By the winter of 1942, Stalingrad was no longer a battlefield but a graveyard of shattered concrete, frozen corpses, and broken men. For the average German soldier, it meant endless Katyusha fire, Soviet snipers watching every street, merciless hand-to-hand combat, and nights spent shivering in cellars with no food, no heat, and little hope. Orders kept coming, but supplies did not. As temperatures plunged and the Red Army closed in, survival replaced ideology, and fear replaced confidence.
Stalingrad would redefine what total war truly meant for the German soldier—and total defeat. Why did Hitler want to capture Stalingrad in the first place? The city, originally named Tsaritsyn, had been renamed after Stalin in 1925 following his role in its defense during the Russian Civil War. Some believed Hitler was obsessed with taking a city bearing his rival’s name.
But on November 30, 1942, Hitler stated: “The objective was an area between the Bend of the Don and the Volga and the town of Stalingrad. Not because the town bears Stalin’s name, which is unimportant, but exclusively because it is a strategically important area. ”
By the second half of July 1942, the German 6th Army, led by General Friedrich Paulus, was on the march. Its objective was ambitious: cross the great bend of the Don, seize Stalingrad, and push on toward Astrakhan.
Success would secure the northern flank of the Axis forces driving south into the Caucasus toward the oil fields that were the true prize of Germany’s summer offensive. Paulus commanded around 120,000 men supported by roughly 170 tanks. Most soldiers marched on foot while motorized units sometimes covered up to 200 kilometers a day. But the advance came at a cost.
The army was operating nearly 2,000 kilometers from Berlin. Supplies were scarce, and priority often went to Army Group A in the Caucasus. Ordered to live off the land, German troops looted their way across the steppe, contributing to widespread starvation among the civilian population. Militarily, the advance seemed encouraging.
Soviet rear units often surrendered. Yet the main Red Army forces slipped away eastward. Unlike in 1941, there were no massive encirclements. Still, this retreat created a dangerous illusion that the Soviet Union was close to collapse—an illusion that would soon prove fatal.
Stalingrad wasn’t an ordinary city. It stretched roughly 30 to 40 miles along the western bank of the Volga, yet was seldom more than 5 miles deep. It was less a conventional city than a long narrow strip of heavily industrialized urban terrain pressed against the river. In the south lay the older districts close to the main railway station and river ports.
The central area consisted of a modern city center with broad avenues, administrative buildings, and large shops. To the north stood vast industrial complexes by now converted to arms production. The Tsaritsa River cut through the southern districts, while the city’s heart was overlooked by Mamayev Kurgan, a 300-foot hill and ancient burial site. Steep bluffs along the Volga’s western bank further strengthened the city’s defensive potential.
Such a layout made encirclement extremely difficult, if not impossible, especially for German forces already stretched to their logistical limits and exposed to enemy pressure on their flanks. At the same time, the city’s narrow shape seemed to invite costly frontal assaults to reach the river. German commanders understood the risks all too well. Prolonged urban combat, like the recent siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea, had caused them tens of thousands of casualties.
The summer offensive had been intended to avoid exactly this kind of fight. Yet with winter approaching and the 6th Army dependent on a fragile supply line, inaction was not an option. True to form, the Germans chose to attack. Upon entering the city, Hitler signaled to his commanding officers: “Upon penetration into the city, the entire male population must be eliminated since Stalingrad, with its 1 million—the population was actually roughly half that—uniformly communist inhabitants, is extremely dangerous.
” He didn’t specify what should happen to the women and children, but as we’ve seen the fate of women and children in German-occupied Eastern territories, we can assume it was not much good. At dawn on August 21, German forces crossed the Don River in assault boats and secured a bridgehead. Soon pontoon bridges were built so armored units could cross. On August 23, Stalingrad underwent a massive bombardment—the most intense air attack the Luftwaffe had carried out since the first day of Operation Barbarossa.
Stalin, insisting that there was nowhere left to retreat, had banned any evacuation of the city. As a result, Stalingrad was packed with civilians, including waves of peasant refugees driving their livestock toward the Volga in a desperate attempt to escape. The heavy use of incendiary bombs turned the city, already suffocating under the summer heat, into a vast inferno, glowing like a massive beacon that could be seen from 40 miles away. It was described as a gigantic torch.
Over the following two days, German bombers continued their destruction. Luftwaffe commander Wolfram von Richthofen noted with cold approval in his diary that Stalingrad was effectively wiped out and no worthwhile targets remained. Another German witness was transfixed by the sight, describing the burning city as “a fantastic picture in the moonlight. ” After three days, Stalingrad lay in ruins.
