As early as May I had accompanied the Führer on a tour of inspection of the construction sites, which at that time had still been a purely Army engineering project. The construction programme was under the overall command of the headquarters of the Second Army Group in Kassel. At my own suggestion, General Adam, one of Blomberg’s protégés and previously Commandant of the Military Academy in Berlin, had been appointed successor to Ritter von Leeb as Commander-in-Chief of the Second Army Group on 1st April, 1938. I had thought at the time that such a competent and gifted general—before Beck he had been Chief of the General Staff—should not be tied to the Military Academy, and had placed him at Brauchitsch’s disposal.
Adam welcomed the Führer in his capacity as ‘Commander-in-Chief West’ and made an introductory speech on the prospects of defending the western front in view of the troops the War Office had allocated to him and of the current progress that had been made with the construction of the fortifications. According to what Adam himself afterwards told me, his comments were in line with the view currently held by Beck, the then Chief of the General Staff; he admitted the express intention of forcefully exposing the vulnerability of the whole system and the impossibility of offering an effective resistance west of the Rhine for more than a few days. The main objective in all this was to dissuade Hitler at any cost from his plans for an attack on Czechoslovakia, which were already anticipated and probably not entirely unknown.
General Adam, who had been earmarked as Commander-in-Chief for the western front, gladly seized the opportunity to hint that he wanted a considerable reinforcement of his undoubtedly inadequate forces; what commander-in-chief, indeed, would not, as one can never have too many troops? But he also took it upon himself to paint his predicament in really drastic terms and, moreover, in his own peculiar language which was never exactly diplomatic.
The result was a new outburst from Hitler, who rejected the complaints out of hand; it was a highly embarrassing situation, which was hardly alleviated when Hitler broke off General Adam’s speech with an abrupt ‘Thank you’ and dismissed him from his presence. I was obliged to stand there and listen to him ranting at me that this general had been a bad disappointment to him, and he would have to go; he had no use for generals like these who had no faith in their mission from the very outset. My protests that that was not what Adam had meant, that he had only wanted to thrash out as many of his problems as possible, and that he was one of our most competent generals, were of no avail; Brauchitsch had the same lecture from him, and this outstanding soldier was pensioned off.
We drove along the frontier in a few long hops. At several places Hitler ordered defence works to be moved right up to the political frontier, for example at Aix-la-Chapelle, Saarbrücken, and so on. Hitler intervened personally everywhere, declaring that the General Staff’s ideas were wrong and misconceived.
At the end of August [in fact from 27th to 29th August, 1938] I accompanied Hitler on a second tour of the West Wall, now in a very advanced state of completion. General von Witzleben accompanied us, receiving numerous detailed instructions for further improvements, which were immediately passed on to Todt as orders. The Army was now responsible only for the tactical survey and allocation of the sites and for the design of the battle installations. The tour served a simultaneous second purpose: as a propaganda deterrent to France.
Very soon after Munich it became clear to me that while Hitler was perfectly happy with the political victory he had scored over Britain, he had had to forgo the strategic solution of the Czechoslovakian problem, for he had originally resolved to oblige Czechoslovakia to join the orbit of the Greater German Reich in close military alliance either by treaty obligations or, if this should prove impossible, by force of arms.
As it became increasingly evident that there was no prospect of winning over Czechoslovakia by peaceful means, as a result of the firm backing she was now enjoying from the European powers, a plan began to take shape late in October 1938 to eliminate the country as an enemy state by force of arms at the very first opportunity; she was already greatly weakened by the loss of her frontier fortifications. Accordingly, towards the end of October, preliminary directives were issued for the maintenance of military readiness for the time when all the political requirements would—one way or the other—obtain, by exploitation of the widely-publicised independence struggle of Slovakia.
So the final elimination of the Czech question had only really been shelved, when General Jodl left the High Command at the end of October to take up his active appointment as an artillery unit commander in Vienna. Had I had any idea that there was a war in the offing, I would never have let him go like that. After the calamity with General von Viebahn in March and April, I decided to go without a replacement for Jodl as chief of the operations staff and had his work transferred to Colonel Warlimont, head of the national defence department, in close conjunction with myself.
The Czech frontier fortifications [in the area which had been seceded to us] aroused great interest not only among us soldiers, but naturally in Hitler as well; they had been constructed on the model of the French Maginot line under the supervision of French construction engineers. We were greatly surprised by the strength of the larger blockhouses and gun emplacements; a number of firing trials took place in the Führer’s presence, with the fortifications being bombarded by our own standard artillery pieces. Most surprising was the penetrating power displayed by the 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns, which were able to smash right through the normal bunkers at a point-blank range of two thousand yards, a function—it should be said—which the Führer had required of them in advance; so he had been right to order their use in this way.*
Early in November 1938, after the High Command had been instructed to draw up General Staff studies on the re-occupation of Danzig and Memel in case circumstances should conspire to favour the execution of such a plan, I had to lay on a tour of inspection of the eastern fortifications. He [Hitler] told me that he desired to form a picture of the strength of our fortifications against Poland: nobody could tell, he explained, whether the Danzig affair—and the return of Danzig to the Reich was his unshakeable objective—might not blow up into a conflict with Poland itself. I asked Brauchitsch to arrange for such a tour of inspection, and said that it would be quite out of the question for him to refrain from taking part himself, as he had on the two previous tours in the west; his method of withdrawing into the background whenever it was a matter of sidestepping outside interference or of avoiding becoming embroiled in unseemly disputes, had long dawned upon me and I did not like it, because then they could fight it all out with me afterwards and accuse me of not having represented the Army’s interests actively enough.
