The battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in the history of human conflict, with upwards of 1.2 million killed on all sides. It’s no surprise to learn there was a lot of chaos in a battle of such a size. Here are seven of the craziest things about the battle you may not have heard before.
Quick primer
If you’re not sure what the battle of Stalingrad is all about, here’s a brief primer to help you out. To learn more, we strongly suggest Anthony Beevor’s award-winning book, Stalingrad.
The five-month battle lasted from September of 1942 to February, 1943 and involved more than five million troops spread across a front of over 200 miles. The city itself, today called Volgograd, is a long, thin industrial city on the banks of the lower Volga river.
The Nazi German 6th army attempted to take the city to protect the flank of the main German assault driving south to the oil fields of the Caucausus. But the Soviets threw everything they had into the city and this side battle turned into the main event of the entire Second World War.
Eventually, a Soviet counter-attack surrounded the German 6th Army, along with armies from Romania, Hungary, and Italy. After a months-long siege in the freezing winter, the Axis armies surrendered and the Soviets took more than 100,000 prisoners of war. It was also the first major defeat of the German armies of the war.
1: Women made up a large proportion of the defenders
The Soviet Union was one of the first nations to guarantee equality between men and women when the communists under Lenin seized power in 1917. This meant, for better or worse, that women were also expected to help defend the motherland when Hitler’s Nazi armies invaded in June 1941.
As the German tanks approached the outskirts of Stalingrad in late summer, 1942, they ran into a barrage of heavy fire from batteries of anti-aircraft guns dug into the rolling steppes of southern Russia. These guns, normally meant to shoot down airplanes, had their barrels depressed to fire on a flat trajectory at targets appearing on the horizon.
The German units fanned out and aggressively assaulted the positions. The AA guns traded shot for shot with the German tanks for two days, holding the entire German army at bay just outside the city.
Eventually the Germans managed to overrun the positions only to find the operators had all disappeared. Instead, there were a bunch of peasant women milling around, watching the going-ons. The Germans ignored them and moved on.
What the Nazis hadn’t realized was that these women were the Red Army soldiers who had been firing the guns! They were a 1077th Anti-Aircraft Battalion made up entirely of young women. They snuck away and rejoined their comrades fighting in the city.
Women became ferocious snipers in the battle. There were more than 200 female snipers stalking German officers, radio operators, machine gunners, and other snipers in the rubble of the city during the battle. One of them, Tanya Chernova, was an American of Russian descent who had returned to the motherland to help defend it against the fascists. She killed over 100 Germans in the battle, and became legendary sniper Vasily Zaitsev’s lover and right-hand woman (they eventually married and moved to Florida after the war).
2: The sniper duel between Zaitsev and Konig never happened
The duel between Russian sniper Vasily Zaitsev and German sniper Erwin Konig is famous thanks to the movie Enemy at the Gates. The duel may not have actually happened. The Russian Ministry of Defence archives show the entire thing had been created as a propoganda story during the battle.
The battle had devolved into small-unit actions. Streets, hallways, and even living rooms because intense battlefields where infantry fought with grenades and shovels. Front lines could run through a factory floor. The rubble of the city created the perfect hunting ground for snipers, who would sneak through the city and shoot their prey.
There were snipers operating on both sides, although the Soviets were quick to realize the strategic usefulness of snipers and had more than 500 in the battle. They were able to infiltrate enemy lines, kill officers and communications operators, take out machine gunners, and cause havoc with morale. One of the Russian snipers’ favorite tricks was to rattle some cans in front of a German position. When a German soldier took a look, they would get a bullet through their head from a sniper hidden in the rubble. Germans would draw straws or flip coins to see who would have to be on watch next, knowing it was a death sentence.
There are also no mention in the German archives of a Major Konig sent to Stalingrad to root out Russian snipers. There were definitely German snipers in the city, upwards of 100 of them, and some of them were ace shots, but the story that the Germans specifically sent their best to hunt Vasily Zaitsev is not true.
