The streets of the city are dead. There is not a single green branch on the trees: everything has perished in the fires. Wooden houses have turned into ashes with chimneys sticking out of them. The many stone houses are burnt out, their doors and windows missing and roofs caved in. Now and then a building that is still standing collapses. People are running about in the ruins, pulling out bundles, samovars and crockery, and carrying everything to the landing-stage. [1]

On one of those days some Colonel reported in my headquarters. I ordered to bring him in. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht has directed me to the 6th Army as the military commandant of Stalingrad, he said. After reporting to the commander of the Army I would like to assume my duties as soon as possible.

I barely could refrain from bursting in laughter: You will have to wait a little. Our divisions are fighting yet in the outskirts of the city.

Well, it cannot take much time, can it?

Try to understand... Taking of one single house can take days here. Our tanks, indeed, made a thrust to Volga on 23 September, but it does not mean that we have taken the city. After fourteen days of fights we are still in the outskirts. In the meantime you may report to the Army chief of staff, General Schmidt. He will explain even better than I, what is going on here. [2]

You know very well that our divisions have melted to the size of regiments. But it is not the only reason. The resistance of the Red Armists in the past days stiffened so much that we did not expect it. Today no soldier or officer speaks with contempt about the "Iwan" as it used to be not so long ago. The soldiers of the Red Army every day master more and more hand-to-hand fights, street fights, camouflage... Our artillery and Luftwaffe literally plough through the terrain before each attack, and yet, when our infantry comes out in open, it gets under hell of a fire. If by day we gain a success in some sectors, by night Russians counter-attack and push us back, often as far as to the initial positions. (...)

Also the Russian command has become better thought. We have got an impression that they want to hold their positions on the west bank of the Volga at any price. The strip they occupy in some places is barely 100 to 200 metres wide. According to the prisoners, even the commanding post of their 62nd Army is in a dug-out on the steep west bank slopes. Reportedly, since mid-September a General Tschuikow is in charge of the Army. Every now and then he manages to bring fresh divisions in across the Volga. His combat strength grows, ours is dropping. Those five engineers battalions, that were airlifted here, sustained such casualties in the attacks on the northern part of the city that we had to pull them out. [2]

The number of divisions and brigades which made up the 62nd Army does not give an accurate and full picture of its numerical strength. For example, on the morning of September 14, one armoured brigade had only one tank; two other armoured brigades had no tanks at all and were soon moved across to the left bank to be re-formed. The composite regiment of Glazkov's division on the evening of September 14 had about a hundred infantry, that is, less than a normal company; the total number of men in the next division to his was not more than 1,500, and the number of infantry in the division was not more than a normal battalion. The motorized infantry brigade had 666 men, including no more than 200 infantrymen; the Guards Division of Colonel Dubyanski on the left flank had no more than 250 infantrymen. Only one division, that of Colonel Sarayev, and two infantry brigades, were more or less up to strength.

The 62nd Army had no integrated communications with neighbours to left and right. Both our flanks were anchored at the Volga. While the Germans were able to fly up to three thousand sorties a day, our air force could not retaliate with even a tenth of that number. [1]

Paulus could not repeat an attack on the scale of the one on October 14. To do that he would have had to have a lengthy breathing-space of ten to fifteen days in order to bring up large quantities of shells, bombs and tanks. We knew, however, that in the region of Gumrak and Voroponovo there were two enemy reserve divisions which could be brought into action. We reckoned that it would take between three and five days for these divisions also to spend themselves, and Paulus would have to relax his pressure. We would then be able to pull ourselves together, regroup our forces and consolidate our positions. But how were we going to survive those three to five days, when we had such small forces at our disposal? The 37th, 308th and 193rd Divisions existed in reality only as numbers - they had only a few hundred infantrymen left between them. After holding off the enemy's most powerful attack we were so weak that we doubted whether we would be able to beat off attacks by fresh enemy reserves, but everyone, as before, was prepared to fight to the last man and the last round. Our fighting spirit was higher than ever. If anyone had offered us for some reason or other to leave the city, all of us, soldiers, officers, generals, would have treated the order as a fake or as a betrayal and would not have crossed the Volga. [1]

one could sense that the enemy had exhausted his offensive possibilities. The flanks of his main group between the two rivers and Stalingrad were poorly protected, and he did not have enough reserves to organise adequate defences in the occupied area. His communications were vulnerable over a vast territory. [3]

The plan of the offensive involved the armies of three fronts. The Stalingrad Front was to strike with its left flank from the neighbourhood of the Sarpa lakes. The Don Front was to pin down as many enemy troops as possible in the Volga-Don country and at the same time strike on its right flank in close co-operation with its neighbour on the right, the newly organised Southwestern Front, which was to deal the main blow from the bridgeheads on the southern bank of the Don. The idea thus was to deal two powerful blows at the flanks of the enemy's Stalingrad group and surround it.