My forebodings were more than justified: courageously though the engineer General Foerster defended the progress made largely under his command on the major fortification works at the bend in the Oder and Warta rivers, Hitler could not find a kind word to say about any of them: these enormous projects were ‘useless mantraps’, with no firepower and only one or two pathetic little machine-gun turrets, and so on. The final outcome was the dismissal of General Foerster from his command; it took a lot of trouble and a personal request from me to the Führer, to have him appointed commanding general of the Sixth Army Corps in Münster.
Even so, the East Wall preoccupied Hitler so much during that winter that some time later he inspected the Oder front from Breslau down to Frankfurt-on-Oder, only this time without me. The embankment fortifications were the cause of the upset this time because they were clearly visible to the enemy from some way off. But in this instance, too, Hitler was subsequently proved right during our French campaign, for it took only one direct hit from our 88-millimetre artillery to smash each of the French concrete blockhouses visible on the opposite bank of the river.
In any event, despite all the vexations they caused the War Office, the intensified work on the eastern fortifications and East Prussia’s special rôle (which I will not go into h
ere) did give all of us the soothing feeling that we no longer had to reckon with the possibility of a war with Poland in the immediate future, always assuming, of course, that we were not directly attacked. The latter contingency was naturally not ruled out even by Hitler, as there was always the possibility that the Poles might come to Czechoslovakia’s aid.
It was in this way that in the spring of 1939 the OKW’s new ‘Directive for Deployment and Battle’ came into existence; in fact, it was really planned only for defensive purposes should Poland, aided and abetted by the Western Powers, decide to act against us, whether as the result of or in connection with the Danzig problem.
For the sake of historical accuracy I must reiterate that this directive was of a purely defensive nature. I believe that Brauchitsch has already borne this out in the witness box.
With my appointment as chief of the OKW I ceased to be a free man: any liberty to dispose of my time as I pleased and to order my family affairs as I wished had to give way to my permanent dependence on Hitler and the unpredictable claims he made on my time. How often I have had unexpectedly to interrupt even my brief weekend leaves at Helmscherode or hunting expeditions in Pomerania to report to him, more often because of some petty whim of his than for any real reason. Readily though leave and even vitally necessary journeys from the Führer’s headquarters to Berlin were granted me, the passes were just as ruthlessly rescinded and I was recalled again. Whether I was myself partially to blame because of my strongly developed sense of duty, or whether it was because Hitler’s adjutants’ office hesitated to put a brake on these demands, I do not know; unfortunately, I never found out what was in the air until I arrived. Usually it was something that had happened which only I could sort out, and as a rule it was nothing particularly delectable.
When could I ever devote a few leisure hours to my wife or children? For me there was peace no longer, even though there was still no war to tie me to headquarters. My wife has borne it all in the most admirable fashion. What kind of husband and father could I be to her and our children, coming home edgy and irritable as I now invariably did? Now that we no longer had to count every penny, and now that we could get theatre tickets every week and afford other luxuries too, I had no time for these things. I was tied to my desk nearly every evening, plodding through the mountains of work that had accumulated during the day. I used to get home dead tired and drop straight off to sleep.
On top of all this, I felt responsible now not only for Helmscherode and my married sister at Wehrkirch, but for the Blomberg children too: they had nobody apart from me to turn to, now that their father was abroad.
At first Blomberg wrote to me regularly, often with numerous requests all of which I was happy to see to. Some weeks after his departure, I received a telegram from him in Italy: ‘Send my son Axel out to me at once with passport and foreign currency for travel expenses, to discuss vital matters with me.’
I called the son in to see me—he was an Air Force lieutenant—and sent him out to his father. On his return eight days later, he brought me a letter his father had written after lengthy discussions with him. In this letter, he asked me to break it to Hitler that he now wanted to separate from his wife, although he would only put this plan into effect if the Führer would take him into his favour again and reinstate him. I asked the Führer to read the letter for himself; as I had expected, he rejected the condition out of hand, pointing out that at the time he had enjoined him to have the marriage annulled at once. Blomberg had turned that down saying it was an impossible demand to make of him, said Hitler, so each had gone his own way and the clock could not now be put back. Carefully though I broke this to Blomberg, he has always thought I contrived Hitler’s refusal out of sheer selfishness on my part in order not to forfeit my position as Chief of the High Command. I learned all this from Axel Blomberg only later. My own reassurances to the contrary were not believed, and through no fault of my own a growing strain was placed on our hitherto friendly relations.
