During the years after 1930 in which Keitel had been head of the organisational department, the first secret preparations began for raising the so-called A-Army, a reserve army which provided for a tripling in the size of the then Army of seven infantry and three cavalry divisions, in the event either of a national emergency or of the relaxation of the disarmament conditions imposed upon Germany. Even a sworn enemy of Keitel, the now famous Field-Marshal von Manstein, who did not even mention Keitel in his reminiscences on their journey to Russia in 1931, is forced to admit that in his field of military organisation Keitel did the most excellent work.*
On the other hand, in his wife’s letters to her mother and sometimes even in Keitel’s letters to his father we see mirrored the burden and the turbulence of those dying years of the first German Republic: Lisa Keitel complains frequently about the mountain of desk work heaped upon her husband and about his nervousness—a trait which one would not have credited in such a tall and burly man, but which was a sign of his lack of patience (which equipped him especially poorly for standing up to a man like Hitler). Politics as such are only lightly touched upon. Like most of the so-called good citizens in Germany both the Keitels backed Hindenburg, who had been elected Reich president in 1925; after him they rooted for the apparently so promising and energetic Reich Chancellor Brüning (1931–1932) and finally for Franz von Papen, under whose aegis the army gained rather more breathing space.
It is a matter for regret that we have no comment by Keitel on the most mysterious and significant figure in the then Reich Defence Ministry, General von Schleicher, who was head first of its Central Office and then of the Minister’s Office, an officer who from 1932 onwards was Reich Defence Minister, and finally, from December 1932 to 28th January, 1933, the last Reich Chancellor before Hitler.
A possible explanation of this lack of Keitel’s views on Schleicher can be found in his illness late in the autumn of 1932, when he fell ill with a severe phlebitis of his right leg to which, however, he at first paid no attention, even continuing to walk from his home in west Berlin to the Defence Ministry building in Bendlerstrasse, clear proof of his stubborn sense of duty. The final result was a thrombosis and pleural embolism, a heart attack and double pneumonia. As his wife fell ill with a heart complaint at the same time, a period of convalescence was ordered for both of them.
During the very months that the head of the T–2 department of the Troop Office lay on his sickbed, initially even calling his subordinates to his bedside for routine briefings and toying all the time with the secret idea of finally writing out his resignation from the service, the fate of democracy in Germany was in the balance; had he still been at work during those months, Keitel would probably have had to declare himself for General von Schleicher, the then Reich Chancellor and Defence Minister.
But he was still at a clinic in the High Tatra mountains in Czechoslovakia on 30th January, 1933, as the president, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, appointed the Führer of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, Adolf Hitler, the 21st Reich Chancellor of the German Republic. According to Keitel’s Memoirs the first reaction to the appointment expressed by a man who was after all one of Germany’s senior General Staff officers, was remarkably negative. He tells how he was bombarded with questions at Dr. Guhr’s clinic at Tatra-Westerheim and again all the way back to Berlin: what would happen now?
I announced [writes Keitel] that I thought Hitler was ein Trommler—a ‘drummer’ who had met with his great success among the simple people thanks only to the power of his oratory; I said that whether he was really suited to be Reich Chancellor seemed highly questionable to me.
This view was echoed by the marked reserve with which most of the senior Reichswehr officers received this new Reich Chancellor, after twenty others had gone before in the eighteen melancholy years of the Weimar Republic. Even so, Hitler was Reich Chancellor and, more significantly for Lieutenant-Colonel Keitel, his one-time superior at the Troop Office, Lieutenant-General von Blomberg, with whom by his own testimony he had been able to get on very well from the outset, and whose departure he had deeply regretted, was now Reich Defence Minister under Hitler:
Blomberg had in the meantime moved into the Reich Defence Ministry, having been suddenly summoned by the Reich President from Geneva, where he had been leading the German delegation at the disarmament conference. Behind his appointment were von Reichenau and General von Hindenburg, the Reich President’s son. Hitler had known von Reichenau for a long time, as the latter had already—as he himself said—been of great assistance to him during his election tours in East Prussia, when he had captured the province for the Party.
