Original subtitles

The Battle of Stalingrad is said to have been the bloodiest

of the whole of the second World War.

It's a struggle between the German fatherland

and the Russian motherland.

The Soviet troops moving into that city

know that it's essentially a death sentence.

Stalingrad falls, that's it for the Soviet Union.

Hitler had no understanding of the enormous will of the Soviet people.

The battle of Stalingrad is one of the most brutal engagements

of World War II.

Now, rare footage from around the world,

expertly restored in full color…

tells the story as you've never seen it before.

In August 1939…

Hitler and Stalin sign a non-aggression pact.

The world is taken by surprise.

Hitler is expanding the borders of Nazi Germany eastwards…

annexing Austria and occupying Czechoslovakia.

And from the earliest days of his career,

Hitler made no secret of his hatred for communism…

nor his desire for Soviet territory.

For Hitler, the Soviet Union was the home

of this new ideology, which he detested.

Communism stood in the way of Aryan supremacy.

And that was his fundamental concern.

The ten year pact flies in the face of everything

the two great dictators stand for.

The Russian public, and the military in particular,

could not understand that these have been the enemy

and how could they now have any kind of a deal?

Stalin himself had actually read Mein Kampf.

He was not naïve about Hitler's aims.

This was a deal with the devil for both sides.

But while western diplomats struggle

to understand this baffling alliance,

Hitler and Stalin reveal their hands.

At the beginning of September 1939,

Germany invades Poland from the west.

Shortly after, the Soviet Union invades from the east.

Within a few short weeks, Hitler and Stalin's armies

complete their conquest. Poland surrenders.

As they carve up the spoils and redraw Poland's borders…

the true meaning of the Nazi-Soviet pact becomes clear.

It was a marriage of convenience,

as Poland was consumed by fascist and communist expansionism.

But while Stalin consolidates his land-grab,

Hitler is far from finished.

Over the next two years,

Stalin watches on as the Nazi war machine

blitzes its way across Europe,

Smashing through democracies like Norway…

…Belgium…

…the Netherlands…

…and France.

At first, the overthrow of major democracies

plays into Stalin's hands.

But as the dust settles, it becomes increasingly obvious

that Hitler has no intention of merely expanding to the west.

Hitler is in control of all of western and central Europe.

Russia really is the last frontier for him.

With Hitler's troops busy holding his gains across Europe,

and the Nazi-Soviet pact in place,

nobody expects The Fuhrer to open a second front of the war.

Although so many national leaders

have learned that Hitler's promises mean nothing…

when the betrayal comes,

it is still unexpected.

On the very early morning of 22nd of June 1941,

everything changed.

Operation Barbarossa started…

and Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

And from this very moment onwards

the two countries were again arch-enemies.

Hitler's hunger for Soviet territory is all-consuming.

Communism had to be defeated, the Soviet had to be defeated,

and Stalin had to be defeated.

And Hitler wants him defeated quickly.

The initial idea of the Germans was…

to crush the Red Army within six, eight weeks.

They used the now textbook Nazi tactic of "blitzkrieg,"

an overwhelming attack, first by planes…

followed rapidly by tanks…

artillery…

…and infantry.

Hitler, at this point, believed that

the Red Army would collapse like a house of cards.

All they had to do was kick in the door

and the whole rotten structure would collapse.

By December 1941,

the German army has stormed through Soviet territory,

holding a line that stretches from Leningrad to Rostov.

The Red Army suffers astonishing casualties,

losing three million soldiers.

But the Nazi onslaught is finally halted at Moscow.

By the following spring,

it is clear that Russia isn't going to fall as easily as France,

and Hitler's war machine needs feeding.

Germany is going to continue fighting the war.

It needs oil, it needs vital resources,

and that means heading down to The Caucasus

at the southern part of the Soviet Union.

So in the summer of 1942,

as the Wehrmacht continues its assault on Russia,

Hitler and his generals plan to send German army groups south

to take the rich oil fields.

