The Lighthouse of Stalingrad

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To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 are quite rightly sacrosanct. The battle for the city of Stalingrad between September 1942 to the beginning of February 1943 is a pivotal landmark of this sacrifice. It was the most decisive of the Second World War with over two million combatants killed, wounded or captured. It was also the bloodiest in history. July 2022 will mark the eightieth anniversary of the start of the campaign in Southern Russia ('Case Blue') that Adolf Hitler predicted would knock the Soviets out of the war. The culmination of this campaign would end in the showpiece city's ruins that stretched along the mighty Volga river as German and Soviet armies battled for its occupancy in brutal house-to-house fighting which lasted five months. Within this deadly struggle Soviet war correspondents such as Vasily Grossman lauded the fight for a key strategic building in the heart of the city, 'Pavlov's House', situated right on the frontline, codenamed: 'The Lighthouse'. Standing a few hundred metres from the river the legend grew of a small garrison of Russia guardsmen holding out against overwhelming odds right up until the battle had been won. In this riveting narrative, unearthing new German and Russian testimonies from those who fought there, The Lighthouse of Stalingrad sheds new light on this iconic conflict that established Soviet dominance in the East and thus guaranteed the Third Reich's defeat in the ruins of Berlin two years later.