Eighty-three years ago today, the largest and bloodiest battle in human history came to an end.
On Feb. 2, 1943, the last remnants of Germany’s 6th Army surrendered in the frozen ruins of Stalingrad. The fighting had lasted more than 200 days and cost an estimated 2 million casualties. It was the first time a German field marshal had ever been taken alive. It also marked the moment the tide of World War II turned permanently against Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
The battle’s conclusion not only reshaped the Eastern Front but also sent shockwaves through every theater of the war.
Hitler’s 1942 Summer Offensive
Germany’s drive toward Stalingrad began in the summer of 1942 as part of Case Blue, Hitler’s plan to seize the oil-rich Caucasus region and sever Soviet supply lines along the Volga River. The city was a major industrial center, producing arms and artillery for the Red Army. It also bore the name of the Soviet dictator, giving it symbolic weight for both sides.
Hitler assigned Gen. Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army the task of capturing Stalingrad. Paulus had served mostly as a staff officer and had never commanded a division before taking over the Wehrmacht’s largest field army. His force of roughly 250,000 troops, supported by 500 tanks and thousands of guns, reached the outskirts of the city by late August.
On Aug. 23, the Luftwaffe launched a devastating bombardment that leveled much of the city. Thousands of civilians died in the initial air campaign alone.
Stalingrad resident Boris Serafimovich Kryzhanovsky described the bombing as the most terrifying day of his life.
“The earth literally trembled,” he recalled. “The next day, our house was gone.”
Stalin’s infamous Order No. 227 was read aloud to every Soviet unit. Known as “Not one step back,” it demanded that Soviet soldiers hold every position. The Soviet Union would not lose the city bearing its leader’s name.
Stalin also forbade the civilian population from fleeing. He believed that the presence of civilians would give Soviet soldiers another motivating factor to fight and die to protect the city. As many as 500,000 residents remained trapped when the ground fighting began.
A Brutal Urban Fight
German tanks and soldiers began entering the city by the end of August. They overran hastily fortified Soviet positions and pushed deep into the city. Soviet troops put up a desperate defense, making the Germans pay for every intersection, every building and every inch of ground.
Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov took command of the Soviet 62nd Army on Sept. 11, 1942, with a single mandate.
“We will defend the city or die in the attempt,” he declared.
What followed was some of the most savage urban combat in military history. Soldiers fought room to room through bombed-out factories, apartment buildings and sewers. Key positions changed hands as many as 15 times. The average life expectancy of a Soviet reinforcement soldier arriving in Stalingrad was measured in hours, not days.
Nowhere was the fighting fiercer than Mamayev Kurgan, a hilltop marked as Height 102.0. Whoever held it controlled the city. German troops stormed it up to 12 times a day. The hill changed hands repeatedly throughout the fall.
Soviet troops hardened their defensive positions. They famously held a ruined apartment complex, later known as Pavlov's House, for months while inflicting more casualties on German troops fighting for a single building than Hitler lost in the entire 1940 Campaign in France.
Soviet troops also bitterly defended the Grain Elevator, Grudinin Mill, as well as the Red October and Barrikady factories.
German Pvt. 1st Class Walter Oppermann captured the desperation in a November 1942 letter home.
“Stalingrad is hell on earth,” he wrote. “Verdun, beautiful Verdun, with new weapons. We attack on a daily basis. If in the morning we manage to advance 20 meters, in the evening the Russians throw us backward.”
Chuikov’s tactics adapted to the destruction around him. He ordered his men to stay as close to German positions as possible, sometimes within grenade-throwing range. The proximity made it impossible for the Luftwaffe to bomb Soviet fighters without hitting their own troops.
Small assault groups replaced large-unit attacks. The very rubble German bombs had created became ideal defensive terrain for Red Army soldiers. Veterans on both sides recalled how, at times, German soldiers occupied basements and ground-level floors while their Soviet enemies occupied the upper-stories.
