Located roughly 330 miles south of Moscow, Kursk and the surrounding countryside lay in Soviet hands, an enormous bulge penetrating deep into the German lines, surrounded on threes sides by the Wehrmacht.
Another decisive battlefield victory, Hitler reasoned, could well shore up his political and diplomatic fronts.Ī look at the map of the German lines in Russia made the target of a German attack obvious. Additionally, Germany's allies began to question their relationships with the Third Reich after the military setbacks in Russia. If Hitler were to negotiate, however, he wanted to do so from a position of strength. Though it was now all but impossible for Germany to win a decisive military victory in Russia, at this point Hitler still could have attempted to negotiate peace with the Soviet Union, and Stalin, despite American President Franklin Roosevelt's call for an unconditional surrender, may well have agreed to a separate peace. After Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht was still a force to be reckoned with, but the Red Army had finally proven itself in battle, winning a major battle and going on the offensive. This was perhaps the great crossroads of the war. Much of the Soviet Union still lay in German hands, however, from the Baltic Sea to Ukraine. Within a few weeks, the lines had settled and the great offensives and retreats had given way to smaller skirmishes along the line.
Manstein was able to stabilize the German line, fight off the Red Army attacks and even retake ground such as the strategically important city of Kharkov. The German situation was salvaged, however, largely due to the exploits of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, arguably the most gifted field commander in all of World War II. Aimed at a giant salient in the German lines around the Russian town of Kursk, the attack proved to be the largest tank battle in history, and ended in dramatic failure for the German army.Īfter the German disaster at Stalingrad in February 1943, many predicted that the Wehrmacht would soon disintegrate in the face of ever more daring Red Army attacks.
On July 5, 1943, Adolf Hitler's last big offensive in Russia began.
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