Tens of thousands were dead, and contact with the outside world was cut. For a time, even Moscow believed the city might already have fallen. The rapid German advance and the sheer brutality of the air attacks shocked the Soviet defenders. Richthofen, previously critical of what he saw as weak resistance, now believed the city could be taken by a direct assault, though only at the cost of heavy losses.
As Stalingrad was burning in the distance and pillars of smoke emerged from the city, German soldiers took triumphant photographs of it. In short time they had managed to get from the Don to the Volga and considered this the border of Asia. Many believed the war was as good as over. A soldier from the 389th Infantry Division wrote in a letter to the home front: “You can’t imagine the speed of our dear motorized comrades and with it the rolling attacks of our Luftwaffe, and the feeling of security we get when our pilots are above us because you never see any Russian aircraft.
I would like to share with you a little glimmer of hope. Our division will have fulfilled its duty as soon as Stalingrad falls. We should then, God willing, see each other again this year. If Stalingrad falls, the Russian army in the south is destroyed.
”
At first glance, Stalingrad looked like a battle the Germans should win. With two additional corps from Hoth’s Panzer Army, the 6th Army was the most powerful formation on the Eastern Front. But this strength was misleading. Of its 21 divisions, many were already under strength.
Paulus could send only eight into the city itself. The rest were stretched thin, guarding nearly 130 miles of exposed front to the north and south. Just one division remained in reserve. More importantly, this was no longer the kind of war the Germans were good at.
There were no sweeping maneuvers, no rapid breakthroughs, no elegant coordination of tanks, aircraft, and infantry. Stalingrad became what German soldiers called a “rattenkrieg,” a rat war. Small groups fought for stairwells, basements, and factory halls. Battles erupted in shattered apartments, grain silos, cellars, and sewer tunnels where soldiers suddenly surfaced behind the enemy in a storm of grenades and submachine gun fire.
As one German officer put it, “Kilometers no longer mattered, only meters. ” Street maps were useless. Street plans ruled instead. This combat felt closer to the trenches of World War I than to Blitzkrieg.
And in this environment, Germany’s greatest advantage disappeared along with any real chance of an easy victory. German infantry loathed house fighting. They found such close-quarter combat, which broke conventional military boundaries and dimensions, psychologically disorienting. During the last phase of the September battles, both sides had struggled to take a large brick warehouse on the Volga bank near the mouth of the Tsaritsa, which had four floors on the riverside and three on the landward side.
At one point, it was like a layered cake with Germans on the top floor, Russians below them, and more Germans underneath them. Often an enemy was unrecognizable, with every uniform impregnated with the same dun-colored dust. “The enemy is invisible,” a general wrote to a friend. “Ambushes out of basements, while remnants, hidden bunkers, and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops in the south of the city.
”
A Luftwaffe officer with the 24th Panzer Division wrote: “The defenders have concentrated and fortified themselves in the sections of the town facing our attacks. In parkland, there are tanks or just tank turrets dug in, and anti-tank guns concealed in the cellars make it very hard going for our advancing tanks. ” With tank losses mounting, the Germans now put their infantry in the lead. Panzers could function as firing support.
As a result of this decision, casualties were mounting. Paulus fed more divisions into the line. Since Soviet commander Chuikov knew that the Germans disliked fighting at night, he ordered small combat squads to attack enemy positions in the darkness to rattle the Germans psychologically as well as exhaust them physically. “If only you could understand what terror is,” wrote one soldier from Stalingrad.
“At the slightest rustle, I pull the trigger and fire off bursts from the machine gun. ” One German pilot recalled: “During the night, the Ivans were very busy. The tremendous noise woke me up. Sand fell from the walls of my sleeping pit.
Wherever you look is fire and flames. Russian cannon and machine guns are firing out of the burning city. Fanatics. ”
Mutual irritations between the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe arose as the Soviets adhered to the principle of “hug them to death,” meaning getting as close to the enemy positions as possible.
The German air force couldn’t be of much assistance as they ran the risk of bombing their own troops. German ground-attack pilot Hans Wu noted: “We have to drop our bombs with the greatest accuracy because only a few meters away in another basement or behind another remnant of a wall are our troops. On our photographic town maps, every single house is marked. Each pilot receives his own specific target marked by a red arrow.
We fly with this city map on our knees, and no one is allowed to drop any bomb before he has identified the exact position of our troops. ” Luftwaffe General von Richthofen remarked more bluntly: “With our army being as feeble as it is, there isn’t much the Luftwaffe can do. Had there been more determination, Stalingrad could have been taken in two days. ”
On the ground, the Germans were taking heavy losses.
One soldier noted: “Let’s count the killed yesterday, and now there’s no company commander. The Russians are fighting desperately like wild beasts and don’t give themselves up, but instead come up close and then throw grenades. For fighting in the wide open steppe earlier, the fighting has reduced to a merciless hammering with men and machines. ” A young officer described the scenes in the south of the city: “We have fought for 15 days for a single house with mortars, machine guns, grenades, and bayonets.
