After Keitel’s commentary on the Stalingrad battle, a lengthy break occurs in the Memoirs. On September 29, 1946, he had been found guilty and sentenced to death on all four counts. Since he had refused to appeal the verdict, he could not expect to complete his account of the last two years and four months of the war. He decided to focus on the part of the war in which he apparently believed he had proved himself worthy of his rank—and of the Führer’s trust. On the afternoon of his fifty-sixth birthday, April 20, 1945, Hitler admitted for the first time that he had lost the war. Although one road was still open to southern Bavaria, where his vacation home at Berchtesgaden had been equipped to serve as a headquarters, Hitler declared he would remain in Berlin to the end. Keitel and Jodl swore they would stay with him. By evening the Führer’s spirits had risen, and he was talking about organizing a counterattack. On the 23rd, Keitel, Jodl, and the Armed Forces Operations Staff went out of Berlin to coordinate counterattacks from the west and north. Two days later, the Soviet forces closed an encirclement around Berlin. Communication with Hitler thereafter became too uncertain to permit his retaining command; and Keitel—for the first time in the war—found himself in a position of active command. He knew it was high time to surrender but imagined that somehow he could improve the situation by rescuing Hitler. The army commands on the scene considered that notion absurd; nevertheless, Keitel threatened and bullied them into compliance. In the Memoirs he expresses no doubt regarding the correctness of his actions and narrates the final events with a degree of verve not seen in earlier chapters.
On the night of April 29, finally having recognized that his term as Hitler’s shieldbearer had reached its end, Keitel told Hitler that the relief operation had failed. On May 1 he learned that Hitler had committed suicide and had named Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz to be president (chief of state) and supreme commander in chief. Doenitz, having expected something of the sort, had been in contact with Keitel for several days, but had been very careful not to assume any authority. As soon as he knew Hitler was dead, Doenitz wanted to order the army group on the eastern front closest to Germany, about a million men, to begin retreating immediately. But he made a mistake that Hitler would never have made in such a situation: he consulted Keitel, who advised him not to let the troops abandon prepared positions until they could conduct an orderly retreat. As a result, the army group lost about a week’s time and then had only forty-eight hours in which to avoid capture. Doenitz sent Keitel back to Berlin on May 8. The unconditional surrender instrument had already been signed in Reims early on the morning of the 7th, and the 8th was V-E Day everywhere but in the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin insisted on a second signing in Berlin, which occurred at midnight on the 8th. Keitel was proud of having secured a twelve-hour grace period after they received notice of the surrender terms for the remaining troops on the eastern front.
At Nuremberg, Keitel symbolically resumed the role of the Führer’s shieldbearer, voicing only disappointment that Hitler had not chosen to stay to answer for himself. Ironically, in the Memoirs he provided enough evidence both to get himself hanged and to prove him to have been a less-than-convincing example of the dyed-in-the-wool war criminal. On the other hand, whether he established an entidement to the remission he sought, or refuted the low opinion in which he was widely held, is at best doubtful.
Earl F. Ziemke
Athens, Georgia
May 2000
Earl F. Ziemke, a research professor of history of at the University of Georgia, is the author of Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East, and The German Northern Theater of Operations, 1940–1945.
PART I
The Background and Career
of
Field-Marshal Keitel
1
The Background and Career of
Field-Marshal Keitel
1882—1946
by
Walter Görlitz
THE photographs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, signing the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender at Karlshorst near Berlin, show him to have been just the kind of Junkers type that the Western Allies had always made him out to be—a tall, broad-shouldered man, his face a little haggard but proud and set, and a monocle firmly screwed into his left eye. At the hour when the totalitarian regime in Germany finally collapsed he was acknowledging that he was an officer of the old school, although there was nothing about him characteristic of the make-up of the indomitable Prussian officer.
Even the skilled American psychologists who analysed and interrogated him during his period of confinement were inclined to see in him the prototype of the Junkers, of the Prussian militarist; perhaps they had never had any real opportunity of making any study of the Junkers class of Prussia. Keitel, in fact, came from an entirely different milieu.
The middle-class Hanoverian Keitel family, a family of landowners, came from a region with a marked anti-Prussian tradition: the field-marshal’s grandfather was a Royal Hanoverian crown-land lessee and was closely connected with the House of Hanover that Bismarck overthrew. Military tendencies and traditions were completely alien to the family, and in silent protest against Prussia’s annexation of the kingdom of Hanover in 1866 the grandfather had bought the 600-acre estate of Helmscherode in the Gandersheim district of the duchy of Brunswick in 1871, while still detesting everything that was Prussian: and when his son, the field-marshal’s father, served for a year as a volunteer in a regiment of the Prussian Hussars he was strictly forbidden when he came home on leave to cross the threshold of Helmscherode while wearing the hated Prussian uniform.
