The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  A week after I acceded to my office, I was summoned to the Berghof [at Berchtesgaden] without any reason being given. When I reported to Hitler in his house that February morning [12th February, 1938] he told me he was expecting the Federal Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, within half an hour for a serious talk with him, as the crisis between our brother countries was calling for an intelligent solution. [At the end of January, Viennese Police had raided the headquarters of the Austrian National Socialists and captured incriminating documentary evidence proving they were banking on Hitler’s armed intervention in Austria. Hitler dismissed the leader of the Austrian National Socialists, and Schuschnigg was visiting Hitler to try to obtain his assurance of standing by their agreement of 1936.] He had sent for me, he said, only so that Schuschnigg would see a few uniforms around; Reichenau and Sperrle were coming down from Munich, so the significance was certain not to be lost on their guest.

  We generals played no part in the conferences and had no inkling of either the objectives or the aims of the talks until Schuschnigg’s departure; we were fearfully bored. We were called in only for lunch and again for coffee later that afternoon, joining in the informal conversations then. The then Austrian Foreign Secretary, Guido Schmidt, confirmed all this at the Trial.

  Obviously it dawned upon me during the course of the day that—with the other two generals—I was by my very presence acting as a means to an end, my very first major rôle in life. This view was strengthened by Hitler’s bellowing for me when Schuschnigg withdrew briefly for private consultations with his Foreign Secretary during the afternoon. I entered Hitler’s study just as Schuschnigg was leaving it, and when I asked Hitler what commands he had for me, he replied: ‘None at all! Just sit down.’ We kept up a short, indifferent conversation for ten minutes, after which I was dismissed from his presence. The effect this had on Schuschnigg has been testified to at the Trial.

  I spent that night—the only time in all those years—at the Führer’s house; but I had to leave the Berghof in the early hours of the next morning in order to set in motion the various deception tactics agreed upon, in collaboration with Jodl and Canaris. As a result of the agreements that were reached, actual military preparations did not even come into the question and, as I was to apprise the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, at that time even the Führer had no thoughts of a military conflict.

  All the greater was our surprise when Hitler’s demand for our troops to enter Austria reached us on ioth March. I was summoned to the Reich Chancellery and briefly told that he had formulated this intention because Schuschnigg had without warning announced there would be a plebiscite on the subject of his agreements with Hitler; Hitler interpreted this move as a breach of their agreements, and planned to circumvent it by military action.

  I proposed that the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Chief of the General Staff should be summoned to receive orders from Hitler direct. It was quite clear to me that Beck would otherwise simply dismiss the whole thing as quite impossible, and I could never report that to the Führer. Brauchitsch was away on an official journey so I called back at the Reich Chancellery, accompanied only by Beck. His objections were summarily brushed aside by Hitler, so he had no alternative but to comply and report back some hours later what troop formations would be ready to enter Austria early on the 12th. Late on nth March Brauchitsch left the Reich Chancellery building with the final executive order, after it had already been temporarily withheld once during the afternoon.

  I reached my home only about eight o’clock that evening and my guests were already awaiting me, among them being by coincidence the Austrian ambassador [Tauschitz] and his military attaché [Major-General Pohl], together with a motley assembly in both uniform and mufti. The invitations had gone out three weeks before, without my even dreaming that 12th March was to be a historic day of the first order. I was shordy able to establish for myself that the Austrian gentlemen were completely at ease and obviously had no idea of what was to happen within a very few hours. It was pure coincidence, but this evening party became the ideal camouflage for our entry into Austria.

  The night that followed was sheer purgatory for me: one telephone call followed another from the Army General Staff and from Brauchitsch; finally at about four o’clock in the morning there was a call from the then chief of the military operations staff, General von Viebahn; all adjured me to persuade the Führer to call the operation off. I had no intention of asking this of the Führer even once; of course I promised them I would try, but I called them back a short time later (having made no attempt to contact him) and told each one that he had rejected their protests. This was something of which the Führer never learned; if he had, his verdict on the Army’s leadership would have been devastating, a disillusionment I wanted to spare both parties.

  At six o’clock on the morning of the 12th, the Führer and I flew out of Berlin: he wanted to take part in the triumphal entry into his Fatherland and personally accompany the troops. We put in our first appearance at the command post of the Commander-in-Chief of the divisions marching into Austria, General von Bock, and he briefed us on the troops’ movements and on their entry routes, because the Führer naturally wanted to be there to welcome his troops. It was from here that the memorable telephone conversation with Mussolini took place, the Führer having flown a handwritten letter out to him by an emissary, justifying his actions to him: Mussolini personally telephoned to confirm that he had received it, and congratulated Hitler; there followed then Hitler’s memorable phrase—‘Duce, I will never forget you for this’—an exclamation which he repeated several times.