Zaitsev’s memoirs mention a three-day duel he had with a particularly good German sniper during the battle. He and his foe ended up stalking each other, playing cat and mouse as they hunted each other while the battle swirled around them. While he was not the German uber-sniper the movies and books make him out to be, he was most likely one of the German snipers already in the city who happened to be a crack shot.
3: The city was full of civilians
The battle for the city was brutal. There were hardly any buildings left standing and the bloodshed was unlike anything seen before, or since. Yet amidst all the horror were half a million civilians, buried deep in their cellars and trying to survive. These included children, the elderly, and mothers.
The reason?
Stalin, the supreme dictator of the USSR, had ordered the citizens to stay. He saw it as a propoganda victory to show that the civilians were not running from the advancing fascist armies.
Most of the civilians wanted to flee but Soviet naval troops blockaded the river and kept them from leaving. Tens of thousands would die in the fighting as a result.
Still, life continued for these people trapped in the maelstrom. Many helped dig trenches and anti-tank ditches. They ran soup kitchens for the soldiers behind the lines, and some became nurses and helped tend to the wounded.
The same happened to civilians in the German-controlled areas of the city, where they helped the wounded, prepared meals, and sewed ripped uniforms in exchange for food. Many of the Russians in the occupied parts of the city later recounted they were treated decently by the Germans.
Prostitution also flourished in the middle of the battle. The civilians were starving and women began selling themselves in exchange for food. Sometimes the brothels would change hands between the Russians and the Germans as the front lines shifted back and forth, and these women would service soldiers from all sides.
4: The city was turned to rubble before the battle began
Stalingrad was supposed to be a proud and modern city bearing the name of the Great Leader, Josef Stalin. It contained a tractor factory, the Red October steel factory, and the Barrikady arms factory. It had been built up from a small town to a large city in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s five year plans to modernize Russia. It had modern apartment buildings, modern streets, and modern infrastructure including telephone lines, streetcars, and sewers.
The German Luftwaffe reduced all of it to rubble in only a couple of days.
As the German Sixth Army approached, German planners thought it best to eradicate the city beforehand. Luftflotte 2 under Generalfeldmarshall von Richtoffen (nephew of the famous WWI flying ace) began a massive two-day bombing of the city which had it engulfed in flames. The glow of the burning city could be seen on the horizon from miles away.
This bombing was methodical and swept across the entire city. Even the suburbs were not spared.
But the bombing was a mistake, and it created the perfect conditions for the defenders. The rubble became hiding places and bunkers and firing positions for the Soviet defenders. It offered the perfect playground for the Soviet snipers, who wreaked havoc on the Germans as they advanced into the ruins of the city.
It also created bottlenecks and took away the one advantage the Germans had: tanks. It forced the German army, which had been built around the fast-moving and hard-hitting power of tanks, to become an infantry army slogging through a battle of attrition.
The Soviets also adjusted their tactics to account for this and began to engage the Germans in close hand-to-hand combat wherever possible. The Germans were not well-trained for this type of warfare. They were an army that depended on technology and aggressive movement to wipe out the enemy at a distance. The Red Army soldiers learned to excel at close-in combat, negating any advantages the Germans may have had in the rubble they themselves had created.
5: The Germans preferred Soviet weapons
The German army of the Second World War was equipped with some of the best technology of the day. The MG-42 machine gun was a fearsome weapon (still used by some militaries even today). The Panzer IV tank and the new Tiger and Panther tanks were monsters that could dominate any other battlefield. But not Stalingrad.
Inside the rubble of the city, the Soviet weapons were far superior to this type of fighting. In particular, the PPSh-41 submachine gun used by Red Army infantry became a favourite of the German infantry. This gun was a short-barrelled submachine gun with a round drum magazine containing 71 rounds. It fired over 1200 rounds per minute, meaning one gun could clear an entire room during an assault.
The German MP-34 was not as fast and they did not have as many. It was usually reserved only for non-commissioned officers, which meant the average German infantryman was stuck with a Kar-98 bolt-action rifle. Awful for the close-in fighting of Stalingrad. Many Germans would toss their rifles and pick up a PPSh-41 from dead Russians at the first chance.
