Stalingrad was a working city, not an empty battlefield, when the Luftwaffe struck it on the evening of 23 August 1942. Refugees from the west had swelled its population, evacuation had barely begun, and the Volga behind it was the only way out. The raids of that week destroyed most of the city’s housing and killed tens of thousands of people; the exact number has never been established.

A city on the Volga

Stalingrad, called Tsaritsyn until 1925, stretched for about 30 miles along the high west bank of the Volga but was only a few miles deep. It grew rapidly in the first Five-Year Plans. The Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, opened in 1930 as one of the showpieces of Soviet industrialization, stood at the northern end, followed southward by the Barrikady artillery works, the Red October steel plant, the Lazur chemical works, the railroad stations and the city center, and then the southern districts with their grain elevator and shipyards. The 1939 census counted about 445,000 inhabitants.

The war made the city more crowded. Evacuated factories, workers and families from Ukraine and the western regions passed through or settled there in 1941 and early 1942, and refugees from the steppe arrived ahead of the German advance in the summer. Olga Kucherenko, writing for the National WWII Museum, estimates the population before the battle at about 700,000. Other estimates differ, and none rests on a reliable count, because refugees were not systematically registered. The factories kept working through the summer; the Tractor Factory, which had been converted to build T-34 tanks, continued to produce and repair them as the front approached.

The city’s defense was organized by a city defense committee headed by Alexei Chuyanov, first secretary of the regional Communist Party committee. Through the summer residents dug antitank ditches and earthworks on the approaches, and factory workers formed militia battalions. German bombers attacked industrial targets in small raids from May onward. According to Kucherenko, calls for the evacuation of residents not needed for production went largely unheeded, and on 20 July a party meeting resolved to combat “evacuation moods” among the population.

Evacuation delayed

The decision not to empty the city early has been explained in several ways. The authorities wanted the factories to keep working and feared that a mass departure would spread panic in the army as well as among civilians. Kucherenko records that Stalin reportedly said soldiers do not fight for empty cities, and that the spirit of Order No. 227 of 28 July was in effect extended to civilians. Whatever the reasons, the consequence was that hundreds of thousands of people remained when the German army reached the Volga in late August.

Those who tried to leave faced the river. There was no bridge across the lower Volga at Stalingrad, and by mid-August, according to the same account, the ferry landings were not finished. Hospitals, orphanages and factory machinery were given priority. Ordinary families often could not get a place on a boat. By the time of the raid on 23 August, Kucherenko estimates, only about 100,000 residents had been evacuated. Crossings to the east bank continued, under fire, until mid-September.

23 August: the raid

On 23 August 1942, as the 16th Panzer Division reached the Volga north of the city, the Luftwaffe’s VIII Air Corps, part of Wolfram von Richthofen’s Fourth Air Fleet, began a series of heavy raids. The U.S. Army history by Ziemke and Bauer puts the tonnage dropped that day at about 1,000 tons, a mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The raids continued, with lesser intensity, for about a week, and a further 24-hour attack on the city followed on 3 September.

The bombs struck a city built largely of wood outside its center. Fires spread through the residential districts, and oil storage tanks along the river burned, sending burning fuel onto the Volga. The waterworks and much of the telephone system were knocked out, which made the fires harder to fight and the defense harder to coordinate. Kucherenko writes that about 90 percent of the housing stock was destroyed. Survivors’ accounts describe streets that became impassable, crowds trying to reach the river landings, and people who sheltered in trenches dug in parks and yards during the summer.

How many died is uncertain. Kucherenko gives a figure of up to 70,000 deaths in the first week and stresses that the numbers are contested. Older and popular accounts often give about 40,000. Neither figure comes from a complete count; the dead included refugees whose names were never recorded, and many bodies were buried in the rubble or by neighbors. The figure for the first week also says nothing about civilians killed later by shelling, hunger, cold, or during deportation.

The factories on 23 August

The German breakthrough to the Volga on 23 August brought the front to the northern edge of the city within hours. Between the river and the German spearhead stood little more than antiaircraft batteries, workers’ militia and a few NKVD and training units. The antiaircraft guns around the Tractor Factory, many of them served by young women of the city’s air defense regiments, were lowered to fire at German tanks over open sights, and several batteries were overrun. Militia battalions from the Tractor Factory, issued rifles and in some cases tanks straight off the assembly line, went into action at the factory’s northern approaches.

