Autumn 1942. A city on the Volga becomes a pile of bricks with people inside it. The Germans reach the river and discover that taking a factory district metre by metre, with a sniper in every shattered kitchen, is not the war they trained for. Soviet commanders tell their men to fight so close that German aircraft cannot bomb them without hitting their own.
Why then
Hitler's 1942 offensive is aimed at the oil of the Caucasus; Stalingrad was meant to guard its flank. Because the city bears Stalin's name, neither dictator will let it go, and a flank becomes the centre.
What they wanted
Paulus, commanding the German Sixth Army, is ordered to take the city and then to hold it. Stalin refuses to let the name fall. Zhukov and Vasilevsky prepare a counter-stroke against the weak Romanian armies on the flanks.
What changed
In November the Red Army closes a ring around a quarter of a million men, and Hitler forbids a breakout. When the pocket surrenders in early February 1943, 91,000 Germans go into captivity; about 5,000 come home. Germany never again holds the initiative in the east.
Still argued
Was this the turning point, or Moscow the winter before, or Kursk the summer after? German generals' memoirs blamed Hitler alone; historians since have given the Soviet commanders more of the credit.