Glantz, David M. The Battle of Kursk. University Press of Kansas. 2004.

Consequences.

Virtually all participants in the Kursk operation and historians writing after the war have agreed on the catastrophic consequences of the German Kursk defeat for the German war effort. Marshal von Manstein cataloged the grim consequences in his memoirs:
When "Citadel" was called off, the initiative in the Eastern theatre of war finally passed to the Russians. . . . Henceforth Southern Army Group found itself waging a defensive struggle which could not be anything more than a system of improvisations and stopgaps. ... To maintain ourselves in the field, and in doing so to wear down the enemy's offensive capability to the utmost, became the whole essence of this struggle.37
In his final judgment on Citadel, Guderian echoed von Manstein's view:
By the failure of Citadel we had suffered a decisive defeat. The armoured formations, reformed and re-equipped with so much effort, had lost heavily both in men and equipment and would now be unemployable for a long time to come. It was problematical whether they could be rehabilitated in time to defend the Eastern Front; as for being able to use them in defense of the Western Front against Allied landings that threatened for next spring, this was even more questionable. Needless to say the Russians exploited their victory to the full. There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative.38
In retrospect, von Mellenthin also judged Citadel to have been "a complete and most regrettable failure." He explained:
It is true that Russian losses were much heavier than German; indeed tactically the fighting had been indecisive. Fourth Panzer Army took thirty-two thousand prisoners, and captured or destroyed more than two thousand tanks and nearly two thousand guns. But our panzer divisions—in such splendid shape at the beginning of the battle—had been bled white, and with Anglo-American assistance the Russians could afford losses on this colossal scale. With the failure of our supreme effort, the strategic initiative passed to the Russians.39
Heinrici too sketched out the tragic consequences of the failure of Citadel, once again emphasizing the broader strategic implications:
The failure of Zitadelle had momentous results, in the political as well as the military realm. The ratio of reserves of the Eastern Army to its enemy was now more unfavorable than it was before. While only a portion of the Soviet operational reserves were reduced in their combat effectiveness, all of the troops available to the Eastern Army had suffered considerably. The initiative, which thanks to Hitler's plans had now fallen into the hands of the enemy, would never again be seized because of the requirement to defend an over-extended front with insufficient forces. Therefore, having the Eastern Army render effective support to any of the OKW theaters of war was now out of the question. Germany's allies recognized that the outcome of Zitadelle, combined with the successful landing of the Western Powers in Sicily, meant that they could no longer anticipate a final victory by the Axis Powers. Therefore, there emerged efforts in all of these countries to oppose their own leadership so that their countries would avoid the effects of the coming defeat.40
Soviet assessments of the consequences of Kursk generally agree with German perceptions. In his memoirs Zhukov emphasized the obvious while underscoring the psychological impact of German defeat:
The battle fought in the Kursk, Orel, and Belgorod area was one of the most important engagements of the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War as a whole. Not only were the picked and most powerful groupings of the Germans destroyed here, but the faith of the German Army and the German people in the Nazi leadership and Germany's ability to withstand the growing might of the Soviet Union was irrevocably shattered. The defeat of the main grouping of German troops in the Kursk area paved the way for the subsequent wide-scale offensive operations by the Soviet forces to expel the Germans from our soil completely, and then from the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria and ultimately to crush Nazi Germany.41
Vasilevsky later echoed Zhukov's assessment:
We were unable then [in late August] to analyze thoroughly the results of the Battle of the Kursk Bulge. Yet one thing was clear: we had not only won a great battle, we had matured in it. Our positions in working out the plan of the summer campaign had been justified: we had learned how to assess the enemy's intentions better than we had done in the past. We had had enough willpower, character, sheer stamina and nerve to avoid a miscalculation, a premature battle engagement or presenting the enemy with a chance to retrieve the situation. Elaboration of the operational and strategic assignments had been done successfully. Troop control had grown in skill at all levels. In a word, our leadership qualities had displayed both a creative skill and a superiority over the military skill of the Nazi command.
As a result of the Kursk Battle, the Soviet Armed Forces had dealt the enemy a buffeting from which Nazi Germany was never to recover. It lost 30 of its divisions, including 7 Panzer divisions. Losses of German land forces amounted to over 500,000 men, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 guns and over 3,500 warplanes. These losses and the failure of the offensive which had been so widely acclaimed in Nazi propaganda forced the Germans to go over to a strategic defense along the entire Soviet-German front. The big defeat at the Kursk Bulge was the beginning of a fatal crisis for the German Army.42
Vasilevsky then added a word about the international significance of the operation, evidencing Soviet bitterness over the perceived lack of Western appreciation of the Soviet war effort:
In reading works by several bourgeois writers on World War II, I have frequently noticed their inclination to play down the Red Army victory in the summer of 1943. They try to instill in their readers the idea that the Kursk Battle was just an ordinary, insignificant episode in the war; to these ends they either barely mention it or just skip it. Very rarely have I come across in such books any real assessment of the Nazi plan of revenge for the summer of 1943 as an adventurous or a bankrupt end to the strategy of the fascist generals. But, as the saying has it, deeds speak louder than words. I would mention just one elementary fact: at the height of the Kursk Battle our Allies landed in Sicily and, on 17 August, crossed over into Italy. Could they have possibly done so with even half the forces against them that we had to contend with in the summer of 1943? I think not.43
All of this is not to deny that the Red Army made costly mistakes, both at Kursk and throughout the remainder of the war. Although the Central Front halted the Ninth German Army more or less according to plan, the entire Soviet leadership underestimated the power of the Fourth Panzer Army opposite the Voronezh Front. This failure is even more surprising considering the extensive Red knowledge of the powerful SS and Wehrmacht forces assembled in the south. In addition, throughout the defensive battle, Soviet counterattacks and counterstrokes tended to be launched prematurely, before the force of the German assault had been absorbed by the antitank defenses. The four tank armies and numerous separate mobile corps employed in the Kursk campaign were frequently mishandled, as a result their combat power was blunted against prepared defenses or they were forced to attack in two different directions. Yet these errors, costly as they were, were errors of execution, not conception.
The Battle of Kursk meant an end to blitzkrieg in a strategic and operational sense. For the first time in the war, a German offensive was contained in the tactical or shallow operational depths. This was surprising and, ultimately, catastrophic for an army whose past strategic successes had been predicated on the delivery of successful deep operational thrusts that paralyzed its foes militarily and psychologically. Kursk proved that massed German armor covered by swift fighter escort could no longer range deep into the Soviet rear with abandon as it had in 1941 and 1942.
Even more striking, Kursk also spelled doom for German blitzkrieg in a tactical sense. Since the start of the war, and in fact since 1939, the Germans had successfully employed panzer divisions and carefully organized combat groups (kampfgruppen) of tanks and motorized infantry,- supported by the vaunted Stuka dive-bomber, to smash through enemy tactical defenses and commence deep exploitations. To the utter consternation of the German command, they were unable to do so at Kursk even though they maintained clear technological superiority in tanks and antitank weapons. This was so because the Soviets had learned, albeit painfully, some fundamental and critical lessons from their numerous past failures. The most important of these lessons was that the only effective defense was one that exploited all arms and possessed both depth and flexibility. At Kursk the Soviets clearly demonstrated that only such a defense had the resilience to withstand traditional German tank assault. As a result, the Soviets proved that a determined and properly constructed infantry-based defense could defeat the tactics of blitzkrieg.
Hence, Kursk marked a turning point in the war strategically, operationally, and tactically. Building on the lessons of Kursk, the Soviets also applied their new combined-arms techniques to offensive situations, at first tentatively and later with greater effect. At Orel and Belgorod-Kharkov, the Soviets led their assaults with infantry supported by massive artillery preparations that softened up German front-line defenses. The infantry was accompanied by infantry support tanks and self-propelled guns, which overcame the most stubborn German tactical resistance. They then committed, first, their tank and mechanized corps and, then, their tank armies to complete the penetration and commence the operational exploitation. Despite early problems, this cascading torrent of properly supported armor became an ever more effective means for subsequent Soviet operational and strategic advances.44
Beset by growing political constraints imposed by a frustrated and increasingly irrational Hitler, unable to match Soviet weapons production, and bled white by the attrition among younger experienced combat commanders, German tactics stagnated. Confronted with the death of blitzkrieg and unable to develop defensive tactics necessary to halt the Soviet juggernaut, German defeat simply became a matter of blood and time.
The battles of July and August 1943 associated with the German Operation Citadel and the Soviet Kursk Strategic Offensive Operation not only ended the myth of German invincibility but clearly demonstrated that the Red Army was rapidly developing the skills to match its enormous numbers. The resulting combination proved fatal to blitzkrieg and, ultimately, lethal to Germany.

44. Interestingly enough, Western armies went through the same sort of education against blitzkrieg and with mixed results. Having failed to deal with it in 1940, Western armies struggled to overcome it in 1944. The British tried to ape German armored practices at Caen (Operation Goodwood) but failed in the teeth of an effective German antitank defense. In Operation Cobra (St. Lo) the Americans resorted to carpet bombing to smash German defenses and unleash Patton's Third Army for its drive on Paris. At Mortain, American air power combined with determined ground defense sapped the strength and shock power of four attacking German panzer divisions. The same occurred (with the help of weather and terrain) in the Bulge in late 1944, when Hitler unleashed several panzer armies against the Allies. Despite these primarily defensive successes, neither the British nor the Americans were able to mount offensive operations as routinely spectacular as the Germans of 1941 and 1942 or the Soviets of 1943 through 1945, partly because of inexperience and partly because of their less mature force structure and tactical and operational doctrine.