But as Hitler plots the route to the Caucasus,

he spots the opportunity to strike a humiliating blow to his adversary.

The German high command, when they're going over the plan

for that summer, they notice that there's this city

named Stalingrad there.

It's just a juicy morsel that caught their eye.

There are strategic reasons for taking Stalingrad.

The large industrial city supplies the Red Army

with tanks and armaments.

And sits right on the bank of the mighty river Volga.

The capture of Stalingrad would cut off this major Soviet supply route.

But the main reason Hitler wants Stalingrad…

is because of its name.

Wouldn't this be a coup to really embarrass Stalin,

by taking a city that has his name?

Hitler changes his plan and splits his forces into two.

One group continues towards the oil fields,

while the other heads for Stalingrad.

The seeds are sown for a major battle of wills.

Just as important as it was for Hitler to take the city,

for reasons of prestige, it was exactly the same for Stalin to keep it.

Stalingrad not only bears Stalin's name,

but also holds a deep personal significance.

This was the city where he had fought and won

in the Russian civil war.

There is an emotion to defend that city

during this new great patriotic war.

Stalin, already furious

that so many Soviet towns had fallen so easily,

is determined that Stalingrad will be different.

On the 28th of July, he issues order 227,

urging, "Not one step back."

Stalin heaped shame on the Red Army,

but the Red Army could redeem itself by fighting heroically

and by not ceding one step of holy Soviet soil.

If the defenders of Stalingrad are to stand firm

against the Nazi assault,

Stalin has to inspire them like never before.

He puts the internationalist communist ideal to one side

and appeals to pre-revolution sentiments,

patriotism, love of the motherland.

Fighting for the motherland, the homeland,

resonated intensely with virtually any Soviet citizen.

The overriding motivator was love for the motherland

and deep hatred toward the invader.

And the people of Stalingrad have more than patriotism

to motivate them.

By the summer of '42,

most Russian people had a very good idea of what the Germans had been doing,

particularly to civilians and to Jews, in the occupied areas.

Murdering thousands of people…

cutting a swath of death and destruction.

There was scarcely an atrocity that didn't go unnoticed,

and they were broadcast widely through the population

and through the military.

When you have got an enemy who is saying,

"I will kill you, I will kill your wife, your children,

and I'll be the master here,"

what sort of reaction do you expect from the local population?

For the people of Stalingrad,

patriotism and fear are powerful motivators.

They rally to create local defenses, digging anti-tank ditches

to slow the Wehrmacht.

They call everyone out to contribute,

men, women and children.

Ahead of the German advance,

the Soviets destroy their own property,

laying waste to anything that might be useful to the German army.

They are really creating kind of a scorched earth landscape

for the Germans to finally come up against.

Leading the German charge toward Stalingrad

is General Paulus.

Friedrich Paulus, some said was quite an imposing figure,

tall, slim, but was regarded by his fellow soldiers

as a bit of a backroom star rather than a front line soldier.

Paulus is a classic standoffish German commander

who prefers to win by using longer range weaponry

and by intimidating the opponents if he possibly can.

The Soviets brace themselves for Paulus's ground attack.

But when the barrage comes,

it doesn't come from his artillery.

The bombing, no one expected.

Theaters were running, children were going to school.

This hit them out of the blue.

On the 23rd of August 1942,

the skies over Stalingrad turned black with swarms of Nazi bombers.

And we're talking some 600 aircraft.

A thousand tons of bombs are dropped on the city.

The Soviet air force is too poorly equipped

to defend against the onslaught.

Planes were just able to come over again and again and again

dropping their bombs.

As the city was mainly built from wood,

it went up light a funeral pyre.

It lit fires that did not go out for months.

By day, pillars of smoke.

By night, the flames of these fires that were never extinguished.

By the end of it, the landscape was apocalyptic.

