After Stalingrad: Kharkov, the Salient and the Decision for Citadel

On 16 February 1943, two weeks after the last German soldiers at Stalingrad surrendered, Soviet tanks rolled into Dzerzhinsky Square in Kharkov, the fourth-largest city of the Soviet Union. A month later the square had been renamed for an SS division, and the Red Army had been thrown back more than a hundred miles. When the spring thaw froze the front in mud at the end of March, it left behind a great bulge around the city of Kursk, 250 kilometers from north to south, that both sides saw at once as the obvious place for the next battle. This chapter follows the winter fighting that made the Kursk salient, the crimes that went with it, and the three months of argument in Berlin, Rastenburg, Munich and Moscow that turned a bulge on the map into the largest battle of the war. It ends on the night of 4 July 1943, with almost three million men waiting in the dark.

Why it mattered

The Battle of Kursk is usually told as a story of July 1943: the German pincers striking north and south into the salient, the minefields and antitank guns, Prokhorovka, and the Soviet counteroffensives that followed. But almost everything that decided the battle was settled before the first shot on 5 July. The shape of the salient was made by the fighting of February and March. The German decision to attack it, and the decision to wait for new tanks before doing so, came out of a long and genuinely divided argument among Hitler and his commanders. The Soviet decision not to strike first, but to receive the blow in prepared defenses and then counterattack, was taken in April, three months before the Germans moved. The preparations those decisions made possible, described in Chapter 2, shaped every fight that followed.

The spring of 1943 was also the last moment when Germany held something like the strategic initiative in the East. The disaster at Stalingrad had cost the Axis an entire German army and most of the Romanian, Italian and Hungarian forces on the Don. Manstein’s counterstroke in February and March, often called the “backhand blow,” restored the front and retook Kharkov, the last great German operational victory in the East. The question that occupied the German high command for the next three months was what to do with that victory: attack again, wait for the Red Army to attack and strike back, or shorten the line and build reserves. Their answer, Operation Citadel, has been criticized ever since, and the criticism has often been shaped by the memoirs of the generals who took part in the decision.

For Americans the period has another meaning. It was the season of Casablanca, of the end of the war in Tunisia and of the planning for Sicily, and of the first large flow of American Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union. The Western Allies were not yet fighting the German army on the mainland of Europe, and Stalin’s complaints about the postponed “second front” grew sharper in exactly the months when the Kursk decision was made. And after the war, the U.S. Army’s own understanding of the battle came largely from German generals who wrote studies for its Historical Division and then memoirs for the American market, a fact that still colors what many readers think they know about Kursk. This chapter relies chiefly on David Glantz and Jonathan House, The Battle of Kursk (1999), Karl-Heinz Frieser’s chapters in the German official history, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8, Roman Töppel’s Kursk 1943 and, for the casualty figures, G. F. Krivosheev’s statistical study of Soviet losses; memoirs are used for what their authors remembered and are identified as such.

The front after Stalingrad

By the end of January 1943 the southern half of the Eastern Front had been broken open. The German Sixth Army, encircled at Stalingrad since November, surrendered in two groups: Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus and the southern pocket on 31 January, the northern pocket on 2 February. Before that the Red Army had already moved on. In mid-January the Voronezh Front destroyed most of the Hungarian Second Army and the remnants of the Italian Eighth Army on the upper Don in the Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh operation, and from 24 January it drove west against the German Second Army in the Voronezh–Kastornoye operation (Glantz and House). Farther north, the siege of Leningrad was partly broken on 18 January, when a narrow land corridor was opened south of Lake Ladoga.

Between Voronezh and the Sea of Azov there was now a gap of about 300 kilometers in which the Germans had few organized formations. Army Group Don, under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, was pulling the First and Fourth Panzer Armies back from the Caucasus through Rostov, and Army Group B’s front on the middle Don had largely ceased to exist. Stalin and the Stavka, the Soviet supreme headquarters, concluded that the Germans were beaten in the south and could be pushed back to the Dnieper before the spring thaw. Their intelligence estimate, which proved disastrously wrong, was that the Germans were retreating to the river and could not stand east of it (Glantz and House; Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr).

The German high command saw the same gap and feared the worst. Hitler’s first instinct, as at Stalingrad, was to hold everything. Manstein’s was to give up ground in the east, concentrate his panzer divisions on his northern flank, and strike the Soviet spearheads when they had outrun their supplies. The argument between the two men, conducted by telephone, teleprinter and two personal meetings, ran through February and is one of the best-documented command disputes of the war (Manstein, Lost Victories; Frieser). It mattered because Manstein had one asset that Hitler had sent him for a different purpose: the SS Panzer Corps, two and then three SS motorized divisions newly refitted in France and rushed east to save Kharkov.

Gallop and Star: the Red Army reaches Kharkov

Two Soviet offensives opened within days of each other. On 29 January the Southwestern Front under Gen. Nikolai Vatutin launched Operation Gallop (Skachok) into the Donets basin, the industrial region between the Donets and the Sea of Azov. Its spearhead was a “mobile group” under Lt. Gen. Markian Popov, four understrength tank corps whose task was to drive deep to the south and cut off the German forces retreating from Rostov. On 2 February the Voronezh Front under Col. Gen. Filipp Golikov launched Operation Star (Zvezda) toward Kharkov and Kursk, with the 40th and 69th Armies and Lt. Gen. Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army (Glantz and House; Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr).

The advance was fast. The 60th Army, on the Voronezh Front’s northern wing, took Kursk on 8 February, and Belgorod fell the next day (Glantz and House). Kharkov, a prewar city of more than 800,000 people and the center of Soviet tank and tractor production before the war, was defended by Army Detachment Lanz, built around the newly arrived SS Panzer Corps under SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser. Hitler ordered the city held. By 14 February Soviet armies were closing on it from the north, east and south, and the SS divisions were in danger of being encircled. On 15 February Hausser, against Hitler’s explicit order and with the reluctant acquiescence of his army superiors, pulled his divisions out to the southwest. The Red Army entered the city on 16 February (Glantz and House; Frieser).

