Neither Soviet nor German troops had any experience in urban warfare. Very unusual about it was the fact that the exchanges of fire happened at very short distances — at a distance of ten or sometimes five meters.

The Germans, who faced the Red Army resistance in the Battle of Stalingrad of 1942-1943, thought highly of the Soviet fighting abilities. Colonel Wilhelm Adam, former Adjutant of Friedrich Paulus, in his memoirs gave the following recollections of the German 6th army soldiers about the Soviet fighters:

After the city battles, the combat engineers deactivated mines and unexploded ordnance.

Their equipment included a steel protector (CH-42 model in the diorama), a helmet, and a mine detector.

The combat engineer from the museum exhibition is holding a high frequency mine detector VIM-203, model of 1941. It included a detection coil unit, a power supply unit, an exploring rod, a shoulder bag, and spare radio tubes. Sometimes, instead of using the exploring rod, the detection coil unit was fixed to the Mosin rifle, which was part of the Soviet soldiers’ obligatory armament. When the mine detector search coil unit was brought closer to a mined metal object, the sound tone of the device changed, and thereafter the detected mine was deactivated, if possible.