Germany’s drive to Moscow had staggered and come to a frozen, weary halt on the outskirts of the city. The Wehrmacht’s Third and Fourth Tank Groups had penetrated as far as Istra, fewer than 25km (15 miles) north of Moscow, while the Second Panzer Army and the Fourth Army were further away on the south and west. Throughout the first week of December the Germans made repeated efforts to regain the momentum and take Moscow. But their exhaustion and losses, their overstretched supply lines, the seemingly limitless Soviet manpower resources, and above all the vicious, numbing cold – which froze solid exposed flesh, turned oil to sticky sludge, and made metal parts as brittle as icicles – defeated every attempt. With the German units ordered to hold their positions at all costs, the Soviets now went on the offensive, led brilliantly by Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, the man who would, in three and a half years, drive his armies into the Germans’ own capital, Berlin.

Only a year later, the Germans suffered their worst defeat yet, at Stalingrad. After capturing most of the totally destroyed city in a series of campaigns in the autumn of 1942, they were cut off and finally forced in January 1943 to surrender, against Hitler’s explicit orders. They had endured three months of exceptionally brutal street fighting. Of an original force of over 285,000 men, only 91,000 exhausted, hungry, and frozen men were left to surrender.

The German defeat at Stalingrad was a turning point of huge importance in the war. In practical terms, of course, it meant that the Soviets retained their access to the oil and food of southern Russia and the Caucasus. It also marked an end to the Germans’ drive across Eastern Europe and the beginning of their long retreat back to Germany. But possibly even more important was the symbolic significance of the battle, for both Germany and the Soviet Union. For the Soviet people, it was a huge morale-booster at a time when Leningrad was still suffering under its two-and-a-half year siege. The American journalist Alexander Werth, who spent some of the war years in the Soviet Union, attended a victory party in Stalingrad held shortly after the Germans’ surrender.

‘Here was a big spread, and with plenty of vodka, and my neighbour was a red-nosed colonel who had already had a good number of drinks. “We’ve done them in,” he cried, “half a million of them! Here, come on, drink to the heroes of Stalingrad – Do dna, bottoms up!” … He beat his chest. “Look,” he cried, pointing to his Red Star, “yesterday I received this from our great government! Zhukov – I worship Zhukov. He planned the whole thing, he and our Great Stalin. Halkin-Gol, where we routed the Japs that was just a rehearsal. But Stalingrad, that was the real stuff! Hitler’s best divisions were destroyed there. And who destroyed them? We Russian people did it!’”

For the Germans, obviously, the battle had the opposite effect. German historian Walter Goerlitz called Stalingrad ‘a second Jena and … certainly the greatest defeat that a German Army had ever undergone’.

German Forces Lost at Stalingrad

There may have been 294,000 men trapped at Stalingrad, including Hiwis (Soviet auxiliaries working with the Germans) and Romanians. Of only 91,000 men (including 22 generals) taken prisoner by the Soviets, fewer than 5,000 survived the war and Soviet captivity. The last Germans taken prisoner at Stalingrad were not released until 1955. Including casualties in Allied units and the rescue attempts, Axis forces lost upward of half a million men. The Stalingrad Campaign may have cost the Soviets 1.1 million casualties, more than 485,000 dead.

The effect of the Battle of Stalingrad on the German war effort has been hotly debated. It is frequently seen as the turning point in the European theater of war, the decisive defeat from which the Wehrmacht could never recover, but militarily Stalingrad was not irredeemable. The German front lines had been largely recreated in the time the remnants of the Sixth Army surrendered. Stalingrad was more important for its psychological than its military value. If any single battle denied Germany victory, it was Kursk, still six months and several German successes away.

The Nazi state proclaimed four days of official national mourning, with all theatres, cinemas and cabarets closed. It was an appropriate response: it was in fact the beginning of the painful death of the Third Reich. For the next 26 months the Germans would be fighting an entirely defensive war, ever closer to home. Even future German offensives -like Kharkov in 1943 and the Ardennes in 1944 and 1945 – would be essentially defensive manoeuvres.