The Stalingrad Cauldron

The encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in mid-November 1942 and its final collapse in February 1943 was a signature defeat for Hitler, as more than 100,000 of his soldiers were marched off into captivity. Frank Ellis tackles this oft-told tale from the unique perspective of the German officers and men trapped inside the Red Army's ever-closing ring of forces. This approach makes palpable the growing desperation of an army that began its campaign confident of victory but that long before the end could see how hopeless their situation had become. Highlighting these pages are three previously unpublished German army division accounts, translated here for the first time by Ellis. Each of these translations follows the combat experiences of a specific division—the 76th Infantry, the 94th Infantry, and the 16th Panzer—and take readers into the cauldron (or Kessel) that was Stalingrad. Together they provide a ground-level view of the horrific fighting and yield insights into