Hausser’s withdrawal was one of the few occasions in the war when a senior commander disobeyed a direct “hold” order from Hitler and kept his command. General Hubert Lanz, his army superior, was relieved a few days later and replaced by General Werner Kempf. Hausser was not. Historians have offered several explanations: that Hitler would not punish an SS general publicly, that the withdrawal saved the corps that Manstein was about to use, and that it fitted Manstein’s plan even if Manstein had not ordered it. Whatever the reason, the SS Panzer Corps survived intact to fight again, and its escape made the counteroffensive possible (Frieser; Glantz and House).

For the Soviet public the liberation of Kharkov, coming so soon after Stalingrad, seemed to confirm that the tide had turned for good. In the United States, too, it was front-page news: the Soviet communiqués of February listed Kursk, Belgorod, Kharkov, Rostov (retaken on 14 February) and Voroshilovgrad as one victory after another. But the Soviet armies that reached Kharkov were exhausted. Rifle divisions that had started the winter with seven or eight thousand men were down to a few thousand; tank corps had a fraction of their tanks; supply lines ran back over hundreds of kilometers of wrecked railway. Golikov and Vatutin nevertheless kept pushing, Golikov west toward Poltava and Vatutin southwest toward the Dnieper crossings at Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk, on the assumption that the Germans were still in retreat (Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr).

Manstein’s “backhand blow,” 19 February–6 March

In mid-February Manstein’s command was renamed Army Group South and given responsibility for the whole front from the Sea of Azov to north of Kharkov. Hitler flew to Manstein’s headquarters at Zaporozhye on 17 February, intending, by most accounts, to insist on an immediate counterattack to retake Kharkov and possibly to replace Manstein. He stayed until 19 February. Soviet tanks of Popov’s group and Vatutin’s 6th Army were reported close enough to the city that the visit ended in some haste. In those three days Manstein persuaded him to accept a different plan: first destroy the Soviet spearheads driving toward the Dnieper, then turn north against Kharkov (Manstein; Frieser).

The method was what German doctrine called Schlagen aus der Nachhand, striking “from the backhand”: letting the enemy come forward, then hitting his overextended flank with concentrated armor. On 19 February the SS Panzer Corps, now with Das Reich and the newly arrived Totenkopf, struck south from the Krasnograd area into the flank of the Soviet 6th Army, while the Fourth Panzer Army under Col. Gen. Hermann Hoth, with the 48th Panzer Corps, and the First Panzer Army’s 40th Panzer Corps attacked from the south and east. Popov’s mobile group, by then reduced to a few dozen tanks and short of fuel, was cut up between 20 and 24 February. By the first days of March the Southwestern Front’s spearheads had been destroyed or driven back to the Donets (Glantz and House; Frieser; Nipe, Last Victory in Russia).

The Stavka responded by sending Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army south from Kharkov to strike the SS Panzer Corps in the flank. It ran into the panzer divisions in the open between 2 and 5 March, and much of it was encircled and destroyed south of the city, in the area of Kegichevka and Bereka (Glantz and House). The Germans paid a price of their own. On 26 February SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, commander of the Totenkopf Division, was killed when the light aircraft in which he was flying to one of his regiments was shot down by Soviet ground fire. Eicke had been the commandant of Dachau and the inspector of concentration camps before the war, and had built the Totenkopf from concentration camp guards; Hitler and Himmler treated his death as a serious loss (Frieser; Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction).

South of Kharkov, near the village of Sokolovo on the Mzha river, the counteroffensive met one of the more unusual units of the Red Army: the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion, formed in the Soviet Union from Czechoslovak refugees, former soldiers and volunteers under Lt. Col. Ludvík Svoboda, the future president of Czechoslovakia. The battalion had been sent forward to help hold the line of the Mzha alongside the Soviet 25th Guards Rifle Division. On 8 March its forward company, holding Sokolovo, was attacked by a battle group of the German 6th Panzer Division with tanks and armored infantry. The village was lost after a day of fighting; its commander did not survive.

Kharkov retaken and Belgorod, 7–18 March

On 7 March the second phase of the counteroffensive began, with the Fourth Panzer Army and the SS Panzer Corps driving north toward Kharkov. Manstein’s intention, as he described it in his memoirs and as the army group’s orders show, was to bypass the city to the west and north, encircle the Soviet forces in it and cut them off from the Donets, rather than fight for the streets. Hausser chose otherwise. On 10 March, as the Leibstandarte and Das Reich reached the outskirts, he ordered an attack directly into the city. Hoth and Manstein objected; Hausser went ahead, and on 11 March the Leibstandarte attacked into northern Kharkov from the north and northeast while Das Reich came in from the west (Frieser; Glantz and House; Nipe).

The street fighting lasted most of a week. The Leibstandarte’s battle groups pushed down the main avenues toward the center, and on 12 March they reached Dzerzhinsky Square, the vast Constructivist plaza in front of the Gosprom building. The Germans later renamed it “Platz der Leibstandarte.” The German armed forces communiqué announced the recapture of Kharkov on 14 March, but Soviet troops held out in the eastern districts and the tractor works until 16 March (Glantz and House; Nipe). The Soviet 3rd Tank Army and 69th Army, with parts of the 40th Army, were driven out to the east and north; some of their units broke out across the Donets only by abandoning their heavy equipment.

