All language subtitles for [English] THE SIXTH ARMY The Most Powerful Unit of Hitler that was Annihilated [DownSub.com]

There is a number that requires no

context or explanation, 330,000.

That is the number of soldiers that the

6th German Army had with them when they

crossed the Don River in the summer of

1942 marching toward a city on the banks

of the Volga that bore the name of the

man Adolf Hitler hated the most. 330,000

soldiers with 3 years of consecutive

victories etched into their bodies, men

who had crossed all of Europe without

knowing defeat, who had destroyed entire

armies and captured hundreds of

thousands of prisoners in encirclement

maneuvers that history books still study

with awe.

The forging of a war machine, origin and

doctrine of the 6th Army. The 6th Army

was formally established in October 1939

just weeks after the end of the Polish

campaign.

It did not emerge from nowhere. It was

the reorganization of the 10th Army,

which had fought on that first front of

the war, transferred to the west on

October 10th, 1939

and renamed under the command of General

der Infanterie Walter von Reichenau.

But to understand what this army really

was, what made it different from any

other formation of its size in the world

at that time, it is necessary to go even

further back to the very nature of the

doctrine [music] that animated it and to

the men that doctrine had produced.

Germany had gone from having an army of

100,000 men, the limit imposed by the

Treaty of Versailles in 1919, to

deploying millions of soldiers in less

than a decade.

This transformation was logistical and

industrial, but also and above all

doctrinal.

The army that Versailles had left alive,

the Reichswehr of 100,000 men, was

paradoxically the laboratory where the

ideas that would transform it were

incubated. Deprived of the possibility

of having tanks, military aviation, and

heavy artillery, the officers of the

Reichswehr spent the 1920s studying.

They studied the war they had just lost,

sought the reasons for the German

collapse in 1918, analyzed the armored

experiments of the British and the

French, and arrived at conclusions that

their European rivals took decades to

assimilate.

But there was something even more

fundamental, something that is often

omitted when describing the German army

of that era, the Auftragstaktik, the

mission tactic.

Its history is older than the 20th

century. Its roots lie in the Prussian

military reforms of the first half of

the 19th century, in the thought of

Clausewitz, and in the operational

practice of Marshall Helmuth von Moltke

the Elder during the wars of German

unification.

Auftragstaktik started from a premise

that its rivals found difficult to

accept, the battlefield is inherently

chaotic and unpredictable, and any

detailed plan begins to degrade the

moment contact is made with the enemy.

Consequently, the solution was not to

plan in greater detail, but to train

officers at all levels to act with

initiative within the framework of the

overall objectives assigned.

In the German army of 1939 to 1942, a

battalion commander who identified an

opportunity on the battlefield had not

only the authority, but the obligation

to act on it without waiting for orders

from above.

They were assigned a goal, take that

village, cross that river, neutralize

that battery, not a method. Initiative

was a cardinal virtue.

A commander who awaited detailed

instructions when the situation changed

was considered a failure, regardless of

their rank. A commander who acted

without orders, but correctly identified

the superior objective and contributed

to its achievement was [music] praised,

even if they had violated the letter of

the plan.

This culture produced middle commanders

capable of [music] making quick and

correct decisions under pressure, which

made German units move with a speed and

coordination that their enemies took

years to understand and even longer to

imitate.

The training system that produced these

officers was equally demanding. The

Kriegsakademie, the war academy,

selected its candidates through a series

of tests that lasted months and

evaluated not only tactical and

operational knowledge, but the ability

to reason under pressure, clarity in

written expression, geographical and

logistical understanding, and

independent judgment.

The selected officers spent years

learning to write concise orders, to

analyze complex tactical situations, and

to understand the perspective of both

higher and lower levels simultaneously.

The result was a core of professional

officers whose technical competence was

in the period 1939 to 1942

unparalleled in the world.

The Sixth Army absorbed this philosophy

from its birth under von Reichenau.

Walter von Reichenau was born in 1884 in

Karlsruhe, the son of a Prussian

general.

He was a man who embodied the

contradictions of the German officer of

that era, a brilliant strategist, a

convinced military technocrat, a

rigorous athlete, running marathons and

practicing extreme sports at an age when

his colleagues played chess in the

officers casino, and at the same time

one of the most ideologically committed

officers to the Nazi regime within the

high command.

Unlike most of his aristocratic peers,

von Reichenau had actively cultivated

his relationship with Hitler since the

early 1930s and had served as an

intermediary between the party and the

army during the rise to power. His

ideology was documented in the Scharfer

Befehl, the Order of Severity, which he

issued on October 10th, 1941 for the

Sixth Army, instructing his men on what

he described as the duty to exterminate

the Jewish Asiatic threat and to

consider Soviet political commissars as

representatives of a subhumanity that

did not deserve the protection of the

laws of war.

The document was distributed on the

Eastern Front at Hitler's request, who

presented it as a model for the other

army commanders.

It was one of the first official

documents in which a field commander

articulated genocide as part of the

ordinary military mission.

The Sixth Army units delivered captured

Jews and commissars to the

Einsatzgruppen and the Feldgendarmerie,

as occurred in the Kiev region in

September 1941, including the massacre

at Babi Yar, where more than 33,000

people were killed in two days.

But his tactical influence on the Sixth

Army was equally real and profound. He

established a culture of initiative at

the intermediate command level, of rapid

decision-making, of sustained aggression

that would persist long after he left

command.

The officers of the Sixth Army learned

that slowness was a vice and audacity a

virtue, that the momentum of combat was

an asset lost the moment the advance was

stopped, and that uncertainty was never

an excuse for inaction.

That culture would take the Sixth Army

from Poland to Kiev, and from Kiev to

the banks of the Volga.

It would also be, in the decisive hours

of the Stalingrad encirclement, the

culture that Paulus did not embody and

that his army urgently needed. The

organizational structure that the Sixth

Army would have at its peak was

generally composed of four army corps,

the Eighth Army Corps, the Eleventh Army

Corps, the Fourteenth [music] Panzer

Corps, and the Fifty-first Army Corps.

The most powerful corps in terms of

maneuverability was the Fourteenth

Panzer Corps, led by General der

Panzertruppe Hans Valentin Hube, which

grouped the armored and motorized

divisions, the Third Motorized Infantry

Division, the Sixtieth Motorized

Infantry Division, the Ninety-fourth

Infantry Division, the Sixteenth Panzer

Division, and eventually fractions of

the Fourteenth and Twenty-fourth.

These formations were sharp edge of the

army, capable of advancing 40 or 50 km

in a day across open terrain, bypassing

enemy positions, and sowing chaos in the

rear.