There is little similarity between a Brunswick estate like Helmscherode and the great manors east of the Elbe; their lords cannot simply be classified as Junkers. Carl Keitel, the field-marshal’s father, led a life no more pretentious than that of any well-to-do farmer. In contrast to his son, who was an enthusiastic huntsman and loved horses and riding, he believed in the maxim that a good farmer could never be a huntsman; the two were incompatible. At the bottom of his heart the son wanted nothing more than one day to be able to manage the Helmscherode estate himself; farmer’s blood coursed strongly through his veins. He knew a little about agriculture and as the descendant of a long line of crown-land lessees and estate owners he had inherited a talent for organising and administering the affairs of large establishments. Several times Keitel was later to toy with the idea of giving up the soldier’s life, but always he heeded what he believed to be his duty, perhaps abetted by the counsels of his ambitious and strong-willed wife.
The obstinacy of his father, who had no intention of relinquishing control over Helmscherode as long as he was of sound body, and the increasing tendency among the landed gentry to take up military careers, particularly after the victorious Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, produced the opposite effect.
The heir of Helmscherode, Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel, born on 22nd September, 1882, became an officer; there is a family story that he was almost in tears as he finally decided to give up all hope of ever being a farmer. There was another reason for the decision, characteristic of the rising generation of middle-class farmers: if one could not be a farmer then the officer’s was the only profession appropriate to one’s rank. But the officer cadre, in the small northern and central German provinces at least, was of purely Prussian stock. What a comedown it was for a family with such a strong anti-Prussian tradition!
Nothing in his youth and nothing in his early years as an officer gave any hint that the young Keitel was destined to rise to the highest position in the German armed forces, or that it was to bring him such a cruel death. Initially he was a poor scholar, and he improved but little with time. His real interests were hunting, riding and farming at Helmscherode. After taking his school-leaving examination at Göttingen in March 1901 he entered the 46th Lower-Saxon Field Artillery Regiment, with its headquarters and 1st detachment at Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick).
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By contrast, the young Lieutenant Keitel was a good and conscientious soldier. As one would expect from his earlier life of eating, drinking, hunting and riding and his enjoyment of good company, he was by no means an ascetic. Even so, he detested frivolity and he loathed extravagant pleasures. When he and his friend Felix Bürkner, the famous show jumper, were posted together to the Military Riding Academy in 1906 they pledged to one another that there would be ‘no skylarking and no affairs with women’.
It was said of Keitel during his time as a division commander in Bremen, between 1934 and 1935, that while he naturally used a service car if he drove to official functions, his wife—if she was invited—had to go by tram as they had no car of their own. This strict and extreme correctness was a characteristic of the man. During the war and at the height of the fuel crisis Keitel, the Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, shocked the senior SS officials attending state funerals, by turning up in a modest Volkswagen, while they, the gentlemen with the silver deaths-heads on their caps and the motto: ‘Our honour lies in our loyalty’ drove up in enormous and glittering limousines.
In any event, the young Keitel soon came to the attention of his superiors on account of his boundless proficiency. First his name was put up for the command of the demonstration regiment of the Field-Artillery Gunnery School, then there was talk of his being posted as inspecting officer to the training establishment for officer recruits. His then commanding officer disclosed to him that there was a condition attached to the latter posting, and that was that the candidate should be a bachelor. Keitel had a violent quarrel with his superior, and pointed out that he was going to be engaged and was thinking of marrying shortly.
In April 1909 Lieutenant Keitel married Lisa Fontaine, the daughter of a well-to-do estate owner and brewer of Wülfel, near Hanover, a strongly anti-Prussian man to whom his new ‘Prussian’ son-in-law was initially not a welcome addition to his family.
Lisa Fontaine had many intellectual and artistic interests; in her youth she was very beautiful although standoffish in manner. As far as can be judged from the letters that she left, she was probably the stronger and certainly the more ambitious partner of the marriage; Wilhelm Keitel was just an average officer, whose only secret ambition was to be a farmer and to manage Helmscherode. The marriage, which was blessed with three sons and three daughters, one of whom died tragically of an early and incurable disease, was to endure through all their trials and tribulations. And when the worst hour came, and her husband was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Lisa Keitel retained her composure. Of Keitel’s sons, all of whom became officers, the eldest married the daughter of Field-Marshal von Blomberg, the Reich War Minister, in whose démise Keitel was to be so disastrously yet innocently involved; while the youngest son was later killed in action in Russia.
Perhaps because he respected a man who knew how to speak his mind, Keitel’s colonel selected him as his regimental adjutant. In the Prussian-German army this was a position of considerable trust: to the regimental adjutant fell the duty not only of handling personnel matters, but also of formulating the mobilisation measures and much else besides.
But his superiors must have believed Lieutenant Keitel capable of far more than this: during the autumn exercises of the Tenth Corps, of which his regiment was a subordinate formation, the Corps’ Chief of Staff Colonel Freiherr von der Wenge, struck up a conversation with him, from which Keitel concluded that he had been earmarked for General Staff duties; it was a belief in which he was not deceived. And so, during the winter of 1913 to 1914, the man who had hated deskwork all his life began, as he himself describes in his early Memoirs, to study the ‘gray easel’ as the handbook for General Staff officers was dubbed by the German Army at that time.
