The date was 31 January, 1943. The place was the basement of the shell-shattered Univermag department store in the Soviet city of Stalingrad. And it wasn't the forlorn and exhausted faces of the Nazis that stuck in the minds of the soldiers from the Soviet Red Army, as they opened the underground warren in which Adolf Hitler's traumatized military commanders were hiding.
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"The filth and human excrement and who knows what else was piled up waist high," recalled Major Anatoly Zoldatov. "It stank beyond belief. There were two toilets and signs above them both read 'No Russians allowed'."
The legendary yet horrifically decisive battle of the same name had just ended in bitter and humiliating defeat for Hitler's 6th Army. It was to be only a matter of time before Nazi Germany capitulated.
Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Vinokur was the first to spot the decorated commander of the German troops lying in a corner. "He laid on the bed when I entered. He laid there in a coat with his cap on. He had two-week-old stubble and seemed to have lost all courage," he remembered. The commanding officer was Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus.
The graphic first-hand accounts of the Volga river battle which claimed the lives of 60,000 German troops and between half a million and a million Red Army soldiers are part of a collection of hitherto unseen interviews with Russian Stalingrad combatants which have been published for the first team.
The Stalingrad Protocols have been compiled by the German historian Jochen Hellbeck, who gained access to several thousand interviews with Second World War Red Army soldiers, held in archives at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
The accounts, which were originally intended as a record of the Soviet Union's "Great Patriotic War" are so candid and disturbingly graphic that the Kremlin only published a small portion of them after 1945, preferring to opt for more orthodox Stalinist propaganda. The "protocols" languished in Moscow's archives until 2008, when, acting on a tip-off, Mr Hellbeck was able to gain access to 10,000 pages of them.
The accounts suggest the invading German army's murderous and brutal occupation of the Soviet Union was one of the prime motives behind the Red Army's ferocious counter-offensive. A Soviet sniper called Vasily Zaytsev tells his interviewer: "One sees the young girls, the children who hang from trees in the park – this has a tremendous impact."