The Power to Resist: How Hermann Balck Navigated Power with Hitler
‘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.” (Ward, 2016)
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 Mein 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.
