The destruction of the Sixth Army in February 1943 ended Germany’s last great offensive in the Soviet south and shifted the initiative on the Eastern Front toward the Red Army. In the Soviet Union the battle became a founding story of the war; in Germany it was the first defeat the regime could not conceal. In the rebuilt city, renamed Volgograd in 1961, the memorial on Mamayev Kurgan and the ruins kept beside the river turned the battlefield into a landscape of remembrance.

A military turning point, with qualifications

The military consequences of Stalingrad were large and immediate. A German field army of some twenty divisions had been destroyed, along with most of four allied armies on the Don. Army Group A had to withdraw from the Caucasus, giving up the oil objectives for which the 1942 campaign had been fought. The Red Army had shown that it could plan and carry out a large encirclement, hold its outer front against a relief attack and reduce a pocket, all in winter conditions and over hundreds of miles. Soviet forces followed the surrender with offensives that recaptured Kursk, Rostov and Kharkov in February 1943.

Historians nonetheless qualify the description of Stalingrad as the turning point. The German army in the south was not destroyed. In late February and March 1943 Erich von Manstein’s counterattack retook Kharkov and stabilized the front, and Ziemke’s account of the winter retreat in the U.S. Army history shows how quickly the overextended Soviet spearheads were thrown back. The strategic initiative passed decisively to the Red Army only after the failure of the German offensive at Kursk in July 1943. Others point to the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 as the moment the German plan for a quick victory failed. Most accounts agree that Stalingrad was the point at which a German victory in the east became very unlikely.

The news in Germany

The German public had been told through the autumn that Stalingrad was about to fall. On 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Göring compared the Sixth Army to the Spartans at Thermopylae in a radio speech. On 3 February the high command announced the end of the battle, presenting it as a heroic last stand, and the regime ordered three days of national mourning. Two weeks later, on 18 February, Joseph Goebbels gave his “total war” speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, calling for the full mobilization of the economy and society.

For opponents of the regime, Stalingrad was evidence that Hitler was leading Germany to ruin. The White Rose group of students at the University of Munich made the battle central to their sixth and last leaflet, distributed in February 1943, which blamed Hitler for the deaths of the soldiers on the Volga and called on students to resist. Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested on 18 February after scattering copies in the university’s atrium; they and Christoph Probst were tried and executed on 22 February. The German Resistance Memorial Center and Ludwig Maximilian University document the leaflet and the trial.

Inside the pocket, an army doctor and pastor, Kurt Reuber, drew a charcoal Madonna on the back of a Soviet map at Christmas 1942. The “Stalingrad Madonna” was flown out with one of the last aircraft and now hangs in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, where it has become a symbol of reconciliation. In postwar West Germany, the experience of the Stalingrad veterans and the long wait for the prisoners’ return shaped how the battle was remembered: often as a story of German suffering, and only later, in historical research and exhibitions, as part of a war of aggression and annihilation.

The Allies and the symbol

For the Western Allies, Stalingrad confirmed the Soviet Union’s capacity to fight on and became a powerful symbol of the alliance. King George VI commissioned a ceremonial sword inscribed to the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad as a token of homage from the British people. Winston Churchill presented it to Stalin at the Soviet embassy in Tehran during the conference of 28 November–1 December 1943, and the sword is now held in Volgograd. Cities in Britain, the United States and France sent messages and gifts, and Coventry, itself devastated by German bombing in 1940, formed a link with Stalingrad in 1944 that became the first city twinning of its kind.

The name spread across the map of Europe. Paris named a square and a Métro station for the battle, and many French cities, among them Nantes, have a Boulevard de Stalingrad. In Italy and Romania, which had lost whole armies on the Don, the memory was different: a story of soldiers sent to a distant war by dictatorships that had not equipped them for it, and of prisoners who did not return. In the United States, the battle was followed closely in the press and became part of the wartime image of the Soviet ally, an image that changed with the Cold War.

Soviet memory and the city

Rebuilding began while the war continued. Volunteers, including the brigades associated with Alexandra Cherkasova, cleared and restored buildings from 1943; Pavlov’s House was among the first rebuilt. The city was replanned with broad avenues, a riverside embankment named for the 62nd Army, and Stalinist-era public buildings. In 1961, during Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign against Stalin’s personality cult, the city was renamed Volgograd. It received the title of Hero City in 1965. Since 2013 the city authorities have used the name Stalingrad in official ceremonies on several anniversaries of the battle.

