The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  All that really could be regarded only as sabre rattling, aimed primarily at tying down our forces in the west and at establishing armed reconnaissance of our reflexes and of the strength of our West Wall. Looked at purely from the military point of view, this procrastination by the French army was wholly inexplicable unless—as was hardly probable—they had quite considerably overestimated the strength of our forces in the west; the only alternative was, as Hitler had said, that they just were not ready for war. Certainly it was a rejection of every accepted tenet of military strategy for them just to look on while the Polish army was slaughtered, instead of exploiting to the full the favourable situation which offered itself to the French Army command all the time that our main forces were tied down in the attack on Poland. This was the strategic dilemma confronting us soldiers: was Hitler to be proved right again after all? Would the Western Powers really fail to pursue the war once Poland had been destroyed?

  Hitler seldom intervened in the Commander-in-Chief’s conduct of the battle: in fact, I can recall only two occasions, the first being when he demanded the rapid reinforcement of our northern flank (which had attacked from East Prussia) by means of transferring to East Prussia tank units to stand by to stiffen and extend the eastern flank far enough to encircle Warsaw from the east of the River Vistula; the second occasion was when he intervened in Blaskowitz’s [Eighth] Army operations, to which he had taken the strongest possible exception. Otherwise he limited himself rigorously to expressions of opinion and exchanges of views with the Commander-in-Chief and to giving verbal encouragement; he never intervened to issue orders to them himself. This was far more frequent with the Air Force, to which he often issued personal instructions in the interests of ground operations; almost every evening he was on the telephone to Göring.

  I handed over to Jodl the duty of reporting on military developments at conferences in the headquarters coach; he was aided by three liaison officers, one for each of the three branches of the armed forces. The latter three had, in fact, been seconded to Hitler as Intelligence officers for their respective Commanders-in-Chief, but there was no room for additional personnel in the Führer’s train.

  I will mention only those few of my visits to the front as are particularly imprinted upon my memory: firstly, there was one to the Army commander von Kluge [Commander-in-Chief of the Fourth Army] whom we visited on 3rd September: a war conference, meal and inspection of the Tuchel Heath battlefield, which offered us an impressive picture of the Polish casualties. Second was a visit we made setting out from the headquarters of the Second Army Corps: the Führer visited the front with General Strauss to see his troops crossing the Vistula at Culm and the ensuing battle. Thirdly, we visited General Busch (Eighth Army Corps) for the crossing of the San and a parade by large sections of the troops, including wounded men back from the front, in honour of the completion of the army bridge shortly before.

  The fourth occasion was a visit to my friend General von Briesen (30th Infantry Division) who had been in the middle of the weakly defended flank of Blaskowitz’s Army and had with just his one division beaten back a mass break-out attempt by a cut-off Polish Army, in a bitter struggle against enormous odds. Only the Führer’s authority had sufficed to get us through to this headquarters position, well within range of the enemy’s guns. In a schoolroom, von Briesen—whose left fore-arm had been shot away in the battle—outlined to him the developing fight his division had put up during the hard and bloody days of the battle. Asked about his injury, he confessed he had led his last reserve battalion into action himself. As we made our way back from the command post, which was inaccessible except on foot, Hitler said to me: ‘That is a real Prussian general of the Royal school. You can’t have enough soldiers like him. He’s a man after my own heart. Before today is over I want him to be the first divisional commander to get the Knight’s Cross. He has saved Blaskowitz’s army by his gallantry and drive.’

  My fifth recollection is of flying to an airfield and of proceeding thence across an army bridge over the Vistula, north of Warsaw, to the command post of the Second Army Corps’ artillery commander. From a vantage point in a church steeple north-east of Praga—a suburb of Warsaw on the Vistula’s east bank—the latter was calling down artillery fire on the outer fortifications of Warsaw.

  It was here that news reached Hitler that Colonel-General von Fritsch had died in action that morning at an infantry commander’s headquarters, during an advance by the 12th Artillery Regiment.

