‘Fridolin von Spaun met Hitler at a dinner for Nazi supporters in the early 1930’s. As Spaun saw Hitler staring at him, he felt as if Hitler’s eyes looked directly into his innermost thoughts. And when Hitler held onto the back of von Spaun’s chair, Spaun felt “a trembling from his fingers penetrating me. I actually felt it. But not a nervous trembling. Rather I felt: this man, this body, is only the tool for implementing a big, all-powerful will here on earth. That’s a miracle in my view.”  (1)

 

One irrefutable fact about the personality of Adolf Hitler was his immense and intense level of charisma. Like a magnetic force dragging the souls of men towards his inner chasm of evil, it was a remarkable gift and the product both of his own personality but his power increased through the desperation of ordinary people to stand alongside the extraordinary. All dictators share this ability to manipulate others and only those with an equally capable self or deep convictions are able to resist. So it was for officers of the German Wehrmacht for they were but men and women.

Embarked as I am on a series of biographies of German officers at the rank of general and above who served Hitler between 1933 and 1945, it is possible to discern some clear categories in the degree to which these very senior officers were attracted to the ideology of Nazism per se - as opposed to those for whom seeking a closer and even personal relationship with the Fuhrer was the ultimate goal. In this latter sense, a nodding adherence to Nazism was simply a passport to entering closer to the dictator’s presence as opposed to those officers who intrinsically shared Hitler’s racist and expansionist views as espoused in his 1923 treatise Main Kampf. The challenge for the biographer is to work out who was who and to trace these emotional attachments throughout a career – a career that may have fluctuated both upwards and of course could often catastrophically crash. In cases where Hitler showed favouritism it seems reasonable to expect that officers retained their devotion to the Fuhrer and this was manipulated by the magnification of awards given for loyalty as much as courage. 

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Willing sublimation to the deception, miscalculation, ruthless violence and racism that usually accompanies being close the central personality within any cult is a basic requirement of absolute loyalty to absolute power. Generals Jodel and Keitel are the most obvious examples of army officers who were both mesmerised by Hitler’s personal charisma and power and found it impossible to resist but they were far from alone – Generalfeldmarschall von Brauschitsch may have wavered in the depth of his loyalty between his oath to Adolf Hitler and his moral obligation to the army which he had served all his life but, in the end and despite having been sacked by Hitler for cowardice and incompetence, proclaimed himself a committed Nazi as he navigated the bloodthirsty purges of the post July 1944 plot. (3) This adds a further complication to the biographer trying to get an accurate and truthful fix on the motivations of any particular officer. Apart from blind loyalty therefore, there was also blind obedience and terror.

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Further out from the very centre of OKW and OKH we start to identify officers who remain totally committed to Hitler but also those for whom the magnetic charm had never worked or was perhaps fading. In the former we can place Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch or Generaloberst Hans Hube while in the latter, those who were drifting away, we could place men like Rommel, von Kluge and von Kleist – while not going so far as to become members of the resistance movement towards Hitler, these officers played a very delicate and tactical game, as most officers did, of not antagonising their leader while also not adhering to every word or command he muttered. Lastly, polarised as far away as one could be from the Nazi regime and from Hitler’s influence were the men of flag officer rank who were prepared to give their lives to end Hitler’s reign as dictator of Germany – Generalfeldmarschall von Witzleben, Major General von Steiff, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner and Generaloberst Olbricht. This is a very generalised survey of the breadth of commitment to Hitler and every individual case needs to be treated and re evaluated on its own merits within the bounds of what evidence is available. So where did Hermann Balck fit in?

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Hermann Balck did not set out to fully clarify his position either during the war, in his life thereafter or indeed his memories. Instead, we have a tantalising narrative that is only partially complete and ignores numerous incidents that would have painted his legacy less than brightly. This makes Balck is a fine example of the complexity of trying to evaluate which officers gave most to the cause of Nazism and the achievement of Nazi ideology and aims as opposed to those who resisted with their conscience and those who did not resist at all. As George Orwell might well have written - all were complicit in some way but some were more complicit than others.