  At midday we drove through Adolf Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau, acclaimed by the townsfolk with an unending roar of welcome. He showed us his school, and his parents’ home, and he was visibly deeply moved by it all. We rounded off the evening in Hitler’s second native city Linz, on the Danube, having been delayed in every town and village on the way by the advancing troops and the wildly celebrating crowds that packed around us. It was long after dark when we drove into the city together with the Austrian Minister Seyss-Inquart [Federal Chancellor since the 11th] who had joined our party on the outskirts; here, from a balcony of the City Hall, Hitler addressed a vast crowd of people tightly packed into the market square below. The atmosphere of the whole demonstration was electric and excited beyond belief; I had never seen anything like it before and I was deeply impressed. I had thought it unlikely that there would be any shooting or anything like that when our troops entered the country, but a reception like this was something I had never dreamed of. We stayed there all next day, Sunday; he [i.e. Hitler] was greatly preoccupied with the administrative details of the union, and during the afternoon there was a brief march-past by German and Austrian troops in front of the hotel [the Weinzinger Hotel at Linz].

  Next day came our grand entry into Vienna, after a midday break at Saint-Pölten. It was not until far into the night that I could get to sleep in our hotel [the Imperial Hotel], where again I had a room giving out onto the street; the dense and thronging crowd below seemed never to tire of roaring and chanting: ‘We want to see our Führer! We want to see our Führer!’ A military parade by German and Austrian troops followed that afternoon, after the Führer’s historic speech to the vast crowd gathered in the Castle square, with its closing sentence, ‘I announce to the German people that my Austrian fatherland has now returned to the Greater German Reich.’ That same evening we flew back from Vienna to Munich: this flight before dusk is the most breathtaking and extraordinary spectacle I have ever witnessed; Hitler saw me in my enchantment, and with tears of joy in his eyes he stammered out to me the bare words: ‘All that . . . all that is now German again.’

  After a hasty meal in the airport restaurant I flew back to Berlin while it was still dark. That same night I was back in my home. The last few days had been like some vast and incomprehensive dream to me. For the first time I had been an eye-witness of history in the making.

  On my arri
val [in Berlin] next morning the Chief of my Central Office, Major Kleikamp, received me with the news that General von Viebahn, chief of the military operations staff, had locked himself into the small overnight room I had had fitted out in Blomberg’s flat after it fell vacant and was threatening everybody who tried to speak to or see him with a gun. I was to call Jodl in to have a word with me at once, as he wanted to see me as soon as I arrived.

  General von Viebahn had been warmly recommended to the Führer as a superlative general staff officer by General von der Schulenburg, the chief of staff of the First World War Army (later Army Group) named ‘Deutscher Kronprinz’; Schulenburg had had him as a captain on his own staff. The Führer had several times suggested to me I ought to take Viebahn into the OKW for its operations staff, as he greatly valued Schulenburg’s judgment; the latter was close to Party circles, and a General in the SS and the SA. I also respected him in view of my old connections with him. I knew Viebahn from my personnel office days and had had a lot to do with him earlier, even before 1933. As the office of chief of the military operations staff was free at the time and as I was employing Jodl as chief of the OKW’s national defence department, I concurred with the Führer’s wishes. At the beginning it had seemed a sound solution to me, as Viebahn was a close friend of Beck’s and I had some hopes therefore that he would bridge the gap between Beck and myself and smooth over our differences. But I never could make head or tail of this odd fellow, and Jodl could make even less; in view of the way he had implored me [to hold Hitler back] during the night before our entry into Austria I completely lost confidence in him. During my absence Jodl had had to suffer the most improbable scenes from him. At one time he had been praying out loud and prophesying disaster for us all; then he had gone off into a distracted and brooding silence for several hours on end. Then, when Jodl had finally told him to get a grip on himself, he had locked himself in, refused to let anybody speak to him, and thrown an inkwell against the door.

  I called Viebahn in to see me. But now that the spectre of disaster had vanished from before his eyes, he was quite coherent again, and when I advised him to take an immediate rest to convalesce he firmly refused saying that he was perfectly healthy and that he failed to understand what I was getting at. He protested to Jodl for having ‘lied’ to me about him, whereupon Jodl unceremoniously threw him out of the room. I had the most extraordinary difficulty in getting rid of this mentally sick and hysterical man at all; the War Office refused to take him away from me, and I had to threaten Brauchitsch that I would go to the Führer and demand the man’s removal if he was not retired from the OKW. That did some good, but it resulted in a complaint from Viebahn against me for libelling him by my assertion that he was not of sound mind. I was happy to be alone with Jodl once again; this other chief of operations staff was a dreadful broken reed.

  On 18th March the end of the Fritsch trial arrived, with the verdict described above. Fritsch retired to the seclusion of a country house that had been built for him some time before on the military training ground at Bergen (near Uelzen), far from man or beast, and the Führer himself announced this to the Berlin generals in an address to them at the Reich Chancellery. He concluded that he had ordered the prosecution witness, whose shameless lying had caused the scandal, to be shot. Some weeks later Canaris told me that the Secret State Police had not complied with the execution order; so it was obvious to me that the witness must have been a hired tool who could hardly be shot as a reward for his deed.

  I demanded an immediate clarification of the case from Canaris, to enable me to make a report to the Führer. Canaris begged me not to make any use of what he had told me, as he had only heard it from hearsay himself; he promised to make immediate inquiries of Heydrich himself. Some days later he told me that the Führer’s order had now been executed and I declared myself satisfied. Today I am convinced that Canaris’ first report to me was correct and that he had retracted it only for fear of Heydrich and what I would tell Hitler. My faith in Canaris was to cost me dearly later.