German bombers had smashed everything in sight;

buildings, factories, parks,

anything in the city was essentially rubbled.

Turned neat city blocks

into nothing more than piles of steel and stone.

The German aerial attack on Stalingrad

is the most intense of the entire war on the eastern front.

It claims the lives of over 40,000 Soviets.

And the tanks and artillery under General Paulus

haven't even arrived.

And if the survivors have any plans to flee the burning city,

they are soon quashed.

Stalin mandated that everyone in Stalingrad stays put.

No one is leaving the city.

The only escape route is across the Volga.

And the Soviet Navy has other priorities.

The naval body on the river itself

was devoted almost entirely to moving food, ammunition and troops,

either to Stalingrad or wounded back from Stalingrad.

Among the defenders with no option but to stay and fight

are soldiers the Nazis would never dream of deploying.

There were about one million Soviet women

who served in the Red Army.

As the country was invaded,

women volunteered on just about the same proportion as men.

What's so significant about that is not just the number,

but also about half of them served in active combat roles.

They were in tank crews, they were snipers, they were gunners.

Even as nurses and medics,

they were expected to go onto the battlefield to recover wounded,

and many nurses actually died on the battlefield.

Even in those so-called support roles,

these were women who were armed, who were trained to use their weapons,

and who fought.

When the advancing German army first encounter women with guns…

they are stunned.

They were used to women in Germany being exalted by the Nazis,

they were mothers, they were homemakers, but they were not combat soldiers.

Germans thought that women serving with weapon in hand

were proof of the denatured essence that is Soviet communism.

And it must have told the Germans, actually, if the Russian women

are prepared to throw in their lot alongside their men…

we've got to defeat a whole people. It's not just the army.

The relentless advance continues.

By the end of August, German tanks hit the suburbs of Rynok,

within sight of the city and the river Volga.

Confidence is running high.

They had reached a prize that they knew was important

to The Fuhrer back in Germany, and they were going to take it,

probably they felt, within a week or two.

Stalin was furious.

"What are you doing there, my generals?" That was his question.

Stalin reissues his order to defend the city at all costs.

There will be no more retreat.

The river Volga is the last defendable position

before the Ural Mountains.

Stalin makes sure that every Soviet knows what is at stake.

The slogan that goes through the Soviet defense is,

"There is no land beyond the Volga."

As if this is the last ditch, literally, that if Stalingrad falls,

that's it for the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, the German advance grinds to a halt.

Stopped not by the Soviet ditches,

but by the Luftwaffe.

The city had been so thoroughly wrecked,

it was almost impossible to move their tanks through the rubble.

Paulus had to change tactics.

He switches to more maneuverable artillery units,

to soften up Soviet resistance before German infantry can storm the city.

Very quickly, Hitler's troops make strategic gains,

taking the main railway station, and the important high ground

of Mamaev Kurgan.

From Mamaev Kurgan,

they are able to see the whole of the rest of the city,

and artillery observers on that height

would be able to completely dominate the fighting.

By the middle of September, it must have seemed

to most of the German attackers that they were almost there.

Surely, within a very short space of time,

the Russian defenders are gonna melt away, and they will have the whole of the city.

But the Soviets show no sign of submitting.

To halt Nazi gains,

Stalin sends in one of his best generals.

General Chuikov was very much in the new breed of Russian general.

He was tough, he was stoical, he was arguably quite ruthless,

and he was the right man for the job.

And Chuikov couldn't be less like his German counterpart,

General Paulus.

He was a real soldier's soldier.

He was approachable, genuinely concerned about his troops.

He was someone who went to the front lines.

He kept his headquarters very near the front lines.

People said everything changed after Chuikov took command.

And the biggest effect he had was on morale,

just totally turned around morale for his troops.

And General Chuikov knows a thing about Paulus's tactics.

As commander of the Soviet 64th Army on its retreat towards Stalingrad,

he knows Germans like to fight at a distance.