By the third day, 54 German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and staircases. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms. It is the thin ceiling between two floors. ”
A young officer in the 76th Infantry Division named Gottfried fought his way forward and described horrors of what many of his comrades hated—man-to-man combat.
“The struggle was man-to-man and house-to-house for every square meter. There was a house where the Germans were in the cellar and the first floor, and the Russians on the ground floor. Nobody wanted to give up the position they held. I reached the houses with only a handful of my comrades.
Here we broke down the enemy resistance in close-quarters fighting. At the same time, we made good our position and stood ready to defend it. Despite strong counterattacks, we held our positions with only a few men. ”
Increasingly, the fighting revolved around the landmarks of the city.
The grain elevator was one of the most formidable strong points in Stalingrad. Built in 1940 from reinforced concrete, it dominated the southern cityscape and quickly became a symbol of the brutal urban fighting. When German forces first occupied it in mid-September 1942, a small Soviet unit launched a surprise counterattack with just 27 men, recapturing the building. For days, the elevator became a concrete fortress.
German infantry, tanks, artillery, 88-millimeter flak guns, and Stuka bombers repeatedly battered it. Yet these Soviet defenders held on. Assault after assault was repelled at heavy cost to the attackers. Despite the building burning from inside and sections collapsing under shellfire, even when surrounded, the garrison refused to surrender, fighting hand-to-hand and disabling tanks with grenades and Molotov cocktails.
As the fighting continued, Germans tried to find reasons why the Soviet defenders refused to give up. The battalion commander said the Soviet commissars had ordered those men to die in the elevator. Another German claimed barbarism: “The elevator is occupied not by men but by devils that no flames or bullets can destroy. ” On September 21, after massive bombardment and a night assault, German troops finally penetrated the building as the exhausted Soviet survivors attempted to break out.
A small number escaped to Soviet lines. Others were killed or captured. After nearly a week of relentless combat, the grain elevator at last fell into German hands at staggering cost for the attackers. By the end of September 1942, Paulus had declared the south and the center of the city won, with the swastika flag flying over the Stalingrad party building.
These September battles had clearly shown what an enormous expenditure of time and forces a systematic mopping-up of the city would entail, when every block, every key feature of the cityscape—a grain silo, the main railway station, Mamayev Hill, the various factory complexes in the north—had to be fought over for days. Yet that was precisely what Paulus had in mind. One German soldier described a Soviet trick: “We would spend the whole day clearing the street from one end to the other, establish blocks and firing points at the western end, and prepare for another slice of the salami the next day. But at dawn, the Russians would start up firing from their old positions at the far end.
It took us some time to discover their trick. They’d knocked holes through between the garrets and attics, and during the night, they would run back like rats in the rafters and set their machine guns up behind some topmost window or broken chimney. ”
The fighting parties came close enough to smell each other. German soldiers confessed that Red Army soldiers gave off a distinct smell of shag tobacco.
A German soldier described how “our trenches were often only as far apart as you could throw a grenade. Ivans tried to push pole charges tied to long poles into our strong points. If I crawled along my trench, the Russians would hurl grenades at me. ” This was a deliberate tactic that put the German soldier in great risk.
But there were more problems on the horizon. Winter was approaching, and supplying the 6th Army became more and more difficult. In October, a report showed that even if the 6th Army had managed to capture all of the city, German logistical failures meant that Paulus’s troops faced a hunger catastrophe and likely could not have held on to Stalingrad in any case. Now you may wonder why didn’t the Germans just abandon Stalingrad?
German military leaders pleaded for withdrawal of the 6th Army to defensible winter lines. Hitler was firmly against this and claimed the capture of the city was necessary to deliver a crushing blow to the Red Army—not just militarily but also psychologically. Hitler needed a spectacular victory of German arms, not only to boost domestic morale but also for the sake of his allies and the world public, especially important neutrals like Sweden and Turkey. “Will Stalingrad turn into a second Verdun?
” Helmuth Brock had written anxiously to his brother on October 4. With his decision two days later, the Führer ensured that it would. Hitler the politician was now holding Hitler the military leader hostage. For prestige considerations, he had to take the city.
By October 1942, German forces of the 6th Army had pushed deep into the city and reached the factory belt along the Volga. At Barrikady, located in the northern industrial district, a vast artillery and armament complex, the battle collapsed into brutal close-quarter fighting. Control was not measured in streets but in individual rooms, stairwells, and shell holes. A single workshop might change hands several times in one day.