Soldiers fired at each other from the tops of staircases, around corners in small apartments, or through holes in the ceiling. Flamethrowers and grenades were used to clear each room as hand-to-hand combat became a common experience.
The shattered cityscape also led to a deadly sniper war. Vasily Zaitsev, a soldier from the Ural Mountains serving in Chuikov’s 62nd Army, recorded 225 confirmed kills and trained dozens of other snipers during the battle. His exploits and memoirs later inspired the 2001 film “Enemy at the Gates.”
By early November, Paulus controlled roughly 90% of the city. His forces were freezing, exhausted and running dangerously low on ammunition and food. He had already lost 40,000 men since entering Stalingrad. Replacements and supplies became scarce for the Germans, while a seemingly unending supply of Soviet soldiers crossed the Volga.
The Trap Closes
While German forces bled themselves dry inside the city, Soviet generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky quietly assembled a massive counteroffensive. On Nov. 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a devastating two-pronged attack aimed at the weaker Romanian forces guarding the 6th Army’s flanks.
The Axis flanks shattered within days. Soviet pincers closed behind the 6th Army, trapping roughly 300,000 German and Romanian soldiers in a pocket stretching about 37 miles east to west and 28 miles north to south.
Hitler refused Paulus’s requests to break out. He ordered the 6th Army to hold its ground and promised them resupply by air. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring assured Hitler his planes could deliver 300 tons of supplies daily. They never came close. The airlift averaged around 105 tons per day, a fraction of the 750 the army needed to survive.
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm in December to break through to the pocket from the outside. Soviet resistance stopped the relief force roughly 30 miles short.
A subsequent Soviet offensive, Operation Little Saturn, smashed through Italian and Hungarian lines, forcing Manstein and other Axis forces to begin falling back. With that, Paulus’ troops had no more hope of rescue.
The Fall of the 6th Army
By January 1943, the situation inside the pocket was catastrophic. The soldiers ate horses, dogs and rats. Frostbite, typhus and dysentery ravaged the ranks. Thousands of wounded lay in basements and cellars with no medicine, no bandages and no hope of evacuation.
Meanwhile, Soviet troops isolated and eliminated German pockets methodically. Tens of thousands of German troops were killed or died of their wounds. Only a few managed to escape on the last Luftwaffe supply planes.
On Jan. 24, Paulus radioed Hitler directly. “Troops without ammunition or food,” his message read. “Effective command no longer possible. 18,000 wounded without any supplies, dressings, or drugs. Further defence senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.”
Hitler’s response left no room for interpretation. “Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round.”
On Jan. 30, the 10th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal. No German or Prussian field marshal had ever been captured alive. The implication was unmistakable. Hitler expected Paulus to take his own life rather than fall into Soviet hands.
Paulus was finished. On Jan. 31, Soviet troops reached the basement of the Univermag department store in central Stalingrad, where the field marshal and his staff had established their final headquarters. Maj. Anatoly Soldatov, among the first Soviet officers to enter, described conditions inside the building as “unbelievably filthy.”
Paulus surrendered that morning. He later told fellow officers in captivity that he had “no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.”
The northern pocket, commanded by Gen. Karl Strecker, held out two more days. On Feb. 2, Strecker’s forces laid down their arms. The Battle of Stalingrad was over.
Roughly 91,000 German soldiers went into Soviet captivity. Only about 6,000 would ever return home.
Hitler was furious.
“What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal,” he said. “That’s the last field marshal I shall appoint in this war.”
He went on to appoint seven more.
On Jan. 31, German state radio had replaced its regular programming with the somber Adagio movement from Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony before announcing the disaster. Sixteen days after the final surrender, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered his infamous “total war” speech at the Berlin Sportpalast.
It was the first public admission by the Nazi regime that Germany faced an existential threat.
