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

On 12 July 1943, in a three-kilometre corridor between the Psel River and the Storozhevoye Forest, southwest of the Russian town of Prokhorovka, divisions of the II SS Panzer Corps—Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf—repulsed an attack by the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, under the command of Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov. The official Soviet narrative, consolidated over the decades, described the engagement as the largest tank battle in history, with four hundred German casualties and the destruction of the elite armoured forces of the Waffen-SS. Inventories of the II SS Panzer Corps, located in 2020 by British historian Ben Wheatley in the US National Archives, revealed that German losses between 11 and 20 July did not exceed sixteen armoured vehicles out of a total of over three hundred and forty. Operation Citadel, launched on 5 July 1943 as a pincer movement on the Kursk salient, was compromised before it began by a number 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 kilometres of trenches under the leadership of Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky. On 13 July, following the Allied landings in Sicily, Hitler ordered the operation cancelled. Belgorod was recaptured by the Red Army on 5 August, and Kharkov on 23 August, effectively ending the German strategic initiative on the Eastern Front.