Hitler ordered to design a Stalingrad Shield.

There was a Crimean Shield, a Narvik Shield, a Cholm Shield, so why not a shield for the
Stalingrad soldier ? Paulus agreed but others were against the idea.  Chief of Staff Schmidt
said that Stalingrad wasn't captured yet. The decorations had to wait. 

Eigener had been in the war from the very beginning, in Poland, France, Russia and now 
Stalingrad. He was to be met everywhere, in tanks and trucks and in the mud with the in-
fantry. He loved life and all living creatures, and therefore he hated war. Friends said of
him that he could not laugh; this was not quite true; they meant that they had never seen 
him laugh.

Eigener was interested in much that other men pass by without a glance; ruins, which others might ignore, appealed to his artist's eye. He examined where most were merely
bored; gun fire and clouds, sun and mud, the clear nights, the Volga mist. He thought of no 
man as his enemy, and so dearly did he love this land that he hoped one day to return to Russia and to live in a house in the hills beside the Don.

In the centre of the shield Ernst Eigener drew a silo, amidst the ruins of the city beside the
Volga. Turned towards it was the face of a dead soldier. Around the soldier's helmet was a
crown of barbed wire and right across the design, in bold letters, the single word 'Stalingrad'.
This design was turned down by Hitler's headquarters.'Too demoralising', said the comment 
on the margin of the drawing. On November 20th, 1942, a day filled with sunshine,
Eigener fell in battle. He was thirty-seven years old. He fell where he had hoped one day to
build himself a house, on the Don High Road, near Kalatch.