Early in May [1934] the first large-scale General Staff exercises under the new Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Colonel-General Freiherr von Fritsch, took place at Bad Nauheim; von Fritsch had replaced von Hammerstein as C.-in-C. on 1st February. I would like to state here that von Blomberg tried to press the candidacy of Reichenau personally upon the Reich President, even threatening to resign, but the old Hindenburg waved both of them away and appointed Freiherr von Fritsch, without paying the slightest attention to Hitler’s endeavours to back Blomberg up in his campaign for Reichenau. Thus, the first attempt at handing over the army to a ‘National Socialist’ general had failed. When I looked Fritsch up immediately afterwards to congratulate him on his appointment, he said I was the first to do so, and for old time’s sake he was particularly glad of that.
The common bond which united Keitel and Blomberg can no longer be traced with any clarity: Blomberg was highly gifted, an intellectual hugely interested in matters of the greatest diversity, towering far above the normal specimens of the Prussian officer corps; Keitel was conscientious, loyal, an outstanding expert in those fields that were his own. Perhaps that was the reason why Blomberg selected him as his closest colleague, especially as this was a time when army expansion was the order of the day and nobody had turned his hand so successfully and so intensively to this problem as Keitel.
After recovering from his illness Keitel hung on for some time in his old office as head of the T–2 department. He saw and spoke to Hitler for the first time at Bad Reichenhall in July 1933—while still head of the organisational department in the Troop Office—at a conference of senior Sturmabteilung commanders; the SA—storm detachments—were the National Socialist Party’s private army.
One of his wife’s letters to her mother, written on 5th July, 1933, describes Keitel’s personal impressions of Hitler:
He has spoken at length with Hitler, he has been up to his cottage, and is full of enthusiasm about him. His eyes were fabulous, and how the man could speak . . . !
Curiously, neither Hitler nor Keitel seems to have recalled this conversation, for later on Keitel suggests that he became acquainted with Hitler only in 1938, while Hitler is reported at the height of the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis to have asked to see ‘this General von Keitel’, whom he obviously did not recall after five years. It can be noted that it was characteristic of Hitler that he automatically assumed that Keitel as a Prussian general had the von-prefix of the nobility.
The Bad Reichenhall conference had been called by Hitler to smooth out the frictions extant between the legitimate German army and the para-military Party troops of the SA, problems on which Keitel’s Memoirs dwell in some detail; his reminiscences from this time as Infantry Commander III with the 3rd infantry division at Potsdam in 1934 throw new light on the background to what has become known as the Night of the Long Knives—the bloody purge of the SA. Keitel takes up a clear frontal stand against the dark intrigues of the SA:
The SA group at Berlin-Brandenburg, commanded by SA-General Ernst—a former apprentice waiter who had been a volunteer despatch rider in the Great War at the age of sixteen—became conspicuous by its intensive activity in my own area [Potsdam] founding new SA units everywhere and trying to establish contacts with Reichswehr officers all over my area. Ernst paid several visits on me as well, without my being able to d
etect what was really behind them. During the summer of 1934 he began to bring the topic of conversation round to our secret [and illegal] arms dumps in my area; he considered them to be in danger because of their inadequate guards, and offered to provide guards for them himself. I thanked him but turned his offer down; at the same time I did shift the location of some of the dumps (machine guns and rifles) because I feared their existence had been betrayed to him. My General Staff officer (Major von Rintelen) and I both smelt rats; we did not trust the SA Group one inch and were highly suspicious of the questionable background of their effusive protestations of friendship.
Von Rintelen had served in the Intelligence Service under Colonel Nicolai [Chief of the Army General Staff’s Counterespionage and Intelligence department in the Great War], so he was a trained Intelligence Officer, and I gave him a free hand to exercise his skill on this ‘outfit’ and take a look behind its scenes. Ostensibly he was just checking back on certain proposals Ernst’s people had made. In the meantime we wound up the smaller arms dumps which were not safe from a military point of view, and transferred them to the maintenance workshops at Potsdam.