The marriage of our children [Karl-Heinz Keitel and Dorothea von Blomberg] took place in May. I had to stand in for both fathers, and after the church wedding I gave a wedding banquet in the main hall of the War Ministry building, while the eve-of-wedding party itself was held in our home, a very private affair.
Hans-Georg had passed his school-leaving examination with flying colours in the Easter term of 1938, but his teachers assessed his character and conduct more highly than his knowledge of ancient languages, which were his one great weakness. When he decided to leave home to become a soldier, my wife took it very hard; my wife was now alone most of the day, as both our daughters had their own careers. Nona did work at home in the evenings, but Erika liked going to parties, theatres and the cinema, and she had a very large circle of friends.
Diverse and interesting though all the official functions were for my wife and myself, they were after all only in the line of duty, and they cost us many an evening that we would have spent quite differently had we been free to choose; but all that was now inevitably bound up with my office. We formed close friendships neither with the families of the high state officials nor with those of the Party leaders, let alone with the diplomatic corps. Either one went out to some outside function, or one had to entertain official guests oneself, and that was as far as it went. My wife was reputed to be an expert in keeping her mouth shut and in self-effacement; they said I was as ‘slippery as an eel’, and they soon gave up any endeavour to communicate or converse with me. For the diplomatic corps I was tedious and sphinx-like, quite the opposite of my predecessor Reichenau who had liked to play first violin in that particular orchestra.
By February 1939 the machinations of the Czechs were beginning to intensify: the press published increasingly frequent reports of border incidents and of excesses committed against the German minorities in Bohemia and Moravia. Official Notes were sent to Prague, and our ambassador [Friedrich Eisenlohr] was recalled to Berlin as well as our military attaché, Colonel Toussaint.
The Führer repeatedly announced that he had put up with as much as he could stand and did not intend to stand impotently by much longer. I gathered that the so-called ‘cleaning up’ of rump Czechoslovakia was drawing near. Although when I asked the Führer he would neither admit his ultimate intentions nor give me any kind of date, I took the necessary steps to see that the War Office was assured of being able to unleash a swift and sudden invasion should the need arise. In my presence, the Führer called in Brauchitsch, talked about the increasingly intolerable position of the German minorities in Czechoslovakia and announced that he had resolved upon military intervention, which he termed ‘a pacification operation’; it would certainly not require any military conscription over and above that provided for in the orders drawn up in the autumn of 1938. As we soldiers—and even I—learned nothing further of the diplomatic overtures between Prague and Berlin than we were told by our military attaché, we were obliged to fall back upon conjecture; we were banking on the same kind of diplomatic surprises as we had witnessed several times before.
I put my own money on ‘the Ides of March’: apart from 1937 it had always been the date since 1933 that Adolf Hitler had chosen to act on. Was it always coincidence, or was it superstition? I am inclined to believe the latter, for Hitler himself often referred to it.
Sure enough, on 12th March [1939], the advance orders went out to the army and air force to stand by for a possible invasion of Czechoslovakia at six o’clock on the morning of 15th March; no forces were to approach within six miles of the frontier before then. None of us soldiers learned what circumstances were to be invoked for the unleashing of such an attack.
When I reported to the Führer at the Reich Chancellery at midday on 14th March to collect his instructions for the armed forces, whose readiness next day had been assured in accordance with his orders, he mentioned just briefly to me that President Hacha had the day before announced his intention of coming for discussions on the crisis, and he was expecting him to arrive
in Berlin that evening. I asked for his permission to warn the War Office at once that in these circumstances the invasion was to be postponed for the time being. Hitler firmly rejected my suggestion and explained to me that come what may he was still planning to march into Czechoslovakia next day—whatever the outcome of the talks with the Czech president might be. Nevertheless I was instructed to place myself at his disposal at nine o’clock that evening at the Reich Chancellery, so that I could issue to the War Office and Air Force High Command his executive orders for the invasion to begin.
I arrived at the Reich Chancellery shortly before nine o’clock; Hitler had just risen from the dinner table and his guests were assembling in the drawing room to see the film ‘Ein hoffnungsloser Fall’ (A Hopeless Case). Hitler invited me to sit next to him, as Hacha was not due to arrive until ten o’clock. Considering the circumstances, I felt properly out of place in this milieu; within eight or ten hours the first shots would be being exchanged, and I was gravely disturbed.
At ten o’clock [Foreign Secretary] Ribbentrop announced Hacha’s arrival at Bellevue Castle; the Führer replied that he was going to let the old gentleman rest and recover for two hours; he would send for him at midnight. That was equally incomprehensible to me; why was he doing that? Was this premeditated, political diplomacy?
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Page 10