History surrounds many battles with the aura of legend: Thermopylae, Cannae, Hastings, Verdun, the Bulge. Few of them can match in intensity and fury, or in the significance of their results, the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, when the long thrust of Hitler’s armies into Russia was halted and reversed. This week the 720,000 people of Volgograd—as Stalingrad was renamed in 1961 during Khrushchev’s destalinization campaign—mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the furious battle on the Volga’s west bank, in which about 300,000 soldiers and civilians lost their lives. For its commemoration, the city has a statue of a bosomy Mother Russia waving a sword, which rises 170 feet above the Mamaev Hill, where some of the fiercest fighting raged. Farther down the hill, a wall bears the inscription: “Iron wind beat them in the face, but they still went forward.”
Grim Order. Hitler’s Wehrmacht had already goose-stepped over almost all of Europe and more than 700 miles into Russia when his elite Sixth Army and panzer units were sent to take Stalingrad in August 1942. As squadrons of Luftwaffe dive bombers darkened the skies above, German troops surged into the city and, toward the north, broke through to the Volga. But Stalin had issued a grim order: “Not one step backward.” With their backs to the river’s edge, the Russians dug in determinedly. They fought the invaders in the streets, factories and cellars for each foot of land, bombarded them from across the river with mortars. A few tied live grenades around themselves and dove under the clanking panzers. Astonishingly, the Russians held off the Germans for three months—long enough for Stalin to reinforce his armies north and south of the city.
In the chill of a week in November, those two forces suddenly swept around behind the Nazis and encircled almost 300,000 of them in a giant nutcracker. As the cruel Russian winter began in earnest, temperatures fell to 49° below zero. Frozen German corpses piled up like logs, many still clad in light uniforms. German rations ran out, and proud troops began to eat the flesh of horses, cats and rats. Hermann Goring’s airlift brought only a fraction of the promised relief. The city’s rubble grew so high that German tanks were unable to roll over it. Through it all, Hitler insisted that his generals stand firm, refusing to allow them to try to break out of the trap and save part of their army. Against his orders, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered, and on Feb. 2 the last pockets of resistance collapsed. For three days thereafter, Germans at home heard nothing but mournful commentary and dirges on their radios.
New Confidence. Many historians regard the battle of Stalingrad as the turning point of World War II, though the Allies’ invasion of Normandy and the successful defense of Britain certainly rival it for the honor. In any case, its impact was as much psychological as military. The battle proved the fallibility of Hitler and the vincibility of the Wehrmacht, which up to then had enjoyed little but victory. The magnitude of the Russian victory—91,000 prisoners were taken, including a field marshal and 20 generals*—aroused the dormant hopes of the Allies and gave them new confidence.
At Stalingrad, Germany not only lost men and morale but all its hopes of pushing the Soviet Union beyond the Urals and controlling Europe’s bread basket and the Black Sea oil wells. After the battle, the Soviet armies paused only a few times before they had driven the Germans back to Germany. The victory also restored much respectability to a Communist movement tarnished in the 1930s by the Stalinist purges and the cynical Hitler-Stalin pact; the party signed up many new believers who mistakenly credited Communism—and not simply patriotism—for inspiring the Russian victory at Stalingrad.
*Only 6,000 ever saw their homeland again. The rest died of cold, disease and starvation.
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