In March 1914 Keitel took part in the Corps’ course for current or future General Staff officers; four Army General Staff officers had been detached to the course, including Captains von Stülpnagel and von dem Bussche-Ippenburg, both of whom were later to be influential personalities in the Republican Reichswehr. It was Bussche-Ippenburg, the Chief of the Army Personnel Office, a key position in this small republican army, who according to Keitel’s early Memoirs fetched him in to the organisational department (T–2) of the so-called ‘Troop Office,’ the disguised agency set up to replace the General Staff forbidden under the Versailles Treaty.
Keitel went to war with the 46th Artillery Regiment, and in September 1914 he was quite seriously wounded in his right forearm by a shell fragment. Among the family papers there is a whole series of letters written by him to his father and father-in-law, and by his wife to her parents; these reveal Keitel’s views on this first great and terrible European war. Naturally, he was duty-bound to hope piously for a German victory, but at the same time deep down there was a dejected conviction that, in fact, all they could do now was just grimly hang on. How similar was his attitude to the Second World War! Determined to fulfil his personal obligations, ruled by blind obedience, but with no hopes left of final victory. He served his Head of State, and he continued to serve him even at the Nuremberg Trial, despite his self-confessed inability to fathom this last Supreme Warlord of Germany.
The turning point in his career as an officer, an event which brought little solace to a man so aware of the limits to his own talents, was his posting to the General Staff in 1914; the General Staff was—and had been ever since Moltke—an élite among the officers. His contemporary letters show how hard the blow fell on him, and how well he knew that he lacked the mental equipment for this new job; those of his wife show her enormous pride in her husband’s appointment.
From the later years of Keitel’s employment as a General Staff officer in the higher command echelons of the Republican Reichswehr there is sufficient testimony of Keitel’s intense nervousness; but we also hear of his immense and insatiable lust for work. His wife’s letters during the ’twenties complain bitterly about his frightful nervousness. And later still, during the Second World War, an over-cynical adjutant coined the catchphrase about him: ‘See that field-marshal scurrying past, with his adjutant bringing up the rear with measured tread . . .’ By then the head of Hitler’s military chancellery, promoted to field-marshal against his will (because traditionally one attains that rank only by valour in face of the enemy) Keitel was already a virtuoso in military and war administration, but not, it must be stressed, in war leadership.
We have no testimony on Keitel’s attitude towards Kaiser Wilhelm II or the Prussian monarchy by the time the Great War ended, with Keitel a captain and General Staff officer to the naval corps in Flanders. It is interesting to note how, unusually for an Army General Staff officer, he had been given such an opportunity to experiment in promoting the Army’s collaboration with the only other branch of the armed forces at the time, the Navy (even though it was only with a naval land force).
For a long time, according to his eldest son, Keitel had a picture of Crown Prince Wilhelm on his writing desk, even at the Reich Defence Ministry. It is not known why he finally removed the picture of this not very worthy heir to the Prussian kings and German Kaisers.
In a letter to his father-in-law on ioth December, 1918, we find Keitel commenting that he wanted now to say goodbye to the officer’s profession in the near future ‘for all time’. Nevertheless, he stayed on. After a brief period of service in the German frontier guard on the Polish border and a period as General Staff officer to one of the new Reichswehr brigades, and after two more years as a lecturer at the Hanover Cavalry School, Keitel was transferred to the Reich Defence Ministry and to the ‘Troop Office’, the disguised General Staff, being allocated ostensibly to the Army organisational department, T–2. As he told his father in a letter of 23rd January, 1925, he had entered not the T–2 department itself but a ‘controlling position’ on the immediate staff of the then Chief of the Troop Office, Lieutenant-General Wetzell. In this position Keitel was occupied primarily with questions of how to raise modest reserv
es—officially forbidden under the Versailles Treaty—for the numerically weak Reichswehr; he also dealt with the organisation of paramilitary frontier guard formations to keep watch on the German-Polish border. Other aspects of his new post were of greater importance for the future. In the small ‘Troop Office’ with its four departments (T–1, operations; T–2, organisation; T–3, foreign armies; and T–4, training) he became very familiar with a number of officers who were later repeatedly to cross his path: Werner von Blomberg, who was later to be Keitel’s ultimate superior as Reich War Minister, began as head of the T–4 department and from 1927 to 1929 he was the chief of the Troop Office, in other words the de facto Chief of General Staff. Colonel Freiherr von Fritsch was head of the T–1 department. As Commander-in-Chief of the Army in 1935 it was Fritsch who put forward Keitel’s name for appointment as Chief of the ‘Armed Forces Office’, the Wehrnachtamt. Colonel von Brauchitsch, later recommended by Keitel as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was also head of T–4 for a time.
In September 1931 Keitel, head of T–2, and the heads of T–1 and T–4, Major-General Adam and Colonel von Brauchitsch respectively, paid a friendly visit to the Soviet Union; there were at the time extremely cordial relations between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, a tradition which already dated back some ten years. There are no records among the field-marshal’s papers throwing any light on what military results and experiences were gathered on this trip, but there is a letter he wrote to his father on 29th September, 1931, in which he describes his impressions of the Russian economy and the high status enjoyed in general by the country’s army; the strict leadership which was characteristic of the system, and the respect paid to the army, made a deep impression on the German lieutenant-colonel.
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Page 2