The infantry corps provided the mass and

sustained combat capability, securing

terrain, reducing defensive positions,

eliminating pockets left by the armored

cavalry behind them.

This was further complemented by

integration with the Luftwaffe,

particularly with the 8th Fliegerkorps

under General Leutnant Martin Fiebig,

which assigned two 87 Stuka dive bombers

and fighter bombers for close air

support to ground units with speed and

effectiveness that no other army in the

world had been able to perfect. The

Stuka pilots supporting the 6th Army

during the years of victories brought

vertical warfare to the battlefield,

attacking enemy artillery, destroying

bridges over rivers, and disrupting

armored concentrations before they

reached the front.

The communication system coordinating

those attacks with Luftwaffe liaison

officers embedded in the headquarters of

the ground corps was the invisible

backbone of that combined power.

All of this, the doctrine, the men, the

structure, the integration with

aviation, was what made the 6th Army

unprecedented in German military

history, and at that time in world

military history.

It was a war machine fine-tuned by three

years of real combat, by victories that

confirmed the validity of its founding

principles, and by the accumulated

experience of hundreds of thousands of

men who had learned to function together

under fire.

That accumulated experience, that

capital of tactical competence and

institutional cohesion,

was an asset that could not be

manufactured in a factory or delivered

through replacement reinforcements.

It could only be earned in combat, and

once lost, it could not be recovered.

Barbarossa, the 6th Army on the Eastern

Front.

On June 22nd, 1941, along a front of

more than 3,000 km, Germany launched the

most ambitious operation in its military

history, the invasion of the Soviet

Union.

For this campaign, the Sixth Army was

assigned to the Southern Army Group

under the command of General Field

Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

Its mission was to advance from Southern

Poland and Ukraine toward the Donbas and

the Caucasus, the industrial and

oil-rich regions that Hitler considered

essential to sustain the German war

machine in the long term.

What they found upon crossing the Soviet

border was not what many had expected,

though not for the reasons one might

assume. The Red Army of 1941 was in a

state of deep crisis. Stalin's purges

between 1937 and 1938 had literally

decapitated its officer corps. Thousands

of generals, colonels, and experienced

commanders had been executed or sent to

forced labor camps.

The units that faced the Germans in the

early days of Barbarossa were often

poorly led, poorly communicated, and in

tactically inadequate positions.

The results were catastrophic for the

Soviets. The Sixth Army, along with

armored units from the First Panzer

Group under the command of Ewald von

Kleist, participated in a series of

encirclement battles that rank among the

largest in military history.

In the Battle of Kiev in September 1941,

the forces of Army Group South closed a

giant pocket around four entire Soviet

armies from the Southwestern Front

commanded by General Polkovnik Mikhail

Kirponos.

The number of prisoners captured

exceeded 600,000 men. There is no

comparable precedent in the documented

history of modern warfare.

The Sixth Army was an integral part of

this maneuver. Its infantry divisions

closed the flanks of the encirclement,

withstood desperate Soviet [music]

breakout attempts from both inside and

outside, and held the pressure for weeks

in an open plain terrain crisscrossed

with rivers and ravines that offered

little natural cover.

"I don't know how many there were," an

infantry officer from the Sixth Army who

served during that period would recall

decades later.

"Endless columns for days. They marched

westward with almost no one guarding

them because we simply didn't have

enough soldiers to escort them all."

But the triumph at Kiev was also, though

no one saw it that way at the time, a

trap.

Germany was winning battles of epic

proportions while time was running out.

The 1941 campaign had begun in June with

the expectation of a victory within

weeks.

By October, the Red Army had suffered

losses that would have destroyed any

other army on the planet, and yet it

still existed. It was still receiving

reinforcements from the Urals and

Siberia. It was still fighting.

Winter arrived.

The German advance came to a halt at the

gates of Moscow.

For the Sixth Army, that first Soviet

winter was a test unlike anything that

had come before.

The men who had crossed Western Europe

in a glorious summer now found

themselves in temperatures of 40° below

zero without proper winter gear holding

defensive positions against Soviet

counterattacks that came at night in the

silence of the snowfall.

German logistics, designed for a short

war, groaned under the weight of a

campaign that wouldn't end.

"The cold was unlike anything I had

imagined," wrote a soldier of the Sixth

Army in a letter that didn't reach its

destination until after the war.

"It's not that it was cold and that was

it. It was that the cold changed

everything. Rifles jammed, engines

wouldn't start, my feet stopped hurting

because I couldn't feel them anymore.

I knew that was worse, not better."

And yet, the Sixth Army survived that

winter. It absorbed the losses, held its

lines, and entered the spring of 1942

still as a functional and combative

force.

Many German units on the Eastern Front

were so decimated during that first

winter that they had to be disbanded or

reformed practically from scratch.

The Sixth Army arrived battered but

structurally intact. Its chain of

command functioned. Its elite divisions

maintained their cohesion. Its

operational capacity was real.

And yet, the Sixth Army survived that

winter. It absorbed the losses, held its

lines, and entered the spring of 1942

still as a functional and combative

force.

Many German units on the Eastern Front

were so decimated during that first

winter that they had to be disbanded or

reformed practically from scratch.

The Sixth Army arrived battered but

structurally intact.

>> [music]

>> Its chain of command functioned. Its

elite divisions maintained their

cohesion.

Its operational capacity was real.

The man and the army, Friedrich Paulus

takes [music] command.

On January 12th, 1942, something

happened that would change the fate of

the Sixth Army in ways no one could have

foreseen at the time.

General Field Marshal Walter von

Reichenau suffered a collapse while on

his morning run in Poltava. The doctors

diagnosed him with a massive cerebral

embolism.

He was flown to Leipzig where he died on

January 17th.

The man who replaced him at the helm of

the Sixth Army was his former chief of

staff, General der Panzertruppe

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus.

The choice of Paulus was neither

accidental nor improvised.

>> [music]

>> Von Reichenau himself had suggested him

to Hitler shortly before his death,

convinced that his former collaborator

was the most capable of the available

candidates. Halder himself, chief of

staff of the OKH, had supported Paulus's

candidacy during the January 1942

crisis. When Paulus had helped maintain

the coherence of command in the most

pressured sectors [music] of the Eastern

Front during the Soviet counteroffensive

that winter, he had the backing of the

system. He had the trust of the men who

held the power within the German High

Command. What he did not have, and what

no one within that system seemed to

value enough at that moment, was the

experience of leading in actual combat

at the operational level.

Friedrich Paulus was born on September

23rd, 1890 in Guxhagen, a small town in

what is now the state of Hesse.

