The Battle of Prokhorovka: The Brutal Clash between the USSR and the Wehrmacht | Documentary

On July 12, 1943, in a three-kilometer corridor between the Psel River and the Storozhevoye Forest, southwest of the Russian city of Prokhorovka, the divisions of the II SS Panzer Corps—Leibstandarte, Das Reich, and Totenkopf—repelled an attack by the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army under Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov. The official Soviet narrative, consolidated over decades, described the engagement as the largest tank battle in history, with four hundred German losses and the destruction of the Waffen-SS's elite armored forces. Inventories of the II SS Panzer Corps, located in 2020 by British historian Ben Wheatley in the U.S. National Archives, revealed that German losses between July 11 and 20 did not exceed sixteen armored vehicles out of a total of more than three hundred and forty. Operation Citadel, launched on July 5, 1943, as a pincer movement on the Kursk salient, was compromised before its inception by a series of factors: massive mechanical failures of the Panther tank, the superiority of the Soviet intelligence system—which included the Lucy network and the Ultra interception system—and the construction of a deep defensive system of over 5,000 kilometers of trenches under the direction of Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky. On July 13, following the Allied landings in Sicily, Hitler ordered the cancellation of the operation. Belgorod was recaptured by the Red Army on August 5 and Kharkov on August 23, effectively ending the German strategic initiative on the Eastern Front.