Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

Stalingrad deals with a significant episode in the conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during the Second World War (1939-1945). The wartime antagonism of these two major European powers was influenced by historical factors—in particular, the First World War and its aftermath.

Tsarist Russia and Imperial Germany had been direct combatants during the First World War (1914-1918)—when the Allied powers of Russia, France, Britain, the United States, Italy, and Japan fought against Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria, known as the Central Powers. The socialist revolution within Russia at this time led to the collapse of Tsarist Russia. Russia’s new Bolshevik government, desperate to withdraw from the unsuccessful and costly war, signed a secret bilateral agreement, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1917, which ended hostilities between Russia and Germany by ceding huge swathes of Russian land in Eastern Europe. This treaty was annulled in 1918 when the Allied powers defeated the Axis powers. This disputed territory formed part of Germany’s sense of grievance in the decades following the First World War, as Germany was obliged to accept punitive conditions under the Treaty of Versailles in 1918.

In 1922, the communist Soviet Union (USSR) was formed, covering a vast area of Eurasia. The largest country in the world by area, its western territories neighbored Weimar Germany, which increasingly viewed the USSR as a military and ideological threat. In the 1930s, Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, largely capitalizing on the post-war national sense of grievance and fear. The fascist Nazi ideology was inherently anti-communist, partly drawing on a supposed racial superiority of Germans over Slavic peoples. A key Nazi aim was to aggrandize Germany by creating Lebensraum (“living space”), pushing into neighboring territories, particularly Eastern Europe. Those territories ceded by defeated Imperial Germany in 1918 were of particular interest. Relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became increasingly tense as Hitler’s expansionism east became apparent, through the annexation of Austria and invasion of Czechoslovakia. In August 1939, however, the two powers surprised the world with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact that agreed to jointly invade Poland and divide its territory. The invasion of Poland by Germany triggered the declaration of war by Britain and France in September 1939 and is generally treated as the start of World War II. Hitler believed Germany’s eastern flank to be protected by the USSR, allowing him to focus resources on the conquest of territories in northwest Europe. The Soviet Union itself used these years to occupy Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania. Operation Barbarossa’s 1941 attack broke Germany’s agreement with Soviet Russia, and it drew the two powers into direct conflict.