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Operation Blau to the Volga: Why Germany Lost Before the Fight Began
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Battle of Stalingrad was decided by a single order weeks before the street fighting started — Hitler's fatal split of Army Group South sealed the Sixth Army's fate. This episode follows Operation Blau, Chuikov's impossible defence, Vasily Zaitsev's sniper war, and the icons of the rubble from Pavlov's House to the Barrikady factory.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Stalingrad, most people assume the Germans lost because they were outfought. After Stalingrad, the real answer is harder to look at.
Stalingrad in late August of nineteen forty-two is not a city anymore in any functional sense. The Luftwaffe has seen to that.
Two names from inside the siege have passed into history, and both tell you something different about what this kind of war actually looks like. Vasily Zaitsev was a sniper.
Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky had been watching the map. And what they saw wasn't just Stalingrad.
The relief attempt came from the south. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm in December of forty-two, driving a column north toward the encirclement.
The formal surrender took place in the basement of the Univermag department store in central Stalingrad. Friedrich Paulus, now a Field Marshal, walked out into Soviet captivity on the second of February, nineteen forty-three.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.