EPILOGUE

Balck was a likable character because he did not take himself too seriously. He went on winning battles, just as Picasso went on painting pictures, without pretentiousness or pious talk. He won battles because the skill came to him naturally. He never said that battle-winning was a particularly noble or virtuous activity; it was simply his trade.1

Freeman Dyson

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

After Balck left the 11th Panzer Division, he briefly commanded the Grossdeutschland Division before departing Russia. As his Berlin home had been destroyed in a bombing raid, he spent time with his family in Silesia where they lived in a castle.

Balck next commanded the 14th Panzer Corps in Italy in September 1943, opposing the Allied landing at Salerno. He counter-attacked the beachhead with the 16th Panzer Division and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, forcing the Allies back towards Salerno while General Mark Clark’s 5th Army faced the prospect of being pushed into the sea. Balck, however, failed to adequately reinforce the 16th Panzer Division — as he retained a large reserve to counter other potential landings — and his troops lacked the strength to destroy the beachhead. This decision historian David Zabecki assessed to be one of Balck’s ‘few battlefield mistakes’.²

As Balck fought the western Allies in Italy, the Red Army launched a major offensive at the Dnieper River which liberated Kiev on 6 November 1943. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein planned to recapture the Ukrainian capital with the 48th Panzer Corps. Manstein placed Balck, who had been promoted to General of Panzer Troops on 12 November, in command: ‘That’s where the point of decision will be and that’s where I need the best Panzer leader.’3 Balck also became reacquainted with Colonel Friedrich von Mellenthin, the 48th Panzer Corps’ chief-of-staff, with whom he had worked closely during the Chir River battles: ‘It was an extremely “happy marriage,” which I now continued with this outstanding General Staff officer.’⁴

As the 48th Panzer Corps contained the 1st Panzer Division, Balck had a bittersweet reunion with the 1st Motorized Regiment, the unit he commanded in France in 1940:

I was able to greet by name quite a number of old acquaintances among the enlisted troops. The current regimental commander was Lieutenant Colonel von Seydlitz, who in France had been a senior lieutenant and company commander under me. But such moments brought home to me the unbelievable levels of attrition we had experienced. Very few officers of the old cadre were still with the unit; many of them had been killed.⁵

Before advancing towards Kiev, Balck needed to first eliminate the Red Army around Zhitomir. The 48th Panzer Corps had advanced 30 kilometres (18.5 miles) into the First Ukrainian Front’s flank and he captured the city on 17 November.

The Red Army responded with a large counter-attack launched by the 3rd Guards Tank Army at Brusilov. Balck contained the Soviet offensive and, by 15 December, he succeeded in stabilizing the front. He next attempted to envelop Soviet forces near Korosten but, as Mellenthin explained, ‘the Russian resistance stiffened and on 21 December their forces in the pocket launched counterattacks on a scale which took our breath away’.⁶ Balck attempted to surround three armoured corps and four rifle corps but soon abandoned the encirclement given the vast size of the enemy force. On 23 December, the 48th Panzer Corps went on the defensive as Balck lacked the strength to recapture Kiev.

Mellenthin nevertheless noted the great tactical success Balck had achieved during the campaign:

. . . the conduct of operations was the most brilliant in my experience. General Balck handled his corps with masterly skill; he showed a complete understanding of the classic principles of maneuver and surprise, and he displayed a resourcefulness, a flexibility, and an insight into tactical problems, strongly reminiscent of the methods of the great captains of history.7

Balck’s troops had destroyed two Russian armies, crippled a third and knocked out 700 Soviet tanks.⁸

On Christmas Day, the Red Army launched a massive offensive near Brusilov as the 1st Tank Army and 1st Guards Army advanced west from Kiev.⁹ After Balck spotted Red Army tank columns near Teterev at dawn, he immediately attacked an overwhelmingly superior force with no prospect of success, a decision his superior, General Erhard Raus — commander of the 3rd Panzer Army — understandably criticized:

