It was the dead of winter. The Battle of Stalingrad was in full swing. Several corpses were in the medical tent at a Soviet camp about two miles outside the city. Three hours later, they were not there. Soon, German scouting parties were seen roaming the streets, covered in blood and scratch marks. Then, entire German camps were found with half-eaten corpses littering the snow-covered ground. Subsequent scouting parties to the same areas found no corpses at all. Soon Soviet camps were overrun, and by the twentieth of December, Stalingrad was a dead zone, although no one knew it. Then German bases in the Soviet Union began disappearing. Whole companies, whole battalions. When 1943 came, the dead numbered well over 250,000. Still, the war continued. It only ended, at least unofficially, when