NO-WIN SITUATION
General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck was sitting down to dinner at his headquarters in the northeastern French city of Molsheim on December 23, 1944, when he got word that he had been fired. Balck, 51, had not been relieved of command because of any battlefield failure: the commander of Army Group G, then fighting the advancing Allies in Alsace, he had spent most of the war battling the Soviets on the Eastern Front, where he made his reputation as one of Germany’s most dynamic and aggressive panzer commanders.
Rather, Balck had run politically afoul of Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Germany’s all-powerful Reichsführer-SS. The brain behind the Third Reich’s police state and the concentration and death camps of its “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” Himmler commanded the SS’s armed force, the Waffen-SS. And Balck had a long record of contentious relationships with Waffen-SS units and their politically motivated commanders.
Earlier that month, Hitler had appointed Himmler commander of the newly created Oberkommando Oberrhein—the Upper Rhine High Command. Although Himmler lacked military expertise—or any military competence at all—he was now in a position to deal Balck some payback. One of Himmler’s missions was to organize and command Operation Nordwind (“north wind”), a large-scale attack scheduled for January 1, 1945, as a follow-on counteroffensive to the already failing Ardennes Offensive. To start with, Himmler detached the German Nineteenth Army—the southernmost of Balck’s two field armies and the closest to the sector now under Himmler’s control—from Army Group G and placed it under Oberkommando Oberrhein, which initially had no troops of its own. Himmler did not want to share any anticipated glory with a Wehrmacht officer of Balck’s standing, so he next moved to get Balck out of the way.
Balck wasn’t in limbo for long, though. Nor was he free of conflicts with Waffen-SS leaders. His longtime friend and mentor, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, was then the chief of the general staff of the German army. With Germany in the final throes of the fight