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In amongst the extreme ends of the spectrum from total support for and total resistance against Hitler we should expect a good deal of variation – for example some officers even came to depend on Hitler very late in the war while others, such as von Brauschitsch vacillated especially if their lives were on the line. The primary reasons amongst the latter were either tied to the fortunes of Germany in the war or the practicalities of survival. There were others of course for whom the disgust and shock at witnessing the war crimes committed on such a dramatic scale by the SS and SD in Russia were so destabilising and against their military code of ethics that they moved into the opposition and were even able to resist Hitler to his face. One such officer was Major General Helmuth Stieff who, due to his role as a senior General Staff officer, often came into contact with Hitler and was able to converse with him knowing of the gathering plots to kill Hitler. (5)  Hitler nicknamed Stieff ‘the poison dwarf’ and would take a personal interest in seeing him slowly hang in the Plotzensee prison in August 1944. Stieff’s was a resistance of a dramatically different kind to that of purely the conscience.

With these preliminary, partial and very general observations in place, it is possible to see Hermann Balck in a clearer light. In his diaries ‘Order in Chaos’ Balck says enough to suggest that he favoured Hitler’s ideology and future ambitions for Germany. (6) Subtle in his language and always cautious, Balck may have taken a very long time to come to the decision to publish his memoirs, but even after forty years, he wanted history to treat him positively. This was no different to the flood of such memoirs published by senior German officers after 1945 and through to 1960. Each was determined to tidy up their place in the whole appalling disaster of the Nazi period. Each was very careful about what was remembered, and in what detail, and Balck did the same in the 1970’s in terms of how he composed his own story. Within his phraseology there is a sense that he is both appealing to the more perceptive reader to try to read between the lines of what was possible and how he acted as a result. This jousting match with posterity is what made writing a new, interpretative biography of Hermann Balck so fascinating.

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Hitler would have been aware that, by the time Balck became known as one of Germany’s master tacticians, he was slightly younger than the majority of his peers at the level of Generaloberst or General of Panzer Troops. Each cohort produced by the Prussian Ministry of War and the Kriegsakademie tended to go through the same promotion cycles where a group of class of officers moved through the ranks together. Balck was something of an exception moving from Colonel in 1942 to General of Panzer Troops within three years leaving all of his contemporaries behind. Clearly much of the speed of his advance was very largely attributable to the desperation for good officers as the war collapsed around Germany, but it was also because of his personal relationship with Hitler.

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There is little resistance to Hitler’s desires, objectives or even methods in Balck’s memoirs, but this did not make him a Nazi. Essentially, Balck was a soldier and never claimed to be anything else and Hitler respected this characteristic in Balck and did not consign him to any of the various dustbins in which Hitler placed the majority of his senior officers. There were the woodentops who simply served without question and there were the fawning supplicants trying to catch his eye and accumulate honours. There were the survivors – the generals whose pretence at fealty Hitler could easily see through. There were the zealots of the SS willing to die for the Fuhrer regardless of what they were ordered to do and there were the incompetent, promoted in peacetime to ranks that they could not cope with during wartime. Hermann Balck was not a member of any of these three groups and Hitler recognised this. So what was Balck’s relationship with Hitler?

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Similar to Albert Kesselring and Erwin Rommel, Hermann Balck was a very able battlefield commander who hated staff work. Balck had always tried to resist becoming a member of the German General Staff and managed to avoid this twice – although he was dragged to Berlin after the Polish campaign, released back into the wild like a lion during the Battle of France and Greece and then put back in his cage during the opening year of Barbarossa. But once he was released for a second time, he never looked back and from his first divisional command with 11. Panzer Division in May 1942, it was a straight road, in between some near misses by bullets and shells, through to corps, army and army group commands – but not Generalfeldmarschall – the reasons for that would need to be for a different article. Equally comparable with Rommel and Kesselring was Balck’s willingness to contradict the Fuhrer. History has a sadly warped perspective on Hitler’s reactions to being challenged but in essence, if the Fuhrer had respect for the individual, then he would listen and enjoy the animated cut and thrust of argument. Sadly, for Germany and indeed Hitler himself, at OKH and OKW levels, Hitler surrounded himself with ‘yes men’ who were unable to stand up to him and who were not respected. Balck himself commented:

‘Many members of the General Staff also failed to recognise the new situation [vis-à-vis the value of the tank and mobile warfare] especially when the General Staff became so full of so many second stringers with top notch qualifications but few natural leaders.’ 

