Tooth flank fracture (TFF) is a fatigue failure mode in gears in which the crack is initiated in a larger depth below the surface within the tooth volume. The crack propagates load-dependently and is not visually observable until final rupture of the tooth. The present publication focuses on numerical fatigue crack simulation of TFF in case-hardened spur gears. Herein, an existing phase-field model for fatigue fracture is revisited and extended to account for the simultaneous subsurface crack initiation and growth in high cycle fatigue during TFF. For this purpose, a gear tooth finite element model is implemented and parameterized using experimental data. Inhomogeneous material properties and residual stresses resulting from the manufacturing process are explicitly considered. The main interest of the study lies in the ability of the phase-field model to reproduce experimentally observable behavior during TFF such as subsurface crack initiation and the emerging subsurface crack path.