In the open, with tanks, air power and artillery.

He's lost a lot of men under his command

when he's been trying to fight that.

Then in the city of Stalingrad he comes into his own.

He can see that they need mobility, and they need speed, and they need space.

And what he's going to do in Stalingrad is deny them space.

Now commanding the 62nd army defending the city,

Chuikov reorganizes it into small units,

or Stormtroops, to downsize the battle.

The Stormtroop tactic came to be called "hug the enemy"

because he would say, "You need to get close.

You should be no more than a grenade-throw apart."

What he means is get so close to them

that they dare not use their artillery and air power,

because their own troops will be too much at risk.

The strategy neutralizes Paulus's greatest advantage.

With it, Chuikov heralds in a new era of urban warfare.

Brutal, bloody, extreme close-quarters combat.

You essentially have Soviet and German troops meters apart,

in adjacent rooms in buildings.

Urban warfare is something that every army hates.

Nobody wants to fight in a city, and especially a city

that's been destroyed into a rubble heap.

They fought even in the cellars, in the tunnels.

It was really a dirty war.

The Germans called it the Rattenkrieg, the Rat's War.

As the bitter, bloody fight unfolded,

the question was, why the Germans had chosen Stalingrad

as the place to cut the Soviet Volga supply route.

They could do that anywhere along the Volga River,

they didn't have to go through the city to do it.

In some senses it was a really poor military decision.

In the confined conditions, troops use every weapon they have to hand.

Pistols, grenades, machine guns,

flame-throwers, even sharpened spades.

But there's one key weapon that the ruins of Stalingrad

offer the perfect conditions for.

Snipers were sighted all over the city.

Chuikov realized how important they were.

The rubble of Stalingrad offers concealment and cover.

All the time, troops are hiding behind these scraps of rubble.

But of course, they need to stick their heads out occasionally,

and then they would be vulnerable to the snipers,

who become the plague of Stalingrad.

And Soviet women are at the forefront of the fight.

There were women that were there in the Red Army as snipers.

Many women were good shots, because what it takes to be a good sniper

is precision and patience, and women tended to be very good at that.

Nevertheless, the Germans kill Soviet defenders

at an alarming rate.

It's a meat grinder, is what it amounts to,

and you're constantly feeding new meat into the grinder.

There was endless counterattacking,

and the Germans were machine gunning them down again and again and again.

Troops sent into the city on average will last for 24 hours

before they're killed or wounded.

But frustratingly for Paulus,

Chuikov always seems to have just enough soldiers

to keep the Nazis at bay.

And the pressure to cling on is unrelenting.

The orders given by Stalin to his fronts, and his armies,

and his divisions, were to stand fast and fight for every inch of terrain.

It was the fortress Stalingrad that was to be defended at all costs.

Lives were not important.

For Stalin, it was "we defend."

The general motto of the Red Army was,

"We'll never surrender."

No setback.

We'll die here…

but the Germans will not capture it.

The sacrifice made by the men and women

of the Red Army unsettles the German attackers.

The Soviet soldier was imagined as this brutish, beastly mass.

Subhuman, but dogged and determined,

and completely disregarding their own survival instinct.

But by October, it is clear that heroism won't be enough

to stop the inevitable.

Chuikov is desperately holding onto landmarks,

but the Germans are taking more and more of the city.

Before long they've actually forced the defenders back

to just this really narrow strip ahead of the river.

It seems only a matter of time before Stalin's cherished city

will be in the hands of his hated enemy.

To Hitler, it looks as though the battle is won,

because on a map almost all of Stalingrad is now in German hands,

and he can take the rest at his leisure with small assault groups.

The attitude of the German high command

is "we're superior," and we're gonna remain superior,

and no Soviet attack will succeed.

By the start of November,

with 90 percent of Stalingrad in German hands,

the battle was virtually won…

when the pace of the fight slowed dramatically.

The Soviet winter had arrived.