  I also remember a visit to the western side of the Warsaw encirclement action, and observing the effect of our artillery bombardment of the city’s suburbs from a tower of Warsaw Sports and Racing Stadium. Three attempts to force Warsaw to capitulate had preceded this last visit to the front, with the result that now the artillery barrage and air bombardment of the city had begun as warned.*

  On 20th September we transferred the Führer’s small headquarters to Zoppot. Starting out from there, we paid a visit to the Westerplatte peninsula near the port of Danzig and to the port and city of Gdynia, as well as to the adjoining high ground, where there were still signs of the violent fighting in which the Pomeranian frontier-guard division had been involved. Those were the troops that the then Major von Briesen had trained and inspired in the ‘loyal Pomeranian’ spirit during his years of service in the eastern frontier forces. The officer casualties suffered by the Pomeranian nobility in this yeomanry division had been particularly heavy.†

  The state funeral of the late Colonel-General von Fritsch took place in Berlin at the Heroes’ Memorial Hall on 25th September. It was bad flying weather, so the Führer was obliged to abandon his plan to take part in the ceremony. Despite this I took off with Funk [my pilot] heading at first for Stettin, as the airfield there was not fogbound like that at Berlin. For more than an hour we waited there for visibility at Berlin to improve, but it did not. Finally, as it was getting late, we took off anyhow in the hope that it would have cleared enough for us to land by the time we arrived. It was a most unpleasant flight, but Funk managed to bring us down safely at the military airfield at Staaken, outside Berlin. I arrived at the funeral only just in time to lay a wreath on the coffin on the Führer’s behalf, and Brauchitsch and I followed the coffin in the endless funeral procession comprising both the services, the State and the diplomatic Corps, until it was finally laid to rest at the military cemetery.

  Colonel-General von Fritsch had accompanied the 12th Artillery Regiment into the Polish camaign as a supernumerary. The Führer had hesitated a long time about whether to give him command of an Army Group or of the autonomous East Prussian Army, as Brauchitsch had urged him to and as I had actively advocated. In the end the Führer had decided against it, explaining that in that event he would have to reinstate Blomberg as well, and that was something he could never bring himself to do. The reason probably was that, at the time, he had held out to Blomberg some prospect of being reinstated should war break out; as he now had no desire to keep that promise, he had had equally to eschew giving Fritsch a high-level post, as that would have been an open insult to Blomberg. Those are my own views, but they are based on remarks that Hitler made at the time to Schmundt, his adjutant.

  The widespread rumour that Fritsch was so embittered that he had deliberately sought death in action is quite false, according to what the officer who reported Fritsch’s fatal injury to the Führer (in my presence) saw with his own eyes: a stray bullet had struck the Colonel-General while he was conversing with his Staff Officers, and within only a few minutes he had bled to death.

  The war in Poland ended with a big military parade through the streets of the partially destroyed Warsaw, to which the Führer and I flew with our lieutenants from Berlin.

  At the airfield a big banquet was laid out in the Führer’s honour, before we took off back to Berlin. As soon as Hitler caught sight of the well-stocked horseshoe table set up in one of the hangars, he turned abruptly on his heel, told Brauchitsch that he never ate with his troops
except standing at a field kitchen, stalked back to our aircraft, and instructed the pilot to take off at once. While I did find that the Commander-in-Chief of the Army had been rather tactless in laying on the banquet, he had certainly acted with good intentions. During the flight the Führer’s anger subsided and he several times began to say something about that banquet, as he now seemed to be reproaching himself for his behaviour.

  When I told all this to Brauchitsch in the course of the next few days, he confided to me that the banquet had been a great success—even without Hitler.

