Stalingrad

The city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd, earlier Tsarytsin) is associated with the most important defeat for Germany in the Second World War. If failure from the front in Russia (at Moscow) in 1941 was the first sign that the war in the East could not be won by Germany, then the Battle of Stalingrad opened the way to its final defeat.

The city of Stalingrad is on the Volga River, a key route to the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, where the oil fields of Baku lay; these fields were essential to the combat capacity of the Red Army. Although initially considered as a secondary objective, the capture of Stalingrad, an industrial center, was in reality the key to protecting the northern flank of the German ...