  The immediate annexation which Hitler had ordered of the Austrian Federal Army and the raising from strongly Reich-German strains of two general-headquarter staffs, together with one armoured, two infantry and two mountain divisions, inflicted a considerable new organisational burden on the War Office as well as signifying that the 36-division programme was being exceeded for the first time. Hitler himself undertook a tour of several garrisons of the new ‘Ostmark’ to harangue the recruits and troop units being raised; it was his supreme ambition to raise here exemplary formations in the shortest possible time and in the old Prussian tradition, under the command of selected Reich-German officers; his thoughts were on the Czechs, who had been taken by surprise by the solution of the Austrian problem and whose interest in it could hardly remain purely academic.

  On 20th April, together with the Commanders-in-Chief of the three services, I took part for the first time in the Führer’s birthday celebrations. Göring, who since Blomberg’s departure had been promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and was thus the senior ranking C.-in-C., made a short speech voicing the Armed Forces’ congratulations; this was followed by the usual handshakes and then we went to view a military parade of all three services in the Tiergarten. At midday we were the Führer’s guests at a small banquet.

  During the evening, shortly before the Führer’s departure for Berchtesgaden, I was called in to see him alone at the Reich Chancellery. There followed the first directive to me (referred to several times at the Trial) to institute preliminary General Staff studies for a conflict with Czechoslovakia. As always, he spoke his thoughts out loud to me, in a little speech: the problem would have to be solved some time, not only because of the way in which the Czech government was oppressing the German population living there but because of the strategically impossible situation that would develop should the time ever come for the big reckoning with the East, and by that he meant not just the Poles but particularly the Bolsheviks. He was absolutely convinced that here would lie the greatest danger to the Reich; western Czechoslovakia would act as a springboard for the Red Army and Air Force, and in no time at all the enemy could be at the gates of Dresden and in the heart of the Reich. While he admitted that he had no intention of unleashing a war on the Czechs of his own accord, yet political constellations might emerge where one would have to strike like lightning.

  The instructions issued to me were recorded for posterity in the Schmundt Document, which I have never seen for myself; I took them in without saying a word, but not without some apprehension. I went over the instructions issued to me [with Jodl] next day and we resolved to temporise, while still drafting a formal directive in the required sense; the documents which have been preserved will, together with Jodl’s diary entries, show the subsequent course of events. About four weeks later—on Schmundt’s insistence—I sent down to the Berghof this first draft of our ‘directive’ to the War Office; its introduction has often been mentioned: ‘It is not my intention to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the immediate future . . . etc.’

  Jodl and I had prudently concealed the matter from the Army General Staff in order, as we thought, to avoid unnecessary alarm. Whether something had indeed leaked out to them—perhaps the Führer had expressed thoughts similarly to Brauchitsch—I do not know. In any event, a comprehensive memorandum emerged, written by Beck, with a first part of a political nature and a second part discussing the balance of military strength and the strategic considerations which would be involved should France intervene in a conflict with the Czechs on account of the French treaty with them.

  Brauchitsch called me over to discuss the best way of bringing this memorandum to Hitler’s attention. He had learned to proceed more cautiously since Hitler’s blunt rejection of the General Staff memorandum on ‘Command of the Armed Forces in Time of War’, which he had handed to Hitler without my knowledge shortly after taking office.

  After I had run briefly through Beck’s memorandum on the li
kely outcome of a war with Czechoslovakia, I advised Brauchitsch not to table its first part on any account, as Hitler would at once reject its political and military arguments out of hand, not even troubling to read the second part at all. We decided for this reason to table only the second part as the Führer really ought to study that. That was how we, in fact, set about it, but the only result was a very sharp protest from Hitler that the data were not objective and that the balance of strength had been depicted far too favourably for the enemy (for example the French armoured fighting vehicles, etc.). It was another disaster for the Army and resulted in a further loss of confidence in Brauchitsch, which I bitterly regretted, even though the Führer did not hold Brauchitsch responsible as much as Beck and the General Staff.

  It was at this time that a new note of discord sounded: much to the (justified) rage of the Army, Hitler had commissioned Göring to survey the progress being made in the construction of fortifications in the west, or rather to inspect them. Göring’s report to the Führer was one long accusation against the War Office from beginning to end: virtually nothing had been done, he alleged, what had been done was inadequate, and there was barely even the most primitive field defence system, etc. Grossly over-exaggerated though all that was, it was true that the whole construction project was still only in embryo; with Blomberg’s agreement, the building programme for the concrete structures and larger fortification works had been foreseen as covering a twenty-year span to their completion. Work had been put in hand all along the line, as Blomberg and I had been able to establish during a 1937 drive lasting several days along the whole length of the front, and while they were indeed only isolated beginnings the plans were complete and were shown to us at the time. But now the Führer was bitterly disappointed and he strongly accused the General Staff of sabotaging his requirements: he announced his intention of transferring the construction of fortifications to [Major-General Fritz] Todt, as the Army’s engineer troops were incompetent.