He was the son of Friedrich August

Paulus, a school treasurer with no noble

pretensions, and Bertha Lindena.

He came from a non-aristocratic family,

a detail relevant in an army where the

prefix von opened doors, although his

movements and demeanor gave him a

distinction that led many to mistake him

for an aristocrat.

He had attempted to join the Imperial

Navy as a cadet without success, and

briefly studied law at the University of

Marburg before finally finding his way

in the 111th Infantry Regiment of Baden

in 1910 as a cadet officer.

He married Elena Rosetti Solescu in

1912, a descendant of a Romanian

aristocratic family, whose social

presence and ambition reinforced in him

an awareness of his position. He fought

in World War I as a junior officer on

the Western and Eastern fronts and in

the Balkans with mountain hunter units.

He ended that war with the rank of

captain [music] and a solid reputation

as a meticulous officer with

organizational brilliance.

During the Weimar period, he was

selected for the small group of officers

who would remain in the 100,000 man

Reichswehr, which itself was a

certificate of professional quality.

Within that restricted framework, he

perfected the skills that would define

him, analyzing complex situations,

drafting precise orders, and

understanding logistics deeply, as well

as the relationships between the various

elements of combined arms.

In the 1930s, with the rearmament of

Germany, [music] Paulus rapidly rose

through the ranks of the General Staff.

In 1935, he was appointed Chief of Staff

of Guderian's Panzergruppe,

participating from that position in the

development of the tactical principles

of the German armored force.

In 1938, he was promoted to

Generalmajor. In 1939 and 1940, as

Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the

OKH, he participated in the planning of

the first military campaigns, Poland,

Norway, France, and the initial

preparation for Barbarossa.

His war game maps were legendary in

their accuracy. His Lagebeurteilungen,

situation assessments, were models of

the genre. The men who worked for him

respected him with an admiration that

bordered on religious awe for someone

who seemed to have eliminated human

error from the military planning

equation.

What those same men noticed with less

enthusiasm, though they rarely voiced

it, was the difference between planning

an operation and conducting it.

Paulus had never commanded a unit larger

than a battalion in actual combat before

receiving the Sixth Army. His direct

command experience was that of a company

and battalion officer in World War I.

Everything he had done after that had

been in the realm of the General Staff,

where the primary virtue was the

precision of analysis and where the

consequences of an erroneous judgment

could be corrected on paper before they

cost lives.

In field command, the consequence of a

wrong assessment was measured in dead

men before the next dawn.

His arrival at the command of the Sixth

Army on January 20th, 1942, coincided

with one of the most difficult moments

for the German forces on the Eastern

Front.

The Soviet counteroffensive of winter

1941 to 1942, launched in December by

Marshal Zhukov, had pushed the forces of

Army Group Center to the west and

created pockets of German units holding

out in isolated towns.

The sector of Army Group South, where

the Sixth Army operated, was relatively

more stable, but the pressure was real.

Paulus inherited an army battered by the

first Soviet winter with divisions that

had suffered losses of between 30 and

50% [music] in men and equipment and

with a logistics chain still creaking

under the weight of a campaign that no

one had designed to last more than 3

months.

In that difficult context, Paulus

demonstrated the virtues that made him a

solid commander under ordinary

conditions. He reorganized the army's

sectors efficiently, ensured that the

chain of command continued to function

in the most pressured sectors, and

maintained the cohesion of the units

during the tactical retreat that the

harsh winter forced to be carried out at

several points.

General der Artillerie Walter von

Seydlitz-Kurzbach, [music] commander of

the 51st Army Corps and one of the most

respected officers of the 6th, valued

Paulus as an organizer and planner. What

he questioned, privately in letters to

other generals that would become

historical documents, was Paulus's

tendency to seek perfection in planning

at the [music] expense of tactical

opportunity and his inability to make

decisions when the situation was

ambiguous. This inability to improvise

was the flip side of the same coin that

made Paulus a brilliant organizer. A

general staff works under the premise

that there is enough time to analyze

before acting. A field commander works

under the opposite premise that time is

never enough and acting with incomplete

information is better than not acting at

all.

Paulus had not internalized this second

premise.

The Auftragstaktik, which animated the

German army, was a doctrine of

initiative. Paulus was a man of

procedure.

The system had promoted him precisely

because he was exceptional within the

system.

What the system had not measured was

whether he was exceptional outside of

it. The death of von Reichenau, the man

who had been his mentor, his sponsor,

and his support in the high command, was

a blow that Paulus never publicly

acknowledged, but that his subordinates

perceived. Reichenau was the type of

commander who could have balanced

Paulus' strengths with the tactical

aggression he lacked, who could have

acted as a counterweight to Hitler in

moments when the Führer imposed damaging

operational decisions.

With Reichenau dead just 3 days after

Paulus took command, the new commander

of the 6th Army was left alone without

the network of personal relationships

and institutional authority that might

have given him room to maneuver.

The nervous tick in his left eye, which

his subordinates would learn to

interpret as a barometer of the pressure

he was under, began to appear during the

following months in moments of greatest

operational tension.

By the summer of 1942, it was visible to

anyone who looked at him for more than a

few minutes. It didn't incapacitate him,

but it was the outward symptom of an

internal tension that the man could not

or would not verbalize.

His first major test in command came in

May 1942.

Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched the

Kharkov offensive with 640,000 soldiers,

1,200 tanks, and about 1,000 planes

using as a base the salient formed in

Barvenkovo in January.

The Soviet objective was to encircle the

4th Panzer Army and the 6th Army

executing an enveloping maneuver from

the salient to the north and south.

During the first days, the pressure on

the left flank of [music] the 6th was

intense.

Paulus coordinated with the 1st Panzer

Army of General Field Marshal Ewald von

Kleist for a pincer [music] response.

While the 8th Corps of the 6th Army

maintained pressure on the salient from

the north, the 1st Panzer Army attacked

from the south closing the encirclement

in Barvenkovo on May 22nd. Two Soviet

armies were trapped. [music] The number

of prisoners captured exceeded 240,000

men.

Paulus received the Knight's Cross of

the Iron Cross for that operation. It

seemed that the man had found his

measure in his army and his profession.

What the success at Barvenkovo did not

show, because the conditions did not put

it to the test, was how Paulus would

respond when the circumstances were

adverse, when the information was

incomplete, when orders from above were

wrong, and the time to analyze them had

run out.

Those conditions would arrive in

November 1942 within a Soviet

encirclement in the ruins of a city on

the banks of the Volga, [music]

and Paulus's responses to those

conditions would seal the fate of

330,000

men.

Operation Blue and the advance toward

the Volga.