General Balck could not resist the temptation and, instead of following his instructions, decided to make an immediate surprise attack against the open enemy flank. Unfortunately, this flank attack had no chance of succeeding, because 150 German panzers could neither combat nor even deflect the mass of Russian armor that had meanwhile grown to nearly 1,000 tanks.¹⁰

However, over the next six days, Balck repulsed repeated Soviet attacks, which Raus praised: ‘the Russians attempted to break through General Balck’s lines, but the only visible results they achieved could be calculated by their mounting tank losses’.¹¹ He continued: ‘General Balck’s blocking force formed the steel clamp that held together the isolated infantry corps and preserved the army from disintegration.’¹²

On 14 July 1944, Balck attempted to repulse a Red Army offensive in the Galician region of the Ukraine by counter-attacking with the 1st Panzer Division at Oleyyov. The assault blunted the Russian advance, but the Soviets later overran the 48th Panzer Corps’ left flank and, although he soon restored the front, the defence of southern Galicia had become untenable. As the Red Army entered Poland, the 48th Panzer Corps retreated into the Carpathian Mountains.

Hitler presents Hermann Balck with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.

(Author’s Collection)

After departing the Ukraine, Balck took command of the 4th Panzer Army in August 1944 and Mellenthin continued to serve as his chief-of-staff. On 10 August, the 4th Panzer Army counter-attacked the Red Army at the Sandomierz bridgehead in Poland. The 3rd Panzer Corps achieved initial success before running out of steam, but Balck’s counter-stroke stopped the Russian offensive in the Vistula bend, earning him the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.

In September 1944, Balck reported to Hitler’s headquarters where the dictator gave him command of Army Group G in France. After arriving in Alsace with Mellenthin, Balck had orders to halt the American 3rd Army, commanded by General George S. Patton, in Lorraine in order to buy time for the upcoming winter offensive in the Ardennes, which would later become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Balck organized his inferior forces — a ragtag assortment of understrength units — to fight an elastic defence centred on the Metz Fortress. He tied down a significant number of Patton’s troops at Metz while his mobile panzer forces disrupted the American advance towards the West Wall. As Balck delayed Patton’s troops in Alsace-Lorraine, his men also engaged the American 7th Army and the French 2nd Armoured Division in bitter fighting. Although the Americans captured the Metz Fortress on 21 November, Balck achieved his strategic objective, as Mellenthin explained:

The whole front of Army Group G was under continuous pressure. The enemy was achieving important successes, but we were keeping our forces relatively intact and falling back slowly to the West Wall; I must emphasize that throughout these operations our object was to fight for time and so enable O.K.W. to assemble reserves for the great counteroffensive in Belgium.13

By delaying the Allies around Metz, Strasbourg and Belfort, Balck successfully bought time for the Ardennes offensive, which commenced on 16 December 1944. Mellenthin departed Army Group G in December and never again served under Balck: ‘It was a bitter experience for me to terminate my long and happy association with General Balck.’¹⁴

Balck returned to the Eastern Front to command the German 6th Army in Hungary with orders to relieve the Soviet siege of Budapest. Operation Spring Awakening would be the Wehrmacht’s last major offensive. The 6th SS Panzer Army and Balck’s troops planned to destroy the Red Army’s 3rd Ukrainian Front between the Balaton and Velence lakes. The offensive commenced on 6 March 1945, and Balck’s 6th Army initially made good progress but a Soviet counter-attack ten days later doomed Spring Awakening. As the Third Reich faced total collapse, Balck worried about the fate of his family in Silesia as he retreated towards Austria with his men. After arriving, they surrendered to Major General Horace McBride’s American 80th Infantry Division on 8 May 1945. General Hermann Balck’s war ended as the guns went silent on VE Day.

