Include a short description of the carnivores that lived during this era

The Course of the Battle

By 23 August, the German advance had reached the borders of Stalingrad and, with their planes began a relentless brutal bombardment, destroying the city. Pushing into the city, the Germans, along with their Axis comrades (Italians, Romanians and Hungarians) fought the Soviets through "rat warfare", fighting on the streets.

On 19 November 1942, the Soviet Red Army launched Operation Uranus, Zhukov’s counteroffensive, attacking in a pincer formation: "hugging the enemy". Within four days, the Red Army had encircled and trapped the German forces.

The Soviets moved in on the 250,000 Germans and their Axis comrades. Winter came, and temperatures fell to the minus forties. Starvation, frostbite, disease and suicide decimated the Germans. They had not prepared for the cold weather, and their equipment froze.

"December 26. We’ve eaten all the horses. I’d even eat cat: cat meat can be tasty. The squaddies(soldiers) look like corpses or zombies, searching for anything to eat. They don’t even try to duck from the Russian shells – they haven’t the strength to run or hide."

—Wilhelm Hoffman, Diary of German soldier

Reinforcements came but to no avail. Hermann Goering, the chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, promised Hitler that his planes could drop 500 tons of supplies each day into Stalingrad. But with Soviet anti-aircraft guns and poor weather against them, only a few made it through. The several German planes did manage to land within the city and were able to get a limited number of troops out to safety. The starving German soldiers had to eat rats and raw horse flesh. Frozen German corpses and dead horses were piled up and used as sandbags. As one German officer put it, Stalingrad had become a ‘mass grave of the Wehrmacht’.

Hitler remained in Berlin, away from front lines but still issuing orders. On Christmas Day 1942, with the temperature at –32 degrees celsius, Paulus received a message from Hitler stating:

"You should enter the New Year with the unshakeable confidence that I and the whole of the German Wehrmacht will do everything in our power to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad.’

"Unshakable confidence."

-Adolf Hitler

Map detailing the strategic setup of the Battle of Stalingrad

Footage from the Battle of Stalingrad