Von Rintelen was able to throw a lot of light on the goings-on, thanks to their loquacity. While we had no idea of any political plans a man like Röhm might be hatching, we did find out that they were trawling for arms for some ‘operation’ in Berlin at the end of June, and that they were prepared—if necessary—to acquire these by capturing military arms dumps whose location had been betrayed to them.
I drove to Berlin and called at the War Ministry building to speak to von Fritsch, but I did not find him in. I went to Reichenau and then with him to Blomberg, where I reported the Berlin SA Group’s secret plans. I was waved coldly away, and told that it was all just imagination: the SA was loyal to the Führer, there was no question of any danger from that quarter. I told him I was not satisfied of that. I ordered von Rintelen to maintain contact and secure further Intelligence on the SA’s intentions. In about the second half of June Ernst again called on me, visiting me in my office at Potsdam, accompanied by his adjutant and chief of staff [von Mohrenschildt and Sander respectively]. I called Rintelen in to act as an observer. After all sorts of empty phrases, Ernst again came round to the subject of the arms dumps urging me to entrust him with their custody in locations where there were no military units stationed: he had information, he said, that the communists knew where the dumps were and he feared that they would seize them. I now entered into the act and identified three small country arms dumps to him, which, however, I knew had been evacuated in the meantime. The arrangements for transferring their custody would be worked out in the near future with the director of the arms dumps, and Ernst would then be told of them. Finally, Ernst said goodbye to me, as he was leaving the country for a long voyage at the end of the month, and he named his deputy to me.
With this new information on the Putsch plans, Major von Rintelen drove in to Berlin the same day and called on Reichenau at the War Ministry; this unscheduled visit by Ernst was all that the overall picture had lacked to confirm our suspicions. Rintelen was seen by Blomberg, who now began to take it seriously too. He later informed me that he broke the news to Hitler on the same day, and that the latter had replied that he would speak to Röhm about it, although Röhm had been dodging him for some weeks now as Hitler had found it necessary to take him pretty sharply to task over Röhm’s ideas on a People’s Militia.
The 30th June Putsch never happened. Hitler flew straight to Munich from Bad Godesberg where he had received the latest news on the plans being hatched by Röhm. Röhm himself had mustered all his accomplices at Bad Wiessee. Hitler’s plane landed at dawn, and he drove in person out to Bad Wiessee, where he caught the nest of conspirators red-handed. Thus one can say that Röhm’s plan was thwarted, on the very day of his briefing for the Putsch. There never was any Putsch. According to the orders seized by Hitler at Bad Wiessee and shown to Blomberg, the Putsch was aimed primarily at the Army—that is to say at the Reichswehr—and at its officer corps, the bulwarks of reaction. They considered that Hitler had apparently overlooked this step in his revolution, but they would be making up for that now. Even so Hitler was to be allowed to remain as Reich Chancellor: only Blomberg and Fritsch were to be removed—Röhm wanted to assume one of these offices himself.
As far as Röhm’s plan was just a matter of reinforcing the army permitted us by the Versailles Diktat by means of a large People’s Militia on the Swiss model, it was already well known to von Schleicher [the former Reich Chancellor and War Minister]. Röhm had wanted to turn the SA, with its revolutionary officer cadre, mostly comprised of former army officers disgruntled at having been retired and hence hostile to the Reichswehr, into a future People’s Army of a Yeomanry nature. This could never have functioned alongside the Reichswehr, but only against it; it would have meant the elimination of the Reichswehr. Röhm knew that Hitler had always rejected these ideas, so he had wanted to force Hitler’s hand by confronting him with a fait accompli. Unfortunately, General von Schleicher also had a finger in the pie: he always was the cat who could not resist political mice. That was why both Schleicher and his emissary, von Bredow, who was en route for Paris with Röhm’s proposals to the French government, had to be arrested. I am not aware whether either of them offered armed resistance, and today I am inclined to think they did not. Both were shot.
