Although General Paulus held, for a time, nine-tenths of the city, the Axis forces were powerless against the extraordinary moral strength of the Soviets and their tactics of encirclement. The latter is perhaps inspired by that used in the 13th century by the Russo-Vareg prince Alexander Nevsky, whose exploit against the Teutonic knights, brought to the screen by Sergei Eisenstein in 1938, had been, on order of Stalin and for the sake of anti-Germanic propaganda, widely disseminated in the USSR after the rupture of the German-Soviet Pact.
The battle of Stalingrad is a major event of the 2nd World War, because it marks the turning point of the war:for the Germans, until then almost undefeated (except in North Africa), it is the beginning of the end. /P>
This glimmer of hope at the height of the war had a profound effect on the populations of Europe and contributed to Soviet prestige in the aftermath of the war. At the Liberation, for most French people, the Soviet counter-attack that followed the victory at Stalingrad contributed as much to European Liberation as the Anglo-American landing in Normandy. Today, the memory of Stalingrad fades before that of the landing due to the collapse of the USSR and the pejorative connotation of the name "Stalin". Nevertheless, the numerous "Stalingrad avenues" as well as the homonymous Paris metro station are proof of the psychological impact of this battle, and not the mark of an attachment to Stalinist ideology.