When the initial Wehrmacht assault on Stalingrad resulted in battalions of the German 6th Army quickly overrunning suburbs of the city, many Russian families were caught unaware and found themselves unable to flee in time.

From this information, more precise attacks could be made on troop concentrations and the Wehrmacht headquarters located in the Dar-Gora area was even shelled one night by Russian artillery, thanks to Filippov providing the exact firing coordinates.

His mother rushed out of their house to see her son being led barefoot by a German platoon through the falling snow, accompanied by two other prisoners, one of them a female.

The procession was marched to a grove of peashrub trees on Bryanskaya street, where Filippov and the two others were hanged in view of neighbors and his parents.

Early in the 1980s, researchers found that the woman hanged together with Filippov was 22-year-old Maria "Masha" Uskova, a single mother from the nearby urban-type settlement Katrichev.