The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  The result was renewed ill-feeling on both sides. The Führer must, in my view, have known of the existence of the construction programme and of its planned rate of progress because Blomberg had briefed him about it in the summer of 1937. The truth was that it no longer fitted in with his own private political ambitions; hence his irritation and the intervention.

  On 20th May, Czechoslovakia for no reason at all and quite out of the blue announced the temporary mobilisation of her Army, which could only be intended for Germany’s edification. Hitler returned to Berlin full of new plans and decisions. He announced he had no intention of accepting this renewed provocation from Czechoslovakia lying down or of letting them get away with it; he demanded we should put ourselves on a war footing as quickly as possible, a demand which found tangible expression in his alteration of the directive’s opening sentence to read:

  It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.

  The Commander-in-Chief of the Army was at once warned verbally of these new orders, which were then confirmed by the directive itself.

  At the same time, the construction of the fortifications in the west—the ‘West Wall’—was transferred to Todt, the Inspector-General of Roadbuilding; he was directed to accelerate the construction programme to top speed, in accordance with the military and tactical plans and principles drawn up by the engineer troops, employing for this task the construction squads which had built the autobahns. The target was to build within eighteen months ten thousand concrete structures of every kind from the most massive fortifications down to the smallest bunkers, while by the autumn of 1938 five thousand small bunkers were to have been built to the designs which Hitler himself had drawn up, to afford protection against mortar and heavy shrapnel, mainly concentrated along the sector between Karlsruhe and Aix-la-Chapelle.

  After he had issued all the most important orders—resulting in much head-shaking and further denigration of the OKW at the War Office—Hitler witnessed firing trials at Jüterbog where various sizes of concrete structures were subjected to heavy field-howitzer and mortar fire to test the ability of the concrete thicknesses he himself had decreed to withstand the bombardment. Afterwards, in the mess, he addressed the Army’s commanding generals who had met to witness the trials; his aim, as he told me, was to counteract with hard and objective criticism the defeatist talk of Beck’s memorandum on the military potential of our prospective enemies and of ourselves. His friend von Reichenau, who still enjoyed a close personal friendship with Hitler, had informed him that Brauchitsch had had the Beck memorandum read out to the commanding generals during a conference, and it had left a decidedly unfavourable impression on them; this was clearly Reichenau’s own contribution to the campaign against the Commander-in-Chief of the Army: Reichenau and Guderian were vying with each other to see who could denigrate Brauchitsch the more.

  The Führer’s speech was quite adroit and convincingly revealed certain vulnerable points in the memorandum; in any event it was a cutting criticism of the General Staff and of its Chief in particular, who accordingly applied to resign his office as he ‘no longer felt able to guide the training of General Staff officers’. On 30th September Beck was relieved of his office and Halder took his place.

  The Commander-in-Chief of the Army requested that Beck be given the command of an Army Group, but the Führer categorically refused: Beck, in his view, had been ‘too intellectual’ to be Chief of General Staff; Beck was seen as an incorrigible defeatist and an obstacle to his plans, and perhaps above all he was recognised as the evil genius who had so often fouled his relations with Brauchitsch. From what I had seen myself, I was able to concur unreservedly with Hitler’s judgment only on this last score.

  I wept no tears over Beck in view of the shameless way he had treated me; I was always the first to recognise his great virtues, and I would never have thought him capable of selling his soul to treasonable intriguers as early as 1938, or of being their spiritual leader from that point on. One can seek his motives only in his injured vanity and his abysmal hatred of Hitler; that was why this formerly impeccable officer made common cause with our enemies and stiffened their resolve while awaiting our overthrow, something Beck was impotent to bring about himself. He was no leader, as he was to show as a conspirator by his pathetic behaviour when there was still time to act and when the plot—even though it had gone wrong—demanded a man of action and not the cunctator that he has always been; witness his three futile attempts at putting a bullet into his own head while sitting in a chair!

