1942: Stalingrad

In late summer 1942, German Wehrmacht troops reached the Soviet capital city on the Volga River, which, since 1925, carried the name of the dictator Josef Stalin (1878–1953). The great resistance of the Red Army led to the entrapment of the German Wehrmacht Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) ordered to keep the city. Relief attacks failed and the attempt to supply the entrapped troops from the air did not succeed to a sufficient degree. The soldiers trapped in the southern pocket (Kessel) surrendered on January 31, 1943, while the troops remaining in the northern pocket surrendered two days later. Of the 195,000 soldiers that had been encircled in November, 60,000 died during the combat operations. 25,000 wounded soldiers could be flown out. 110,000 soldiers were taken as Soviet prisoners of war – only 5,000 of which survived and returned to their home countries following the war. Soviet prisoners of war in the pocket of Stalingrad were starved to death by the Wehrmacht.

In public memory, “Stalingrad” is the symbol for the turning point in the war. In the historiography, this notion is contested – here, it is the failure of the German offensive against Moscow in December 1941 that is considered the turning point. Nevertheless, the defeat at Stalingrad has left a major impression in the public eye of all warring states; for the Red Army, victory meant a major boost of self-confidence.