COMMAND PRINCIPLES

The foundation of Balck’s outstanding success as a commander was his avoidance of dogma. He had learned that lesson in World War I after witnessing how the power of artillery, machine guns and barbed wire conferred an advantage to defenders only to see trench-mortars and tanks shift this advantage back to the attackers. Balck realized that nothing is permanent ‘as every situation is different and subject to change’.15 He accordingly avoided fixed methods and always improvised solutions to planning problems:

First and foremost, never follow a rigid scheme. Every situation is different — no two are the same. Even if they appear to be the same, in one case the troops will be fresh while in another they’ll be fatigued. That difference will lead to different decisions. I’m against the school approach that says, ‘In accordance with the ideas of the General Staff, in this situation you must do thus and such’. On the contrary, you must proceed as dictated by the personalities involved and the particulars of the situation.¹⁶

Balck accepted the chaos of war and refused to follow doctrinal solutions, possessing what the German Army calls fingerspitzengefuehl (fingertip feeling), an instinctive sixth sense for terrain, tactics and the art of war. He understood that success leads to complacency, which encourages predicable planning, which in turn invites defeat: ‘If you repeat yourself you end up playing with open cards and handing the advantage to the enemy.’¹⁷ Therefore, Balck cautioned against dogma in favour of creative thinking:

Never do the same thing twice. Even if something works well for you once, by the second time the enemy will have adapted. So you have to think up something new. No one thinks of becoming a great painter simply by imitating Michelangelo. Similarly, you can’t become a great military leader just by imitating so and so. It has to come from within. In the last analysis, military command is an art: one man can do it and most will never learn. After all, the world is not full of Raphaels either.¹⁸

General Heinrich Gaedcke, who served as the 6th Army’s chief-of-staff in Hungary in 1945, recalled how Balck taught him how to think creatively:

General Balck taught me to ask, ‘Where is the enemy strong?’ He’ll be strong at the forward point of the bridgehead and at the two shoulders. The weak points are the two stretches between the point and each of the shoulders. And where is the enemy commander? His headquarters will be between those two weak stretches. So I cut through the weak stretches, slice open the bulge from two sides, grab the headquarters and the whole bridgehead will collapse by itself without exposing me to heavy defenses. That’s what I call innovative leadership, far indeed from the standardized, rigid approach.19

The kampfgruppe concept epitomized Balck’s thinking on how to organize troops in battle. In France in May 1940, he realized the foolishness of organizing troops in rigid ‘infantry regiments’ and ‘panzer regiments’, which resulted in a near disaster at Sedan after his riflemen crossed the Meuse River without panzer support. Balck’s solution to the traditional organization of soldiers was to form mission-orientated battlegroups consisting of the right balance of forces need to achieve the given objective. Balck personally perfected this combined arms approach in the mountains of Greece where he outmanoeuvred Australian and New Zealand troops in terrain ideally suited to defensive warfare. The soldiers of Kampfgruppe Balck — a mixed assortment of capabilities drawn from panzer, infantry, motorcycle, engineer and artillery units — consistently outperformed the Allied soldiers fighting in rigid World War I platoon, company and battalion formations.

Balck also distinguished himself with his forward presence on the battlefield, trusting his subordinates such as Mellenthin to keep everything under control at his headquarters. By giving up centralized control, Balck gained control of what was really important — fleeting opportunities at the front which he exploited to maximum effect. He would be at the schwerpunkt, the focal point, where a decisive decision can win a battle:

I commanded from the front by radio and could thus always be at the most critical point of action. I would transmit my commands to the Chief of Staff, and then it was up to him to make sure that they were passed on to the right units and that the right actions were taken. The result was to give us a fantastic superiority over the divisions facing us.²⁰

Mellenthin appreciated the wisdom of Balck’s approach:

General Balck and myself were very close. When he went to the front lines I stayed behind and kept all things under control while he was at the Schwerpunkt, or vice versa. I myself, every second or third day, went to the front. General Balck then sat at the desk at Corps or Army Headquarters. . . . I had complete freedom when he was away — to make my own decisions.21

Balck’s forward command style contrasted strongly with the Allied and Russian commanders, who usually commanded their soldiers over the telephone or radio from rear headquarters. ‘The secret of modern armor leadership is that everything has to happen in the blink of an eye,’ he explained. ‘That can only be accomplished if the commander is right at the point of action.’²² Balck would give his subordinate commanders brief verbal orders which would be swiftly executed:

The most important thing was that I gave all orders verbally. Even my largest and most important operations orders were verbal. . . . I always prized most highly those commanders that needed to be given the least orders — those you could discuss the matter with for five minutes and then not worry about them for the next eight days.²³

Balck’s record of combat success also reflected his men who fought the hard battles and his subordinate commanders who enjoyed a great deal of command responsibility under the Prussian principle of auftragstaktik (mission tactics). He usually told his subordinate commanders what he wanted them to achieve but allowed their initiative to determine exactly how this would be done:

Generally the German higher commander rarely or never reproached their subordinates unless they made a terrible blunder. They were fostering the individual’s initiative. They left him room for initiative, and did not reprimand him unless he did something very wrong. This went down to the individual soldier, who was praised for developing initiative.²⁴

Balck realized that ‘combat leadership is largely a matter of psychology. As much as possible, I tried not to tell my people what to do’, he said. ‘As long as I saw that a man was sound, I let him do things his way, even if I would have done them differently.’25 However, in rejecting fixed schemes, he also knew that less-talented subordinates could not be trusted with too much independence. ‘It depended entirely on the subordinate,’ Balck explained. ‘If he was a stupid fellow, you had to go into much detail explaining the situation to him; if he was an intelligent officer, a word was sufficient for him.’²⁶

Although Balck mastered the art of armoured warfare, he did not end the war with entirely clean hands. During the Lorraine campaign in November 1944, Balck discovered that Lieutenant Colonel Johann Schottke, the divisional artillery commander, was drunk in his bunker and unaware of where his batteries were located. Balck ordered Schottke’s summary execution, which was duly carried out. In 1948, a civilian court in Stuttgart found that he had not acted within the framework of the German military justice and sentenced him to three years in prison and he served eighteen months.

In November 1944, while Balck opposed the American advance through Vosges, he ordered the civilian population of Gérardmer towards the Allied lines. In the subsequent fighting, his forces virtually destroyed the town. In 1950, a French military tribunal in Paris tried Balck in absentia with the war crime of destroying Gérardmer and sentenced him to twenty years in prison, a verdict he condemned as hypocritical: ‘It was predictable that the French would show no understanding in this case, although they later did exactly the same sort of things in Indochina and Algeria.’²⁷ However, the American occupation authorities and the West Germany government refused to extradite Balck so he never spent any time in a French prison.

On 19 September 1949, a West German Denazification Court cleared Balck, concluding, ‘These proceedings have found no causal connection between this man and National Socialism.’²⁸ However, Balck never really came to terms with having fought for the Nazi regime or the suffering the Wehrmacht caused. Although he acknowledged the crimes of the Nazis, he never acknowledged how his actions contributed to the suffering inside occupied counties.

After the conquest of Greece, German forces requisitioned food and medicine which resulted in the deaths of 100,000 Athenians.29 By the end of the war, over 500,000 Greek civilians had died from disease, starvation and reprisals while 59,000 Greek Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, leaving only 14,000 survivors. After Allied soldiers liberated the country in October 1944, they found a malnourished and exhausted population.³⁰ Although Balck had played such a critical role during the German invasion of Greece, he never linked his actions with this level of death and suffering.

After the war, Balck remained vocal about Red Army war crimes, notably the massacre of German soldiers at Sovchos 79. However, he never spoke of the Wehrmacht’s crimes in Russia, such as the ‘Commissar Order’, which called for the immediate execution of all Soviet political officers, or its wilful support of the Holocaust, such as the massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar in September 1941. Balck never acknowledged the Wehrmacht’s criminal nature and never fully came to terms with the evil cause that his extraordinary talents had served.