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Halder was probably as near as any senior commander got to resisting up to Hitler – and he had lost the respect of the Fuhrer.

The double-tap of being a superb and tested field commander coupled with straight talking elevated Balck into an elite category – a small group of officers who achieved great things for Hitler who were not also diplomats like von Manstein but men he could relate to and who were allowed almost direct access to the Fuhrer. These men could also be forgiven transgressions. Balck often mentions his special relationship with General Schmundt, Hitlers highly dependable and trusted Head of the Wehrmacht personnel office, and how Schmundt would enable Balck to get to see the Fuhrer – indeed it seems as if meeting men like Balck was in fact a tonic for Hitler before he had to once more face his teams of compliant court flunkies. Schmundt himself was no doubt a member of the Balck grouping which, in my view, is why Schmundt’s death from wounds received in the July Plot explosion filled Hitler with such ravenous hatred and desire for retribution against the would-be assassins.

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Balck did not resist the Fuhrer, quite the contrary, and in contrast to numerous members of the military resistance, he adored his presence for the future of the nation:

‘Hitler just was not replaceable. His person was the glue that held the people and the Wehrmacht inseparably together…without him, the Wehrmacht and the state would have collapsed, much the same as it had been with Napoleon and his grenadiers’. 

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While numerous other generals would have totally disagreed with Balck’s sentiments, these did not make Balck a blind disciple. Balck did not acquiesce in the Fuhrer’s presence which makes him a rare and interesting type within the history of the military personalities of the Third Reich.

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Forgotten to history, Balck would become one of only nineteen officers to receive the Knights Cross with Oakleaves, Swords and Diamonds making him an equal of Erwin Rommel in status if not fame. Hitler made each award personally to Hermann Balck and observers talk of how close they seemed to be in their private conversations. Balck did commit war crimes – a small part of which he received a post-war prison sentence for (the remainder being unknown at that time) but he hated the SS with a vengeance and, I would argue that Balck deserted them both in the Festung of Budapest and right at the war’s end in the final hours – something the Waffen-SS members after the war did not forget. Depending on our own moral perspective, which must not be superimposed on those who fought at the time, Balck went as far as perhaps a soldier should and even maybe slightly further.

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In an interesting breadcrumb was left to us by Balck on page 423 of his memoirs. (9) While being held, prior to his trial, in the American prisoner of war camp Generalfeldmarschall Maximillian von Weichs told Balck that he had been near Hitler in the final days of the war. According to von Weichs,

‘Hitler had complained that everyone in Hungary had failed him – and he named the names of the senior army and Waffen-SS leadership. The only man that he had been able to reply upon, he said, had been Balck.’

This self-aggrandising admission is naturally of interest but not as much as what came next:

‘Hearing that left me with a bitter and empty feeling. I had never held back, and I was usually right in my assessments, but what good was that praise after the fact when no one listened to me at the time.’

Hermann Balck was bitter but not because of the way Hitler had mishandled the war, not because of the six million Jewish human beings murdered in the gas chambers and not because of the tens of millions of other civilians and soldiers killed. (10) Balck was bitter because Hitler had not listened to him regarding how to extend the war and to win it. Hermann Balck clearly had the character and power to resist Hitler, he simply chose not to.

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Philip Kay-Bujak taught Modern European History for over twenty years and is a former British Army officer and independent school Headmaster. He is the author of numerous books on military history and his new book called ‘Hermann Balck: Hitler’s Forgotten General’ ISBN 978 1036 118 488 is published by Pen & Sword and available from all good bookshops and on-line retailers.