From what I have heard, historians dont feel as though the capture of Stalingrad was necessary to the Nazi war effort, that if Hitler had concentrated his troops elsewhere, they would have obtained their objective (which was the capture of some oil fields to the south). Hitler supposedly wanted the capture of this city because it bore the name of his arch enemy, Joseph Stalin, and it would have been a source of personal honor for him. Instead, the Nazis lost a terrible battle there and ended up surrendering an entire army. The Nazi general in charge at Stalingrad had requested permission to retreat from this engagement because he knew it was not winnable. Hitler refused, reinforcements could not be sent, the Nazis were surrounded, and eventually the general surrendered anyway. Of the thousands of Nazi troops taken prisoner and marched off to Siberia, essentially none of them ever returned home.
A terrible miscalculation by Hitler, costing thousands of lives, dooming the survivors to a miserable remaining life In Siberian prison camps.