Rubble, twisted steel, and destroyed machinery turned every advance into a deadly crawl. A German soldier wrote over the course of several days: “The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures. They never get tired and are not afraid of fire. Every soldier sees himself as a condemned man.
The only hope is to be wounded and taken back to the rear. Stalingrad had turned us into beings without feelings. We are tired, exhausted, bitter. ”
By the end of October, the Germans had taken most of the factory area and had squeezed the Russians into a narrow strip along the Volga.
Yet the enemy kept fighting. A Stuka pilot wrote in his diary: “It is incomprehensible to me how people can continue to live in that hell. But the Russians are firmly established in the wreckage, in ravines, cellars, and in a chaos of twisted steel skeletons of the factories. ”
Hitler arrived in Munich at a moment of acute military tension.
The Allied landings in North Africa had shaken German confidence, and the situation on the Eastern Front remained unresolved. According to Goebbels, the veteran party members listening to Hitler’s speech at the Löwenbräukeller ensured that Germany was standing at a decisive turning point in the war. Yet Hitler offered little reassurance. Instead of a clear strategy or a vision of how even a limited victory might be achieved, he delivered only defiance: an iron determination to continue fighting and an uncompromising hatred of German enemies.
He categorically rejected any idea of a negotiated peace. Hitler could promise only imminent success. He boasted of his intention to reach the Volga at a specific city, downplaying its symbolic link to Stalin while emphasizing its economic importance, especially river traffic and oil shipments. He claimed victory was essentially secure, dismissing the remaining resistance as insignificant and arguing that speed did not matter as he wished to avoid a second Verdun.
Rather than calming fears, the speech deepened them. The contrast between Hitler’s confident claims and the grim reality of mounting casualties, relentless bombing, and a widening war was impossible to ignore. Mentioning Verdun to a population exhausted by prolonged conflict only heightened doubts that the regime still controlled events. By stressing economic objectives and openly acknowledging the slow process of the battle, Hitler also implicitly exposed the flaws of his own strategy.
The fighting went on. The Red October metal works was attacked 117 times. Twenty-three separate assaults took place on just one day. All ended in failure.
A soldier saw how an attack was preceded by a hurricane of fire: “We had never experienced anything like it before. After 30 minutes, it all stopped, and to our rear, infantry jumped up, crossed the embankment, and headed for the Volga. We thought that nobody on the other side could possibly have survived that barrage. Now we waited to advance.
Hardly any of the men who formed the advance platoon were ever seen alive again. The Russians had crept into previously prepared cellars and bunkers, let our infantry press overhead, and then had come out of their positions to shoot them in the back. ”
On November 11, Paulus launched what would become his final offensive at Stalingrad. It was a tightly planned attack led not by regular infantry but by specially trained pioneer units, men skilled in demolitions and explosives.
Their mission was to smash a path through the ruins, creating openings that any remaining able-bodied infantry could exploit. With brutal efficiency, the pioneers blew apart buildings and forced a narrow penetration into the Lazur chemical works. But the effort stalled almost immediately. There were simply too few infantry left to push through the breach and turn the breakthrough into something decisive.
On the night of November 15, a determined Soviet counterattack forced General Zeitzler to commit his final reserves. Once again, the Germans gained only a few meters of ground, paid for with crippling losses. The pattern was unmistakable. By November 17, even Hitler appeared to grasp the hopelessness of the situation.
In an order of the day read to all troops, he admitted the extreme difficulty of the fighting and the shrinking combat strength of the 6th Army. Yet he offered nothing beyond empty reassurance, claiming the Soviets were in even worse condition and demanding one last push to seize the factory district and reach the Volga. But time had run out. Nearly half of the 6th Army’s battalions were considered fought out, with some companies reduced to fewer than 50 men.
Reinforcements that might have helped were instead being diverted to North Africa. Although the Germans now controlled most of Stalingrad, they had done so at the cost of their own destruction. Two days later, the Red Army would close the trap. In reality, the German army had already reached its limits.
Months of stubborn Soviet resistance combined with Hitler’s disastrous decision to split the 1942 offensive had drained the Wehrmacht’s strength and made its original goals unattainable. Even worse, those goals had been reversed. Obsessed with capturing Stalingrad for reasons of prestige and regime instability, Hitler had lost sight of the true objective of the campaign: the oil fields of the Caucasus. The final culmination point had been passed.
Once again, Hitler had lost the race against time. We discussed why the Germans didn’t evacuate Stalingrad. Hitler insisted on pushing through. But why did the Soviets continue to fight?
They too took horrendous losses. Why throw all your troops into a senseless meat grinder? That was because the Soviets had a plan. Countless Soviet troops lost their lives in Stalingrad in order to make Operation Uranus a success.