Hausser’s decision has been argued over ever since. German critics, beginning with officers of the Fourth Panzer Army, said that it cost the SS corps heavy casualties in street fighting that an encirclement would have avoided, and that it let more of the Soviet garrison escape. Defenders of Hausser, including George Nipe, argue that the city was weakly held, that the direct assault was faster, and that it achieved the same result. What is not in dispute is that the SS Panzer Corps, which had been in action continuously since late January, came out of the battle badly worn. The figure most often given for its losses in the whole winter campaign is about 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, a large share of them in the fighting for Kharkov (Nipe); the exact number depends on the dates and categories counted, and it should be read as an approximation.

Belgorod, 80 kilometers north of Kharkov on the Northern Donets, fell on 18 March to a battle group of the Leibstandarte under SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper and the army’s Grossdeutschland Division, advancing on its western flank. The town was taken against comparatively light resistance (Glantz and House; Frieser). With Belgorod the German counteroffensive reached its limit. Farther north, Army Group Center’s Second Army was too weak to push on toward Kursk, and within days the roads turned to mud.

The cost to the Red Army was heavy. Krivosheev’s statistical study of Soviet losses, drawn from the General Staff’s records, gives the Kharkov defensive operation of 4–25 March 1943 as costing the Voronezh Front and the reinforcements sent to it 45,219 killed, missing and captured and 41,250 wounded and sick, a total of 86,469 (Krivosheev; Glantz and House). That figure does not include the losses of the Southwestern Front in the Donbas or of the offensives that preceded the German counterstroke. In about four weeks Manstein had destroyed or badly damaged two Soviet tank armies’ worth of formations, retaken the second city of Ukraine, and restored a continuous German front from the Sea of Azov to Belgorod. Robert Citino has pointed out that it was a restoration rather than a victory: Germany ended the winter with far less than it had held in November, and the Red Army had lost none of its capacity to rebuild.

The crimes of the winter fighting

The war on the Eastern Front was fought as a war of annihilation from its first day, and the battles around Kharkov in February and March 1943 were no exception. Some of what happened is documented well; some is known only from Soviet investigations or from testimony given years later, and has to be treated with care. The rule followed in this collection is to state what each source says and how it is known.

The best-documented case is in the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka, southwest of Kharkov. On 12 February, during the battles that followed the rescue of the encircled German 320th Infantry Division by a battle group under Joachim Peiper, troops of the Leibstandarte occupied the two villages, where two SS officers had been wounded by retreating Soviet troops. On 17 February, according to Ukrainian sources and the testimony of survivors gathered by Danny Parker for his biography of Peiper, Leibstandarte troops killed 872 men, women and children there in reprisal; about 240 of them were burned alive in the church of Yefremovka (Parker, Hitler’s Warrior, pp. 356–357). A former sergeant of Peiper’s battalion, questioned by the Western Allies in November 1944, said that after the rearguard of Peiper’s column was found killed and mutilated at Krasnaya Polyana, Peiper had ordered a village burned and its inhabitants shot (Parker). Peiper’s battalion acquired the nickname “blowtorch battalion” (Lötlampenbataillon), which several historians connect with these killings. Peiper himself wrote in a letter in March 1943 that the unit’s reputation for terror went ahead of it (Parker; Westemeier, Joachim Peiper).

The killing of wounded Soviet soldiers in a Kharkov military hospital after the city was retaken in March is reported in Soviet investigations and in Western histories of the Waffen-SS. Tim Ripley, in Steel Storm, writes that Leibstandarte troops murdered wounded Soviet soldiers in the city’s military hospital and that several hundred were killed, and that captured Soviet officers and commissars were routinely shot. The number of victims, the exact date and the units responsible have not been established with the precision of the village killings: no German document describing it is known, Soviet figures were sometimes inflated for propaganda, and accounts differ on whether the patients were shot or the building was set on fire. The event itself is accepted in the historical literature on the Leibstandarte, but it is presented here, as the sources present it, as a reported crime whose details remain uncertain.

The fighting for the city also came on top of fifteen months of German occupation. Kharkov had been taken in October 1941. In December 1941 and January 1942 the German army and Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C concentrated the city’s remaining Jews in barracks at the tractor works and shot them at the ravine of Drobitsky Yar on the city’s edge; the number of victims is usually given as 10,000 to 15,000 or more (USHMM; Yad Vashem). Thousands more civilians died of hunger in the winter of 1941–42 and thousands of young people were deported for forced labor in Germany. When the Red Army entered the city in February 1943 it found the evidence of those crimes, and when it returned for good in August 1943 the Soviet government made Kharkov the scene of the first public trial of Germans for crimes in the occupied territories. In December 1943 three Germans and a Soviet collaborator were tried before a military tribunal for the murder of civilians and prisoners, including killings with gas vans, and were hanged in the city’s main market square on 19 December before a large crowd. That trial, its evidence and its limits are the subject of Chapter 8.

Soviet forces were not innocent of crimes in the same weeks, and some of those that took place have been described in Western and post-Soviet research: the shooting of prisoners in the heat of battle, the killing of German wounded left behind in withdrawals, and, in the towns the Red Army retook, the arrest and execution by the NKVD of people accused of collaboration, sometimes on thin evidence. These are not equivalent in scale or intent to the German policy of annihilation, but they are part of the record.

The thaw and the shape of the salient

While Manstein was retaking Kharkov, the Red Army was attempting a second great offensive farther north. On 15 February the Stavka formed a new Central Front under Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky from the headquarters of the Don Front, which had just finished the destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and ordered it to attack west and northwest from the Kursk area toward Bryansk and Orel, together with the Western and Bryansk Fronts, to envelop the German Second Panzer Army in the Orel bulge. Rokossovsky’s armies had to move hundreds of kilometers by rail and road from Stalingrad in the depth of winter, and they attacked piecemeal from 25 February. Parts of the 2nd Tank Army and a cavalry group reached the Desna near Novgorod-Seversky before German counterattacks and the collapse of the southern front in March forced the Stavka to halt the offensive (Glantz, After Stalingrad; Glantz and House).

