It's something in between. Both sides buried their dead - often in mass graves - and there was certainly a concerted effort to clean up the city after the battle.

However, many of the graves on the German side were makeshift and shallow - they simply didn't have time to bury their dead properly - and often were not found by the clean-up teams after the battle.

This is not extraordinary when compared to the Western Front in the First World War, where unexploded ordnance and sometimes bone fragments are still found to this day in the fields of France. In both France and Volgograd there are now procedures in place with regards to how to deal with these unearthed remains though - namely how to rebury them in proper memorials - so the number of remains discovered each year grow fewer and fewer.