Like a Beacon · Wie ein Fanal

Like a Beacon · Wie ein Fanal

Operation Citadel in early June 1943, from the west – and what Turkey made of it. A staff game in English and German, with a study from the documents.

Operations Order No. 6 wanted the victory at Kursk to have "the effect of a beacon seen around the world" – and, the files add, to keep the neutrals in line. In April 1943, Hitler considered a thrust by both army groups from Rylsk east to Kursk, then gave it up. In this game it is made, in early June, before the Panthers.

You sit in the Operations Department of the Army General Staff: you plan the regrouping across the army-group boundary, you put proposals to Hitler, you answer Manstein, Kluge and Kleist. At a second desk, in the German embassy in Ankara, you write the reports Berlin reads – sober or pleasing –, and you watch what Turkey does: the Aegean, the chrome, Cairo.

• No score. At the end your dates stand beside the record, Berlin's picture of Turkey beside Ankara's own. The June result can put the Soviet timetable back by at most six weeks; the Ukraine is lost in every game.
• The crimes of the period stand in the files column with date, place and source, and are never playable – among them an order of your own department, of 4 September 1943, that set the zones of the withdrawal.
• From the record: Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin (US Army 1968), Foreign Relations of the United States 1943, the Nuremberg documents and the judgment in the High Command Case. Every value is marked: document, official history, secondary, or assumption.
• With the study in eight chapters, free online as well.

English and German. Plays in the browser, about an hour and a half.

Content note: war crimes, deportation, and the murder of the Jews, stated from the documents; no images of the dead.