Who won the Battle of Stalingrad?
The Soviet Union won the Battle of Stalingrad. Encircled by Operation Uranus, the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus surrendered between 31 January and 2 February 1943, and about 91,000 survivors were taken prisoner. With military casualties of 2 to 2.5 million, it was one of the bloodiest battles in history and the turning point on the Eastern Front.1
Some battles are won by maneuver. Stalingrad was won by refusing to let go. For five months two armies fed themselves into the ruins of one city on the Volga, until the attacker was surrounded by the defender and the entire war in the East swung the other way. Imperial War Museums calls it the bloodiest battle of World War II, and HISTORY one of the largest, longest and bloodiest engagements in modern warfare.2
The battle from both sides
Two perspectivesFor the Soviet Union Stalingrad was a battle that could not be lost: the city bore Stalin's name and guarded the Volga and the road to the Caucasus oilfields. Chuikov's 62nd Army fought a grinding urban defense, trading rubble house by house and hugging the enemy so close that German airpower and artillery could not be used freely. While the defenders held the west bank at terrible cost, Zhukov massed reserves for Operation Uranus, striking the weak Romanian flanks and encircling the German Sixth Army. Forbidden to break out, Paulus surrendered in early 1943. The victory shattered the myth of German invincibility and began the long Soviet advance that would end in Berlin.
For Germany Stalingrad was meant to secure the southern flank of the 1942 offensive and cut the Volga. The Sixth Army under Paulus fought its way into the city and took most of it, but the Soviets clung to a strip along the river and the fighting devoured Germany's strength street by street. The flanks, held by weaker Romanian, Italian and Hungarian units, were left dangerously thin. When the Soviet pincers closed in November, Hitler forbade a breakout and promised supply by air that never came. Frozen, starving and cut off, the Sixth Army was destroyed and over ninety thousand went into captivity. It was the turning point of the war in the east.
Case Blue
In the summer of 1942 Germany drove south and east, aiming for the oil of the Caucasus and the great river that carried it. In the way stood Stalingrad, an industrial city strung along the west bank of the Volga, and a city that carried Stalin's own name. Taking it became a matter of prestige as much as strategy. The German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus reached the outskirts in August and pounded the city to rubble from the air.3
Who commanded at Stalingrad?
On the German side Friedrich Paulus led the 6th Army, with Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army beside him and Maximilian von Weichs over both at Army Group B. On the Soviet side Vasily Chuikov held the city with the 62nd Army, while Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky planned the counterstroke that trapped Paulus.4
Paulus was a gifted staff officer who had helped plan the invasion of 1941, but he had little experience of commanding troops in battle. His opponents were a mixed team. In August 1942 General Andrey Yeryomenko took over the Southeastern Front. Chuikov took over the battered 62nd Army in September and is said to have vowed to hold the city or die there.5
Above them stood Zhukov, who with Vasilevsky drew up the plan that became Operation Uranus, two pincers that struck the weak Romanian armies on the flanks north and south of the city in November. Once the 6th Army was trapped, Hitler sent Erich von Manstein, his best troubleshooter, to rescue it. He failed.6
23 August 1942: a city that was not evacuated
Stalingrad was put on a war footing on 19 July. On 28 July Stalin issued Order No. 227, remembered by its demand “Not a step back,” which forbade further retreat. Stalin decided that the city bearing his name had to be held at any cost, and local militias were raised, women among them. On 23 August the Luftwaffe's Fourth Air Fleet, Luftflotte 4, dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs on the city. The bombing went on for a week and destroyed 90 percent of the housing. It has been said that Stalin kept civilians from leaving in the belief that their presence would stiffen the defense. Women were put to work digging trenches.7
How many died in the bombing is disputed. A 2018 study by two Russian historians cites a count of 71,000 civilians killed by the bombing of 23 to 29 August alone, and the toll of the whole battle was far higher. The same study cites research counting about 710,000 people in the city on 23 August 1942, of whom more than 185,000, at least 26 percent, died through bombing, fighting and occupation. An incomplete wartime tally for the city's districts lists 42,754 killed by bombs and shells alone. When the fighting ended, a census found that only some 10,000 civilians had survived in the ruins, 994 of them children.8
A war of rooms and staircases
