Only one thing by 4th of May at a conferance in Münich with Hitler, Zeitzler and von Kluge were in favour of an attack.While von Manstein thought that an attack in April might have a good chance of succes but did NOT belive that the prospects for the attack were good at this LATE stage. Model concluding that the prospects of achieving surprise were gone and was negative to the Zitadelle plan.
The initial idea for
Zitadelle arose in early March 1943, when Hitler instructd the OKH to start planning for it. By then, Manstein's "Backhand Blow" at Kharkov was still rolling, but it would stop shortly after that, simply because the spring
Rasputitsa had arrived and turned the landscape into a sea of mud and because of his own considerable losses at Kharkov (II Panzer Army lost half its armour there). Manstein was in favour of launching
Zitadelle as soon as possible, and so the original start date was set to May 12.
But the problem was that even way before the May 4 meeting at Munich (in which Hitler, Zeitzler, Kluge, Guderian and Manstein were present, Model could not make it and sent a letter stating his opinions about the whole issue), the Soviets already
knew that the Germans would be attacking the Kursk salient and had begun their preparatives, so that even if the Germans had attacked on May 12 as originally planned they would've crashed against substantial Soviet defences, and with far less new fancy weapons that they would have available later in July.
On April 8, Zhukov sent a telegram to Stalin stating with 100% certainty that the German attack would be directed against Kursk, and in this he had the full agreement of Vasilevsky and the Front commanders in the area. And there's yet another source, Anastas Mikoyan's Memoirs, which claims that the Soviets knew with certainty about the German plans even earlier than that. According to Mikoyan, he was summoned to a meeting with Stalin on March 27, in which Stalin told them that the Germans were gathering forces for an assault on Kursk.
Historians still don't agree where and how did the Soviets get this key information. "Lucy" is a possibility, another is information from Bletchley Park, either provided willingly by the British or smuggled to the NKVD resident in London by Cairncross and Philby. The problem with this option is that according to records, all the German messages decrypted at Bletchley Park pointing to a German offensive at Kurk are dated after April 8. And there are still other open options: Soviet partisans could had tapped German land cable lines behind the front (a very real possibility and something that was done regularly), or the Soviets, unknown to their western Allies, could have been able too by that stage in the war to break the German codes.
Whatever the reason, the Soviets were fully alert by early April, and even if the Germans had attacked on May 12, the Soviets would have had a full month to fortify themselves and stockpile reserves and supplies. This is what Model stated in his letter to the May 4 Munich meeting: he (unlike Manstein) had conducted careful intensive aerial reconaissance of Soviet positions in front of his forces, and they were already formidably fortified, and so he wanted to call the whole thing off.
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