Before this legendary battle, Hitler's armies were still advancing. After her there was nothing but retreat and final defeat.
On November 11, 1942, Adolf Hitler was at his residence Berchtesgaden, in the mountains of Bavaria. There he celebrated with his closest entourage the capture of Stalingrad and the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.
After three months of the fiercest fighting in the entire Second World War, which often turned into hand-to-hand combat among the ruins of this city, Hitler believed that his Army Group B, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, had won.
The fall of Stalingrad opened the way for Hitler's armies to the vital oil fields of the Caucasus around Maikop and Grozny, as well as a path north to destroy the Soviet forces on the Central Front that defended Moscow and Leningrad. The attacks on these cities had failed a year earlier.
Hitler was so confident in his own foresight that three days earlier, on November 8, he spoke on the radio and announced victory at Stalingrad, as well as the impending collapse of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
This confidence of Hitler was based on seemingly convincing rosy reports from the front. German troops occupied 90 percent of Stalingrad's territory, reaching the banks of the Volga in the east. Only a couple of plots of land in the city along the coastline remained in Soviet hands.
These pockets of resistance seemed insignificant, and their elimination was inevitable.
But even before Hitler and his entourage finished celebrating November 11, news came from Stalingrad that clearly showed that the battle for the city was not yet over.
In fact, this battle, which many writers call a turning point in the European theater of war in World War II, was only half way through.
Other analysts go even further and argue that if the Battle of Midway Atoll was decisive in the Pacific Ocean, and the Battle of El Alamein was the greatest in North Africa that led to the liberation of Italy, then Stalingrad was the decisive battle of the entire war, and caused the inevitable fall of Hitler. and the Nazi regime.
It is quite understandable that such a point of view does not always find a favorable response in the member countries of the North Atlantic alliance, since it seems that Stalingrad downplays the importance and significance of the Allied landings in Europe, the offensive on the Western Front, as well as the military losses of Canada, Britain, the United States and others. coalition allies.
But this point of view does not belong to Stalin. His increasingly angry demands on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 to invade Western Europe and open a Second Front suggest that he was not confident in his ability to win the war on his own.
However, the indisputable truth is that Stalingrad was the most extreme point that the Nazi war machine could reach. Before Stalingrad, Hitler was still advancing. After Stalingrad, there was nothing but retreat and final defeat.
Reports that arrived in Berchtesgaden on the evening of November 11 reported that Soviet troops attacked the 3rd Romanian army with powerful forces, as well as Hungarian and Italian units defending the northern flank of the German army.
A few days later, other reports came in which reported that another Soviet group, supported by tanks, was attacking the Romanian divisions defending the southern flank of the Germans.
Hitler's staff officers immediately realized that Paulus and his 6th Army were in danger of being surrounded and locked up in Stalingrad.
The Fuehrer was advised to order Paulus to withdraw his troops immediately before the trap slammed shut.
Hitler refused. "I will never, never, never leave the Volga," he shouted to Paulus on the phone.
Instead, Hitler ordered General Erich von Manstein, who was with his troops at the front in northern Russia, to urgently come to the south and break the incipient Soviet blockade around Stalingrad.
Manstein's offensive was restrained by the arrival of winter, and it was only on December 9 that he managed to get close enough to Stalingrad, at a distance of 50 kilometers, so that Paulus's troops in the ruins of Stalingrad could see his signal flares.
This was the closest chance of salvation for Paulus and his more than a million-strong group.
When the battle on February 2 of the following year actually ended, the losses of German troops and their allies in killed and wounded amounted to 750 thousand people, and 91 thousand were taken prisoner. Of these prisoners of war, only 5,000 were destined to return home from Soviet camps.
This battle was no less bloody for the Soviets, whose troops were commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov. His army of 1, 1 million people lost almost 478 thousand people killed and missing. 650 thousand were injured or suffered from diseases.
Throughout most of the battle, the average life expectancy of a Soviet infantryman at the front was one day.
In addition to this, at least 40 thousand civilians of Stalingrad were killed during the battle.
Stalingrad is inextricably linked with the Battle of Kursk, where the largest tank battle in history took place. This battle took place in July and August 1943, when Manstein tried to align the front line after the defeat of Stalingrad and the subsequent victory of the Soviet troops near Kharkov.
After Kursk, when Soviet troops effectively thwarted the German blitzkrieg tactics for the first time, using powerful, highly mobile and closely cooperating air and tank forces, Hitler's troops moved on to an incessant retreat, which ended in Berlin.
Near Kursk, Manstein lost almost 250 thousand people killed and wounded, as well as 1000 tanks and almost the same number of aircraft.
