On This Day: Battle of Stalingrad ends after bloodiest fight in history

FEBRUARY 2, 1943: The Battle of Stalingrad – the bloodiest fight in history – ended on this day in 1943 after a brutal five-month siege led to a decisive Soviet victory over the Nazis.

Only 6,000 of the 330,000 first attacking Germans survived the offensive on the Russian city that was named for the country’s communist dictator Joseph Stalin.

The symbolic slaughter also led to the deaths of 478,741 Soviet soldiers and 40,000 civilians who were forced to remain in Stalingrad while it was turned to rubble.

The Soviet victory represented the turning point of World War II for the Allies, with the Germans finally being forced back in the east and withdrawing troops in the west.

To the USSR it also embodied communism’s triumph over fascism and humiliated Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who had ordered his soldiers to fight to their deaths.

A British Pathé newsreel reporting on Stalingrad’s liberation provides a terrifying glimpse of its ruins, including hundreds of thousands of bodies imbedded in ice.

It also shows the twisted remains of some of the invaders’ 1,500 tanks and 6,000 artillery pieces destroyed by the Soviets, who lost three times as much weaponry.

The battle had begun on August 23, 1942 - two years to the day after the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed.

Stalingrad - Russian for “Stalin’s town” - was both strategically important as it lay on a vital trading river near oil fields - and enormously symbolic in a war of ideology.

Hitler, who was determined to smash communism, ordered General Friedrich Paulus, who commanded the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army, to capture it at all costs.

[On This Day: Battle of Stalingrad begins]

And Stalin, who was shamed by the Nazi’s June 1941 invasion and easy 600-mile advance of four million enemy troops, also made Stalingrad his top priority.

So, while German soldiers encircled the metropolis and 1,000 Luftwaffe planes dropped bombs on Stalingrad, the Red Army remained inside.

Russian forces transferred the city’s grain and cattle stocks to the western banks of the Volga while refusing to evacuate 850,000 regular city dwellers.

Thus, air-equipped Germans and Soviet troops fought from house to house as civilians starved amid temperatures as low as –30C and outside bombardment.

But the Germans, who failed to bring sufficient cold-weather clothing, became encircled themselves as winter set in.

Thousands froze to death as they faced ace Soviet snipers such as Vasily Zaytsev, who killed 225 Wehrmacht soldiers and 11 enemy sharpshooters over five weeks.

[On This Day: Germans surrender to Russia’s 6th Army at Stalingrad]

Paulus, who was promoted to Field Marshal after been told that no German so senior had ever been taken prisoner, eventually capitulated.

He hoped to save the lives of his remaining 107,800 soldiers, who were filmed surrendering en masse and being marched out of Stalingrad.

But unlike Paulus, who the Soviets allowed to resettle in communist East Germany after the war, only 6,000 of his men ever returned home.

Around half are believed have died while being marched to labour camps in Siberia, where 50,000 others were worked to death.

A further 500,000 reinforcement Axis forces – also counting Romanians, Italians, Hungarians and Croats – were either killed, wounded or went missing.

[On This Day: U.S troops occupy Okinawa after bloodiest battle of Pacific]

In total, there were a record two million casualties, including 1.2million Soviets.

The population of Stalingrad, which until 1925 was called Tsaritsyn and was again renamed Volgograd after Stalin’s death, fell to just 1,500 following the war.

It has since risen again to just over a million following extensive rebuilding efforts.