Views of Kharkiv, Ukraine city center. The buildings appear largely intact and the leaves are on the trees, indicating that it is summer, probably 1942. German soldiers travel the streets in vehicle and on foot and bicycle. View of a statue of Taras Shevchenko, which has been left standing. Nice street scenes. A German soldier walks past with a young local woman. 01:45:51 Bridge over a river, with German troops and vehicles heading in one direction and a couple of Russian peasant women heading the other. Troops in the field, which appears to be the southern steppe. German vehicles travel over a deeply rutted dirt/mud road. Tanks and other vehicles cross bridges. 01:48:40 Shot of a partially-derailed flat-bed train. More tanks and soldiers on foot move across the steppe. Soldiers operate communications equipment. German vehicle travel down a dusty road. Quick shot of a horse-drawn cart in a field by the side of the road. A Russian man stands beside the cart with his hands raised. 01:51:16 Nice CUs of soldiers' faces as they cross a river in a motorized raft. 01:52:34 CUs of Central Asian families out on the steppe. They are perhaps Tatars, Mongols, or Kalmyk. Their house appears to be made of clay. Women carry water in buckets on yokes, one cooks on an outdoor fire. A German soldier shows four men how to use a cigarette roller. Cut to a burning truck, and then to more soldiers marching across the steppe, escorting tanks. They move through a small village with a statue of Lenin. Smoke billows on the horizon. A soldier digs a foxhole. LS of soldiers moving across a field. Officers and other soldiers stand beside a tank. A group of Soviet civilians moves past the camera. Burning tanks and corpses. 01:57:12 German soldiers in an encampment. Quick shot of a group of them conferring. Shot of buildings rapidly consumed by flames and German soldiers marching Soviet POWs down a road. More scenes of another burning village. 01:56:31 Officers and other soldiers stand beside a tank. A group of Soviet civilians moves past the camera. Burning tanks and corpses. German soldiers in an encampment. Quick shot of a group of them conferring. Shot of building rapidly consumed by flames and German soldiers marching Soviet POWs down a road. Shots of another burning village. 01:58:39 German soldiers stand at attention in a newly-dug German military cemetery. A road sign reads"Nach Stalingrad 9k", indicating that the troops are approaching Stalingrad, which means that ithe date is likely June or July 1942. The soldiers are now moving into areas with more modern, industrial-looking buildings, fortified with barbed wire. German soldiers, some of them wounded, in a trench. Soldiers carry a wounded or dead comrade; CU of a fluttering flag with a medical cross symbol, planted in the ground. Several takes of a soldier running past barbed wire and down toward the trench. More shots of a cemetery, including a grave that indicates that the soldier died in September 1942. A plane crashes into the ground. The final shots of this footage appear to be in the actual city of Stalingrad following air raids by the Luftwaffe (much of the city has been reduced to rubble). Two German soldiers walk through spectacularly destroyed buildings. 02:02:25 Soviet civilians huddle around a makeshift fire. German soldiers fire a cannon on a large building (perhaps apartments, perhaps a factory), and then German soldiers charge forward.
German advance into USSR; fighting at Stalingrad (?)