By early November, Hitler had become increasingly uneasy about clear signs of a Soviet buildup along the weakly held Don front. On November 2, he ordered Luftwaffe attacks against Soviet pontoon bridges that were funneling troops into bridgeheads south of the river. The following day, he instructed that the 6th Panzer Division and two infantry divisions be transferred from the west. As the threat grew more urgent, Army Group B moved the 48th Panzer Corps into the Don Bend on November 9 to act as a mobile reserve and shore up the Romanian defenses.
On paper, this appeared to be a powerful force. In reality, it was badly worn down by the fighting at Stalingrad. The 22nd Panzer Division had only 42 operational tanks. The 14th Panzer Division lacked its infantry regiments, and the Romanian 1st Armored Division was barely fit for combat.
Expecting the possibility of deep Soviet breakthroughs, German commanders ordered the towns of Karpovka and Kalach to be turned into fortified zones and formed emergency alarm battalions for rapid response in the rear. Far from being complacent, Hitler and much of the German high command were deeply anxious, fully aware of how limited their ability to react had become. Yet neither Hitler nor the OKW was willing or able to take decisive action. Suspending the fighting in Stalingrad, pulling the 6th Army to defensible positions, or shortening other sectors of the front were all options left untouched.
With reserves exhausted, Hitler’s choices were severely constrained. Pulling troops from the central front risked disaster. Abandoning the Caucasus would negate the entire purpose of the summer campaign. And yet he fatally underestimated how little time remained.
Crisis elsewhere, especially in North Africa, demanded attention as well. Preoccupied with securing the Mediterranean flank and juggling his already overstretched forces, Hitler could do little more than hope there would be no new surprises in the east. His luck, however, was about to fail him. During roughly two weeks away from Germany’s military nerve centers, a cascade of decisive events unfolded: Rommel’s retreat from El Alamein, the Allied landings in North Africa, and the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad.
That offensive, one which General Zeitzler had believed the Red Army incapable of mounting, began before dawn on November 19 amid dense fog and driving snow. Following an 80-minute artillery barrage, although facing roughly equal numbers of Axis troops, the Soviets had far superior concentration of force at key points. Once again copying German operational methods, they masked men, tanks, and guns at decisive sectors while deliberately avoiding direct clashes through German frontline divisions. Instead, they struck the poorly trained, ill-equipped, and demoralized Romanian units guarding the flanks.
Soviet forces from the Don front drove southeast toward Kalach, while units of the Stalingrad front attacked south of the city the following day, advancing northwest toward the same objective. At the same time, Soviet planners intended to establish an outer defensive line along the Chir and Krivaya rivers, aiming not only to encircle the 6th Army in Stalingrad but also to trap Axis forces throughout the Don Bend. Advancing through thick mist in white camouflage, Soviet troops quickly overwhelmed the Romanian defenders. Although some Romanian units fought stubbornly, their lack of tanks and insufficient heavy anti-tank weapons sealed their fate.
By midday, Soviet armies had pushed through the fragile defensive line, with growing numbers of Romanian troops succumbing to panic at the sight of tanks. General Ferdinand Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps moved almost immediately to contain the breakthrough, but a string of setbacks prevented it from delivering a decisive blow. The 22nd Panzer Division, the core of Heim’s corps, had buried its tanks in pits and covered them with straw to protect them from the cold, only to discover when rushed into action that mice had chewed through electrical wiring. As a result, just 42 of its 102 tanks could be committed.
Confusion at higher command levels made matters worse. Army Group B ordered Heim to block the Soviet breakthrough at Kletskaya, while Zeitzler, after consulting Hitler, redirected the corps northward to counter the attack at Bolshaya. With fewer than 100 operational tanks and so little fuel that supplies had to be borrowed from the Romanians, the Panzer units were shuttled back and forth in what officers later described as a wild goose chase, squandering their remaining strength. When they did manage to engage Soviet forces, German tank crews fought effectively, destroying large numbers of T-34 tanks.
But the chance for a coordinated counterattack had vanished. The 48th Panzer Corps soon found itself on the defensive, unable to halt the Soviet tide. Henry Shapiro was one of the few Western journalists reporting from within the Soviet Union as he flew over the snow-covered landscape. He saw thousands of Romanians wandering the steppe, cursing the Germans, desperately looking for Russian feeding points and anxious to be formally taken as POWs.
Some individual stragglers would throw themselves on the mercy of local peasants, who treated them charitably, if only because they weren’t Germans. The Russians thought they were just poor peasants themselves. The Romanian soldiers were sick and tired of the war, and the prisoners I saw all said roughly the same thing: that this was Hitler’s war, and the Romanians had no business being on the Don. Although Stalingrad is remembered as a German-Soviet showdown, the battle was also fought by soldiers from several other nations.
