The city was practically totally destroyed. Without infrastructure wouldn’t it have just been some pile of rocks on the Volga? Why did the axis not just set up shop a few miles down the river after destroying the city?
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Stalingrad commanded the Volga River.
In 1942, Hitler’s aim was to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains. Germany was already critically low on oil, so succeeding here was pretty make-or-break for the German war effort. If they went down into there without guarding their rear, Soviet troops could follow them down the Volga and trap hundreds of thousands of soldiers between their guns and the mountains.
Even bombed to rubble, Stalingrad remained a place where an army could control the flow of people and material up and down this river – kind of like Vicksburg single-handedly keeping the Mississippi closed to Union during the US Civil War. It was also a route for British supplies to reach the USSR, up through Persia.
This strategic importance never went away entirely, but it’s also true that its symbolic value became more and more important as time went on. No one has ever accused Hitler of being a rational military mind. And looking back, we *do* refer to Stalingrad as the turning point of the whole war in the east.
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