One of the symbols of the Battle of Stalingrad is the building at 47 Chuykov Street. Many tourists still confuse it with the Pavlov House, but any resident of Volgograd will easily say that this is the Gerhardt Mill. It all started with the organization of a small business: in June 1899, the newspaper "Tsaritsynsky Vestnik" reported that a steam mill was being built in the "Balkans" (now Lenin Square in Volgograd). It was a five-story building with brick walls and wooden floors, and by August 1900, the mill had produced its first products. The business was off to a start!

However, a few years later, a serious fire occurred, destroying almost the entire milling complex. To prevent a recurrence, Gerhardt took a thorough approach to the repairs: all floors and even the stairs were made of reinforced concrete, and the walls were reinforced with 5 cm thick metal rods. This was necessary to protect the building from vibrations caused by the milling machines. Such structures were typical for the Russian Empire, but for Tsaritsyn, this level of strength was new. Probably, merchant Gerhardt could not have imagined that these reinforcements would one day save the building from bombings.

During the reconstruction of the mill, oil pressing, fish smoking, and bakery workshops were added, as well as warehouses for finished products. Entrepreneurs spared no expense on advanced technologies: they acquired a generator for autonomous power supply, built a boiler house, and installed internal mechanical conveyors.

Before the October Revolution, the Gerhardt Mill was a leading enterprise in Tsaritsyn, with an annual turnover of almost 1 million rubles, which was a huge sum at that time. The new history of the mill began on September 14, 1942, when the first high-explosive bomb hit the building, and for the first time in many years, production came to a complete halt.