Because they didn't at first. For all the destruction inflicted upon the 5th Guards Tank, by the end of Prokhorovka the Germans had made no real gains meaning both sides were able to retrieve their damaged vehicles. ITTL it took roughly two days before the Germans were able to resume the advance. That is two days in which the Soviets could drag the damaged vehicles off to be repaired behind the lines.
Except in TTL Prokorovka had the same result as OTL, a big German tactical victory wityh hundreds of knocked out Soviet tanks littering the battlefield. See George Nipe's two books. Blood Seel & Myth, Decision in the Ukraine, , Demolishing the Myth Valeriy Zamulin.
You need to realise that much of what was written about Prohorovka during the Cold War was in fact based on a Soviet lie. It may be based on whateve Rotmistrov said to Staln in order to expain all the Soviet tanks we now know ere lost. We know from Nipe's research of the II SS Panzer Corps records that the German tank losses were nothing like what the Soviets claimed (hundreds f Tigers and Panthers - claims which cannot be true because II SS Panzer Corps only had a handful of Tigers and did not have Panthers at all at the time. Khruschev's rrole in the lead up to the attack was also covered up. Had it been revealed that he had in fact forced Rotmistrov to make the attack, thus peciptating the destructin of 5GTA after Stalin died and Khruschev was in power it would have been hugely embaerrassing for the Kremlin to say the least and it would have made the Soviet Union look bad abroad. So the continued the lie until the Soviet Union fell.
And because Western historians believed the Soviet line nobody bothered to check the records of II SS Panzer Corps which were captured by US forces at the end of WW2 and held in US archives whee they lay unexamined for forty years or so until historians such as ipe actually bothered to look. At which point the Soviet account began to fall apart like the house of cards it actually was.
Prior to that of course Werstern historians of the battle had written accounts based on the traditional Soviet account which is why there are still those who beleve the "traditional" version of the battle.
In the Shattered Citadel timeline the POD occurs after Prokhorovka with that battle going as per OTL. Whicch is one of the reasons Manstyein is in position to launch a more powerful Operation Roland than he did IOTL. The ther reason of course is hat, due to the success of the Hermann Goering Division at Gela in TTL Manstein manages to convince Hitler to continue Citadel with Operation Roland in an attempt to capture Kursk with the Southern wing only. This gives Manstein more Luftwaffe support than he had hough this is limited because I kept the historical weather conditions.
