Za I fully understand your quandry but to me if not Kursk it would of happened elsewhere. The Soviets wanted to pull the might of the Wehrmacht armor out into the open for hoping that sheer weight of numbers could win the day for them. the Kursk salient is often called a complete Soviet victory, I see it as a waste of human life on both sides and almost a near draw, something Soviet sources still do not want to admit too and most probably even in this high tech time we live in records have been conviently lost. As for German lossess records true many are still being found little by little to form the basis of new titles I was mentioning. I do see though the feeling of the Med/Italien campaign weighing heavily on the German hierarchy so therfore resources had to be pulled from somewhere and the units on the Ost front were becoming thin which again the Soviets tried to take advantage of