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The Gerhardt Mill, a riverside flour mill that served as a strongpoint near the 13th Guards Rifle Division’s sector, was left in its damaged state as a memorial. Beside it stands the State Panorama Museum “Battle of Stalingrad,” opened on 8 July 1982, whose circular painting depicts the defeat of the German forces in the city. The museum’s collection includes weapons, uniforms, documents and gifts sent to the city from abroad. It forms part of the State Historical and Memorial Museum-Reserve “Battle of Stalingrad,” which also manages the memorial on Mamayev Kurgan and other sites.

Pavlov’s House on Lenin Square, formerly 9 January Square, is still an apartment building. A memorial wall of bricks recovered from the ruins stands on its eastern side, and a bas-relief on Lenin Square records the defense. Across the station square, a copy of the Barmaley fountain of children dancing in a circle, made famous by a wartime photograph of the burning city, was installed in 2013. Mass graves, tank-turret markers along the former front line, and plaques naming units and individual soldiers mark the city from the Tractor Factory to Beketovka.

The factories were rebuilt as well. The Tractor Factory resumed production after the war and remained one of the city’s largest employers for decades, with memorials to the divisions that fought in its workshops placed at its gates. Red October and Barrikady were rebuilt on their old sites. Along the former front line, monuments made from T-34 turrets on stone plinths mark the positions the 62nd Army held on the eve of the counteroffensive, so that the outline of the defense can still be traced through the modern city.

Mamayev Kurgan

The hill that changed hands repeatedly in the autumn of 1942 became the site of the city’s principal memorial. Construction began in May 1959, and the complex “To the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad,” designed by the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich with the engineer Nikolai Nikitin, was dedicated on 15 October 1967, according to Russia’s submission to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. Visitors climb from the entry composition “Memory of Generations” along an avenue of poplars to the square with the sculpture “Stand to the Death,” then past walls carved as ruins to the Square of Heroes, the Hall of Military Glory and the Square of Sorrow.

At the summit stands “The Motherland Calls,” a figure of a woman raising a sword, about 85 meters high including the sword. When it was completed it was among the tallest statues in the world. The hill also holds a military memorial cemetery on its western slope, whose memorial walls list 6,480 surnames, and mass graves of the divisions that fought there. Marshal Vasily Chuikov was buried on the hill at his own request in 1982, and the sniper Vasily Zaitsev was reburied there in 2006. Every year on 2 February and 9 May veterans’ families, officials and schoolchildren climb the hill.

The memorial reflects the way the battle was remembered in the Soviet Union: as a collective act of sacrifice and victory, with the Communist Party and the state at its center. Since 1991 historians in Russia and abroad have used opened archives to examine subjects the Soviet narrative left aside, including Order No. 227 and its punishments, the delayed civilian evacuation, the treatment of prisoners and the scale of Soviet losses. In recent years the battle has again been drawn into political argument in Russia, and its commemoration has become part of official state ceremonies.

Writing about the battle has changed with access to sources. Soviet histories and memoirs, such as those of Chuikov, Rokossovsky and Yeryomenko, presented the battle through the eyes of commanders. German memoirs by Manstein and others defended their authors’ decisions. Since the 1990s, works based on both sets of archives, including Antony Beevor’s narrative history and the three-volume operational study by David Glantz and Jonathan House, have reconstructed the battle in far greater detail and given more attention to soldiers, civilians and the Soviet side of the fighting.

Cemeteries and reconciliation

For decades after the war there was no German cemetery at Stalingrad. After the end of the Soviet Union, the German War Graves Commission and Russian authorities agreed to build one at Rossoshka, northwest of the city, where it was dedicated in 1999. A Soviet military cemetery opened across the road in 1997. Search teams continue to recover remains from the former battlefield and rebury them in both cemeteries. In Germany and Austria, memorial stones such as those at Limburg and Frankenburg am Hausruck recall local men who died at Stalingrad, and annual ceremonies are held at several of them.

Paulus, released from Soviet captivity in 1953, lived in Dresden in East Germany and died in 1957; he is buried in Baden-Baden. Chuikov rose to Marshal of the Soviet Union and commander of Soviet forces in Germany. The ordinary soldiers of both armies left letters, diaries and memoirs that historians now use alongside the operational records, as this collection does in Chapter 3 and Chapter 2. The numbers behind the cemeteries are discussed in Chapter 8.

Stalingrad remains one of the most studied battles in history. It can be followed back to Operation Barbarossa, forward to Kursk and the long road west, and outward to the posters and propaganda of the period collected in The Art of World War II. The collection hub brings together the map, timeline and sources for all nine chapters.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Memory on the Volga and beyond

Sources and further reading

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