Stalin often said that they found 146,000 unburied German corpses lying on the steppe and inside the city following the battle. Thus the assumption has been that that is the number of German deaths that occurred after the encirclement, because prior to the encirclement the Germans were burying their dead. However you have to wonder who was doing the counting and how careful they were being! I'm thinking the error bars around that number are pretty big. I find it hard to believe that the Germans suffered 2000 combat deaths on October 14th inside the tractor factory. But it's hard to find any eyewitness accounts of people who were fighting in the tractor factory that day, so, maybe they did all die! Adelbert Holl's book and Death of the Leaping Horseman describe the fighting mostly around the outside. Does anyone know of any detailed descriptions of what happened inside?
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