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The roots of the Wehrmacht’s failure at Kursk are found not only in the battlefield’s dark Russian soil, but deeply buried in the stony ground of two years of fighting on the Eastern Front. The struggle it spawned was staggering in its scope and consequence. It reveals Kursk as a desperate gamble by Hitler to secure the future of his forces on the Eastern Front-and even Germany’s wider prospects in the war. Only recently has a clearer and more balanced perspective come into view.

For decades the battle has been visible only through two distorting prisms-one held by a defeated and divided Germany, and the other by the manipulative and oppressive Soviet regime. Yet the Battle of Kursk remains controversial, with aspects of its conception, conduct, and impact still hotly debated. A Soviet round had struck me in the shoulder, shattering the bone and leaving me gasping for air.Īt the battle’s conclusion, Germany’s inspector-general of armored troops, the wily Heinz Guderian, deemed that Germany had “suffered a decisive defeat”-certainly not the outcome Hitler had in mind when he said that Operation Citadel, as the Germans called the offensive, would be “of decisive importance.” In that same instant I was knocked off my feet as though hit by a heavyweight boxer. The butt kicked and a round was sent hurtling toward a faceless Soviet soldier. I instinctively yelled a warning, dropped to one knee and squeezed the trigger of my rifle. I twisted to see a camouflaged cover being thrown off a trench.

He whimpered as I moved toward him, but was silent by the time that I was at his side. I expected to be cut down any moment or blown to smithereens by the shells that slammed about….I heard my old friend Ernst panting seconds before his right arm was torn from his body by an explosion that flung his rifle at my feet. Ivan bullets zipped around us I could hear them flying past my ears. The 20-year-old lieutenant struggled toward his platoon’s objective on the morning of July 5, 1943, against a weight of fire he had never before experienced. German infantryman Raimund Rüffer would never forget the first day of Hitler’s offensive toward the Russian city of Kursk.