July 20 plot

Sunday, July 20 was the anniversary of the von Stauffenberg bomb plot on the life of Adolf Hitler.

To mark the occasion and to honour the men who hatched the plot and were subsequently murdered, recruits to the Bundeswehr received their military rank outside the German Parliament buildings in Berlin last Sunday.

The ceremony was attended by members of the German Government, including the Chancellor and the Defence Minister.

The nucleus of the bomb plot of July 20, 1944 was hatched in the ruins of Stalingrad.

Some post-Soviet Russians have stated that Chuikov spent over one million soldiers lives to hold the city, but that claim is almost certainly exaggerated.

The Germans lost about 350,000 men, the Italians, Hungarians and Romanians about 100,000 men apiece.

The Red Army also must have lost at least 500,000 men in Stalingrad and the surrounding areas, which were adjunct to the battle.

But the most horrendous toll must have been on the innocent civilians, who formerly lived in the city.

Stalingrad was estimated to have had 850,000 residents in 1940. It isn't known how many of them may have escaped the carnage and vanished into the interior of Russia.

After 1945, a census showed only 1,500 of these people remained in the pile of rubble that had once been Stalingrad.