The Germans are still not fully equipped

for the tremendously low temperatures, around -30 degrees.

They have some winter clothing, but they're still resorting to newspaper

and captured boots and so on,

in order to try to protect themselves against the cold.

And the German army are running short of supplies.

One big problem that the Germans are facing

is the length of their supply lines.

It's impossible to advance for many, many months and weeks.

You have to stop somewhere, you have to reach your target,

you have to wait for more resources coming.

Surrounded by a wasteland,

everything of potential value had been destroyed

or removed by the Soviet defenders.

The Wehrmacht were counting on a rapid collapse of the enemy

and getting a lot of access to resources on enemy territory,

which they don't get in Russia because of scorched-earth policies.

Stalingrad reveals the absolute limits of German logistics.

Paulus and his troops regroup for a final push.

If they can claim the last scraps of the city,

they can cross the Volga and extend Hitler's empire to the Urals.

But still the Soviets refuse to give way,

clinging to tiny enclaves along Stalingrad's riverbank.

The Soviet resistance holds out until November the 19th,

the day the war changes.

The Soviet counter-offensive took them by total surprise.

The Germans find themselves facing an offensive

by over a million men and women stretched across the front.

An enormous drive, tanks, artillery in huge numbers

concentrated at points of breakthrough.

And everybody on the German side

is completely mesmerized, paralyzed.

"What? This has never happened before. We've never had this happen before."

The Nazis have been duped on a grand scale.

Stalin's deputy commander-in-chief, General Zhukov,

had been plotting the massive counterattack

since mid-September.

The orders that he gives to Chuikov in Stalingrad

are fight, fight, fight, hang on at all cost.

Reinforce the city with just enough forces

to keep the Germans occupied

and to hold on to as much of the city as he can.

For two months, while Chuikov is hanging on by his fingernails,

Zhukov comes up with this concept, Operation Oran.

Zhukov had amassed One Million soldiers

without Paulus suspecting a thing.

And the Soviets played him for a sucker.

They transport all these troops in secret.

The deception operation,

the maskirovka operation that they pull off is amazing.

The German intelligence service never really realized that

the Soviets were capable of such an operation.

Sixth army intelligence officers did notice

suspicious troop movement on the flanks,

and they did report them to the army command,

but they were not believed.

Everything had to be done at night,

troops had to be hidden during the day,

and they don't just need to do this in one place,

they need to do it in two.

Zhukov realizes that the cream of the Nazi force

are concentrated up front fighting in the city,

leaving their flanks and rear guard poorly defended.

Most of the people doing the guarding in those areas,

those vulnerable areas, were not Germans,

they were affiliated armies like the Italians,

the Romanians, and the Hungarians.

The Romanians had only joined Hitler's forces

to reclaim the areas that the Soviet Union

had already taken from them.

They now find themselves hundreds of miles

further into Soviet territory.

They have no particular interest in being that far,

and they certainly don't want to be there in the depths of the Russian winter.

Zhukov's calculation proves devastatingly accurate,

as the axis allies collapse.

The Romanians just can't cope with this onslaught of Soviet troops.

The flanks of the seemingly invincible Sixth Army

find themselves overwhelmed by this surprise twin-pronged attack.

This pincer movement is remarkable on account of its scale

and its ambition,

but it's also remarkable on account of the fact

that it essentially copied German blitzkrieg tactics.

The Soviets are able to break through the demoralized,

overstretched Romanian forces in the open step,

and amazingly rapidly they link up the pincers.

After just four days of progress,

the Soviet pincers close west of Stalingrad, near Kalach.

The red army has ensnared 300,000 Nazis

and their axis allies.

They had encircled all the German troops in Stalingrad inside

and enclosed this noose around them,

and they were ecstatic.

During the entire operation, every soldier and every officer

knew what he was doing,

and when they achieved those tremendous results,

I mean, everybody was elated.