In the summer of 1942, Hitler designed

the great German offensive in the south,

Operation Blue, Fall Blau.

The goal was twofold and ambitious to

the point of recklessness, to capture

the oil fields of the Caucasus and cut

off Soviet supply lines via the Volga

River.

Army Group South was split into two

groups. Army Group A would advance

toward the Caucasus, while Army Group B,

which included the Sixth Army and the

Fourth Panzer Army, would advance east

and southeast.

On June 28th, 1942, Operation Blue began

with an attack toward Voronezh.

The bulk of the Sixth Army did not

advance until 2 days later, with the

Second Hungarian Army and First Panzer

Army protecting its left and right

flanks, respectively.

The first days confirmed the hopes.

>> [music]

>> The Soviet front in southern Russia was

collapsing.

Timoshenko's forces were retreating

instead of holding fixed positions,

learning the bitter lesson of 1941.

The encirclement pockets that had

characterized the first year of the

campaign were becoming more difficult to

execute, but the advance was real.

On July 23rd, Rostov-on-Don fell. This

success led to the issuance of Führer

Directive Number 45, which changed the

execution order of Operation Blue with

consequences that some generals

immediately interpreted as a symptom of

overextension, it was ordered that Army

Group A advance toward the Caucasus

without waiting for Army Group B to

secure the Volga.

Both objectives would be taken

simultaneously.

And in the same document, the Sixth Army

was assigned a task that the directive

presented as secondary, but that would

become the center of gravity for the

entire war. Advance solely toward

Stalingrad and take the city.

Stalingrad,

an industrial city on the banks of the

Volga, stretching more than 50 km along

the western riverbank, with enormous

factories manufacturing T-34 tanks and

heavy armament, even while shells rained

down on its roofs.

A working-class city, functional without

the architectural beauty of Kiev or the

vastness of Kharkov,

but it had the river.

And it had Stalin's name. And these two

[music] factors made it the place where

the war would change direction forever.

The rapid advance of the Sixth Army

toward the Volga had created an exposed

[music] left flank of more than 560 km

to Voronezh, protected by the Second

Hungarian Army, the Eighth Italian Army,

and the Third Romanian Army. On the

right [music] flank, the Fourth Romanian

Army. These troops, with inferior

material capabilities and lacking modern

anti-tank defenses, would determine the

future of the Sixth Army in the months

to come.

No one in the German High Command wanted

to see it, or perhaps no one had the

courage to say it out loud.

On August 23rd, the vanguard of the 16th

Panzer Division sighted the Volga. On

the same day, the Fourth Luftflotte, the

Fourth Air Fleet of General Oberst

Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, bombed

[music] Stalingrad with approximately

600 aircraft. The civilian death toll

from this bombing exceeded 40,000. The

city was burning, and the Sixth Army was

preparing to enter.

The Rattenkrieg, the rats' war in the

ruins.

No one who has studied the first days of

the Sixth Army's assault on Stalingrad

can fail to notice the gap between

expectations and reality.

The initial combats in August 1942

seemed to confirm what prior experience

had promised. The Soviets were giving

ground in the suburbs, fragmenting under

the combined pressure of infantry and

aviation, and the city appeared destined

to fall within weeks.

General Paulus calculated that organized

resistance would soon collapse.

General Field Marshal von Weichs,

commander of Army Group B, shared this

optimism. Even in the OKW, the reports

of the advance were read as the final

phase of an operation that followed the

logic of all the previous ones. It was

not to be. Stalingrad was not France. It

was not Belgium. [music] It wasn't even

the Ukrainian steppe, where the large

encirclement pockets had worked with

clockwork precision. Stalingrad was an

industrial city of Soviet construction

from the 1920s and 1930s. Reinforced

concrete buildings of four and

five-story structures designed not for

aesthetics, but for resistance to the

climate and industrial weight, metal

structures hundreds of meters long with

steel and concrete walls, stone barns

with 1-m thick walls, industrial

drainage canals that cut the terrain

into sectors of close combat. The city

didn't have the wide avenues or open

spaces that made tanks and artillery

decisive in open fields.

It was a labyrinth.

And in a labyrinth, Auftragstaktik and

Blitzkrieg lost their most fundamental

advantage, speed.

On September 13th, 1942, General

Lieutenant Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov took

command of the 62nd Army from Nikita

Khrushchev and Andrei Yeremenko with an

order that left no room for

interpretation, "Defend Stalingrad to

the death."

Chuikov, 42 years old, had been in the

Red Army since he was 15 when he

enlisted as a volunteer in the Red Guard

in 1918 during the Civil War. He had

fought in the Winter War of 1939 to 1940

as an army commander and that

experience, in many ways a fiasco for

Soviet forces, had shaped his

understanding of what it meant to fight

in conditions of reduced visibility,

restricted terrain, and the tactical

superiority of the adversary.

He was explosive in demeanor, prone to

expelling subordinates who did not act

with the speed he demanded, and had an

intuitive grasp of what set urban combat

apart from any other form of warfare.

Chuikov understood something his

adversaries took weeks [music] to

accept. The only way to survive inside

Stalingrad was to not leave space

between their own lines and the German

ones.

The standard distance between enemy

lines in conventional combat, typically

between 300 and 500 m, was the distance

needed by German artillery to fire

safely without hitting their own

positions,

>> [music]

>> and the distance needed by Stukas to

identify targets and attack them without

risking hitting friendly troops.

If Soviet defenders got close enough to

the attackers, that artillery and

aviation lost their utility.

Bombing the enemy meant bombing

themselves. Chuikov called this hugging

the enemy.

His men practiced it with a ferocity

that was beyond any manual of tactics.

The practical implementation of this

tactic transformed the battlefield into

something the Germans had never

encountered. Soviet sapper units turned

every building into an independent

fortress. They would demolish internal

staircases to prevent vertical movement,

block doors with rubble, open loopholes

in separating walls between apartments

to create fire networks covering

hallways and inner courtyards.

>> [music]

>> Snipers operated from positions in the

upper floors and basements

simultaneously,

>> [music]

>> keeping German attackers in a state of

constant alertness that wore down

concentration and consumed the soldiers'

psychological energy with an

effectiveness [music]

no frontal assault could match.

German assault engineers, the Pioniere,

who entered a building never knew if it

was completely clear or if there were

still Soviet soldiers alive on the floor

below, on the roof, or behind the wall

they had just crossed. On September

13th, 1942, the 71st, 76th, [music]

and 295th German infantry divisions

advanced toward the city center,

defended at the time by around 20,000 of

Chuikov's men.

The 71st division reached the city

center and captured the main railway

station.