  For the War Office and the OKW the summer of 1938 was taken up with preliminary planning for the Czechoslovakian contingency (code-named the Green contingency). The difficulties involved in the exercise were primarily of a logistical nature: how could the manpower and equipment of forty incomplete divisions (including Austria’s) be assembled for the attack without the least suggestion of mobilisation, which Hitler had expressly forbidden?

  The primary method was to hold large-scale ‘manœuvres’ in Silesia, Saxony and Bavaria, with the successive call-up of several age-groups of reservists without releasing any of them before the manœuvres had ended; the divisions were raised on the troop training grounds, while the Reich Labour Service was mobilised to man the positions in the west. Every imaginable but inconspicuous makeshift had to be exploited: hastily improvised ammunition and supply columns were camouflaged as being connected with the manœuvres, and the railway movements as being linked with the Reich Party Rally. In retrospect one can only admire the Army’s achievement in laying all this on: under Halder, the General Staff achieved the seemingly impossible without exciting the least suspicion or allowing anybody to detect what really lay behind these ‘manœuvre’ preparations. For sheer ingenuity they could not be beaten; Hitler himself suggested many of the ideas and he was kept constantly up to date by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army about how things were going.

  In August Halder took the opportunity of a voyage on the [Führer’s yacht] Grille on the occasion of a review of the fleet to brief the Führer and myself from a map on his actual operational plan. The Führer asked numerous questions but did not express any particular opinion; he asked for a map to be prepared showing all the dispositions and how our forces were to be deployed, and for a brief memorandum on the probable sequence of events. He was particularly interested in those points of the enemy’s frontier fortifications where it was planned to break through, as he had made a careful study of their value and their weaknesses. There were a number of differences of opinion on this score, particularly over the use of medium artillery, of which we had only a modest quantity, and over the armoured forces and the airborne operations. The briefing conference ended without either a decisive yes or a clear no from him: he [Hitler] wanted to chew it all over again at his leisure. Halder was as wise to him as ever and at once turned over to him the map and all his notes, with a request that a decision should be reached shortly as the orders would have to be issued to the various Armies.

  Upon his return to Berlin, the Führer gave me his views and asked me to pass them on to Brauchitsch. After a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing with me, he announced that while by and large he was in agreement with the plan, he was forced on principle to object to the plan for employing the armoured groups, which was all wrong, and which he wanted to see changed to provide for them to link up and lunge towards Prague from the south-west, up through Pilsen. Halder told me he refused to make such an alteration, because our very weakness in medium artillery would oblige us to fragment our armoured forces to ensure that our infantry could break through the crucial points. I was unable to argue with Halder’s logic, but could perforce only comply with my instructions from Hitler; I advised Brauchitsch to talk it over with the Führer himself, but he refrained from doing so.

  The Führer, moreover, had again migrated to Berchtesgaden duringthe second half of August, It was at this time that [Mr. Neville] Chamberlain made his first historic visit to
the Führer at the Berghof, and I and our Foreign Secretary [von Ribbentrop] were both summoned to attend. For the British Prime Minister to pay a visit seemed to me at the time to be a most unusual event. The old gentleman had actually flown over from London to Munich; apparently it was the first time he had ever flown anywhere. The so-called ‘German problems’ and the maintenance of peace were of course high on the agenda. As always during political functions I was merely the representative of the Armed Forces summoned for the guest’s reception and departure, and I took no part in the talks; my presence seemed very superfluous to me, however interesting it was for me to get to know Europe’s leading statesmen—or at least to see them and exchange a few conventional words in conversation with them. I left the Berghof soon after Chamberlain; it was apparent that Hitler had not been satisfied by the result.

  During the first half of September, the annual Reich Party Rally took place, only this time it served simultaneously to camouflage our troops’ concentration in the areas of the ‘manœuvres’ which had themselves been so planned that at one time the general trend of the manœuvres would seem to be towards the Czech frontier, while at another time it would be in the opposite direction.

