171 patients with malignant stenosis of the esophagus and cardia were subjected to curative or palliative surgical treatment. Specifically, there were 84 primary esophageal carcinomas, 5 cases of malignant esophageal stenosis caused by an extraesophageal malignant tumor (inter alia bronchial carcinoma), and 82 primary carcinomas of the cardia. The average age of the patients as a whole was 63.7 years, and the sex ratio (ma1e:female) was 4.0:l. In 18 esophageal carcinoma patients and 21 patients with carcinoma of the cardia curative resection was possible, but in 132 patients merely palliative surgery was performed, most frequently esophageal intubation and gastrostomy . The specific operations with a curative objective performed upon the esophageal carcinoma patients were abdominothoracic esophageal resection with upward displacement of the stomach (n = 16) or interposition of a colonic segment (n = 2), whereas in the patients with carcinoma of the cardia, proximal resection was performed in 13 cases, either subtotally or as a cardiofundectomy, and total gastrectomy in 8 cases. For the subsequent reconstruction of the passage the interposition of a jejunal segment was most frequently used. The clinical mortality for the curative resections was 33 % for the 18 esophageal carcinoma patients and 9.5 % for the 20 patients with carcinoma of the cardia. The long-term survival rates are depressing: of the patients who underwent curative resection 47.6% were still alive after one year, 28.6% after 2 years and 14.3% after 5 years. Of the patients treated only palliatively on account of an already advanced stage of the tumor, 91.5% died within the first year; only 4.9% of patients from this group were still alive after 2 years.