It must've been a hell of a shock to the Germans to realize

that this Slavic people that they'd always looked down on,

these Untermensch, were actually capable of launching

an operation of this type of sophistication.

Ahead of the secret counteroffensive,

the Red Army had undergone a huge rearmament program.

They can bring in some new airplanes,

they can bring in the first full tank army into combat in this counteroffensive,

and they out-blitzkrieg the Germans.

Not just the ground forces, but the air forces,

which in the meantime had been undergoing a complete reorganization.

It's an amazing rebirth.

Again women play a pivotal role.

They had women fighter pilots who were sent to Stalingrad.

These were women flying Yak fighters,

which was one of the most modern Soviet fighters of the day.

And of those women, one, Lilia Litvyak,

got two kills on her second day in combat

and went on to become the highest scoring female ace in the war.

The skies over Stalingrad are no longer dominated

by Goring's Luftwaffe.

General Paulus struggles to come to terms with the new reality.

General Paulus, with his Sixth Army,

now find themselves encircled by enemy infantry and armor.

They are within what the Germans called "a kessel" and they are vulnerable

and having to resist the tremendous pressure

of lack of supplies and encroaching Soviet forces.

General Paulus has to decide on his next move quickly.

Three-hundred thousand men in this kessel.

If you leave troops in exposed positions, you're gonna eventually lose all of them.

They've got two options now. They either fight their way out

or another relieving army has got to fight their way in.

Paulus and most of his subordinate commanders

correctly concluded that we'd better get out of here

and get out of here now.

But Paulus's urgent appeals to Berlin are rebuffed by The Fuhrer.

Hitler would not contemplate retreat.

You don't retreat before Slavs,

you don't retreat before the inferior Untermenschen,

you stay and you win.

If you can't win, you stay and die.

Hitler gave the order, "You stay in Stalingrad.

We will not give up Stalingrad."

And Paulus decided, "I will follow that order."

Facing annihilation,

the doggedly loyal Paulus refuses to disobey Hitler.

One suggests a brighter person might have said,

"Mein Fuhrer, this is the position."

But all Paulus ever seemed to do was to obey the instruction

that came from above.

He was perhaps too sensitive to be a leading soldier.

Paulus was a good staff officer, a good theorist on war,

but he was possibly not the right person, the right character

in this very difficult situation.

You need a strong character, you need people with their own will,

and Paulus was, in this regard, a bit weak.

By the end of November, it is clear that, without help,

the trapped Nazis are doomed.

Paulus watches as his divisions in Stalingrad

bleed themselves white, get weaker and weaker and weaker.

They're running out of everything, they've got to get help

from the outside or they aren't gonna survive.

Goring feeds Hitler's delusion by telling him that his Luftwaffe

can supply the army with food and ammunition.

This was a strong argument for Hitler.

So if Goring is promising that, we are going to do that,

and the Sixth Army should stay where it is and we will organize an airlift.

Not for the first time in this war,

Goring is inflating the capabilities of his air force.

Just to support the entire German army,

they needed 800 tons of food every day.

Could you imagine?

Hitler has this delusion that the Luftwaffe

has the resources to do that.

Using everything,

they fly about ten or 15 tons a day.

The fact is that they can't do it.

There's no way they can resupply an entire army by air.

The new Soviet air force is more than a match for the Luftwaffe.

The Russian air force conduct an air blockade,

which is just a brilliant operation

of shutting down the Luftwaffe attempts to transport food in

to the Sixth Army.

The airlift is an abject failure,

and by early December, it is obvious that the Sixth Army's only hope

is a ground based rescue.

Field Marshal von Manstein, who was Commander-in-Chief of that region,

tried to assemble some forces to relieve the Sixth Army

and to push the Soviets back.

Manstein optimistically calls his offensive operation,

"Winter Storm."

He launches it from the south, towards the kessel.

But Manstein's plan has one major flaw.

The great combat power that the Germans had

is within the pocket, not outside.