When Kharkov fell and the Germans reached Belgorod, the Stavka moved fast to keep them from going farther. The 21st Army and the 64th Army, both Stalingrad veterans, and the 1st Tank Army were sent to the area north of Belgorod and east of Oboyan in the second half of March; the 21st Army took up positions in the area that would become the southern face of the salient (Glantz and House). Then the weather intervened. In the last days of March the spring thaw, the rasputitsa or “season of bad roads,” turned the black earth of the region into mud. Operations on both sides came to a halt, and the front froze where the armies stood.

The line that the thaw froze in place ran north from the Sea of Azov along the Mius and the Northern Donets to Belgorod, then bent sharply west and north around Kursk, past Sumy and Rylsk, before turning east again south of Orel. The result was a salient, a bulge in the front, around the city of Kursk, about 250 kilometers from north to south and up to about 160 kilometers from east to west. North of it, a German salient of similar size around Orel bulged eastward into the Soviet lines. The two salients interlocked like the pieces of a puzzle. Each was an invitation: the Kursk salient to a German pincer attack from the north and south to cut it off at its base, the Orel salient to a Soviet attack from the north, east and south to cut it off at its base. Both invitations were accepted.

What next? The German debate, March–April

Even before Kharkov was retaken, the German high command had begun to plan the next step. On 13 March Hitler signed Operational Order No. 5, which set out the army’s tasks for the coming months. Army Group South was to form a strong panzer army north of Kharkov by mid-April and attack north toward Kursk, while Army Group Center attacked south from the Orel area to meet it; elsewhere the front was to stay on the defensive, and the Germans were to try to strike before the Soviets recovered (Frieser; Glantz and House). The thaw, the exhaustion of the SS corps and the losses of the winter made that timetable impossible, but the idea of pinching off the salient was now fixed in the planning.

Within that idea there were real alternatives, and the German commanders argued for them. Manstein, by his own account, preferred one of two options. The first was to attack as early as possible, in April or early May, before the Red Army had rebuilt its armies and dug in: a strike “from the forehand” that would use the advantage won in March. The second, if that was impossible, was another backhand blow: to wait for the Soviet summer offensive, which he expected against the Donets basin, let it come forward, and then strike its flank from the Kharkov area with the concentrated panzer divisions, as in February. Hitler rejected the second option, because it meant giving up, at least temporarily, the coal and industry of the Donets basin, which he regarded as essential (Manstein, Lost Victories; Frieser). Manstein’s memoir makes his preference for the backhand look clearer in retrospect than the record of spring 1943 does; in April and May he supported the Kursk attack as long as it came early.

The strongest advocate of the attack inside the high command was not Hitler but the Chief of the Army General Staff, Gen. Kurt Zeitzler, who developed the plan for a pincer attack on the salient and pressed it on Hitler through April. Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commanding Army Group Center, supported it consistently. Col. Gen. Walter Model, whose Ninth Army would make the northern attack, was the most skeptical of the commanders who would carry it out: in late April he reported, with aerial photographs of the Soviet positions, that the defenses in front of him were far deeper than had been assumed and that his army was too weak to break through them quickly. Col. Gen. Heinz Guderian, appointed Inspector General of Armored Troops at the end of February with the task of rebuilding the panzer arm, opposed the operation outright, on the grounds that it would waste the tanks Germany needed to meet the Allied invasion of Western Europe that was certain to come in 1944 (Frieser; Töppel; Guderian, Panzer Leader).

Hitler issued the order for the operation, now named Zitadelle (Citadel), on 15 April 1943 as Operational Order No. 6. It called for the attack to begin as soon as the weather allowed, with 3 May given as the earliest date, and set out the plan that, with only small changes, was carried out in July: the Ninth Army would attack south from the area south of Orel, the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf would attack north from the Belgorod–Kharkov area, and the two would meet east of Kursk, encircling and destroying the Soviet armies inside the salient. The order emphasized speed, surprise and concentration on narrow fronts, and it carried a sentence that has been quoted in nearly every history of the battle.

In their words

“Der Sieg von Kursk muß für die Welt wie ein Fanal wirken.” (The victory at Kursk must shine like a beacon to the world.)

The language of the order was more confident than its author. The operation was to be a limited one: not a drive to the Volga or the Caucasus like the offensive of 1942, but a single blow to destroy the Soviet forces in the salient, shorten the front by about 250 kilometers, free reserves, take hundreds of thousands of prisoners for the labor program, and restore German prestige with Germany’s wavering allies after the winter. Frieser and Töppel both stress how modest those aims were compared with the summers of 1941 and 1942. The question was whether even such a limited blow could succeed against an enemy who could see it coming.

Munich, 4 May, and the long wait for new tanks

Model’s report changed Hitler’s mind about timing. Hitler had been focusing more and more on the new weapons that German industry was beginning to deliver: principally the Panther medium tank, but also the Ferdinand heavy tank destroyer, of which 90 were built on the Porsche chassis rejected for the Tiger, and larger numbers of the Tiger heavy tank itself. If the Soviet defenses were as strong as Model said, Hitler reasoned, the attack needed these weapons to break them (Frieser; Töppel). On 4 May he called his senior commanders and advisers to Munich: Manstein, Kluge, Model, Zeitzler, Guderian, the armaments minister Albert Speer and the chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, Gen. Hans Jeschonnek.