A Turning Point
The fall of Stalingrad sent reverberations far beyond the Volga. Across occupied Europe, resistance movements from France to Yugoslavia gained momentum. The White Rose group in Munich published its final pamphlet denouncing Hitler’s leadership and the catastrophe on the Volga. In the Warsaw Ghetto, fighters preparing for their spring uprising drew strength from the German defeat.
For the Western Allies, the timing of Stalingrad was important. American and British forces had landed in French North Africa in November 1942 during Operation Torch. It was the first large-scale U.S. ground engagement against the European Axis. Those landings benefited directly from the fact that Hitler’s attention and resources were consumed by the fight for Stalingrad.
American and British support had even been sent to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. British-made tanks were already fighting alongside Soviet units by 1942, a few of them at Stalingrad. The bulk of the Allied support sent to the Eastern Front would begin arriving after the German defeat in the city. The support eventually totaled more than 400,000 trucks and 13,000 tanks that fueled the Red Army’s drive west.
At the same time, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco, from Jan. 14-24, 1943. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin declined to attend, citing the ongoing battle of Stalingrad as demanding his presence in Moscow.
The Casablanca Conference produced the Allies’ demand for “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers. It also set the strategic framework for the remainder of the conflict, including the invasion of Sicily and the eventual cross-Channel assault on Normandy.
The German surrender at Stalingrad and the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal both occurred in the first week of February 1943. Only two months earlier, German and Italian forces had been routed at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein in Egypt.
Churchill later titled his account of this period “The Hinge of Fate,” marking the months that permanently shifted Allied fortunes across the globe.
Captured German Lt. Gen. Alexander von Daniel, commander of the 376th Infantry Division, offered a blunt assessment of what the defeat at Stalingrad meant for his country.
“The operation to surround and liquidate the German 6th Army is a strategic masterpiece,” he said in his postwar testimony. “Making up for colossal losses in people, equipment and ammunition sustained by the German armed forces as a result of the perishing of the 6th Army will require huge effort and a lot of time.”
Germany never recovered from the disaster at Stalingrad. The Wehrmacht was forced to pull divisions from Western Europe and other theaters to replace its staggering losses, weakening its ability to resist future Allied operations. The loss of hundreds of thousands of Romanian and Italian troops weakened public support for the fascist regimes.
The 300,000 Axis troops lost in Tunisia only months later compounded the damage. Following these devastating losses and the Invasion of Sicily, the Italian public was finished with the war. Mussolini was removed from power and the first Axis nation unconditionally surrendered to the Allies.
Following the disastrous Battle of Kursk that summer, Hitler had lost all momentum on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union and Western Allies were now advancing toward Berlin from the East, the South and the following year from the West.
The Deadliest Battle in Human History
The Battle of Stalingrad consumed roughly 2 million military and civilian casualties. It stands as the largest, longest and deadliest urban battle ever fought. It remains the deadliest battle in all of human history.
Soviet losses in the battle outnumber all American and British dead from the rest of WWII combined. While the Soviets lost a terrifying number of soldiers and civilians in defending the city, they inflicted irrecoverable losses on the Axis. The German defeat at Stalingrad, combined with other Allied victories during that time, marked the beginning of the end for Germany, Italy and Japan.
Chuikov, the general who vowed to die defending the city, survived the war. He led his troops westward for two more years and personally accepted Berlin’s surrender on May 1, 1945.
He is buried on Mamayev Kurgan, the hilltop he fought to hold, where the 85-meter Motherland Calls statue now towers above the graves of 34,000 defenders. Zaitsev was reburied there in 2006.
The city was later renamed Volgograd. However, the devastating battle that was fought there over eight decades ago remains a key moment in Russian history.
Eighty-three years after the final German surrender on the Volga, Stalingrad remains the defining turning point of the Second World War. Its outcome shifted the war on the Eastern Front in favor of the Soviet Union. It reshaped the entire Allied war effort and set in motion the events that would bring the deadliest conflict in human history to an end.