So Manstein has a tremendous shortage of forces,

and gets about halfway to the kessel. But he is forced to break off.

Resolute Soviet forces stopped Manstein's troops

forty-eight kilometers short of Stalingrad.

Inside the pocket, a senior officer urges Paulus to ignore Hitler

and punch through to Manstein's relief force.

Paulus had one commanding officer of one of his corps,

Walther von Seydlitz, and Walther von Seydlitz

always tried to persuade Paulus, "break out."

"Break out. It's on you, don't follow the orders from Hitler.

It's on you, just do what you want."

If Paulus stays put, his men are bound to suffer further.

The situation within the kessel for the Germans is unbelievably bad.

They are freezing to death.

They are being bombarded by artillery and air power.

And it's cold, so there's nothing to eat.

They go from regular meat, horse meat, no meat, and it's just a progression.

And if you don't eat, you can't fight.

And if you don't have fuel, you can't move your tanks or your trucks.

And if you can't move your tanks and your trucks,

you can't move your troops.

This is the problem for the soldiers in Stalingrad area.

Still The Fuhrer demands that Paulus stays and fights.

Hitler is still pursuing his delusional ideas

that the Sixth Army can hold fast

and create a fortress, and somehow live on thin air.

Nazi propaganda did its best to present events in a rose light,

that everything is all right, and yes, difficult,

but we'll do our best.

But Paulus knows sending his exhausted troops out

to confront a revitalized Soviet army will carry a terrible cost.

He did care for his men.

He didn't like losing them in the numbers they were losing.

And contemplating a breakout,

he calculated, was perhaps just too big a risk.

Once again Paulus chooses to follow Hitler's orders

and sit tight.

By Christmas, 1942 there was no relief, there was no hope.

As the new year dawns,

the Red Army offers the stubborn Nazis a way out.

They've already got the Sixth Army trapped and starving to death,

and why don't they surrender?

They should surrender. Can't they see they can't possibly win?

The Soviets offer surrender, the Germans reject it,

therefore the Soviets have to take more active measures.

When Soviet generals initiate Operation Ring,

a move to squeeze down the kessel,

they discover the Germans are a spent force.

The capability of the Germans to resist is virtually gone, and they are a mob.

Not much more than a mob.

They are daily being shelled and shot at,

casualties are mounting, enormous numbers of wounded.

People are cold. They're clinging to survival.

Realizing that they are expected to die in Stalingrad,

Paulus pleads with Hitler.

General Paulus, again and again, asks Hitler,

"Are we allowed to surrender Does it make any sense if we fight on?"

And Hitler again and again said, "Yes, you have to fight to the last bullet."

It was really a nightmare for them,

because they realized the only way we conduce… is dying

in this desert of snow, blood and tears.

The Red Army squeezes the remaining German defenders

into two small pockets that lose contact with each other.

Through January, Paulus is in a bad way.

We know he was suffering from dysentery.

There's a kind of sense that Paulus's spirit is broken.

He's become obviously desperate,

and he didn't always say to Hitler what he really wanted,

and that's tragic in a general.

On the night of January the 30th,

Hitler promotes Paulus,

but the honor carries an ominous coded message.

Hitler's last throw of the dice is to make Paulus a field marshal.

He's calculating that, you know, this great honor

that is only given to a few German soldiers

is actually gonna keep Paulus fighting for as long as possible.

A field marshal has never surrendered.

It's never happened in the history of Germany armed forces.

Hitler thinks that Paulus will either shoot himself

or somehow find a magical way out.

An officer comes to Paulus in the basement

of the Stalingrad department store

and says, "Here is this wire from Hitler."

Paulus looks at it and says, "I'm not going to kill myself,

I'm a Christian."

The next day,

field marshal Paulus, the ever-faithful yes-man,

finally disobeys his fuhrer.

Paulus decides that further resistance is useless,

and that he will surrender,

ironically, in the square of the fallen soldiers in Stalingrad.

