On the night of July 17, AG South was forced to begin the withdrawal of its forces from Prokhorovka to their original positions, Footnote 3 and on September 22, the Voronezh Front, which had forced the enemy to retreat by 400 km, reached the Dnieper River. Thus, after 12 days of heavy fighting in the southern part of the Kursk Bulge, Army Group (AG) South, the stronger one of the two formations that participated in the offensive, was able to move only 35 km forward (out of the planned 145). Footnote 2 Nevertheless, the decision to carry out the operation was not revoked, which led to a failure of the Wehrmacht with major consequences. Footnote 1 By the end of the first third of May 1943, the quantity and condition of the Soviet troops were such that it became impossible to achieve the goals set out in the Citadel plan. The recently published documents of the German troops of the Central and Voronezh Fronts, operating at Kursk and of the Steppe Military District (StepMD) provide evidence that, as early as at the end of April 1943, even the command of one of the Wehrmacht strike groups at the Kursk Bulge considered the conditions to be unfavorable for carrying out a major offensive.
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