However, a counterattack by the 13th

Guards Rifle Division under General

Major Alexander Rodimtsev, which had

crossed the Volga on barges under German

fire the previous night, preserved the

central dock, the vital point for

maintaining the flow of reinforcements

and supplies from the eastern riverbank.

Of that Soviet division, only 320 men

out of the initial 10,000 survived the

entire battle. [music]

But the dock was held.

Control of the Volga was the heart of

the Soviet defensive strategy. The

eastern bank of the river remained in

Soviet hands throughout the battle, and

from that bank came night after night

the reinforcements, ammunition, food,

and medical supplies that kept the 62nd

Army alive. The ferries crossed under

fire from German artillery and aviation.

Many sank. Those that made it unloaded

under fire and returned with the

wounded.

The river in September and October was

at temperatures that killed anyone who

fell into the water within minutes.

The barges navigated between the blocks

of ice that [music] began to form in

November. The logistical bridge over the

Volga was fragile, intermittent, and

costly in lives, but it was never

entirely broken.

The 6th Army bled in September and

October.

The divisions that had entered the

battle with thousands of men each were

reduced to skeletal remains, but often

more lethal because the survivors were

the most experienced and adapted to the

specific type of combat in the city.

The figures from the 14th Panzer Corps

are revealing. By the end of September,

the 16th Panzer Division, one of the

elite units of the 6th that had reached

the Volga in August, had fewer than

2,000 effective combatants.

The 24th Panzer Division, another of the

jewels of the 6th, had lost more than

60% of its officers since the beginning

of the fighting in the city.

Some regiments were fighting with fewer

than 100 effective soldiers, the

equivalent of a nominal company.

The factories that named the combat

sectors became the epicenters of the

most brutal battles. The Dzerzhinsky

Tractor Factory, with its steel and

concrete halls 800 m long, its assembly

pits several meters deep, and its

overhead cranes still hanging over the

shattered battlefield, was the scene of

fighting that lasted weeks and was

literally measured in meters per day.

The Barrikady Gun Factory, where the

Soviets had been producing artillery

until days before the Germans arrived,

was a complex of industrial buildings

that the defenders had converted into a

fortress of concrete and steel that

required an enormous effort to be taken

room by room.

The Red October Steel Factory [music]

in the northern sector was a

conglomerate of smelting furnaces,

warehouses, and administrative buildings

that changed hands in some sectors

several times a day.

"Inside the factory it was different,"

wrote a German corporal who served in

the fighting for Barrikady.

"Outside there was sky, even if it was

gray. Inside there was only darkness,

cement dust, and the noise, always

[music] the noise. The shots inside

those spaces sounded different, drier,

closer.

You'd go deaf after a while and fight in

silence, looking at shadows."

On October 14th, 1942, Paulus launched

what would be the most concentrated

assault of the entire battle.

Five full divisions, the 14th Panzer

Division, the 305th and 389th Infantry

Divisions, the 100th Jaeger Division,

and the 60th Motorized Infantry

Division, with more than 90,000 men and

300 tanks concentrated on a front of 4

km with massive support from the

Luftwaffe, which carried out over 3,000

combat sorties on the most intensive

days.

The objective was the Dzerzhinsky

Tractor Factory and the surrounding

industrial area. In the first hours, the

overwhelming weight of the strike

shattered several Soviet battalions. The

14th Panzer Division broke the lines of

the 37th Guards Division and advanced

northeast, reaching the edge of the

factory and splitting the 62nd Army into

two sectors.

For a moment, it seemed the resistance

would finally collapse.

The 138th Siberian Rifle Division

arrived, crossing the Volga on rafts

during the nights of October 15th and

16th under continuous German fire, with

water temperatures close to freezing.

Every man who crossed that river knew

that the chances of their barge being

sunk before reaching the shore were real

and calculable. They crossed anyway.

This division and the fresh units that

followed in the days after injected

exactly the kind of resistance capacity

needed to prevent the sector from

collapsing. The Germans took the

Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory. They took

most of Barrikady. They occupied half of

the Red October Factory, but the 62nd

Army survived.

By the end of October 1942, the state of

the 6th Army was that of a force that

had gained nearly all the available

ground and consumed an irreplaceable

portion of its combat potential in the

process.

It controlled 90% of the city, but that

percentage represented destroyed

buildings, useless rubble, and terrain

that had no operational value. The

remaining 10% in Soviet hands was a

narrow strip along the Volga riverbank

with a depth in some sectors of only 200

or 300 m.

But that strip led to the Volga, and as

long as it led to the Volga,

reinforcements would continue to arrive.

"We were no longer an army," recalled

one of the survivors of those weeks with

the flat voice of someone who had

learned to speak of such things without

letting the tremor show.

"We were small groups, four men here,

eight there. Each building was a

separate world. You didn't know what was

happening 50 m from you. You heard shots

and didn't know if they were yours or

the enemy's.

Sometimes it didn't matter to know."

On November 11th, 1942, the last German

attempt to take the city before the

winter came was the assault on the

coastal strip in the southern sector,

where the forces of the 71st Infantry

Division attempted to push the remnants

of the 62nd Army toward the river in the

central dock sector. They managed to

advance to within 300 m of the Volga at

some points,

but they never reached the water.

And the men who attempted this final

advance had already been fighting for

weeks with a tenth of the personnel they

had started the campaign with.

At that very moment, hundreds of

kilometers to the north and south of the

Volga, the Red Army was finishing the

secret concentration of the forces that

would make all of this irrelevant.

>> [music]

>> The time the Sixth Army had spent inside

the city, every day of urban combat,

every decimated battalion, every [music]

tank lost in the hallways of a factory

that was worth no tank, had also been

the time that Vasilevsky and Zhukov

needed to prepare what was to come on

November 19th.

The trap [music] closes, Operation

Uranus.

On September 13th, 1942, while the Sixth

Army began to push into Stalingrad, a

different plan was presented to Stalin

in Moscow.

Not a reinforcement of the city's

defense, but the encirclement of the

attacker.

Its authors were General Georgy Zhukov

and General Polkovnik Alexander

Vasilevsky, Chief of the Soviet General

Staff.

The concept was brutally elegant.

Instead of trying to defeat the Sixth

Army inside Stalingrad, the idea was to

surround it from the outside. The flanks

of the Sixth Army were protected by Axis

ally units whose commanders knew better

than anyone their own vulnerability.

Romanian General of Army Petre

Dumitrescu, in command of the Third

Romanian Army on the northern flank, had

repeatedly requested additional

anti-tank weapons from the Germans.