The General Staff and the GHQ must be given the credit for their excellent timing. We were in a position to create a superiority in manpower and materiel on the main lines of attack. The essential thing was to prevent the enemy from organising the defence and withdrawing troops from the Volga-Don area for building up reserves.

We all realised that there was no time to waste. The General Staff realised this, too, and preparations for the operation went ahead swiftly. (...)

On November 3, I was invited with a group of staff officers to attend a conference in the zone of the 21st Army, now under the Southwestern Front. The meeting, presided over by Zhukov, was attended by all army commanders and the commanders of the divisions assigned to the main effort. Special attention was given to co-ordination between neighbours at Front boundaries.

Later we heard that a similar meeting was held on the Stalingrad Front as well. [3]

the first was that the Russians were increasingly becoming war experienced soldiers, and the second that their factories beyond the Volga and the Urals were increasingly approaching full production. [4]

The nineteenth of November will live in my memory as a day of black disaster. At the break of dawn on this gloomy, foggy day in late autumn, during which lashing snowstorms were soon to appear, there began, simultaneously with the onset of an extraordinarily hard eastern winter, the catastrophe on the most rashly advanced sector of our German front in the east that had been feared and anxiously anticipated by many. With devastating force, the Russian offensive first struck the neighbouring Roumanian formations on the left flank of the army of Stalingrad. This took place in the big bend of the Don south of Kremenskaya. [5]

Stunned, we stared at our situation maps, on which menacing thick red lines of encirclement and arrows showed the enemy attacks, penetrations and directions of advance. We had never imagined a catastrophe of such proportions to be possible!

The abstract map pictures soon gained life and colour from the reports and stories of many men on the run from the north and west (...) bringing with them tales of disaster. They came from Kalach, where on 21 November the sudden materialisation of Soviet tanks had created such a panic in the peaceful quiet of the rear echelons that even the strategically important bridge over the Don had fallen into enemy hands. [5]

On all the sides the Russians had pressed forward to the edge of the Stalingrad suburbs. The iron ring of destruction tightened ever closer around the place where the horrible fate of the doomed army was drawing to a close. The stage set of its downfall was eerie and ghostly. It was the gigantic pile of ruins and debris of Stalingrad that stretched for more than twenty kilometres along the high right bank of the Volga. A desolate city that had bled and died from a thousand wounds. (...)

Over the entire ruins of Stalingrad fell an almost unceasing barrage of artillery and mortar fire. This, together with the repeated air attacks, continued to cause new casualties among the human masses of the dying army which had flooded together in the city centre and were experiencing hell on earth during the last days of January.

The army of sick and wounded rapidly assumed horrifying dimensions. [5]

every hour harvested new victims. Nobody counted them. I had not received any detailed casualties reports for days then. They only contained a general information - the 76th Infantry Division had heavy casualties on 27 January, the 44th Infantry Division completely destroyed, 371st, 305th and 376th Infantry Divisions lost, the 3rd Infantry Division (Motorized) only had weak scattered combat groups, and the communication with the 29th Infantry Division (Motorized) was lost. How many soldiers were still alive there? How many able men did we have? How many sick and wounded were there in the cauldron? The doctors I met on those days were speaking about 40 to 50 thousand. [2]

Soviet and German soldiers, who used to shoot one another just several hours earlier, now standing calmly together in the square, their arms at hand or flung over the shoulder. But what a shocking difference between them! German soldiers ragged, in worn-out greatcoats over their fatigued uniforms, thin, deadly exhausted, unshaven and with sunken cheeks. And Soviet soldiers - well-fed, cheerful and wearing excellent winter clothes. [2]

The Stalingrad defeat came as a deep shock to both the German nation and their army. Never before in all of Germany's history had there been so fearful an end of so large a force. [11]