On the 22nd November 1942, following the launch of the Soviet counteroffensive, Operation Uranus on the 19th November, General Friedrich Paulus sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler to inform him that the German 6th Army had been surrounded.
Rather than attacking the 6th Army directly in Stalingrad, the Red Army had launched two pincer movements, one from the north, the other from the east, to break through the lines of comparatively understrength and underequipped Romanian, Hungarian and Italian units that were protecting the Germans' flanks. By the 23rd November, the two pincers met just east of Kalach at Sovetsky, encircling the Germans and trapping over 250,000 troops within the city.
In the above photograph, Romanian soldiers, fighting to support the Wehrmacht, are pictured near Stalingrad in 1942.
The original image can be found here.
Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-218-0501-27 / Lechner / CC-BY-SA
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