subsequently defeated the Soviet counteroffensive at the Battle of Kharkov and established himself. After 12 days, Reichenau fell ill and died.
Of course, the recommendation of the predecessor Reichenau was only one aspect, from the process of Paulus's deployment of troops during the Battle of Stalingrad, he almost completely carried out Hitler's orders, including the time period when the 6th Army was encircled, if he resolutely took the initiative to break through to the north, it was very likely that he would meet and get out of the predicament with Manstein's liberation army "Don", but he once again faithfully carried out Hitler's order: "Wherever the German soldiers attack, they must hold", and missed the opportunity to break the siege. It also destroyed the most elite backbone unit of the German army on the southern front and completely lost the ability to attack strategically.
Thus, "loyalty" to Hitler was another major reason paulus was able to take over the 6th Army.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus
Hitler did not like that the High Command and the General Staff were led by independent generals, but wanted to be filled by people he could trust and would always be subordinate to him, and Keitel, of course, met this criterion, but Halder, the Chief of Staff, was finally relieved of his duties by the intolerable Hitler due to his repeated "direct advice" in the summer offensive, and was soon arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in concentration camps; then it was the turn of the Chief of Operations of the Supreme Command, Jodl. From the perspective that the successor was Paulus, as a young general trusted by the Führer and intended to reuse, Hitler's agreement to make Paulus the commander of the army group also had a factor of experience.
So the third reason is that Paulus, who has been working as a staff officer, has the resume of a military commander, so that Hitler can easily promote him to the core team of war guidance, such as the fact that the very young General Zeitzler succeeded him as chief of the general staff proves Hitler's inner thoughts, and he has greatly distrusted and hated the original high-level team of the Wehrmacht.
However, he ignored the shortcomings of the indecisiveness of the staff officers, Paulus was not the experienced Reichenau after all, and eventually buried the 6th Army.
Adolf hitler
Even after Paulus was captured, the Germans tried to send a battalion of paratroopers and special forces to the Soviet-controlled area to rescue, a plot that was foiled by the timely transfer of prisoners by the Soviet internal affairs forces, which shows the importance Hitler attached to the general.
Because of the preferential treatment Paulus enjoyed in the Soviet Union and his testimony in Nuremberg after the war, many Germans regarded him as a traitor, especially the Germans who had relatives who died in Stalingrad, cursing Paulus, accusing him of stealing his life but failing to save the well-equipped 300,000 troops, a charge that accompanied him until the end of his life, on February 1, 1957.