The city of Volgograd, better for its previous
name Stalingrad, was founded in 1569
as a fortress. The city fell to the Cossack rebel
armies of Stenka Razin (1670) and
Pugachev (1774). It was renamed Stalingrad in
1925.
Before bolshevik's takeover it was known as Tsaritsyn.
One of the biggest and most
decisive battles of World War II was focused
here. The city was virtually destroyed.
The true numbers may never be known, but at least
hundred thousands Russians and
250.000 Germans died in the Battle for Stalingrad.
After the turning point at
Stalingrad, Soviet forces took the offensive
on the eastern front.
This heavily industrialized port, rail junction
and regional capital has been
built from scratch since 1945. Now today Volgograd
is the administrative and
economic center of the Lower Volga Region and
is also the major transport
center of this area. The Volga-Don Canal connects
the Volga and the Don rivers
and so makes Volgograd a port of five seas: the
Caspian, the Black, the Azov,
the Baltic and the White. The city was renamed
Volgograd in 1961.
The City of Stalin.
In those early months of 1942 Stalingrad was very
much on Hitler's mind,
although he had not yet been able to determine
exactly the place it would
occupy in his war policy. In Hitler's preoccupation
with Stalin as the supreme
dictator, he had mentioned several times the
importance of the Germans taking
the city of Stalin, partly for its propaganda
value as Stalin's namesake, partly
because of its importance as the industrial center
of the Don basin and the Volga.
But there was more to it than that. The symbolism
of Stalingrad was always
high in Hitler's mind, although to his generals
it was just a place on the map.
As the winter turned to spring, urged by his
various advisors to various courses
of action, Hitler's mind kept coming back
to Stalingrad.
Citizen soldiers.
After General Richthofen's 4th Airfleet had demolished
the city of Stalingrad,
political commissar Krushchev feared the Red
Army would collapse.
He organized five thousand members of the Red
October Metallurgical Works
to fight beside the troops of the 62nd Arm. Five
thousand rifles were rounded
up, and the men were split into brigades. The
whole operation was supervised
by the NKVD, which had been keeping a sharp eye
on the factory workers
for years. This was a Soviet factory, not a western
one, and most of the
workerswere single men who lived in barracks.
Their daily lives were not so
very different from those of the Russian soldier,
even before the war.
Most of them had been assigned by this factoryand
would stay there during
their workaday lives. The factory had it's "garden
city" about which the
gouverment had made much, but the wooden houses
and quiet little gardens
represented a minority of the workers, the privileged
few.
As for the orders, the NKVD prison in the center
of town was a grim
reminder of what happened to those who did not
follow instructions.
In this desperate hour the prisoners were turned
out to feight for their
freedom, under the eyes of the NKVD companies.
Stalingrad must die !
Hitler's preoccupation with Stalingrad had now
become intense. After the
4th Panzer Army reached the banks of the Volga
on August 23 he kept
pressing General Paulus to hurry up and capture
Stalingrad.
Goering showed up for the situation meetings
and announced that his
Luftwaffe's air reconnaissance to the north of
Stalingrad had not uncovered
any Soviet troop concentrations worth bothering
about. So what was the
delay all about ? Hitler could not understand.
The more he thought about Stalingrad, the more
determined he became
to make an example of the city, and that had
been carried out admirably.
Just as soon as Paulus captured Stalingrad the
female population was to be
deported to become slave laborers and whores
for the Germans, and the
male population was to be exterminated.
If
you want to see a good map of the city of Stalingrad click here.
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