  No sooner had Warsaw fallen than the first divisions began to roll towards the western front, although up to then the situation had been no worse than just a few localised outbreaks of fighting flaring up here and there in the approaches to the West Wall. The first troops were directed to the northern flank in the area near and to the north of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) because the Führer thought that our miserable frontier forces confronting Holland and Belgium were far too weak, and that this was as good as inciting the French to skirt round to the north of the West Wall and lunge straight into the defenceless Ruhr region. But at that time our opponents in the west were probably still chary of violating Belgium’s neutrality, because the latter’s king had apparently refused to permit French troops to cross his territory, as we learned later via Rome, thanks to the family ties linking the two Royal houses.

  The Soviet Union’s demeanour throughout our Polish campaign was of especial interest and particularly edifying. After we had launched our attack, Hitler had, of course, arranged for Stalin’s immediate intervention in the campaign to be requested through diplomatic channels; we had a vested interest in this, because we particularly wanted the quickest possible conclusion of the campaign—we wanted a lightning war—in view of our western frontiers’ vulnerability. Stalin, on the other hand, intended to reap his reward in the division of Poland with as little [Russian] bloodshed as possible, and he informed the Führer that he could not be ready to attack before three weeks at the earliest, as his forces were neither prepared nor mobilised. From the very outset, the High Command had ensured that our military attaché in Moscow [General Köstring] was kept in the picture, and further attempts were made through diplomatic channels to persuade them to change their attitude, but there was no further news from Moscow: just that they could not get ready to intervene any faster.

  But, just as we were crossing the River San in the south and Warsaw was within our operational grasp, the Red Army—despite their alleged ‘total unreadiness’—was suddenly marching into Poland, overrunning the last of the Polish troops as they fell back and taking them into captivity, while they deflected a large part of the others into Roumania. There were no brushes between our forces and those of the Red Army; the Soviet troops halted a respectful distance away from the demarcation line and only the most urgent military intelligence was exchanged.*

  The Army’s troop trains had been rolling westwards at the maximum carrying capacity of the railway system ever since the fall of Warsaw, with the troops often marching considerable distances to the railheads. Nothing seemed less probable to the War Office than the likelihood of an autumn or winter campaign on the western front; while I was still at the Strand Hotel at Zoppot, on about 22nd September, I was shown an order the Army General Staff had issued ordering the partial demobilisation of the army. At the time I telephoned General Halder and said that his order was quite impossible, as the Führer had not yet authorised it; the order was withheld, or rather reworded to the effect that the lessons we had learned during the Polish campaign necessitated fresh dispositions for a possible war in the west.

  The strength of the War Office opposition to Hitler’s idea of putting the Army on a war footing in the west as early as October 1939 was soon demonstrated by various incidents. The War Office, together with the vast majority of the Army’s senior generals, including von Reichenau, had not only military but political reasons for its stand, and I shared them to the full.

  Quite apart from their daunting recollections of the First World War, and the strength of the formidable Maginot line against which there were then virtually no weapons of destruction, they considered that the Army was as yet not capable of launching any fresh assault after its eastern campaign, without a pause to recover, to regroup and remobilise, to finish its training and to complete its re-equipping. Particular doubts were expressed about winter warfare, with the fog and rain, the short days and the long nights, which made mobile warfare virtually impossible. In addition, the fact that the French had not exploited either the good weather or the weakness of our western defences earlier could only lead us to conclude that they did not really want to fight, and that any attack we might launch would only foul up the prospects of peace talks—probably making them impossible. It was clear to us that the Maginot line would oblige us to press our attack through northern France, Luxembourg and Belgium and possibly even through Holland, with all the consequences we had suffered in the 1914–1918 war.