The positions taken at Munich are known mainly from the memoirs of Guderian and Manstein and from the reconstruction of Frieser, who used the surviving German records. Model presented his aerial photographs and his doubts. Kluge argued for the attack. Manstein said that the operation would have succeeded in April, that its chances were now uncertain, and that he needed more infantry; but he did not oppose it. Guderian and Speer argued that the Panthers, still plagued by mechanical problems, were not ready, and that the tanks would be needed in the West. Zeitzler defended his plan. Hitler did not decide. Citadel was not canceled, but within days its start was postponed to 12 June (Frieser; Glantz and House; Guderian; Manstein).

Guderian recorded one more conversation in his memoirs. On 10 May, after a meeting in Berlin on Panther production, he asked Hitler directly why he wanted to attack in the East at all that year. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces High Command, answered that the attack was necessary for political reasons. Guderian asked how many people even knew where Kursk was. Hitler, by Guderian’s account, said that he agreed and that whenever he thought of the attack his stomach turned over (Guderian, Panzer Leader). The story is recollection, written after the war by a man who wanted it known that he had been against the operation, and it cannot be checked against a contemporary record; but it fits what the documents show of Hitler’s indecision in May and June.

The postponements followed one another through May and June. After 12 June the date moved again to 20 June, then, on 17–18 June, to the beginning of July; the intermediate dates are given slightly differently in different accounts. Each delay brought more Panthers and Tigers to the front, but each also gave the Red Army more weeks to dig, lay mines and bring up reserves, and the balance of forces moved steadily against Germany. The Panthers of Panzer Regiment 39, about 200 tanks in two battalions, arrived at the front in the last days of June and the first days of July, with little time to train and with mechanical faults still unsolved (Frieser; Töppel). Finally, at a conference at his headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia on 1 July, Hitler announced to his commanders that the attack would begin on 5 July. In his address he said that the operation had been delayed to wait for the new weapons, and that it had to succeed (Glantz and House; Frieser).

The Soviet decision: defend first, then strike

On the Soviet side, the decision that shaped the battle was made more quickly and held more firmly. By early April the Stavka, the front commanders and Soviet intelligence all expected the Germans to attack the Kursk salient as soon as the ground dried. The question was what to do about it. The Red Army had attacked in every season since December 1941, and its instinct, and Stalin’s, was to attack again. But the winter had shown what happened when Soviet offensives outran their strength, and the summers of 1941 and 1942 had shown how German armored offensives could break Soviet lines in open country.

On 8 April Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Deputy Supreme Commander, who was then at the Voronezh Front, sent Stalin a long report on the situation. He predicted, correctly, that the Germans would attack the salient from the north and south with strong armored forces, aiming to encircle the Central and Voronezh Fronts. He argued that it would be unwise for the Soviet armies to launch a preemptive offensive in the coming weeks. It would be better, he wrote, to wear the enemy out on Soviet defenses, destroy his tanks, and then go over to a general offensive with fresh reserves to finish off his main forces (Zhukov, Memoirs; Glantz and House). Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the Chief of the General Staff, who was with Zhukov when the report was written, agreed, and the General Staff collected the views of the front commanders, who also expected an attack on the salient.

On the evening of 12 April Stalin met Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Vasilevsky’s deputy, Gen. Aleksei Antonov, in the Kremlin. By the accounts of Zhukov and Vasilevsky, he accepted their recommendation: the Central and Voronezh Fronts would build deep defenses and receive the German attack, while strong reserves were assembled behind them for a counteroffensive (Glantz and House; Vasilevsky, A Lifelong Cause). The plans for those counteroffensives, which became Operation Kutuzov against the Orel salient and Operation Rumyantsev against Belgorod and Kharkov, were developed in parallel, as Chapter 7 describes. The strategic reserve was gathered in a new Steppe Military District east of the salient, which became the Steppe Front under Col. Gen. Ivan Konev on 9 July.

The decision was not unanimous and it was not fixed. Gen. Nikolai Vatutin, who replaced Golikov in command of the Voronezh Front at the end of March, argued in May and June for a preemptive attack on the German forces around Belgorod and Kharkov before they were ready, and Stalin was tempted. Each time the German attack failed to come, the pressure to strike first grew. The Stavka warned the fronts several times in May that the attack was imminent, each time wrongly, and each false alarm strengthened the case of those who wanted to attack. Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Antonov held to the defensive plan, and Stalin kept to it (Glantz and House). On 2 July the Stavka sent its final warning, correctly this time: the Germans would attack between 3 and 6 July.

What Moscow knew: Ultra, Cairncross and “Lucy”

The Soviet decision rested on intelligence, and the sources of that intelligence have produced one of the longest-running arguments about the battle. The Red Army’s own intelligence was extensive. Its front and army reconnaissance, including raids to take prisoners, its aerial reconnaissance, its radio intercept and direction-finding units, and the partisans behind the German lines all reported the German buildup around Orel and Belgorod through the spring. David Glantz, the historian who has done most to bring Soviet sources into Western writing on the battle, has argued that these sources, rather than any single spy ring, gave the Stavka its picture of German intentions, and that they were good but not perfect: the Soviets correctly predicted the axes of attack but overestimated the strength of the northern attack and underestimated that of the southern one (Glantz, Soviet Military Intelligence in War; Glantz and House).

British intelligence also contributed. At Bletchley Park the codebreakers of the Government Code and Cypher School were reading some German army teleprinter traffic enciphered on the Lorenz machine, which they called “Tunny.” A decrypted Tunny message of 25 April 1943 set out the German assessment of the situation and the plan of attack on the salient in detail. The British government passed the substance of this and other Ultra-derived intelligence to the Soviets through official channels, through the British Military Mission in Moscow, disguised as coming from a well-placed source rather than from codebreaking (Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War; Copeland, Colossus). The Soviets were not told about the codebreaking itself.