  Shortly before, I and Major von Lossberg had delivered to the Führer in his home in Munich the exact timetable of events for the Green contingency [operations against Czechoslovakia]; the timetable laid down in detail for the Army and Air Force all the steps to be taken, the troop movements and the orders to be issued, etc., starting with the day of the attack, D-day, and working backwards.

  This timetable was governed by two characteristic considerations:

  1. At what point did it become impossible to camouflage our troop movements any longer?

  2. How late could the issue of an order halting troop movements be left?

  This calendar of deadlines would serve as a guide to Hitler as he guided his diplomatic measures in harmony with the unrolling skein of the military master plan.

  I showed him how the timetable would work (it had been formulated by Jodl in close collaboration with the fighting services). According to the plan, Hitler had only to fix the date for D-day and the whole plan would tick smoothly over like clockwork; it would be possible each day to see what was due to happen and when.

  Hitler was delighted with this ‘programme’ and dismissed us both from his presence without further ado. That was the first time I ever saw the inside of his modest flat. After a brief meal in a nearby restaurant, Lossberg and I drove back that same afternoon along the autobahn to Berlin; it had been an exacting day.

  At the [Nuremberg] Party Rally, which I had been required to attend this year as well, Hitler inquired of me whether the General Staff had amended its operational plan in accordance with his wishes. I telephoned Halder and he said they had not: they had not been able to amend it in time, as the orders had had to go out. I asked Hitler for permission to fly to Berlin to speak with Brauchitsch personally; I made the excuse that for security reasons it would be imprudent to use the telephone. I determined on no account to return to Nuremberg without having achieved my purpose. I spoke alone with Brauchitsch and he saw the position in which we both now found ourselves; he promised to speak at once with Halder along these lines. But when I called on him two hours later to pick up his final decision for my flight back to Nuremberg, he rejected any prospect of making any alterations; that was quite impossible, and I would have to tell Hitler that.

  I already knew better of the Führer than that, and I knew he would not be satisfied with that answer; and that was how things turned out. Brauchitsch and Halder were directed to present themselves to him in Nuremberg next day. The talks between them began in the ‘Deutscher Hof’ hotel just before midnight and lasted several hours: Hitler’s idea was to bring these recalcitrants round by calmly and patiently lecturing them in detail on the use of modern battle cavalry (in other words armoured formations); I had already suggested a perfectly viable compromise solution to them. I deplored the waste of so much time, particularly at night, on this as I could predict that in the end all their opposition and all their unjustified obstinacy were bound to collapse in defeat, with a consequent fresh loss of prestige for both of them. By three o’clock it was too late: Hitler lost his patience and ordered them categorically to unite the armoured formations as he had required and use them as a combined force in the break-through attack through Pilsen. Coldly and sullenly he dismissed the gentlemen from his presence.

  As we were quenching our thirsts in the vestibule after losing this battle, Halder asked me in a voice quivering with indignation: ‘What’s he really after?’ I was so irritated that I retorted: ‘If you really haven’t found out yet, then you have my sympathy.’

  Only now did Brauchitsch intervene to make amends. The new orders were at once drawn up and Hitler’s demands were fully met. As Halder was writing out the orders, I could only ask Brauchitsch: ‘Why do you fight with him, when you know that the battle is lost before it’s begun? Nobody thinks there is going to be any war over this, so the whole thing wasn’t worth all that bitter rearguard action. You are throwing down your trumps in quite futile gestures and in the end you only have to give in just the same; and then when it really is a matter of life and death your opposition will lack the necessary authority to be effective.’

  I have described this episode in detail only because it illustrates in one characteristic example (a controversy that was not even of the first order) the symptoms of the conditions under which we had to work with Hitler. If he once got an idea into his head, no man on earth could ever shake him out of it; he always had his way, whether it was approved or disapproved by his advisers.