Romania played the most critical part. The Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies were assigned to guard the long exposed northern and southern flanks of the German 6th Army. These sectors stretched along the Don River and south of Stalingrad and were too wide for the forces available. Romanian units were poorly equipped for anti-tank warfare, lacked modern artillery, and were thinly spread.
Then there were also the Italians. Italy was not fighting inside the city itself, but the Italian 8th Army was deploying further northwest along the Don River as part of a wider Axis defensive system supporting the Stalingrad operation. Its task was to hold extended river sectors and protect the northern approaches to Army Group B. Like the Romanians, Italian units were overstretched and poorly equipped to counter Soviet tanks.
Let’s not forget the Hungarians, who also contributed forces to the campaign through the Hungarian 2nd Army positions along the Don north of Stalingrad. Its role was similar to that of the Italians: holding defensive lines and securing German flanks. While the main German effort focused on the city and the Caucasus, the Hungarian army was also inadequately supplied and lacked effective weapons. Though not destroyed during the initial encirclement at Stalingrad, it would soon suffer catastrophic losses during subsequent Soviet offensives in early 1943.
Lastly, Croatia was the only non-German Axis nation to fight directly inside Stalingrad itself. The Croatian 369th Reinforced Infantry Regiment, often called the Croatian Legion, fought alongside German units in the street-to-street combat. Its soldiers took part in assaults on factories and residential districts and endured the same brutal conditions as the Wehrmacht. The regiment was ultimately trapped and destroyed with the rest of the 6th Army, sharing its fate in the final surrender.
In the early hours of November 22, a forward unit of the Soviet 26th Tank Corps encountered almost no resistance as it captured the vital railway bridge over the Don River at Kalach. The Germans, lacking both the fuel and manpower needed to mount a counteroffensive to recover the crossing, were left with no realistic option. Despite serious misgivings among nearly all commanders in the area about whether it could work, they were forced to rely on an airlift as the sole means of sustaining the 6th Army’s combat capability. When the Soviet pincers finally closed on November 23, the encirclement proved far larger than expected.
Instead of the anticipated 85,000 to 95,000 men, more than 250,000 Axis soldiers had been caught inside the pocket. Hitler forbade Paulus to break out and promised to supply the 6th Army trapped in Stalingrad by air. One German soldier noted in his diary: “We are encircled. It was announced this morning that the Führer has said, ‘The army can trust me to do everything necessary to ensure supplies and rapidly break the encirclement.
‘”
Why did the Stalingrad airlift fail? Because it was simply impossible to supply such a huge trapped force by air. More than 250,000 Axis soldiers were encircled, and they needed hundreds of tons of food, fuel, ammunition, and medical supplies every day just to keep fighting and survive. The Luftwaffe could deliver only a small fraction of what was required.
Winter weather made matters worse. Thick fog, snowstorms, and extreme cold grounded aircraft. At the same time, Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns shot down many transport planes, while advancing Red Army units captured or shelled German airfields, reducing the number of usable landing sites and increasing flight distances. The aircraft themselves were poorly suited for the task, often slow, lightly protected, and able to carry only limited cargo.
German leadership badly misjudged the situation. Göring assured Hitler the airlift could succeed, but the Luftwaffe never had the capacity to sustain an army of that size. Luftwaffe commander Jeschonnek also made assurances, and that was exactly what Hitler wanted to hear. Historian Antony Beevor, who wrote the book “Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege,” wrote the following: “Many historians have also given the impression that almost every officer in the 6th Army believed that an attempt should be made immediately to break out of the Russian encirclement.
This is misleading. Corps commanders, divisional commanders, and staff officers were firmly in favor of a breakout. But in the infantry, especially regimental and battalion commanders, were much less convinced. Their troops, especially those who were already dug in with bunkers, did not want to abandon their positions and heavy weapons to march out into the snow where they would be exposed to Russian attacks in the open.
Soldiers were also reluctant to move because they believed the promises of a strong counterattack coming to rescue them. ” The slogan in support of this at the end of Paulus’s order of the day on November 27—”Hold on, the Führer will get us out”—had proved very effective. Within the pocket, the marked soldiers tended to believe the “hold on” slogan as a firm promise, but there were doubts. This is an example of a discussion that took place between officers: “We’re never going to get out of this one.
This is a unique opportunity which the Russians aren’t going to let slip by. ” “You’re a real pessimist. I believe in Hitler. What he says he’ll do, he’ll stick to.
Just hold out. The Führer will get us out. ”
Hitler, however, never intended to get them out. The relief operation was to enable them to stay and continue the fight.
At a conference on December 12, Hitler emphasized: “We must not give it up now under any circumstances. We won’t win it back again. Things would have been quicker if we hadn’t hung about so long. But to imagine that one can do it a second time, that’s ridiculous.