As a result of these two battles, Hitler lost his most experienced armies, as well as a large amount of military equipment.
If these troops and weapons had been available after the Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943 and in Normandy in June 1944, Hitler could have offered them much more stubborn resistance.
But like Napoleon Bonaparte before him, Hitler was eager to seize Russia's rich lands and resources. And like Napoleon, he underestimated the severity of the Russian climate and the difficulties of the area, as well as the willpower of the Russian people in their resistance to the invaders.
By accident or by design, Hitler chose to attack Russia on the same day as Napoleon - June 22, when he began his Operation Barbarossa.
Stalin expected this. He did not believe that Hitler would fulfill the conditions of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and he guessed that the Fuhrer wanted to profit from the resources of Russia and its satellite countries.
Stalin used this time to evacuate Soviet military enterprises to safe places. Many of them were transferred to the Urals and Siberia. They played a decisive role during the battles at Stalingrad and Kursk.
In the early stages of the war, the offensive of the Nazi war machine was devastating, partly due to the fact that Stalin and his generals gave land to gain time.
By December 2, 1941, Hitler's troops reached the outskirts of Moscow and could already see the Kremlin. But further in the northern direction, they were unable to advance.
In the spring of 1942, Hitler ordered an offensive southward into the Caucasus, targeting the region's oil fields. By the end of August, German troops captured the oil production center, the city of Maikop, and were approaching another oil-producing region, the city of Grozny.
But contrary to the advice of the generals, Hitler became obsessed with Stalingrad and demanded to seize it.
There were reasonable grounds for his military calculations, since he believed that it was rather dangerous to expose unprotected troops in the Caucasus to the risk of attack from Stalingrad. But the Hitlerite generals were convinced that the real desire of the Fuehrer was to humiliate Stalin, whose name was Stalingrad.
Paulus' 6th Army approached Stalingrad in August.
Stalin appointed Marshal Andrei Eremenko and Nikita Khrushchev to command the defense of Stalingrad and Nikita Khrushchev, who later replaced Stalin as the Soviet leader, and was an army political commissar in Stalingrad.
The film "Enemy at the Gates" is a work of fiction about the initial stage of the Battle of Stalingrad, where there is fiction. However, the main character of the picture, sniper Vasily Zaitsev, actually existed. He is said to have killed up to 400 Germans.
This film gives a true picture of a battle in a city with all its madness and horror. Stalin demanded: "Not a step back," and the Soviet troops defended against the superior forces of the Nazis with their air support with manic resilience.
Soviet troops, often just a militia, when only one in ten soldiers had a rifle, nullified the superiority of the Nazis in the air and artillery, fighting at such close range that all these advantages were useless.
The Soviet plant, which produced T-34 tanks and was not evacuated before the Nazis arrived in the rear, like the rest of Stalingrad's enterprises, continued to work and produced tanks until the end of August. And then the workers of the plant sat down at the levers of the machines and moved from the checkpoint straight into the battle.
But when Paulus's troops broke through to the banks of the Volga and took almost all of Stalingrad, they doomed themselves to defeat.
The troops were immensely exhausted, and supplies were carried out irregularly.
When the Soviets launched a counterattack at the end of November with three armies in the north and two in the south, Stalingrad was blockaded for two days.
The German Luftwaffe Air Force could not supply the troops from the air, since the 300,000-strong group surrounded in the cauldron required about 800 tons of supplies daily.
Aviation could only drop 100 tons per day with the available forces, and even these capabilities were quickly reduced due to the rapid build-up of Soviet aviation forces, which grew both quantitatively and qualitatively.
In late November, Hitler reluctantly ordered Manstein to break the siege from the north. But he forbade Paulus to carry out an organized breakthrough with the withdrawal of troops, although this was the only way to escape.
On December 9, 1942, Manstein's troops approached a distance of 50 kilometers from the perimeter along which Paulus was surrounded, but could not advance further.
On January 8, the Soviets asked Paulus to surrender on very generous terms. Hitler forbade him to surrender and promoted the general to the rank of field marshal, knowing that "not a single German field marshal surrendered." The hint was clear: as a last resort, Paulus had to follow the traditions of Prussian military honor and shoot himself.
Since only a small fraction of supplies reached the encircled, and the Russian winter was getting stronger, Paulus again asked permission to surrender on January 30 and was again refused. On February 2, 1943, further resistance became impossible, and Paulus surrendered, declaring: "I do not intend to shoot myself over this Bohemian corporal."
Until 1953, he was in captivity, and after that, until his death in 1957, he lived in the Soviet-occupied territory of East Germany in the city of Dresden.
