One month had passed since the German 6th Army had been surrounded by the Soviet counteroffensive of 19 November, but periodic spurts of fighting still erupted in the cold ruins of the Red October factory. A Russian war correspondent wrote that the Germans were like “hairy savages in stone age caves devouring horse flesh in smoke and gloom, amidst the ruins of a beautiful city they have destroyed.” One such cave was inside the think walls of Shop Number 3 (known as Hall 2 to the Germans), where bedraggled remnants of Pionier-Bataillon 170 and a few survivors of a battalion of the once-powerful Infanterie-Division 79 existed in a cratered landscape of shattered ruins. Surrounding their blasted refuge with wire and a few precious mines, the Germans sighted their last remaining weapons and waited for the inevitable.
