For Rokossovsky, what annoyed him the most was not the shame on his back, but the seemingly endless number of reporters in front of him, from Germany, Italy, Romania, France, Britain and other places.

"General Quchel, with all due respect, if you had been willing to put all these journalists into your army earlier, you would have at least doubled your army. Rokossovsky took the trouble to point a poker face at countless shots, letting the flash crackle and flicker.

In order to deal with these reporters from afar, the day after the surrender, Qucheller had to leave his original headquarters, and transferred the headquarters of the entire army group to the headquarters at the time of Rokossovsky's surrender, and then the two of them were like pets, at the mercy of the people of the Imperial Propaganda Department.

Even the Germans did not know where to find a Soviet flag full of holes and burn marks, and asked Rokossovsky to perform the scene of handing over the flag and bowing over and over again.

"General Rokossovsky...... You know, the capture of Stalingrad would have a major impact on the foreign policy of Germany as a whole. Therefore, the domestic reporters and the top brass of the military Nan Mian seemed a little too excited. Qucheller smiled at the camera, and then took the shabby flag from Rokossovsky for the 10th time.

What the capture of Stalingrad meant was very clear to both the Soviet and German tops. As an important node of the German offensive in the south, the capture of Stalingrad was finally completed with the broken Volga defense line, and now Quchler seems to have nothing else to do except transfer some troops to strengthen the defense along the river.

After completing the frontal defense along the wide Volga River, the flanks and rear of the German heavy armored forces finally had a relatively safe environment for the time being, at least until Stalingrad was reoccupied by the Soviets, and these German troops only had to concentrate on dealing with the enemy in front of them.

Army Group G, heading north, would immediately receive reinforcements of about five divisions, which would undoubtedly be great news for Guderian, who was already exhausted. At least the purpose of his troops going north has been achieved, and the only thing left is to consume each other with Zhukov.

And the most important problem was that the Germans had solved the last hidden danger of Army Group M's southward movement, at least the strategic objective of General Manstein's seizure of the Baku oil fields, which the Germans had now more than half accomplished. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in the Baku region were encircled in a vast Soviet enclave and lost contact with Moscow, and how long these forces could hold out was to ask General Manstein about his tanks and artillery.

"Needless to say, you and I both know what the loss of Baku's oil fields meant to the Soviet Union, but you should also know that it is impossible for the Germans to occupy Baku intact. Rokossovsky moved his stiff shoulders, cherishing the rest time he had waited so hard.

The journalists and officials of the German propaganda department asked almost countless questions that tested Rokossovsky's pride, including his views on Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union. Anyway, the screws in the propaganda machine are intended to squeeze all the news out of Rokossovsky before he gets reused by the Führer.

As if to unify the tone, all the reporters turned a blind eye to the civilians who buried their bodies outside the underground headquarters, and they seemed to have little interest in the poor women and children anxiously waiting for the German water trucks with buckets.

The Germans were no longer enemies of the city, and after a simple disinfection, water tanker trucks drove into the ruined city, and under the watchful eye of Ukrainian soldiers with weapons on their backs, the locals finally drank "drinking water" that was slightly better than the river water.

"Don't grab it! line up!" a middle-aged man wearing a German flag armband wore a black Nizi coat, trying to maintain order at the scene. These people were originally elected by the Germans to maintain law and order in the occupied areas, and they were originally called "traitors" and "renegades" by the local residents. But now time has proven their choice, and they have become a rare "decent person" among the city's natives.

In addition to the local poor who were struggling to make ends meet, there were more than 50,000 prisoners who were enjoying their life in the camps in advance. The men were in German custody and were clearing the rubble. It is precisely because of the efforts of these people that some streets were quickly restored to traffic.

Another reason for them to clear the ruins is that there are countless deadly mines buried in the ruins, most of which are improvised by the infantry, and there is no way to identify them on the map. Therefore, the Germans brutally used prisoners to restore the city, and carried out dangerous "demining" work for them in disguise.

One by one, bodies that had long since been unrecognizable were carried out of the rubble in silence by civilians, many starving to death in the hours before the resistance ceased. Hideouts of mass suicide by Soviet soldiers abounded, and when the door was opened from the outside, a disgusting smell of spoilage gushed out.

Local civilians wearing masks or handkerchiefs walked into the rooms filled with corpses without saying a word, and dragged out the bodies that had committed suicide with guns or other weapons. The walls were littered with spurted red liquid, which dried up and sealed everything in that eternal moment.

From time to time there was a sound of crying, low and faint, at least in front of the German soldiers, and few people were blatantly crying. After all, after a day's work, there is food as a reward, and no one will be overwhelmed by the dead and their family's stomachs.

In some of the slightly neat streets, there were already naughty children laughing and running, and not far from where they were playing, there was a huge pit that was already half filled with corpses. For a few months, these children began to be surprised by the "thing" of corpses, they were not afraid of blood, nor were they afraid of gunfire, and even looked curiously at the passing German patrols, and looked at these victors from afar with a pair of bright eyes.

Older and more sensible children, who were experienced shoe-shiners, relied on the craft to bring home German chocolate and potato flour in the most difficult years than the Soviets provided relief food.

A city that was already dead began to come to life in the moment the battle ended. Although life seems so fragile and small here, it also proves to everyone that it is stubborn and tenacious. It was as if people had crawled back from the cracks of hell, and although it had become dilapidated, it was restored to the human world in an instant.

"A bag! yes, a bag of potato flour!" In the middle of the ruins, a German soldier with a gun on his back was making a deal with two elderly local residents, he held out his hand and gestured the number, and the Ukrainian soldiers next to him followed to do some vague translation work.

The two old civilians eventually pulled out the jewelry in their pockets, and the gold glittered and looked worth a lot of money. But in this place tempered by artillery fire, everything valuable is nothing more than food and life, and a priceless work of art is worth a few bags of moldy potato flour at most.

"These Germans didn't seem to be as terrible as they thought, they exchanged their things for valuable things, greeted old people passing by politely, took care of the children's business, and gave candy and chocolates to the shoes-shiners. A Soviet officer who was in charge of counting prisoners with the Germans lamented to his assistant that a few days earlier he had ordered desperate fire to wipe out all the enemies in gray-green uniforms in front of him.

Of course, not everything is so prosperous, and not everything is friendly and harmonious. In some dark corners, you can still hear the sound of distant gunfire from time to time. Complaints of looting and murder by the Germans were not uncommon, and it was not news that the Soviets had shot at German patrols. Hundreds of people die every day, and after all, this is still a devastated ruin, not a glittering metropolis.

Just as Rokossovsky and Küchler were once again standing in front of the camera, supplying ammunition to the German propaganda machine. Just a block away, a dozen Soviet soldiers who refused to lay down their arms ended up surrounded in a building.

The Germans did not politely invite them out to commend their courage and will to resist to the end, but found a sapper with a flamethrower on his back and sprayed a scorching flame of hundreds of degrees into the building through the window. The pressure was so great that flames erupted from all the windows around the building in an instant, accompanied by the heart-rending screams of the people inside.

Amid the cruel laughter of the German soldiers, everything returned to peace, but when the cleaners arrived, they found that there were 40 corpses of various kinds. It was clear that there were a lot of civilians inside, because a corpse was still holding a child in its arms - they were gathered together by the Soviet soldiers who rushed in, and the Soviet soldiers clearly wanted to resist...... As a result, no one expected that it was not the Germans who rushed in, but the flames.

The Germans recorded that the last resistance to Stalingrad occurred 1 month after Rokossovsky ordered the surrender.