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Stalingrad, WWII: Turning point of Hitler’s Third Reich Essay

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It was nearly unimaginable to the world when Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered his German forces to the Soviet Union on February 2, 1943. The Battle of Stalingrad, a major Second World War battle began with the German’s offensive on July 17, 1942 and ended with the German surrender on February 2, 1943. It was on August 5, 1942 that Adolf Hitler ordered an attack on the city of Stalingrad. This battle went down as one of the bloodiest battles in history, taking large tolls on both sides and most importantly marking the turning point for Hitler in the Second World War. The “master race” had taken its first major blow, proving to the world that they were not invincible. And in fact, Germany would not rise again after this truly …show more content…

Referring to the Battle of Stalingrad, one soldier wrote, “But what is death in reality here? Here they croak, starve to death, freeze to death-it's nothing but a biological fact like eating and drinking. They drop like flies; nobody cares and nobody buries them,” (Schneider 344) making sense of the severe conditions and its effect on German soldiers in Stalingrad.
One may wonder why Stalingrad was so important to Hitler. Well, Stalingrad was the capital of the Soviet Union, the heart of their industry and their largest city. As an industrial city, Stalingrad contained numerous factories that provided tanks, guns and ammunition for the Soviet war effort. Without the war supplies and the oil fields in Caucasus, nothing would be supporting the Soviet forces. And more importantly, a World War Two database describes Stalingrad as a “city [that] bore the name of Hitler’s nemesis, Joseph Stalin, [which] would make the city’s capture an ideological and propaganda coup” (http://en.allexperts.com). As both Hitler and Stalin recognized, taking Stalingrad would prove essential to their country’s propaganda, boosting their nation’s morale and destroying the others. Stalingrad was named after Stalin and thus symbolic to both sides of the war. Basically, to the Germans, taking Stalingrad meant the crushing the Soviets; taking them out of the war once and for all.
First off, it is crucial to recognize the significance of this battle. The Battle of

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