We can’t possibly replace the stuff we have inside. If we give that up, we surrender the whole meaning of this campaign. To imagine that I shall come here another time is madness. We are not coming back here a second time.
That is why we must not leave here. Besides, too much blood has already been shed for that. ” The main goal of the 1942 summer offensive had always been the oil fields of the Caucasus, not the capture of Stalingrad. While Hitler’s choice to hold the city wasn’t obviously a mistake at the time, his statement carried a tone of desperation, like a man realizing the situation was slipping away but clinging to the hope that a single bold move might still turn things around.
As the Soviets carried out more offensive operations, the chance for relief evaporated. By Christmas Eve 1942, any hope of rescuing the 6th Army had completely disappeared. A former salesman, now a Wehrmacht soldier, wrote a letter to his wife: “Christmas Eve is here, and my thoughts linger even more than usual on my loved ones. My wish tonight is that you spend the holidays healthy and undisturbed, and that I may be able to celebrate this festival again with my loved ones.
We are still in a somewhat difficult situation, still in the endless barren Russian steppe which is now covered by a blanket of snow, and an icy wind is blowing. There are 14 of us in a hole in the ground, somewhat protected from the cold and wind. The supply problems are huge for us, with ammunition and most importantly food being in desperately short supply. ” The 6th Army was starving.
Three days later, General Zeitzler showed up unannounced at Hitler’s private headquarters and bluntly warned him that if German forces were not pulled back from the Caucasus, they risked being trapped in a situation even worse than Stalingrad. By the end of the year, the withdrawal was put in motion, and by the beginning of the new year, the Germans would be back at roughly the same positions they had occupied before the start of the summer campaign, minus hundreds of thousands of soldiers, not to mention the loss of material. And many more men would continue to perish as hunger and disease set in. I read that Chief of Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler put himself on the same diet as his men in Stalingrad.
In a few weeks he had lost almost 12 kilograms. At least he was warm while his men suffered from the extreme cold in Stalingrad as the Russian winter was fully upon them. A German soldier inside the pocket wrote: “Most men had frostbite to the feet, and many had no footwear. Their feet were bound with rags and strips of tent canvas to protect against the cold.
We have been without rations for days. The only protection we had for our heads was a thin cap comforter under our steel helmets. The men made themselves gloves of stitch rags. ”
In January 1943, when the final aircraft left Stalingrad and landed in German-occupied Novocherkassk, seven mailbags were seized by the authorities.
The letters were opened, names and addresses removed, then sorted by content and tone. They were bundled neatly and forwarded to Army High Command, where the Bureau of Army Information analyzed them statistically, dividing troop morale into five categories. The results painted a grim picture. Only a tiny fraction expressed confidence in the leadership, while the majority were negative or indifferent.
The letters and letter fragments were first publicized in Germany in 1954 under the title “Stalingrad: Last Letters from Stalingrad. ” The German edition included an afterword explaining the extraordinary journey these letters took. According to that note, tracing the fate of the letters reveals an almost absurd story of bureaucratic excess, of a military and party apparatus obsessed with censorship and analysis. After being flown out of the Stalingrad pocket, the letters passed through countless offices.
Officially, they were meant to be used to assess troop morale, but a direct order from Hitler’s headquarters soon demanded that they be confiscated. The directive moved from the Army High Command to the Central Censorship Office of the Army Postal System. Once reviewed and officially acknowledged, the letters, together with other Stalingrad documents such as Hitler’s orders, field reports, and radio messages—amounting to roughly half a ton of paper—were handed over to the army press corps. Their task was to produce an account of the battle of Stalingrad.
The high command hoped the documents would shift blame away from itself, but their content was too damning. The project was halted, and Goebbels ruled the book unacceptable to the German nation. Eventually, copies of the letters were stored in the army archives in Potsdam. Just days before the fall of Berlin, they were removed from the archives and saved, ensuring that the voices of Stalingrad would survive.
The Bureau of Army Information took care of the statistical breakdown of troop morale, dividing it into five rubrics. This was the resulting picture: a little over 2% had a positive attitude towards the Nazi leadership. The majority was negative, and one-third was indifferent. An example of one of the letters, presumably from a German administrator in Stalingrad, illustrates the mood: “Everything is collapsing.
A whole army is dying. Day and night are on fire, and four men busy themselves with daily reports on temperature and cloud ceilings. I don’t know much about war. No human being has died by my hands.
I haven’t even fired live ammunition from my pistol. But I know this much: the other side would never show such a lack of understanding for his men. I should have liked to count stars for another few decades, but nothing will ever come of it now, I suppose. ”
Another wrote: “The army had been surrounded for seven weeks, and it can’t last another seven.