The rubble was a trap. In the open, German tanks and aircraft ruled; inside a shattered city they were half blind. The fighting broke down into a struggle for single streets, blocks and buildings, many of which changed hands again and again. One ordinary apartment block, held for 58 days by a few dozen men under Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and known as Pavlov's House, was marked on German maps as a fortress.9
Mamayev Kurgan, the grain elevator and Pavlov's House
The first German assault on the city proper came on 13 September, aimed above all at Mamayev Kurgan, the hill that rises above the city center. Alexander Rodimtsev's 13th Guards Rifle Division was rushed across the Volga to stop it, and the hill and the central railway station changed hands again and again. How often the summit of the Kurgan changed hands, Chuikov later wrote, no one could say.10
In the south of the city Soviet troops, among them sailors of the 92nd Rifle Brigade, fought for the giant grain elevator, which finally fell to the Germans at the end of September. A German soldier wrote in his diary that it was held "not by men but by devils."11
In the center, Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and three of his men drove the Germans out of a four-story apartment block on the city's central square and turned it into a fortress. Reinforced to 24 men, they mined every approach and dug a trench to bring in machine guns, mortars, anti-tank rifles and ammunition, while civilians sheltered in the cellars. The house held for 58 days, was marked as a fortress on Paulus's own map, and in 1945 made Pavlov a Hero of the Soviet Union.12
From late September the weight of the battle moved north to three huge works: the Red October steel plant, the Barrikady gun factory and the Tractor Factory. A new assault opened there on 14 October, on a narrow front, and by the next day the Tractor Factory was in German hands. By mid-November the 6th Army held about 90 percent of Stalingrad, and still could not take the rest.13
The 62nd Army holds the bank
General Vasily Chuikov, commanding the Soviet 62nd Army, ordered his men to “hug” the enemy, to stay so close that German artillery and bombers could not fire without hitting their own. Reinforcements and ammunition crossed the Volga by night on ferries under constant fire; the wounded went back the same way. The defenders were pressed into a thin strip along the water, but that strip never broke.14
Operation Uranus
While the world watched the city, the Soviet command prepared something larger. On 19 November 1942 they launched Operation Uranus, striking not at the strong German center but at the weaker Romanian armies guarding its flanks. Within four days the two pincers met west of the city. Paulus and his 6th Army, at least a quarter of a million men, were sealed inside a pocket, the besiegers now besieged.15 › Operation Uranus, 1942
The cauldron: Göring's airlift and Manstein's relief
When the ring closed, Paulus asked to break out of a pocket roughly 40 by 50 kilometers. Hitler refused and relied on Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, to keep the army alive from the air. According to the U.S. Army's official historians, Göring assured him that the Luftwaffe could fly 600 tons of supplies into the pocket every day.16
Sources differ on what the army really needed: Germany's national history museum puts it at 300 to 400 tons a day and says that amount never once arrived, while Paulus himself put the minimum at 750 to 800. The airlift averaged about 90 tons a day in December and about 120 in January. Just under 30,000 wounded were flown out in the empty transports. Inside the pocket the daily ration shrank to two slices of bread and a little tea, men began dying of exhaustion from mid-December, and temperatures fell below minus 40 degrees.17
The relief attack, Operation Winter Storm, began on 12 December. Manstein's new Army Group Don sent Hoth's panzers north, and they got within 48 to 56 kilometers of the pocket, by different counts, before Soviet resistance forced them back after nine days. Manstein wanted Paulus to break out toward him, but Hitler would not allow it. On 16 December the Red Army smashed the Italian 8th Army further up the Don, putting the whole German front in the south at risk. On 23 December Hitler renewed his order to hold, and the 6th Army was left to its fate.18
On 8 January 1943 Soviet envoys offered surrender terms, and Hitler forbade Paulus to accept. On 10 January Rokossovsky's Don Front attacked after a huge bombardment, opening Operation Ring. By 23 January the Red Army had taken all the pocket's airfields, Pitomnik and Gumrak among them, and on 26 January the pocket was cut in two on either side of Mamayev Kurgan. On 30 January Göring broadcast a speech comparing the trapped army to the Spartans at Thermopylae, and Hitler made Paulus a field marshal, since no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Paulus gave up the southern pocket on 31 January, from the cellar of a bombed-out department store. The northern pocket followed on 2 February 1943. Around 91,000 men marched into captivity, and Paulus became the first German field marshal ever to surrender.19
How many soldiers died at Stalingrad?