  Hitler, on the other hand, thought that the strategic disadvantage in each day wasted outweighed the opprobrium of infringing another country’s neutrality, which was just as much an obstacle to the enemy as to us, but to whose implications the enemy was likely to be more susceptible than the average German soldier. For Hitler, the significant issue was the time that the enemy would gain for rearming and strengthening his forces, especially now that the British Expeditionary Force had arrived; he afterwards put the increase in size of the latter during the seven months we lost up to May 1940 at five-fold, an increase from four to twenty divisions; in this context, he added, each British division had to be counted as equivalent to three or four French ones as far as fighting value was concerned. But the most decisive factor weighing in Hitler’s mind was his anxiety for the Ruhr industrial region of the Rhineland and Westphalia, the heart of German rearmament: the loss of the Ruhr would be synonymous with the loss of the war; he believed that the strong and mobile Anglo-French army in northern France might at any time attempt a sudden thrust through Belgium to break into the Ruhr, and in all likelihood it would be detected too late to be effectively countered.

  In October 1939 these two points of view stood diametrically opposed to each other. At the time I was inclined to share the War Office’s point of view; the result was the first serious crisis of confidence between Hitler and myself. Whether he had somehow found out that I had been over to Zossen for a long discussion with Brauchitsch and Halder I don’t know. In any event when I publicly told him what I thought, as I was bound to do, Hitler violently accused me of obstructing him and conspiring with his generals against his plans; he demanded of me that I accept and identify myself with his opinions and represent them without reservation to the War Office. When I tried to intervene to point out that I for one had certainly kept Brauchitsch adequately informed on his [Hitler’s] well-known assessment of the situation and of his intentions, he began to insult me and repeated the very offensive accusation that I was fostering an opposition group against him among his generals.

  I was extremely upset and talked the whole thing over with Schmundt. He tried to soothe me, and told me that at midday General von Reichenau had been for lunch with the Führer and had had a long private interview with Hitler afterwards. Hitler had afterwards very angrily told Schmundt that much to his rage Reichenau had given voice to the same fundamental objections as the War Office. So that was probably the reason for his aggressive mood towards me that evening—it all happened on the same day.

  I asked Schmundt to tell the Führer that in view of his lack of confidence in me I wished to be posted elsewhere, as it was impossible for me to continue working under those conditions. How diligently Schmundt performed this errand for me I don’t know; I did not enter the Reich Chancellery myself, but merely waited in case I was called in for an interview. But when nothing had happened even by next day, I wrote a handwritten letter to Hitler and, referring to the lack of confidence in me which he had voiced, asked to be
posted elsewhere, and if possible to the front. I handed this letter to Schmundt to give to Hitler.

  The result was an interview between Hitler and myself, in which he told me that he was rejecting my request and he would prefer not to have such requests made to him in future: it was his prerogative to tell me when he had no further need of my services, and until then I had to do as I was told in the office to which he had appointed me. My letter, he suggested, was the result of over-sensitivity on my part; he had not told me that he no longer had any confidence in me. With that, he at once went on to other matters, outlining his own assessment of the situation, with an angry outburst about Reichenau, who, he said, would do better to bother less about diplomacy and more about the quickest way of getting his armoured group ready for battle again: all he was doing was just writing it off as unserviceable as the result of wear and tear on the engines, tank-tracks and so forth.

  Finally I was ordered to tell Brauchitsch to call on him. At the same time Hitler told me that he had already had a lengthy discussion with Brauchitsch in my absence, in which the latter had outlined the War Office’s views. He concluded by saying that the War Office should not dabble in political and military questions, nor was that the General Staff’s concern; it did not even have enough drive to pull the Army together again after the brief campaign in Poland: there was no problem in knocking the armoured formations back into good shape again, if only there was the will to do it.

  I was ordered to be present at this new conference with Brauchitsch. He (Hitler) said he had very closely considered what his decision should be [on the campaign in the west] and during the next few days he would hand the Commanders-in-Chief a memorandum he had himself written on the problems of world war, with all his own views about it.

  The conference with Brauchitsch took place in my presence—I believe it was on the next day. [It was on 5th November, 1939.] Von Brauchitsch and I silently listened to Hitler’s very extensive discourse on the War Office’s point of view as far as it was known. Brauchitsch followed him, giving two reasons why he could not agree: