In the Red Army, so called "trophy teams" would survey the battlefield after the front line moved on. Their job was to find out which tanks could be salvaged and which ones were a lost cause. A report would be composed with a map of where the tanks are left, what kind of tanks they are, how badly damaged they are, etc. Here is an example of such a report.

Tanks were separated into three categories:

• Worthy: No major components of the tank are damaged. Penetrations in the armour, if any, can be sealed with plugs.

• Needs repairs: Some major components are damaged or missing. Penetrations are present, but the breaches are small and spaced far enough apart to not have compromised the overall structural integrity of the plate.

• Unworthy: Burnt out tanks, tanks with significant damage to armour plates, including deformation bad enough to impede normal function of the tank's mechanisms.

Worthy tanks are collected at a field evacuation center to be inspected and repaired. Tanks that need repairs are shipped off to repair factories. Interesting specimens were sent to appropriate institutions to be studied, regardless of their condition. Unworthy tanks were basically scrap. Typically they were not high priority and were abandoned, only to be picked up after the war and cut up/melted down. However, by that time, nobody had the nice maps composed by trophy teams anymore and a number of tanks that were left in hard to reach places. I follow archaeological communities and tanks in various condition are still found once in a while. All the low hanging fruit is long gone though, a lot of what's found these days is more like a pile of fragments than a tank.