Battle of Stalingrad
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The Battle of Stalingrad was fought between August 1942 and February 1943 on and around the Volga river in southern Russia, and it is usually taken as the turning point of the war on the eastern front. German forces of the sixth army entered the city in September 1942 and fought street by street for the ruins of the factories, while Soviet defenders held the river bank and the oil traffic beyond it. In November the Red Army struck the much weaker Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces on the flanks and encircled the sixth army inside the city. Hitler forbade a breakout and refused to let the trapped army retreat, while the Luftwaffe's promised airlift never delivered enough supplies. Starvation, cold and disease destroyed the trapped army; what remained surrendered in February 1943. Of roughly 300,000 German soldiers encircled, about 90,000 marched into captivity, and fewer than 6,000 ever returned. The defeat destroyed the offensive power of the Wehrmacht in the east, cost Germany its Romanian oil fields and was celebrated in the Soviet Union for the rest of the war. Soviet losses were comparably heavy, and the ruins of the city were left without a standing building.