Even the German Kar-98 was not as good as the Russian Moisin-Nagant 1891 rifle. Both weapons were from the late 19th century, but the Moisin-Nagant had greater range and accuracy, and was able to withstand cold without jamming, whereas the Kar-98 was infamous for freezing up in the winter. Russian snipers continued to use the Moisin-Nagant right up until the end of the war.
By the second month of the battle, the average Russian infantryman was using the semi-automatic SVT-40, giving them a huge advantage in a close-quarters fight. The German army was beginning to look outdated in the streets of Stalingrad.
6: There were cannibals
World War Two was all-around awful everywhere. Cannibalism added yet another layer of horror to this already horrifying conflict.
There are many reports of Axis troops resorting to cannibalism during the winter of 1942-1943, once the Red Army had surrounded them and trapped them in the snow and rubble of the city.
The Soviet counter-attack had come as a complete shock to Hitler and the German general staff. They felt they were on the verge of victory, and Stalingrad was about to fall. Then two massive Soviet armies attacked from the north and south of the city and linked up to the west, trapping nearly a million Axis soldiers in a giant pincer. They were cut off from their supply base a hundred miles to the west at Rostov.
The German Luftwaffe attempted to airlift tons of supplies into the city as the freezing winter set in, but the small German Ju-52 transport plane was never designed for this kind of operation. The Germans also did not have control of the air and Soviet fighters shot down many of the transports. The Axis soldiers were truly cut off.
The Germans, Romanians, Hungarians and Italians trapped at Stalingrad began to starve. They ate their horses. Soon, men were eating their leather belts. Soviet propaganda blared the following message over loudspeakers all across the battlefield, day and night:
“Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad…tick…tick…tick…tick…tick…tick…tick. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad…tick…tick…tick…”
The snow, the constant shelling, the starvation and the morale-killing propaganda took their toll. Reports of cannibalism began to filter back to the German HQ in the Univermag department store deep in Stalingrad, where General Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, was bunkered down.
Most of those reports involved starving soldiers cutting the flesh off their fallen comrades and other bodies frozen stiff around the battlefield. But there were some reports of Romanians drawing straws and killing their comrades to eat them.
7: The Panther tank was first used here
The brand new Panzer V “Panther” tank was the German answer to the fearsome Soviet T-34 tank. The first production runs of the Panther were still coming off the line when the battle for Stalingrad began. When the Germans and their Axis partners found themselves suddenly trapped, the Germans decided to try and break them out with a massive armored assault from the south.
Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, arguably Germany’s best general of the war, was in overall command of the front and he had to quickly patch together a new army group out of all the disorganized German units scattered around southern Russia. He had an entire army group under Field Marshall Wilhelm List about to be cut off in the Caucausus, today’s Chechnya and Ossetia. He had several mixed units still retreating from the massive Soviet assault, the survivors of whom were shell shocked and completely disorganized.
von Manstein decided to piece together a new armored corps using what he had available and launch a counter-attack against the Russian pincer’s flanks. He hoped to hold the Soviets back long enough for List’s army group to retreat north to safety, and also to rescue the Sixth Army trapped at Stalingrad.
The first 47 Panther tanks, along with 22 Tiger tanks, complemented 180 of the older model Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks in Operation Winter Storm. The German attack hit the Soviet flanks, but Soviet Marshall Georgiy Zhukov was prepared. He had been planning for a German counter-attack and the flanks of the Soviet offensive were well-protected by dug-in anti-tank and armored units.
In the swirling snow of December on the frozen steppes of southern Russia, hundreds of German tanks, including the new Panthers, smashed into the Soviet lines. The fighting was fierce. The Panthers proved their worth, knocking out Soviet T-34s with their long-barrel 76mm guns while shells glanced off their thick sloped armor.
But the tanks had mechanical problems, particularly in the snow. The transmissions broke down. Their turret motors jammed. There was also not enough room inside the cramped turret for the crew to operate comfortably thanks to a large muzzle brake that separated the loader from the rest of the crew. Finally, there were just too few of the new tanks.
von Manstein’s counter-attack was stopped 48 miles from the Sixth Army, and of the 47 Panther tanks he committed to the attack, 31 were left behind in the snow. Only one had been taken out by the enemy.