They learned some of it anyway. John Cairncross, a British civil servant recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and later identified as one of the “Cambridge” spies, worked at Bletchley Park in Hut 3, where decrypts were translated and analyzed, from 1942 until June 1943. He took raw Tunny and other decrypts out of the park and passed them to his Soviet handler, Anatoli Gorsky (Smith, Station X; Copeland). By his own later account and that of his Soviet handler, Yuri Modin, the material he passed included information on German plans for Kursk and on the location of Luftwaffe airfields in the region; the Soviet government later awarded him the Order of the Red Banner. How much his raw decrypts added to what the Soviets already knew from the official British channel and their own sources is impossible to measure from the evidence now available. They allowed Moscow to see that the official British warnings were genuine.

The most famous intelligence story of Kursk, and the most doubtful, is that of “Lucy.” Rudolf Roessler, a German émigré publisher living in Lucerne, Switzerland, passed a stream of high-level German military information to Soviet military intelligence through the network of Sándor Radó in Geneva, which the Soviets called “Dora.” Radó code-named Roessler’s source “Lucy” because he knew only that it was in Lucerne. Through 1942 and 1943 Lucy’s reports included information on German plans in the East, and in the spring of 1943 they included reports on Citadel (Radó’s network messages, preserved in Soviet and Swiss records). Who Roessler’s sources were has never been established. Roessler himself named possible informants in the German high command before his death in 1958; a CIA study of the network concluded that the material probably came through Swiss intelligence and possibly from German officers opposed to the regime.

In 1981 Anthony Read and David Fisher argued in Operation Lucy that the ring was a British operation to feed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets without revealing its source. The official historian of British intelligence, F. H. Hinsley, flatly denied this, and later writers, including Phillip Knightley and V. E. Tarrant, have pointed out that Britain had no need for such a channel because it was already passing Ultra-derived intelligence to Moscow officially, and that some Lucy reports arrived too fast to have come through Bletchley Park. Timothy Mulligan’s study of intelligence before Kursk, based on the German and Soviet records then available, concluded that Lucy’s reports were among many the Soviets received, that some were inaccurate, and that they did not give Stalin a unique or decisive view of German plans (Mulligan, “Spies, Ciphers and ‘Zitadelle,’” 1987).

The Western Allies: Casablanca, Tunisia and Sicily

The German and Soviet decisions were made with one eye on the West. From 14 to 24 January 1943 Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with their Combined Chiefs of Staff at Casablanca, in French Morocco. Stalin had been invited and declined, citing the Stalingrad battle. The conference announced the demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan; it agreed to give priority to the war against the U-boats, to launch a combined bomber offensive against Germany from Britain, and, once North Africa was cleared, to invade Sicily. The cross-Channel invasion of France that the Soviets wanted for 1943 was in effect deferred, and in May, at the Trident conference in Washington, the Western Allies set it for the spring of 1944. Stalin learned the decision in June and sent Roosevelt and Churchill some of the bitterest messages of their correspondence.

The war in North Africa ended on 13 May 1943, when the last Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered; the number of German and Italian prisoners is usually given as about 250,000, though estimates range from about 230,000 to 275,000. That campaign, in which the U.S. Army fought its first great battles against the Germans, including the defeat at Kasserine Pass in February, is told in this site’s Kasserine Pass collection. For the German high command, the loss of an army group in Tunisia in May, coming after the loss of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February, increased the pressure to win something in the East and, at the same time, the fear of where the Allies would land next. The Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, began on 10 July, five days after Citadel opened. Hitler cited it on 13 July as one reason for calling off the Kursk offensive, though historians disagree about how far it was the reason rather than the occasion (Frieser; Töppel).

What the United States could send the Soviet Union in 1943 was supplies. Lend-Lease aid had begun in the autumn of 1941 and had been slow and uncertain in 1942, when the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel suffered terrible losses and the routes through Iran and across the Pacific were still being built. In 1943 it began to arrive in quantity. By the figures compiled by Hubert van Tuyll, Allied shipments to the USSR rose from about 2.45 million tons in 1942 to about 4.79 million tons in 1943, more than a quarter of the wartime total. Most American aid went by the Pacific route to Vladivostok in Soviet-flagged ships, and through the Persian Corridor, where the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command assembled trucks and ran the railway north from the Gulf. Aircraft were flown from Alaska across Siberia (van Tuyll; Weeks).

The balance on 4 July

By the evening of 4 July the two sides had concentrated around the salient the largest forces ever assembled for a single battle up to that time. How large depends on what is counted, and the published figures differ widely. Glantz and House, using Soviet archival figures, count the whole Soviet force in and behind the salient, including Konev’s Steppe Military District, at 1,910,361 men, 5,128 tanks and self-propelled guns, and about 25,000 guns and mortars; within that total they count 1,426,352 men in the combat forces of the Central and Voronezh Fronts. For the Germans, they give 780,900 men and 2,928 tanks and assault guns for the forces committed to Citadel (Glantz and House). Frieser, using the German records, counts 518,271 German troops in the attacking formations, about 2,450 tanks and assault guns at the start, and 7,417 guns and mortars, against 1,426,352 Soviet troops, 4,938 tanks and 31,415 guns and mortars (Frieser). The Soviet history Kurskaia bitva (1974), by contrast, put the Germans at 900,000 men and 2,700 tanks, a figure that served to magnify the victory.

The aircraft figures vary most of all. Frieser gives the Luftwaffe about 1,372 aircraft for Citadel and the three Soviet air armies covering the salient and its southern flank, the 16th, 2nd and 17th, about 2,650; other counts put the Luftwaffe at about 1,800 and the Soviet total, with the Steppe Military District’s air army and long-range aviation, at nearly 2,800 or more (Frieser; Bergström; Glantz and House). Whatever the exact figures, the pattern is the same in every count: the Soviets had roughly two to three times as many men, about twice as many tanks, three to four times as many guns, and more aircraft, and they were waiting in prepared positions that the Germans would have to attack. The air war is described in Chapter 5.