Balck also struggled to reconcile his mostly fond wartime memories of Hitler and post-war acceptance of the man’s crimes. Balck certainly could have killed Hitler if he had wished: ‘I was never required to surrender my pistol while visiting Hitler; and if I had decided to use it, nobody could have stopped me.’³¹ During the war, he opposed Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, but he was also friends with the man:

I had known Stauffenberg well for a long time. We had been assigned to the same cavalry brigade. I often had many pleasant conversations with this intelligent man who was highly educated in history.³²

When Balck became aware that Stauffenberg had become highly critical of the regime, he warned him: ‘We are for better or for worse tied to Hitler.’³³ However, after the war, he acknowledged that Stauffenberg ‘acted as he saw right’ and that he ‘will always hold Stauffenberg in honorable remembrance’.³⁴ Balck’s final verdict on Hitler concluded:

But despite all my conscious efforts to evaluate Hitler with complete objectivity, I cannot escape the final verdict — he was our downfall. Beware of strong men who do not know the limits of their power.³⁵

Even with the benefit of post-war hindsight, Balck’s analysis of Hitler cannot escape his memoirs from the time he had fallen under the dictator’s spell.

BALCK’S LAST BATTLE

After being released from American custody in 1947, Balck worked in a warehouse in Germany and later represented well-known firms, living an obscure life. Mellenthin meanwhile immigrated to South Africa where he worked in the aviation industry and later became director of Lufthansa in Africa. Although Balck had refused to participate in the United States Army Historical Division’s work while a prisoner of war, Mellenthin did and developed five monographs before finding fame with his bestselling book Panzer Battles. Mellenthin would again work with the American military and this time he convinced Balck to break his thirty-year silence.

After the United States experienced defeat in Vietnam, the American Army refocused on its traditional Cold War role — defeating a possible Red Army invasion of Western Europe — but it faced a dilemma in determining how this could be achieved given the numerical superiority of Warsaw Pact forces compared with NATO’s. Balck had the perfect credentials to help solve this problem as David Zabecki and Dieter Biedekarken explained:

. . . the U.S. Army’s major challenge was to develop a tactical and operational doctrine for fighting outnumbered and winning against the overwhelming numerically superior tank forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Balck, of course, was one of the undisputed masters of just that.36

The army’s leadership accordingly invited Mellenthin and Balck to America, seeking their advice on how to fight while being outnumbered and win against overwhelming Soviet strength. Consequently, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, both men participated in interviews, seminars, conferences and wargames facilitated by the American Army’s War College.³⁷ ‘Balck and Mellenthin,’ as Dennis Showalter explained, ‘made virtual second careers in the late 1970s as think-tank consultants advising the US Army how to fight outnumbered against the Soviet Union in the Fulda Gap and win panzer-style.’³⁸

General William E. DePuy understood that Balck and Mellenthin’s combat experiences on the Eastern Front gave them tactical expertise the American Army lacked:

. . . they achieved a virtually unmatched record of battlefield success, despite being greatly outnumbered, in terms of men and materiel, on many occasions. Indeed, toward the end of the war it became the normal condition. Of special significance for us today is the fact that while expecting to be outnumbered by as much as ten or more to one, they also expected to win — and often did.39

Balck provided authoritative advice to the American military on how to destroy Red Army tank formations and, in particular, his conduct during the Chir River battles impressed his audience.

In May 1980, Balck and Mellenthin participated in a conference and wargame on NATO tactics at the Army War College hosted by the BDM Corporation. DePuy arranged the event ‘to examine twentieth century German military experience in battle against Russian forces’ in order to develop ‘insights useful in aiding our understanding of the challenges NATO faces today in Europe as it prepares to confront the Soviets in any future conflict’.⁴⁰ DePuy found himself in awe of Balck and noted in his report on the conference:

General Balck tends to be a man of few words — somewhat brusque — almost laconic, but deeply thoughtful. He was, and is, clearly a man of iron will and iron nerves. He exudes a strong aura of confidence — confidence in himself, in the German Army and in the German soldier.⁴¹

The activities included a wargame in which Balck and Mellenthin assumed command of the 3rd Armoured Division to defend West Germany against a Warsaw Pact invasion in the Hunfeld–Lauterbach–Bad Hersfeld sector of the country, which included the Kassel–Frankfurt Autobahn. They were both astounded to discover that their division contained 325 main battle tanks.