No exact count exists. Germany's national history museum estimates that about 150,000 German soldiers died inside the pocket and that probably more than 400,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. Including the wounded, captured and missing, a 2018 Russian study puts the military losses of both sides at 2 to 2.5 million, one of several estimates that differ widely. To set Stalingrad beside the costliest battles of World War I, read our accounts of the Somme and Verdun.20
The German side is the best documented. The pocket held about 250,000 Germans and more than 30,000 Romanian soldiers and Soviet auxiliaries. Britannica notes that the Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian bodies in and around the city, and that of the 91,000 men who surrendered only some 5,000 to 6,000 ever came home. Counting the whole campaign, the Imperial War Museums give a German loss of 500,000 men. Germany's allies bled too: Italy lost about 110,000 killed or wounded, Hungary 143,000 and Romania 160,000. On the Soviet side, the figures compiled by a team of the Russian General Staff give 1,129,619 losses, of whom 478,741 were killed, missing or captured. On our list of the deadliest battles in history, which counts military casualties only, Stalingrad is second, behind the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, whose far less certain estimates run higher.21
For the 91,000 prisoners the surrender was not the end of the dying. Sources count 22 or 24 generals among them. Already starving and sick, they went into Soviet captivity, and almost half of them were dead by the spring of 1943. Only about 5,000 to 6,000 ever came home, the last of them by 1956. Paulus fared better. He gave evidence at the Nuremberg trials and spent his last years in Dresden, in East Germany.22
The hinge of the war
Military losses alone, counting the killed, wounded, captured and missing of both sides, are put at 2 to 2.5 million, and civilian deaths come on top of that. After Stalingrad the German army in the East was never again able to mount a war-winning offensive; from here the front rolled slowly but steadily back toward Berlin. It is the moment World War II in Europe turned, and it turned in a single ruined city that would not fall.23
In Germany the shock was felt at once. On 3 February the armed forces report issued from Hitler's headquarters announced the defeat, and three days of national mourning followed. On 18 February Joseph Goebbels proclaimed "total war," yet soon after the surrender the year "1918," a reminder of the last lost war, appeared painted on house walls in German cities. For the Red Army the next great test came that summer at Kursk. Stalingrad sits at the center of every list of the greatest battles of the Eastern Front and of the greatest battles of World War II.24
Stalingrad today: Volgograd and The Motherland Calls
The city was named a Hero City in 1945 and was renamed Volgograd in 1961. The battle still dominates it. On Mamayev Kurgan, the hill fought over all autumn, work on the memorial complex "To the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad" began in May 1959, and it opened on 15 October 1967. A path of stairs, squares and sculpture climbs the slope to a hall of military honor and a war cemetery, where memorial walls carry 6,480 names.25
Over it all stands The Motherland Calls, a woman striding forward with a raised sword, designed by the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich. With its pedestal it is 85 meters tall and weighs 8,014 tons. The hollow concrete figure is not rigidly fixed to its 16-meter foundation and stays upright by its own weight. The sword was fitted in May 1967 and later replaced by one shaped to cope better with the wind.26
The Panorama Museum of the battle also cares for the ruins of a steam mill left standing as a war monument, and since 2012 a small museum has occupied the cellar of the central department store where Paulus was captured. Russia put the Mamayev Kurgan memorial on UNESCO's Tentative List in 2014 and in 2024 proposed it again with Belarus, this time alongside the Brest Fortress memorial.27
How well do you know the war in the East? Try the World War II battles quiz, or weigh Stalingrad against other giants in Which Battle Was Bigger?