By the numbers

The forces at Kursk on 4 July 1943, by two counts

Men, tanks and assault or self-propelled guns, guns and mortars, and aircraft; Glantz and House (from Soviet archives) and Frieser (from German records). Bars within each group are scaled to the largest figure in that group.

Men · Soviet, incl. Steppe Military District (Glantz & House)1,910,361

Men · Soviet, Central and Voronezh Fronts (Frieser; Glantz & House’s combat forces)1,426,352

Men · German (Glantz & House)780,900

Men · German attacking formations (Frieser)518,271

Tanks and SP guns · Soviet (Glantz & House)5,128

Tanks and SP guns · Soviet (Frieser)4,938

Tanks and assault guns · German (Glantz & House)2,928

Tanks and assault guns · German (Frieser)c. 2,450

Guns and mortars · Soviet (Frieser)31,415

Guns and mortars · Soviet (Glantz & House)25,013

Guns and mortars · German (Glantz & House)9,966

Guns and mortars · German (Frieser)7,417

Aircraft · Soviet, with reserves (approx.)c. 2,800

Aircraft · Soviet 2nd, 16th, 17th Air Armies (Frieser)c. 2,650

Aircraft · German (Bergström, approx.)c. 1,800

Aircraft · German (Frieser)c. 1,370

Timeline

From Stalingrad to the eve of Citadel

1. 14–24 Jan 1943Roosevelt and Churchill meet at Casablanca; unconditional surrender announced; Sicily chosen as the next target.
2. 18 JanA land corridor to besieged Leningrad is opened; Zhukov made Marshal of the Soviet Union.
3. 29 JanSouthwestern Front (Vatutin) opens Operation Gallop into the Donets basin.
4. 31 Jan–2 FebThe German Sixth Army surrenders at Stalingrad.
5. 2 FebVoronezh Front (Golikov) opens Operation Star toward Kharkov and Kursk.
6. 8–9 FebRed Army takes Kursk (8 Feb) and Belgorod (9 Feb).
7. 15 FebCentral Front formed under Rokossovsky; Hausser pulls the SS Panzer Corps out of Kharkov against Hitler’s order.
8. 16 FebRed Army enters Kharkov; Vasilevsky made Marshal.
9. 17 FebLeibstandarte troops kill 872 villagers at Yefremovka and Semyonovka (Parker).
10. 17–19 FebHitler at Manstein’s headquarters, Zaporozhye; accepts the counteroffensive plan.
11. 19 FebManstein’s counteroffensive opens; the SS Panzer Corps strikes south from Krasnograd.
12. 20–24 FebPopov’s mobile group destroyed.
13. 25 FebCentral Front opens its offensive toward Orel and Bryansk.
14. 26 FebTheodor Eicke, commander of the Totenkopf, killed when his aircraft is shot down.
15. 2–5 MarRybalko’s 3rd Tank Army encircled and largely destroyed south of Kharkov.
16. 7 MarSecond phase: German drive north toward Kharkov begins.
17. 8 Mar1st Czechoslovak Battalion fights at Sokolovo; Otakar Jaroš killed.
18. 11 MarLeibstandarte attacks into northern Kharkov on Hausser’s order.
19. 13 MarHitler signs Operational Order No. 5.
20. 14–16 MarKharkov announced retaken on the 14th; fighting at the tractor works ends on the 16th.
21. 18 MarLeibstandarte and Grossdeutschland take Belgorod.
22. Late MarThe spring thaw halts operations; the Kursk salient is fixed.
23. 8 AprZhukov’s report to Stalin recommends a deliberate defense.
24. 12 AprStalin, Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Antonov agree on defense, then counteroffensive.
25. 15 AprHitler issues Operational Order No. 6 for Citadel, earliest date 3 May.
26. 4 MayMunich conference; no decision; attack postponed to 12 June.
27. 13 MayAxis forces in Tunisia surrender.
28. 17–18 JunCitadel postponed again, to the beginning of July.
29. 1 JulAt Rastenburg Hitler sets the attack for 5 July.
30. 2 JulStavka warns the fronts to expect the attack between 3 and 6 July.
31. 4 Jul, afternoonPreliminary German attacks on the southern face to seize observation points; the main offensive follows at dawn on 5 July.

How Americans came to understand these months

For most of the Cold War, the American picture of the winter and spring of 1943 came from the German side. After 1945 the U.S. Army’s Historical Division employed hundreds of captured German officers, under the direction of the former Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, to write studies of their campaigns against the Soviet Union. The studies were meant to teach the U.S. Army how to fight the Red Army if it ever had to. One of them, on Citadel, was prepared by a group of officers under Gen. Theodor Busse, who had been Manstein’s chief of staff at Army Group South. They were valuable, and some of them are still used, but they were written from memory, without access to the German records that the Allies had captured, and they told a consistent story: that the German army had been defeated by Hitler’s interference, by Soviet numbers and by the Russian winter, rather than by an opponent that had learned to fight.

The memoirs that followed reached a large American audience: Guderian’s Panzer Leader in English in 1952, F. W. von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles in 1956, and Manstein’s Lost Victories in 1958. Manstein’s account of the backhand blow at Kharkov became a classic of operational art in American military education, and his presentation of Citadel as Hitler’s mistake was widely accepted. Only from the 1980s, when David Glantz organized the U.S. Army War College’s Art of War symposia at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the Eastern Front operations of 1942–1945 and began to publish Soviet sources in English, did American soldiers and readers begin to see the Soviet side of the same campaigns: the Stavka’s overconfidence in February, the hard lessons it drew, and the deliberate choice of April. The German official history, published from the 1990s, and the work of Frieser and Töppel, completed the correction. The history in this collection rests on both sides’ records.