Heeresgruppe B sent him 67.5 cm Pak

97/38

anti-tank guns. Dumitrescu [music]

replied that it was not enough. It

wasn't. The Soviets knew this. The

maskirovka, deception and camouflage,

was carried out with a meticulousness

the Germans had not seen before.

For weeks, large masses of infantry,

tanks, and artillery were secretly

concentrated to the north and south of

Stalingrad in the sectors defended by

the Romanians.

>> [music]

>> The movements were carried out only at

night. Trains advanced without lights.

Oberst Reinhard Gehlen, head of

intelligence for Fremde Heere Ost,

Foreign Armies East, had detected signs

of concentration on the Don bridges in

front of the Third Romanian Army, but

dismissed the threat as limited.

The nine panzer divisions that OKH kept

as a strategic reserve were not sent

south. They stayed in front of the Rzhev

salient, where Gehlen believed the main

strike would occur.

On November 19th, 1942, at 7:30 a.m.,

with temperatures several degrees below

zero and thick fog limiting visibility

to 200 m, the Southwestern and Don

Fronts initiated an 80-minute artillery

preparation.

About 3,500 Soviet guns opened fire. The

fog and snow prevented forward observers

from adjusting the fire, so the

artillery simply fired on known or

estimated positions.

The damage to the third Romanian army

was real, but not devastating. What

destroyed them was what came after.

The Fifth Tank Army of Lieutenant

General Prokofy Romanenko advanced in

four assault groups. The 47th Guards

Rifle Division supported by 64 tanks

destroyed the 14th Romanian Infantry

Division.

The 50th Guards Rifle Division with 74

tanks [music] collapsed the Fifth

Romanian Infantry Division. By noon, the

tank brigades of the First Tank Corps

and the 26th Tank Corps were flowing

through the holes in the Romanian front.

The sudden appearance of nearly 200

tanks caused the complete collapse of

the 14th Romanian Infantry Division. The

center of the Romanian army

disintegrated. On November 20th, the

Stalingrad Front launched its own arm of

the encirclement from the south with the

51st Army of Major General Nikolai

Trufanov and the 57th Army of Major

General Fyodor Tolbukhin attacking the

right flank of the Fourth Panzer Army.

The weak Romanian divisions of the Sixth

Corps quickly collapsed.

Tolbukhin committed the Fourth

Mechanized Corps of Major General Vasily

Volsky, which advanced westward against

minimal resistance.

On November 22nd, Lieutenant Colonel

Georgy N. Filippov led a column of five

T-34 tanks, two motorized rifle

companies in trucks, five armored

vehicles, and three captured German

vehicles toward the pontoon bridge over

the Don at Berezovsky, northwest of

Kalach.

Pretending to be a German column,

Filippov reached the bridge before dawn.

The guards, a military police unit, an

8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun, and personnel

from an engineering school did not

recognize the deception until the Soviet

soldiers were already on the bridge. The

8.8 cm gun destroyed [music]

two T-34 tanks before being neutralized.

The bridge was captured intact. Filippov

established a defensive perimeter and

waited for 11 hours alone with his small

force until reinforcements arrived. He

was awarded the title of Hero of the

Soviet Union.

On November 23rd, 1942, the Soviet

encirclement arms closed to the east

[music] of Kalach.

The Sixth Army, 330,000 men in 22

divisions, along with troops from other

corps and Axis allied units, was

completely surrounded.

It was the first time in history that a

complete German field army had been

trapped.

More than 30,000 Axis soldiers escaped

to the south before the pincers fully

closed. Inside the Kessel,

the cauldron, as the Germans called the

pocket, about 284,000 men remained.

The paper fortress, the encirclement,

and the airlift.

The initial reaction inside the Kessel

was one of disbelief.

Many officers and soldiers did not

immediately understand the magnitude of

what had happened. Communications were

confused, reports contradictory,

but those who understood right away, the

commanders of the more veteran

divisions, the staff officers who knew

the maps and the numbers,

felt something that very few described

in their diaries with the correct word.

The word was despair.

"When I realized the encirclement was

real, that it was not a temporary

movement of the enemy, but a closed

trap, I stared at the map for a long

time," wrote a lieutenant colonel whose

name did not survive the war.

"I didn't think about Germany. I didn't

think about my family.

I thought about the men who were

sleeping 100 m from where I was

standing, who still didn't know what I

already knew."

Paulus immediately requested permission

to attempt a breakout to the west before

the encirclement was consolidated. On

the night of November 23rd at 11:45

p.m., he sent a radio signal to OKW

requesting freedom of action, the

euphemism for permission to break out of

the encirclement. Hitler's response the

next day was unequivocal. The Sixth Army

would stay in position, be supplied by

airlift, and wait for von Manstein to

break the encirclement from the outside.

The promise of the airlift had an

involuntary architect, Reichsmarschall

Hermann Göring, commander of the

Luftwaffe, who had assured Hitler that

his air force could supply the Sixth by

air.

He did so without consulting technical

experts, basing it on the precedent of

the Demyansk encirclement the previous

winter, where the Luftwaffe had supplied

six trapped divisions, 96,000 men, with

an average of 300 tons per day for 3

months.

But the comparison was flawed. The Sixth

Army was more than three times larger

than the force trapped at Demyansk. Its

headquarters calculated that it would

need at least 750 tons per day to

operate.

Generalleutnant Martin Fiebig, commander

of the Eighth Fliegerkorps, had already

told Paulus on November 21st that the

Luftwaffe did not have the means to

supply the Sixth Army by air.

When the airlift began on November 24th,

Fiebig only had 25 operational Ju 52

transports in theater, each capable of

carrying about 2 tons.

The first day of the airlift delivered

86 tons. The first 5 days totaled 269

tons. The temperatures in the Stalingrad

area during November and December of

1942 ranged between 0 and -10 degrees

[music] Celsius during the day, dropping

to -35 during the coldest nights.

The Pitomnik airfield inside the Kessel

began receiving flights. Tatsinskaya,

237 km away, was designated as the main

base for the airlift. The army inside

the Kessel began to ration itself. The

daily bread rations were reduced first

to 400 g, then to 200. The 25,000 horses

of the artillery units,

>> [music]

>> which the soldiers needed to move the

pieces across the snowy terrain, were

sacrificed for food.

When the horses were gone, whatever

could be found was eaten.

Of the 58,000 Soviet auxiliaries, the

Hiwis, prisoners who had agreed to serve

as labor and logistical support for the

German army, more than 19,000 remained

inside the Kessel, and some fought

alongside the German units.

The 3,500

Soviet prisoners the Germans held in two

detention camps inside the Kessel

survived in even worse conditions. Of

that total, it is estimated that fewer

than 20 survived.

