The Creepiest Battle of WW2 - Inside The Grain Elevator

In the scorching hell of Stalingrad, in August 1942, a colossal concrete and steel fortress loomed over the burning city. The grain elevator, a 35-meter titan of Soviet industry, was about to become a meat grinder.

As Hitler’s 6th Army stormed towards the Volga, 50 men – a motley crew of exhausted soldiers, sailors, and NKVD troops – barricaded themselves inside this behemoth.

Against these desperate defenders, the Wehrmacht hurled an entire division. Waves of German infantry crashed against the elevator’s walls. Bullets thudded into concrete, flames licked at steel, and the screams of the dying echoed through halls choked with smoke and burning grain.

The Germans brought everything: tanks, flamethrowers, 88-millimeter anti-aircraft guns firing point-blank. In a single day, 105-millimeter howitzers pumped 500 rounds into the structure, punching 44 two-foot wide holes through solid concrete. Yet still, the Soviets held.

Inside, hell reigned. Water ran out. Machine guns overheated. Men fought with cracked lips and bleeding hands, their lungs burning from smoke and pulverized concrete. They dropped their fallen comrades into grain silos, literally becoming part of the fortress they gave their lives defending.

Lieutenant Andrei Khazanov, one of the few survivors, later recalled the nightmarish reality within the grain elevator’s walls: (QUOTE) “We sensed and heard the enemy soldiers’ breath and footsteps, but we could not see them in the smoke. We fired at sounds.”

For six days, this handful of men held back the tide of Operation Case Blue. They bought time with their lives, each hour of resistance paid for in blood. But as ammunition dwindled, the Germans tightened their noose.

When all Soviet forces around the Grain Elevator finally retreated in defeat, the few men still alive inside the building decided to make a legendary last stand; while they drew breath, they would make the German 6th army pay.