A German officer watching the city burn recorded that the street dogs threw themselves into the freezing Volga to escape: "Animals flee this hell... only men endure." The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest and deadliest urban battle in human history, a meat grinder that consumed up to 1.5 million Axis and over 1.1 million Soviet casualties, reduced 99 percent of a city of half a million to dust, and permanently broke the myth of German invincibility.

This episode traces how a secondary flank objective in Hitler's oil-driven Case Blue offensive metastasized into an ideological duel between two dictators over a city's name. It follows the apocalyptic Luftwaffe bombing that ironically buried German tank advantages under three stories of rubble, the women of the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment who lowered their guns at advancing Panzers, Chuiko ...