On December 9th, 1942, General Kurt

Zeitzler, newly appointed Chief of Staff

of OKH, began consuming the same daily

rations of calories as the soldiers

trapped in Stalingrad in an attempt to

persuade Hitler of the urgency of the

situation. He visibly lost weight in

days.

Hitler did not change his position.

The attempted rescue, Wintergewitter.

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein arrived

in Novocherkassk on November 26th and

activated Heeresgruppe Don. He had few

forces available, but those arriving

were of first-rate quality. Generalmajor

Erhard Raus brought the 6th Panzer

Division from France with 150

operational tanks.

>> [music]

>> The 23rd Panzer Division arrived from

the Caucasus, though with reduced

resources.

The 17th Panzer Division with only 57

tanks was promised, but took time to

arrive.

On December 12th, 1942 at 6:30 a.m.,

Hoth launched Operation Wintergewitter,

winter storm.

The sky was clear. Visibility was

excellent. The 6th Panzer Division with

141 tanks was the Schwerpunkt, the

spearhead pushing north along the

railway line. The first day was

encouraging. Hoth advanced about 20 km

and shattered Soviet rifle divisions.

The Luftwaffe was able to provide close

air support with Stuka sorties.

But starting on December 13th, General

Major Vasily Volsky committed the fourth

mechanized core to defensive positions

around Verkhnekumsky. What followed was

a five-day battle that consumed the time

von Manstein didn't have.

The fourth mechanized core suffered

enormous losses, more than 5,500

casualties and around 70 tanks, but its

resistance was brilliant.

It allowed the second guards army of

Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky to

reach the Myshkova River and form a

solid defensive line with five fresh

rifle divisions.

On December 19th, the sixth Panzer

division finally crossed the Myshkova

and captured an intact bridge at

Vasilyevka.

It was 48 [music] km from the southern

perimeter of the Kessel.

This was the closest the rescue would

get. Von Manstein sent a radio message

to Paulus that same night instructing

him to initiate the breakout southward.

The code name was Donnerschlag, thunder.

General Hans Valentin Huber had at least

60 operational Panzers and had started

to concentrate the 14th Panzer Corps at

the southwestern corner of the Kessel.

The distance to cover was about 50 km.

It was risky, but it was possible.

Paulus did not order the breakout. The

decision, or non-decision, of Paulus

during those hours is one of the most

studied debates in the military history

of World War II.

His defenders point out that Hitler had

expressly denied authorization for a

retreat.

His critics argue that at that moment

von Manstein was implicitly giving him

permission and that there were German

commanders who in similar situations

acted without waiting for formal

approval from Hitler.

General der Artillerie Walter von

Seydlitz-Kurzbach, commander of the 51st

Army Corps inside the Kessel, had

attempted to force the issue on November

23rd by issuing his own orders for

preparing a breakout.

Paulus tolerated this act of

insubordination without consequences.

What Paulus did believe, with a

sincerity that his later memoirs did not

conceal, was that the Sixth Army did not

have the fuel or the fighting capacity

to survive a 50-km advance in open

terrain during the winter, abandoning

all its heavy equipment.

He thought that most of the men who

survived the breakout attempt would

reach the other side without equipment,

without organization, and without the

possibility of being reorganized into a

fighting force.

He may have been right.

But not attempting it meant that

everyone would die.

By December 23rd, von Manstein

recognized the reality.

The Sixth Panzer Division was withdrawn

from the Mishkova Salient to support the

Chir Front, which was collapsing under

the impact of Operation Little Saturn.

On December 24th, the Red Army launched

its Kotelnikovo Offensive with the

Second Guards Army and the Seventh Tank

Corps of General Rodmistrov.

Hoth's forces, already decimated,

withdrew. Kotelnikovo was captured on

December 29th. There would be no rescue.

Little Saturn and the [music] collapse

of the flanks.

While Wintergewitter advanced and failed

at the Mishkova, another element of the

Soviet plan was unfolding on the

northern flank. Operation Little Saturn,

a scaled-down version of the original

Operation Saturn that the [music] Stavka

planners had designed, launched on

December 16th, 1942,

two Soviet armies against the Eighth

Italian Army of General Italo Gariboldi,

which was defending a 125-km

sector along the Don. The Eighth Italian

Army consisted of 10 infantry divisions

in three corps, the Second, 35th, and

Alpine Corps, along with the 298th

German Infantry Division.

The only armor available as a reserve

for the Italians was a provisional

formation called the 27th Panzer

Division, which was little more than a

regimental-sized battle group with 65

mostly obsolete tanks.

Vatutin began the operation at 8:00 a.m.

on December 16th with a 90-minute

artillery preparation, which was

practically ineffective due to the dense

fog.

The first day did not produce a decisive

breakthrough, but on the second day,

December 17th, the 17th Tank Corps was

introduced into the gap between the

Italian divisions Cosseria and Ravenna.

The defense broke. The 25th Tank Corps

of General Pavlov and the 24th Tank

Corps of General Vasily Badanow poured

into the open space. On December 24th,

the 24th Tank Corps of Badanow with 58

operational tanks under a sky that

German Stukas had been relentlessly

attacking for days, reached the

Tatsinskaya airfield. The airfield was

filled with nearly 200 transport

aircraft. Luftwaffe personnel were

completely caught by surprise. The first

Soviet shells triggered panic. The

planes began taking off in emergency

conditions, some without cleared

runways. More than 50 aircraft were

destroyed on the ground. The supply

depots accumulated for the airlift

caught fire. The airlift to Stalingrad

was severely damaged. Badanow reported

his position to Vatutin. He had

completed his mission, but his tanks

were out of fuel and ammunition.

Vatutin had no means to resupply him

immediately.

On December 25th, General Hermann

Balck's 11th Panzer Division surrounded

Badanow's Corps and began systematically

destroying it. On the night of December

27th to 28th, Badanow made an

unauthorized breakout and reached the

Soviet lines with nine tanks and around

900 men.

The collapse of the 8th Italian Army and

the loss of Tatsinskaya dismantled the

last external support for the 6th

[music] Army.

Von Manstein organized emergency

defensive lines along the Donets with

what was left available.

But for the Sixth Army inside the

Kessel, [music] the message was clear.

There would be no rescue. There would be

no corridor.

Only the cold, the hunger, and the time

they had left remained.

Operation Ring, the final blow.

The New Year of 1943 arrived in the

Kessel of Stalingrad with temperatures

regularly dropping to minus 20° C during

the day and minus 35 at night.