Well, actually, the 31st of January was the birthday of Chuikov.

What a coincidence.

He captures Paulus on his birthday.

It's not quite the end, of course, because the northern pocket

is no longer in communication with the south.

It doesn't know about the surrender order, and it carries on fighting

for another couple of days until it, too, finally surrenders.

Over two-thirds of the trapped German army had lost their lives.

Those who survived the Soviet onslaught

succumbed to the cold, or starvation.

What was unique was the starving.

There was no other place on the eastern front

where German soldiers, in the thousands, in the tens of thousands,

starved to death.

91,000 German troops surrender to the Soviets in Stalingrad.

Back home, Goebbels spins the story

of a heroic Sixth Army fighting to the last drop of blood.

Very few would return to tell the truth.

Of that 91,000 who were still breathing,

only 5,000 ever return to Germany,

after long years of captivity in Russia.

It had been five months since the first bombs

dropped on Stalingrad,

and the slaughter had continued right through to the surrender.

The battle of Stalingrad is said to have been the bloodiest

of the whole of the second World War.

Average estimates,

Russian military losses exceeded one million people.

The total number of Axis forces lost, about 800,000.

Hitler's vanity campaign

cost him far more than lives and equipment.

It sends a signal to everyone fighting his tyranny.

Stalingrad was a clear symbol of victory for the Soviets,

and a clear symbol of defeat for the Germans.

Here you have a town, a symbol, a pocket,

a formal surrender, a proper battle,

which was lost by the Germans.

It's the very first time that anywhere in the world,

the Germans were defeated colossally.

The Germans are not invincible.

That's the take from it. And that is extraordinary.

It was not just defeat of the German army,

it was humiliation of the German army.

The Germans try to blame their defeat on the elements.

Most of the battle of Stalingrad happens before winter ever hits.

The winter factor's been greatly exaggerated as a way of

not admitting that the Russians were better than they were at something.

They claim that the superior Nazi forces

were let down by their allies.

The Germans explain their defeat

in part by blaming the Italians and Romanians

for not doing their part, which I consider to be a travesty.

The Germans said they're a bunch of cowards.

That's the way German generals perceive their allies,

as weak sisters who didn't have a stomach for a fight.

In truth, the Romanians and other axis allies

guarding the Sixth Army's flanks were not as well armed

as their German counterparts.

They had been warning the German high command

that they were vulnerable, that they needed reinforcements,

and all of those warnings were ignored.

Hitler believed that his generals could roll through Russia

as they had through Europe, that the Slavs, the Untermensch,

would offer little resistance.

Hitler had hoped that what he saw as the rotten Bolshevik Soviet regime

would crack as soon as he kicked in the door in Operation Barbarossa.

His perception of the Soviet Union

was that this giant of the Soviet Union is already nearly on its knees.

Stalingrad was a battle that need never have been fought,

an exercise in hubris.

It was arrogance that prompted the Germans

to do what they did in '42.

They set the objectives, then added Stalingrad to it,

almost cavalierly, in the middle of the operation.

That was clearly a bridge too far.

The German defeat does more than expose Hitler's vanity

to the world, it reveals a fiercely patriotic people

and a well-armed Soviet war machine.

Hitler had no understanding of the enormous resources

of the Soviet Union, of the enormous will of the Soviet people,

men and women, to defend the motherland.

Huge numbers of Soviet men and women gave their lives

in order to stall the German war machine.

And in large part this was the Germans' own fault.

The Germans were such barbaric occupiers,

that the Soviets felt they had nothing to lose.

The unprecedented Soviet victory at Stalingrad

forces the Germans onto the defensive

for the first time in the war.

It certainly changes the map of the war.

This is the farthest east the Wehrmacht ever gets.

From this point it's all gonna be retreat.

Not only is it the bloodiest battle,

it's probably the most significant battle of the second World War,

because this is the great turning point.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com