How the Red Army Turned Stalingrad Into a Trap for 300,000 Germans

By November 1942, the German Sixth Army held nine-tenths of Stalingrad. The Soviet defenders were pinned against the Volga, in places with less than 300 metres of ground behind them. Ten weeks later, it was the Germans who were trapped: 300,000 men, surrounded on the frozen steppe. This is how it was done. Stalingrad was a 30 km ribbon of a city with a kilometre-wide river behind it and no bridges. The German army was built for open ground, and it bombed the city into rubble it couldn’t fight through. While the Soviets fed the city just enough men to survive, they gathered a million more in secret, and hit the weakest part of the German line. 0:00 90% of the city, then trapped 0:23 The ground: a city on a river 1:45 Why bombing it backfired 3:24 Factories, the Kurgan and Pavlov’s House 5:55 The weak point in the German line 6:56 Operation Uranus 8:48 The trap closes 9:33 The rule in one line Sources Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (1998) David Glantz & Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed (1995) and Endgame at Stalingrad (2014) Vasily Chuikov, The Beginning of the Road (1959) Army sizes and losses are estimates; sources vary. Positions of units on the map are a reconstruction and partly simplified for clarity.