My leave was already due in September, but it didn’t come through. I consoled myself with the others who also had to kiss their leaves goodbye. ” The pocket was shrinking as the days progressed. One wrote: “The Russians have broken through everywhere.
Our troops, weakened by long periods of hunger, without possibility of relief, engaged in the heaviest fighting since the beginning of this battle without a day’s relief, and in a state of complete physical exhaustion, have performed heroically. None of them surrenders. We are aware that we are the victims of serious mistakes in leadership. Also, the wearing down of the fortress Stalingrad will cause most severe damage to Germany and her people.
” You clearly see how this soldier saw how the military leadership had failed. Others started to doubt the existence of the Almighty. As one wrote: “I don’t believe any longer that God can be good, for then he would not permit such great injustice. I don’t believe in it anymore, for he would have enlightened the minds of those people who began this war and always talked of peace and the Almighty in three languages.
I don’t believe in God anymore because he betrayed us. I don’t believe anymore, and you must see how you can come to terms with your faith. ”
“Supplies all gone,” radioed Paulus from the pocket on January 22, 1943, adding, “What orders should I give to troops that have no more ammunition? ”
The Soviet leadership wanted to destroy the encircled German forces in Stalingrad as quickly as possible so they could then turn south and trap Army Group A in the Caucasus.
From the beginning, the Red Army launched repeated attacks on the surrounded Germans inside the pocket. Despite extreme hunger, cold, and exhaustion, the Germans didn’t give up. Their stubborn resistance impressed and frustrated the Soviets. It was not until January 10, after Paulus rejected a surrender demand, that the Soviets launched their final offensive, Operation Ring.
This attack was preceded by one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war. About 280,000 Soviet soldiers, supported by 250 tanks and around 10,000 artillery pieces, attacked the pocket. In contrast, by now Paulus had only about 25,000 combat-ready frontline troops, 95 usable tanks, 33 assault guns, and 310 anti-tank guns, many of which couldn’t even be moved due to the lack of fuel. Even so, the Germans resisted fiercely.
In the first three days of the attack alone, the Soviet Don front lost more than half of its tanks and suffered 26,000 casualties. Still, the outcome was inevitable. On January 16, the Soviets captured Pitomnik airfield, the main German supply base. From that point on, the airlift collapsed.
Planes had to land at the much smaller Gumrak airfield or simply drop supplies by parachute. Often exhausted German soldiers could not reach the dropped supplies or had no fuel to transport them. The final phase began on January 22 when Hitler rejected Paulus’s suggestion to seek negotiations. On January 23, Soviet forces smashed through the remaining German defenses, and on January 26 they split the 6th Army in two.
The Luftwaffe continued dropping supplies, sometimes up to 100 tons a day, but it no longer mattered. By January 28, the situation inside the pocket was horrific. Food distribution stopped. Starving, freezing, wounded, and sick soldiers crowded into cellars.
Organized fighting broke down into small, desperate actions. On January 30, Paulus sent Hitler a message praising loyalty and sacrifice. The next day, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal, clearly expecting him to take his own life rather than surrender. Paulus refused.
On the morning of January 31, Soviet troops reached Paulus’s headquarters. The last radio messages reported that the Russians were at the entrance and that equipment was being destroyed. Paulus allowed himself to be captured. Hitler was furious, calling Paulus weak and accusing him of ruining the myth of heroic sacrifice.
Meanwhile, 33,000 German troops under General Strecker continued fighting in the northern part of the city until February 2, 1943, when they finally surrendered. That morning, the last German message was sent. By noon, reconnaissance aircraft reported no more fighting in Stalingrad. In total, over 90,000 Germans, including 24 generals and 2,500 officers, were taken prisoner.
Conditions were deadly. By May 1943, only about 15,000 of those prisoners were still alive. Around 90% of ordinary soldiers died in captivity, compared to 50% of junior officers and just 5% of senior officers. Of these survivors, only about 5,000 eventually returned to Germany, the last as late as 1955.
Exact German losses remain debated. Soviet figures claimed 147,000 Germans killed and 91,000 captured, of whom 86,000 died, for a total of 233,000 losses. Other historians estimate that between 220,000 and 250,000 German soldiers died during the entire Stalingrad campaign. In addition, around 12,000 Romanian troops and 20,000 to 50,000 Soviet auxiliaries, Hiwis, were also trapped.
Soviet losses were enormous for the entire Stalingrad campaign. Soviet permanent losses—killed, missing, or captured—are estimated at nearly 500,000 men. By any measure, Stalingrad was a catastrophe.
What the Germans had once feared as a Verdun on the Volga became exactly that: a mass grave for hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides.