Von Blomberg kept the list of names of those who were shot in his safe; it recorded seventy-eight names. It is to be regretted that during the Nuremberg Trial the witnesses, even [SA Lieutenant-General] Jüttner, concealed Röhm’s real objectives and tried to hush things up. Those who were participants in his plans and fully initiated in them were the highest echelons of the SA leadership corps; the average SA man and the SA officers below the rank of colonel had no idea of them, and probably never did even afterwards.
Nevertheless, what he [Blomberg] said in his telegram of thanks to Hitler is absolutely correct: by Hitler’s decisive personal intervention at Bad Wiessee and the steps he took, he had managed to stamp out a smouldering danger before it burst into a conflagration which would have cost a hundred times more lives than it eventually did. Why the guilty parties were not made to stand trial by court martial, but were simply shot, is beyond my comprehension.
This latter comment is characteristic of the field-marshal’s ingenuousness. That Hitler had no legal right whatsoever to order these executions without further ado, that this was a clear breach of justice, occurred to neither Blomberg nor Keitel in 1934: they saw only the vague and disturbing outlines of a post-revolutionary SA state looming up ahead, under the figurehead of Röhm. As Field-Marshal von Manstein later wrote:
The more distant those days become from the present, the more people seem inclined to minimise the extent of the danger represented by the SA at the time under the leadership of a man like Röhm; it was a danger not only to the Reichswehr, but to the very State itself.
Karl Ernst, the leader of the Berlin SA Group, and his adjutant and chief of staff were both shot on the night of 30th June to 1st July, the Night of the Long Knives, while Ernst Röhm, the Chief of Staff of the SA, was shot early next morning; General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were murdered that night at their home at Neubabelsberg, and Major-General von Bredow was shot as well.
In the spring of 1934 Keitel’s father died and he inherited the estate at Helmscherode for himself. Keitel applied to resign his commission so that he could devote himself wholly to the affairs of the family estate; he wanted his resignation to come into effect on 1st October, 1934. He was called before the Chief of Army Personnel, General Schwedler, who told him that Fritsch was prepared to offer him the command of a division near Helmscherode, and Keitel selected one at Bremen, the 22nd Infantry Division. He withdrew his resignation. ‘Such’, said Keitel in his Memoirs, ‘is the force of human destiny.’ He was not long in his new command.
At the end of August [1935] I received a telephone call from the command
er of the Military District, that the Commander [General von Kluge] wanted me to drive out and meet him at a rendezvous to discuss something very urgent with him. At the time I was at the exercise ground at Ohrdruf; we met nearby and had a quiet conversation à deux. He was extremely friendly: he disclosed to me that on 1st October I was to succeed von Reichenau as Chief [of the Wehrmachtamt, the Armed Forces Office] in Blomberg’s ministry, and that the only other candidate for the post, von Vietinghoff, had been turned down. I was very disturbed, and obviously showed it. He told me further that it was Fritsch who had been behind my nomination and that I ought to bear in mind that this was just as much a vote of confidence from Fritsch as from Blomberg. I begged him to move heaven and earth to prevent my appointment, there was still time for that. Would he tell Fritsch that as a soldier I had never been so happy as I was now as a divisional commander in Bremen; I wanted nothing to do with politics. He promised to do so, and we parted.
On the way back to Bremen from Ohrdruf I stayed for some days at Helmscherode, where my wife was living with our children. She urged me to accept the offer, and not to do anything to prejudice my chances of selection. . . .
Keitel had been on good terms with Fritsch for a long time, and he valued Blomberg as an understanding, intelligent and educated superior. Keitel’s ideal was to buttress the position of the Reich War Minister as supreme commander of the armed forces, and to create for him in the Armed Forces Office—and above all in its National Defence Department—an effective joint operations staff controlling all three services. He never considered himself suited either by education or talent for the rôle of a Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff; like Blomberg, he did recognise the need for establishing such a post, but no such post was ever created. Both the army—in the persons of Colonel-General Fritsch and General Ludwig Beck, the latter being Chief of the Troop Office and a leading military theoretician—and the navy stood up in arms against these innovations.
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Page 3