  During the second half of September [in fact, on 22nd to 23rd September, 1938] Chamberlain paid a second visit to us, this time at Godesberg on the Rhine. Brauchitsch had provided me with Stülpnagel as an observer in case military measures were called for, so at least I had somebody to talk to during the political discussions, which went on for hours on end and from which we soldiers were always excluded. Late that afternoon there was a dangerous element of tension in consequence of a telegram from Prague reporting the mobilisation of the Czech Army. While I telephoned Jodl and arranged for him to clarify the position with our military attaché in Prague, Hitler dictated a letter to the British Prime Minister to the effect that he was adopting complete freedom of action and was prepared if necessary to safeguard German interests by force of arms, should the current talks be vitiated by the Czech mobilisation. Fortunately, the reports coming in to that effect were refuted both by Jodl and by Chamberlain himself, with the result that the talks were resumed next day and ended, if not with a final solution, at least with the creation of a suitable basis for avoiding war. After dusk that evening we flew back to Berlin making a detour round the thunderstorms raging all over the country; it was an incomparable spectacle to see the electric discharges from some ten thousand feet up, with the lightning streaking out both level with and below our plane.

  On the next day I drove out to a deer rutting as the guest of Director Luenitsch [General Manager] of A.E.G., the General Electric Company, and on the second day at J., near Berlin, I brought down the strongest deer of my life; to me it seemed a good omen for the imminent solution of the Czech question.

  As is well known, it was Mussolini’s intervention that finally brought about the Munich talks between the four statesmen in the Führer’s building at Königlicher Platz at the end of September. The only statesman I did not already know at the reception was M. Daladier to whom the French Ambassador François-Poncet introduced me while we all partook of a small standing buffet. I was left out of the talks, although Göring did take part in them. The result [i.e. the seceding to Germany of the Sudetenland] is well known, but I do not believe it is generally known that it was Daladier who finally removed the British Prime Minister’s obdurate resistance over the Sudeten question by saying: ‘We won’t tolerate war over this, the Czechs will just have to give way. We will simpl
y have to force them to accept the cession.’ Schmundt took all that down as they went along.

  At the ambassadors’ conference where the territories to be transferred were decided upon, our military High Command was represented because even though the ethnic and language frontiers were to be the guiding factors, the new strategic frontier and the amputation of the Czech frontier fortifications played quite a considerable military rôle: these were the instructions I gave, and through the medium of my observer they served as a term of reference for our Foreign Office representatives. The exceedingly valuable services performed by François-Poncet in ensuring the acceptance of the German demands, and the humorous threats he uttered to the others—‘Now then, hurry up! The Old Man (Hitler) is already on his way to Berlin’—are all history now. The fact was that France had no intention of going to war over Germany’s eastern problems; Hitler’s recognition of this and his unshakeable faith in France’s supineness—he had repeatedly reassured them he would never go to war with them over Alsace-Lorraine—were disastrous for the outcome of his diplomacy in the Polish problem, for after Munich England began to think quite differently and forced the reluctant French to join her camp.

  I am convinced that the swift progress we had made since the summer of 1938 with the construction of our western fortifications, and the scale of the manpower and material effort we had devoted to them, both had a major hand in influencing the French in their reappraisal of the treaty of alliance they had guaranteed Czechoslovakia*. The western fortifications could hardly remain concealed from the French, and indeed they were not intended to; they obviously gained enormously in effect as their defensive value was demonstrated during the autumn of 1938: only a very few divisions were required to man these fortifications, reinforced by some three hundred thousand men of the Reich Labour Service and improvised reserve units, and they were equipped only with grossly inadequate weapons and armaments. The whole thing was only one vast bluff. By means of bonuses, day- and night-shifts and a magnificent effort from the men, maximum output was obtained. Each week Todt had to report how many complete bunkers had been poured, and the result was that by 1st October, 1938, the required number of almost five thousand fortification sites—admittedly only finished in the rough—was attained.