Germany's Operation Citadel aimed to pinch off a Soviet bulge around Kursk. On the southern side, SS panzer divisions had pushed toward the rail junction at Prokhorovka. The Soviet counterattack of about 600 tanks lost heavily, perhaps 300 or more tanks destroyed or damaged, while German losses were far smaller. But the German advance stalled. The same day, the Soviets launched an offensive north of Kursk, and Hitler soon called off Citadel. The Germans never mounted a major strategic offensive in the east again.
The German offensive at Kursk began on July 5, 1943, against Soviet defences of extraordinary depth, with minefields and anti-tank guns laid out for many miles. On the southern flank, the II SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser made the deepest gains, and by July 11 it was near Prokhorovka, a village with a railway station, on open, rolling farmland.
The Soviet command committed its reserve, the 5th Guards Tank Army under Pavel Rotmistrov. On the morning of July 12, its tanks, many of them T-34s and lighter T-70s, advanced across a narrow front between a river and a railway embankment. Some ran into an anti-tank ditch dug earlier by Soviet engineers. German Tigers and assault guns destroyed large numbers of them at close range.
For decades Soviet accounts described Prokhorovka as a great victory in which some 1,500 tanks clashed. Research since the 1990s, using German and Soviet archives, has put the numbers far lower and the Soviet losses far higher. Yet Rotmistrov's attack had achieved its purpose: the SS corps could not break through.
Key people: Pavel Rotmistrov, Paul Hausser, Nikolai Vatutin