Faces of War: Casualties and losses in the Battle of Kursk

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The Forgotten Soldier

The photographs shows eight unidentified men who fought in the greatest clash of armoured forces in history; The Battle of Kursk. They were all Waffen-SS volunteers of the SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Leibstandarte SS. All photos are taken on the Kursk salient in July 1943 by the war correspondents Max Büschel and Johan King who served with the Leibstandarte SS during the battle of Prokhorovka. The photographs is maintained by U.S. National Archives. The whole Battle of Kursk refers to the period of the German offensive Zitadelle and the subsequent massive Soviet counterstrikes, named Kutuzov and Polkovodets Rumyantsev, that followed the German offensive in July and August in 1943. It involved more than 3 million men, 10,000 tanks, 55,000 guns and mortars and 5,500 aircraft. According to Russian military historian Grigoriy Krivosheyev, who based his figures on the Soviet archives, Soviet casualties in the counter-offensives that followed Citadel were ~710,000 in combat, including 254,470 killed or missing. German historian Roman Töppel writes that Krivosheyev's figures on Soviet losses at Kursk are underestimated. According to German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser, Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units suffered 111,132, including 34,448 killed and missing in these battles. A veteran of Kursk wrote: We fought man to man. All German superiority in communications, movement, and gunnery was lost in the chaos, noise, and smoke. The atmosphere was choking, I was gasping for breath, with perspiration running in streams down my face. The psychological stress was immense. We expected to be killed at any second. Those who were still alive and still fighting a couple of hours later were astonished. The concentrated area of the battlefield was filled with burned-out armoured vehicles, exuding columns of black, oily smoke. The historian Martin Gilbert remarked: All wars end up being reduced to statistics, strategies, debates about their origins and results. These debates about war are important, but not more important than the human story of those who fought in them. Ordinary men conscripted into the Heer, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine or enlisted men of the Waffen-SS did not fight for [the Nazi Party]. Neither did the hundreds of thousands of European volunteers. There were certainly other values and beliefs involved. Perspectives that may be easily forgotten.