Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

Stalingrad is a nonfiction military history book published in 1998 by renowned British historian and author Antony Beevor. The book tells the story of the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943) during the Second World War, exploring the events that led up to it and its legacy. Stalingrad garnered significant acclaim upon its release, receiving the 1999 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wolfson History Prize in the same year.

This study guide refers to the 2011 Penguin Books Reissue. Citations are for page numbers in this edition.

Content Warning: The source text contains detailed historical descriptions of extreme wartime violence and suffering, including combat, execution, war crimes, torture and cruelty, interrogation, physical and psychological trauma, starvation, mass loss of life, destruction, and sexual violence and coercion. The guide refers to these elements as necessary for analysis.

Summary

In the early morning of June 22, 2041, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, that directed three “Army Groups” toward the Baltic Sea, Moscow, and Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, had convinced himself that no German attack was forthcoming and so had not prepared defenses along the border.