"With the Sixth Army, I can storm the heavens themselves"

• Adolph Hitler, before the start of Fall Bleu.

The bronzed faces, the squinting, the steppe stretching out for miles, the lack of combat helmets at the ready, the cracked nature of their stripper-clip pouches.

Everything suggests, as the photo itself estimates, August 1942. Case Blue has only just begun, the thrill of the advance is back on! German media is in a frenzy, reminiscing of the earlier advances of 1941; with winter over, 'nothing is impossible for the German soldier!'

Ah...the hubris. We can see, even in this picture, when the Germans had yet to suffer a significant land defeat on any front (sorry fellows, nothing before El Alamein II was decisive), the telling technological gaps and the strain beginning to be exerted on the still-budding German industry. These men, sweaty-faced and squinty-eyed, would probably be more familiar a sight to a French fanttassin, 1812, than to any other soldier from any other time period. The German Infantry marched in columns stretching miles back as the isolated Panzerkorps continued to heedlessly smash ahead towards the Volga.

There...they were supposed to stop, then turn South to the rich oilfields, but a decisive and somewhat inexplicable shift in the psyche of Adolf Hitler, and therefore the OKH, occured. Stalingrad was now the objective. German infantry, used to fighting short - but incredibly sharp- mop up actions in the steppes where they knew their 'flying artillery' and excellently sited artillery was never far behind, descended into a hell that the German soldier was not prepared to face.

Two militaries entered the 'Stalingrad Academy of streetfighting' and the more adaptable one emerged victorious. Amazingly, for a nation willingly fighting on two fronts, and against foes who simply dazzled their production values, the Germans had not instituted the most basic of 'total war' principles. It would only be AFTER the defeat of the 6th army that a defiant Gobbels would stride out to roaring crowds and demand 'Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?' Only then, did Women begin to be seen in factories, only then did the German economy switch to a war footing. Too late; and good for us.

Literally marching to hell

Arguably the only destination worthy of such a broadly atrocious and barbaric military force - lest we forget this is the army that presided over the massacre at Babi Yar, and almost countless 'lesser' atrocities in places Belaya Tserkov', Zhytomyr, Tarnopol... a unit initially led by the most rabid Nazi/racist in the German officer corps, von Reichenau, who appealed to his soldiers thus:

Soldiers must accept without reservation the necessity for harsh but just expiation extracted from Jewish untermenschen. This punishment serves the further purpoose of suppressing uprisings, which experience has shown are always instigated by Jews.

When Sixth Army troops weren't actively participating in Einsatzgruppen massacres (in one case some enthusiastic souls reportedly using clubs to beat a group of children to death... another a barn full of children set alight... a lot of unbelievable shit), they were treating them as entertainment to fill their idle moments - the scene in Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate in which Germans in Stalingrad gather to watch a Jew being burned alive like it's a picnic is depressingly plausible after investigating this Army's rap-sheet.

Were they all beasts and murderers? No - a staff officer named (Lt Colonel) Helmuth Groscurth threatened the use of force against SS thugs when he discovered a barn full of Jewish children scheduled for execution - his principled objection to this was overruled, he was chided for "delaying the execution", and the barn burned to the ground the next day. Long before being sent to the Volga in '42, Groscurth confided in his brother:

One can't view the responsible people with anything but the deepest contempt. Because this is so, Germany will be destroyed; I no longer have the slightest doubt of that

So uh...

What further background & details can be known about this WW2 picture?

Was that what you had in mind?

Thanks guys very intriguing. I added your responses to a thread in r/history I posted on this same photo. So all the info will be accessible in one thread.