Hard to say a thing about Rommel. he had made the decision to pull back at Alamein and once he heard the Hitler order that his DAK men could only die in their trenches with honor he cancelled the retreat. So not sure if Rommel would order a retreat from Stalingrad.

However Paulus never would have dared to go against Hitler´s wishes.And like we have read neither Manstein dared to order anything directly...

I guess it would depend on how things would go after that. Häusser left Kharkov against orders but as the later phases went excellently Hitler could not put him in the court, really.

I´d think Guderian, Hoth and Kesselring out of these would have come out and probably sacrificed their career as well. Some one might have lost his head as well but not Guderian, I think.

One of the problems here is like PzJgr says that the 6th Army held a big number of Soviet troops stuck for some 2 1/2 months.

__________________