Battle of Kursk A Lost Victory 5 July 1943

Although Hitler may have had much cause for concern after Germany's horrific defeat at Stalingrad, he was by no means ready to give up his struggle against the Soviet Union. After all, the defeat of communism and the supposedly subhuman Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union had always been a central goal of Nazi ideology. Hitler had, moreover, faced considerable adversity in the past, but in the end he had always triumphed over any difficulties. As a young man, he had been wounded during Germany's ill-fated attempt to defeat the Allies in World War I; in the political sphere, his first major offensive -the so-called Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich - had ended with a jail sentence. Now, two decades later, Hitler faced bleak prospects once again. Furthermore, the magnitude of the disaster at Stalingrad, where what was left of the encircled German 6th Army surrendered to the Soviet Red Army on 2 February 1943, was, of course, far greater than the setback he had suffered years earlier in his attempt to seize power in Munich.
Still, Hitler refused to believe that all was lost, and he took comfort in the way German forces under the direction of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had regained much lost territory in the wake of the surrender at Stalingrad. In fact, by June of 1943, he found himself confronted with a very tempting strategic opportunity: a great bulge in the enemy lines centred on Kursk, a town best known before the war for its destruction at the hands of Mongols in 1240, and for the iron-ore deposits below its soil that rendered compasses useless.
Within the huge salient, measuring 190km (120 miles) wide by 120km (75 miles) deep, were troops of the Soviet Central and Voronezh fronts (army groups). If the German forces could attack from the north and the south in a huge pincer movement, it would be possible for them to encircle the Soviets. They could then destroy them in a bloody Kesselschlacht, or 'cauldron battle', of the kind the Germans had used to amass unprecedented tactical victories during the first part of the war against the Soviets. The Germans would thereby not only succeed in regaining territory and annihilating countless Soviet forces, but would also improve Germany's international position.
In Hitler's view, Kursk would 'light a bonfire' that would impress the world. Such an impression was especially important from a diplomatic perspective. In addition to the well-publicised awful defeat the Germans had suffered at Stalingrad, they had also lost North Africa to the Allies between 1942 and 1943. As a result, representatives of the Italian and Romanian governments had begun to make discreet inquiries about some sort of peace agreement. Turkey had finally made the decision not to act against the Soviet Union in the Caucasus, and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had even found it necessary to warn the Finnish Government against seeking to come to terms with the Soviets.
On top of these diplomatic motives, strategic concerns also provided some of the impetus for Germany to preserve the initiative it had regained on the Eastern Front with Manstein's counter-offensive at Kharkov. Although Hitler and his generals realised that their strategic goal now had to be far more limited than it had been at the onset of the German—Soviet "war in 1941, they nonetheless believed that a successful attack at Kursk would have value. Such an offensive, code-named Operation Citadel, would inflict enough damage on the Red Army to keep it from launching its own major attack, while at the same time giving the German forces the chance to consolidate their defences. It was meant to be the most significant of several other limited offensives aimed at this same general goal.