The fighting at the factory gates bought time for the 62nd Army to bring units north, and the German XIV Panzer Corps, short of infantry and fuel, did not push into the city that week. The cost to the workforce was heavy. Factory work continued in the following weeks under shellfire; the Tractor Factory went on repairing tanks and sending them directly to the front. As the front closed in, machinery and skilled workers that could be moved were evacuated across the river, and the remaining workers joined the defense or the stream of people trying to reach the east bank.

Life in cellars and gullies

After the first week, much of the remaining population lived underground. People sheltered in cellars of ruined buildings, in dugouts cut into the walls of the ravines (balkas) that run down to the Volga, and in sewer pipes and bunkers. As the front moved into the city in September, these shelters lay inside the fighting. Survivors later described going out after dark to fetch water from the river or from broken mains, to search for food in ruined shops and grain stores, and to bury the dead.

Children were among the most visible survivors. Kucherenko notes that many youngsters foraged and begged in the streets and often did so more successfully than adults, and that the 13th Guards Rifle Division had about a dozen underage wards who carried supplies and mail for its soldiers. Soviet soldiers sometimes shared food with civilians in their sectors; German soldiers sometimes did the same in theirs. Both sides also took food from civilians. Accounts collected after the war describe soldiers who would take anything they came across.

Many residents served the defense directly. Kucherenko records that about 75,000 Stalingraders joined the armed forces in various capacities during the battle. Workers’ militia battalions from the Tractor Factory, Barrikady and Red October fought at the factory gates in late August and again in October. Women served in antiaircraft batteries, in signals units and as medics. Two wartime civilian diaries studied by Mikhail Nasekin and Aleksandr Buganov, published in Russian in 2021, give contemporary detail of daily life as the city changed from a place behind the front to the battlefield itself.

The crossings

The Volga at Stalingrad is roughly a mile wide, with islands and channels on the eastern side. Through the autumn the same boats and barges that carried soldiers and ammunition west at night carried the wounded and civilians east. The Volga Military Flotilla’s gunboats and armored launches supported the defenders with gunfire and ferried troops; civilian river crews worked alongside them. German artillery and aircraft targeted the landings, and crossings by day became nearly impossible once German troops overlooked the river from Mamayev Kurgan and the city center.

By late autumn the river itself began to freeze. Ice floes made crossings dangerous through November and early December until the river froze solid enough to cross on foot and by vehicle. For civilians trapped in the city, the season of drifting ice meant the last escape route was effectively closed.

Under occupation and deportation

By mid-October German forces controlled most of the city and its western and southern outskirts. Kucherenko estimates that about 250,000 local residents were then in the German-held combat zone. From mid-October both sides carried out large-scale evacuations of civilians from their operational areas. On the German side, up to 10,000 people a day were driven out on foot toward the west, many without provisions, and some were sent to forced labor. By the end of 1942, by her estimate, no more than 15,000 civilians remained in the German-occupied zone of the city.

Deportees were marched to transit camps and dispersed through the occupied Don region and beyond; able-bodied adults could be selected for forced labor in Germany. Jewish residents who fell into German hands faced murder by German security forces, as elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union. The casualty chapter places these losses in the wider record. When the fighting ended in February 1943, Soviet authorities found the surviving population of the central districts living in ruins, without water, electricity or shelter.

After the battle

The clean-up of the city took months. Kucherenko records that by the end of May 1943 the remains of 200,000 servicemen and 12,000 animal carcasses had been cleared from the streets. Unexploded ordnance lay everywhere, and the first returning residents lived in dugouts and the shells of buildings while reconstruction began. Volunteers, including the women’s brigades associated with Alexandra Cherkasova, began clearing and restoring buildings by hand in 1943; their work started with Pavlov’s House, one of the first buildings rebuilt.

Civilian testimony shaped how the battle has been remembered, but it was collected unevenly. Soviet commissions gathered evidence of German crimes, and historians have since used diaries, letters and interviews to recover individual experiences. The National WWII Museum’s essay draws on such accounts. Readers who want to compare civilian survival under siege can turn to the Siege of Leningrad; the fighting that took place among Stalingrad’s remaining residents is the subject of the next chapter, and the advance that brought the bombers is covered in Chapter 1.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The city and its people, 1930–1943

Sources and further reading

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