Balck and Mellenthin had to deploy the division to defend as close as possible to the East German border to keep the Red Army out of the West German heartland. They were expected to slow the Warsaw Pact advance, locate its main effort and destroy the enemy force as far forward as possible. After conferring over the situation map, Mellenthin announced that they would not take long, adding that on the Eastern Front they normally decided upon a course of action in five minutes.42

Balck and Mellenthin’s plan involved deploying three cavalry squadrons as a covering force to screen the battlefield between the border and the main battle position. Two brigades would defend the southern sector, supported by artillery, tactical airpower and attack helicopters with orders to defend the area. They left the north-western sector open to entice the Red Army to commit two tank divisions to advance along the Autobahn toward Alsfeld and Giessen, hoping to create an operational breakthrough. As these Soviet divisions advanced along the Autobahn, five American battalions would attack their flank just north of Lauterbach and destroy the entire force. After Warsaw Pact forces advanced beyond Alsfeld, a NATO counter-attack would strike the rear of the lead enemy division and the vanguard of the next division. Balck and Mellenthin added that such a manoeuvre would require a NATO commander with strong nerves.

American observers questioned Balck and Mellenthin on the wisdom of allowing a Russian tank division into the rear area near the population centre of Frankfurt. They replied that the deeper the enemy advances, the greater the opportunity to destroy the force; however, upon further reflection they decided it would be wiser to deploy a delaying force on the Autobahn to protect German civilians and Balck later added: ‘We were very much hampered towards the end of the war in our mobility, because we could not let the Russians get into areas that were settled by Germans.’⁴³ DePuy considered Balck and Mellenthin’s plan a risky gamble:

The boldness — indeed the audacity — of their plan might be regarded as irresponsible, had it been proposed by other parties. But their willingness to open up the battle was rooted in their highly successful experiences and cannot be dismissed. Presumably they had learned that the big pay-offs came under conditions in which they — not the Russians — shaped the battlefield and retained the initiative. They must also have believed that nothing less than big pay-offs could solve the problem with which they were faced.⁴⁴

Lieutenant General Paul Gorman independently conducted the same wargame and his solution involved defending the northern sector and deploying a covering force to draw Warsaw Pact forces into a pocket near Fulda, where they would be destroyed in a counter-attack from the south. A brigade would defend the sector east of Fulda while two brigades with artillery support would conduct an ‘active defence’ in the rugged Hohe Rhoen region where some ground could be yielded to the Soviets without allowing a significant enemy advance. A large brigade of three tank and one mechanized battalions would form a mobile reserve south of Fulda and would either counter-attack the south flank of the Soviet main advance as its vanguard reached the defensive position near Fulda or against the Soviets near Alsfeld, if their main effort approached that region.

Balck and Mellenthin praised General Gorman’s plan and noted that it conformed with their concept on how to fight the Red Army. Balck even declared to Gorman that they were ‘brothers under the skin’.45 DePuy also noted the convergence of American and German operational thinking:

The similarity between the two concepts — the German and American — was remarkable. In both cases, the larger part of the sector was held by the smallest part of the force. In both cases, the enemy was ‘invited in’ to a selected avenue or pocket. In both cases, a large reserve was held out for a decisive counterattack. The principal (and only significant) difference lay in the fact that the German generals wished to let the Russians go on — the farther the better — while General Gorman planned to stop them cold in front of Fulda.⁴⁶

DePuy acknowledged the risky nature of the German plan and concluded that in ‘the hands of average commanders it would probably be a disaster. In the hands of a Balck, working with a von Mellenthin, it is an option with distinguished historical precedent.’⁴⁷ DePuy, pleased with the outcome of the wargame, believed that Balck and Mellenthin had helped demonstrate that a smaller well-led force could synchronize its operations and defeat a larger less-organized force, as the Wehrmacht had achieved on numerous occasions on the Eastern Front.⁴⁸ Balck’s legacy became part of the way the American Army fights, influencing all western militaries, as David Zabecki and Dieter Biedekarken explained:

German tactical doctrine, especially as it had been practiced by Balck against the Russians, had a clear influence on the development of the new American doctrine, called AirLand Battle. From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s the study of Balck’s December 1942 battle on the Chir River as commander of the 11th Panzer Division was a standard element in the formal course of instruction at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. It was held up as one of the best historical examples of the tactical principles embodied in AirLand Battle.49

Balck had kept a detailed journal throughout World War I and World War II, and after being ‘discovered’ by the American military, he used this record as the basis to finally write his memoir, published as Ordnung im Chaos in German in 1981. The English version was only published in 2015. Earlier German memoirs, such as Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Manstein’s Lost Victories and Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles — all published in the 1950s — tended to blame Germany’s defeat solely on Hitler and avoided criticism of the Wehrmacht’s operational performance. For example, Guderian in Panzer Leader declared:

I had repeated angry altercations with him [Hitler], because over and over again he would sabotage the taking of necessary military measures for the sake of the obscure political game he was playing. He would also attempt to interfere in matters that purely concerned the Army, always with unfortunate results.⁵⁰

Manstein similarly announced in Lost Victories that Hitler became ‘increasingly accustomed to interfering in the running of the army groups, armies and lower formations by issuing special orders which were not his concern at all’.⁵¹ Mellenthin in Panzer Battles likewise concluded that ‘Hitler’s method of direct command hastened Germany’s defeat. Orders to “fight for every foot” had disastrous effects. But apart from strategy, his methods of control affected the whole war machine.’⁵²

Guderian, Manstein and Mellenthin’s accounts, of course, have an agenda of inflating their own reputations and explaining away the Wehrmacht’s defeat. Balck’s memoir, in contrast, refused to endorse the myth of Hitler’s inflexible orders, giving a more balanced view:

Hitler never interfered in the operations of my corps. I always had complete freedom of action. I was allowed to attack, defend, or withdraw as I thought appropriate. In the usual fashion, army and army group allocated the tasks and objectives without ever getting involved in details.53

Balck also explained that ‘the number of Hitler’s interventions was not nearly as high as popular legend now describes it.’⁵⁴ He nevertheless was critical of Hitler’s leadership, but in a more balanced and measured manner:

Operationally, Hitler had a clear and one might even say an exceptional understanding. He combined this with a rare ability to influence men. He was incapable, however, of judging what could be accomplished with the available forces and when the correlation of forces was completely against him. He believed that he could bridge any gaps with his iron will.⁵⁵

As Balck did not blame the German defeat exclusively on Hitler, he acknowledged both the Wehrmacht’s failure and his own shortcomings with honest self-assessment:

We lost Stalingrad, Africa, and the Caucasus campaign because these campaigns were conducted beyond secured supply lines, and when this error became apparent, we did not abort in time.⁵⁶

Balck acknowledged that the Red Army counter-offensive during the winter of 1942–43 ‘was well planned, well prepared, and brilliantly executed’.⁵⁷ He also added, ‘I also underestimated the Russians considerably.’⁵⁸ Balck’s honesty makes his memoir a far more valuable resource for historians than the earlier accounts written by his contemporaries.

Although the German Army won spectacular tactical victories, its lack of operational perspective and strategic bankruptcy failed to translate its initial success into a victorious war. Balck understood this truth all too well and perfectly expressed this sentiment by comparing German conduct during World War II with the Punic Wars from ancient times:

After Cannae, Hannibal did not march on to Rome, which caused his cavalry commander Marhabal to exclaim, ‘Vincere scis, Hannibal, victoria uti nescis. [You know how to gain a victory, Hannibal, but you do not know how to make use of it.]’ Did Hannibal lack military leadership greatness, or did he correctly know the limits of his power? He probably was right because he was vulnerable in human resources and space. Both of these factors were on the side of Rome, as well as decisive maritime dominance. Germany also achieved legendary victories but in the end succumbed to the human factor, space, and maritime domination, all of which were clearly on the side of Russia. Unfortunately, we did not have the sense of proportion and reality, like the great Carthaginian.59

On 29 November 1982, one year after the publication of Ordnung im Chaos, Hermann Balck, former commander of panzer troops, died in Erlenbach-Rockenan, West Germany, aged eighty-eight.