Questions readers ask

Why was it called the Kursk salient?

Because it was a bulge in the front line around the city of Kursk, about 500 kilometers south of Moscow. It formed when the Soviet winter offensive took Kursk on 8 February 1943 and the German counteroffensive retook Kharkov and Belgorod in March, south of it, but could not go farther before the spring thaw. Russians usually call it the Kursk Arc or the Kursk Bulge (Kurskaya duga).

How many times did Kharkov change hands?

Four times. The Germans took it in October 1941. A Soviet offensive to retake it failed in May 1942 (the Second Battle of Kharkov). The Red Army took it on 16 February 1943, the Germans retook it on 14–16 March 1943 (the Third Battle of Kharkov), and the Red Army liberated it for the last time on 23 August 1943, at the end of the Kursk battles. That final liberation is described in Chapter 7.

Why did the Germans wait until July?

First because of the thaw, which made large operations impossible until about May; then because Hitler, encouraged by Model’s report on the strength of the Soviet defenses, decided to wait for the new Panther tanks, more Tigers and the Ferdinand tank destroyers. Each postponement brought more of them to the front, but the Soviets gained more from the delay than the Germans did.

Did the Soviets know the Germans were coming?

Yes, in general, from April: the direction, the objective and the forces. They learned it from their own reconnaissance and from British intelligence passed officially and by the spy John Cairncross, as well as from the Lucy network in Switzerland. They did not know the date until the last days, and gave several false warnings in May. The hour of the attack was learned from prisoners on the night of 4–5 July.

How it connects

The three months of waiting described here were used by the Red Army to build the defenses of Chapter 2, against which Model’s Ninth Army attacked in the north (Chapter 3) and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, led by the SS Panzer Corps that had retaken Kharkov, in the south (Chapter 4). The Luftwaffe and the Soviet air armies counted here fought the battle described in Chapter 5; the SS corps and Vasilevsky met again at Prokhorovka (Chapter 6). The counteroffensives Zhukov proposed on 8 April liberated Orel, Belgorod and, finally, Kharkov in August (Chapter 7). The crimes of the winter fighting, and the Kharkov trial of December 1943, belong to Chapter 8, and the reckoning of losses and memory to Chapter 9. Common questions are answered in the Battle of Kursk FAQ.

Sources

• David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), especially chapters 1–3 on the winter campaign, the planning on both sides and the balance of forces (pp. 337–338 for the strength figures); and When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (University Press of Kansas, 1995; revised 2015), for the winter campaign, Lend-Lease and guns and mortars (p. 165).
• David M. Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942–August 1943 (London: Frank Cass, 1991); After Stalingrad: The Red Army’s Winter Offensive, 1942–1943 (Solihull: Helion, 2009); Soviet Military Intelligence in War (London: Frank Cass, 1990).
• Karl-Heinz Frieser, “The Battle of the Kursk Salient,” in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8, The Eastern Front 1943–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017; German edition 2007), on the German debate, Operational Orders No. 5 and 6, the Munich conference and the balance of forces (p. 100 in the German edition).
• Roman Töppel, Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War (Warwick: Helion, 2018); Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943 (Solihull: Helion, 2011); Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011); Dennis Showalter, Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (New York: Random House, 2013).
• George M. Nipe Jr., Last Victory in Russia: The SS-Panzerkorps and Manstein’s Kharkov Counteroffensive, February–March 1943 (Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2000); Robert M. Citino, The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2007).
• G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill, 1997), for the Kharkov defensive operation of 4–25 March 1943.
• Memoirs, used as recollection: Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Chicago: Regnery, 1958); Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London: Michael Joseph, 1952); G. K. Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971); A. M. Vasilevsky, A Lifelong Cause (Moscow: Progress, 1981); F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956).
• Crimes: Danny S. Parker, Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of SS Colonel Jochen Peiper (Boston: Da Capo, 2014), pp. 94–96, 356–357; Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler’s SS Commander (Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2007); Tim Ripley, Steel Storm: Waffen-SS Panzer Battles on the Eastern Front, 1943–1945 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 73; Charles W. Sydnor Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945 (Princeton University Press, 1977); Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2016); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, on Kharkov and Drobitsky Yar.
• Intelligence: F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1981); B. Jack Copeland, ed., Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2006); Michael Smith, Station X (London: Channel 4 Books, 1998); Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (1994); Anthony Read and David Fisher, Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring of the Second World War (1980); Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession (1986); V. E. Tarrant, The Red Orchestra (1995); Timothy P. Mulligan, “Spies, Ciphers and ‘Zitadelle’: Intelligence and the Battle of Kursk, 1943,” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 2 (1987).
• Lend-Lease: Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (New York: Greenwood, 1989); Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004); summary tables in Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease”.
• Sokolovo and Otakar Jaroš: Military History Institute, Prague (Vojenský historický ústav); Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Wikipedia, “Battle of Sokolovo”.
• Reference summaries checked for dates and figures: Wikipedia, “Third Battle of Kharkov”, “Battle of Kursk”, “Lucy spy ring”, “John Cairncross”, “Joachim Peiper” and “1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”; University of Oregon, table of forces at Kursk after Kurskaia bitva (Moscow, 1974).

Photographs: a Soviet photograph of February 1943 of unrecorded authorship; German propaganda company (PK) photographs, several by SS war correspondents, in the Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE), the Polish National Digital Archive and the Dutch National Archives; Russian Ministry of Defence portraits (CC BY 4.0); an Office of War Information photograph in the Library of Congress; and a modern map by a Wikipedia contributor (CC BY-SA 3.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. German wartime photographs, and especially those of SS propaganda companies, were made to glorify the units they show; their captions are given with that in mind, and dates and places their records do not confirm are noted as uncertain. Badges and insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations in the period style, not official emblems.