The daily bread ration was reduced to 80

g on December 30th. The army had 103

operational tanks and 35 assault guns by

mid-December, [music]

but the fuel necessary to move them ran

out faster than it could arrive.

On January 7th, 1943, General Polkovnik

Konstantin Rokossovsky, now in command

of the Don Front, which had taken on the

responsibility of the encirclement, sent

an ultimatum to Paulus through special

emissaries.

The terms were specific: normal rations,

medical treatment for the wounded and

sick, repatriation to any country after

the war.

Paulus rejected the offer. Hitler's

orders were equally specific: resist to

the death.

On January 10th, 1943, at 8:05 a.m.,

Rokossovsky initiated Operation Ring,

Koltso.

General Polkovnik Nikolai Voronov, Chief

of Artillery for the Red Army and Stavka

representative, had concentrated 500

guns and howitzers plus 450 multiple

rocket launchers in a 12-km wide attack

sector.

It was the highest artillery density

achieved by the Red Army up until that

point in the war.

Unlike previous operations, the sky was

clear and visibility was excellent.

Soviet forward observers were able to

adjust fire with precision.

The 55-minute bombardment that opened

Operation Ring destroyed German

positions across the entire western

front of the Kessel, especially in the

sector of the 44th Infantry Division.

The five rifle divisions of the 65th

Army under General Batov advanced

against the 44th Division. The Germans

resisted position by position, sometimes

engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Four

German battalions were destroyed,

[music]

but Hube's panzer reserves arrived in

time to contain the most dangerous

advances, and the Western Front held on

that first day.

January 11th was different. Hauptmann

Rudolf Haen, with four tanks, awaited

the advance of the 57th Guards Tank

Regiment

>> [music]

>> with its British-made Churchill tanks.

In a fight lasting minutes, Haen

destroyed 18 of the 21 Churchills before

the attack was contained.

It was the kind of tactical action the

6th Army could still produce, but Hube

lost 30 of his 46 tanks and 11 of his 18

heavy anti-tank guns in just the first 2

days of Operation Ring.

On January 16th, the 51st Guards Rifle

Division captured the Pitomnik airfield.

The 6th Army lost its main airfield. The

Luftwaffe was forced to withdraw its

escort fighters. Transport flights

continued unprotected toward the

secondary airfield of Gumrak.

On January 23rd, Gumrak also fell.

The last German flight left the Kessel

at 10:45 that morning.

From that moment, resupply depended

exclusively on air drops, most of which

[music] fell on Soviet-controlled

territory.

Rokossovsky paused on January 17th to

replenish ammunition and reorganize his

units.

The Don Front had suffered approximately

26,000 casualties in 1 week of fighting

and lost half of its tanks.

The pause cost the Soviet offensive some

momentum, but the final outcome was not

in doubt.

On January 21st, the offensive resumed.

Four rifle divisions from the 65th Army

and all available artillery struck the

German line around Baburkin.

The 44th Infantry Division, already

reduced to a third of its strength,

could not hold.

The western front of the Kessel began to

collapse. On January 26th, 1943 at 11:00

a.m., the 21st Army under Major General

Chistyakov broke through the remnants

[music]

of the 8th Army Corps and linked up with

the 62nd Army of Chuikov at Mamayev

Kurgan. The Kessel was split in two.

Strecker's 11th Army Corps was isolated

in the north in the ruins of the tractor

factory in Barrikady. The bulk of what

remained of the 6th Army, including

Paulus and his staff, was trapped in the

southern pocket around the Univermag

stores in the city center.

On January 30th, 1943, the 10th

anniversary of Hitler's rise to power,

Friedrich Paulus was promoted to

Generalfeldmarschall by radio. It was

simultaneously an honor and an implicit

order of suicide. No German field

marshal had ever been captured.

Paulus told a subordinate who recorded

his words, "I have no intention of

shooting myself because of this Bohemian

corporal," referring to Hitler. He chose

surrender.

The end, surrender and captivity.

The morning of January 31st, 1943, the

Univermag warehouse building in the

southern center of Stalingrad was the

last headquarters of Friedrich Paulus.

In the basement of [music] this

building, among mattresses, scattered

papers, and the sour smell of the

wounded, the newly promoted

Generalfeldmarschall awaited the end.

Soldiers from the 38th Motorized Rifle

Brigade of the 64th Army under General

Mikhail Shumilov surrounded the

building. At 7:15 a.m., Paulus and his

staff emerged into the open and

surrendered.

In the northern part of the Kessel,

General Karl Strecker initially refused

to surrender.

His 11th Army Corps, about 50,000 men

scattered across the remains of seven

divisions entrenched in the ruins of the

tractor factory in Barrikady, held out

for two more days.

On February 1st, 1943 at 8:30 a.m. the

Don Front launched the final assault

with the 65th and 66th armies preceded

by a 90-minute artillery bombardment.

The 16th Air Army bombed the German

positions with all available capacity.

The northern and western fronts of the

pocket were shattered. About 4,000

Germans were killed or wounded in the

final assault. More than 20,000 were

captured. Strecker's subordinates

initiated surrender talks without his

authorization. On February 2nd, 1943 at

7:00 a.m. Strecker finally agreed to

surrender. At 9:20 a.m. Heeresgruppe Don

received the last message from

Stalingrad.

The resistance had ended. The 6th Army

no longer existed. Of the 284,000 men

trapped in the Kessel on November 23rd,

approximately 150,000 had died during

the encirclement from combat, cold,

hunger, or disease.

The Soviets claim to have captured

91,000 prisoners. Other estimates

suggest the number may have reached

107,800

including about 700 Croats and

approximately 3,000 Romanians.

Of those prisoners, most died in the

following months during the marches to

the camps [music] and in the conditions

of the camps themselves.

Many were sent to Pokrovsky Camp number

127 near Saratov. Of 8,007 prisoners

sent there, 1,526

died on the way [music] and another

4,663

in the first 6 weeks after arrival.

Others were sent to Beketovka Camp

number 108 where they were employed in

clearing the battlefield rubble.

The officers were distributed into three

camps: [music] Oranki number 74,

Yelabuga number 97, and Krasnogorsk

number 27

>> [music]

>> where they were interrogated and some

processed for war crimes.

Some disabled prisoners were released in

1947 and 1948. Most were not released

until after Stalin's death in 1953.

Only about 6,000 of the prisoners

captured [music] at Stalingrad ever

returned to Germany.

The last group returned in 1955, 12

years after the surrender.

"I was no longer afraid of dying." wrote

a German soldier on a piece of paper

found many years later among the ruins

of the city. "I was afraid of dying

alone with no one knowing my name."