The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  Hitler appeared every day at about noon in our small barracks, and again during the late afternoon, to be briefed on the situation. By now the duty of outlining the latest developments to him had been completely taken over by General Jodl. Apart from the western front, the OKW was still preoccupied with the problematic and highly exposed Norwegian theatre, which continued to give us cause for alarm until the end of May, when the British and French relinquished their hold there. Basically, I was out and about every other day, mostly in the area of von Rundstedt’s Army Group, where he was directing the Führer’s vital breakthrough operation, coupled with a wheel to the north. His Chief of Staff had in the meantime been replaced by General von Sodenstern, who was an old colleague of mine from my days in the Troop Office [the disguised General Staff] from 1926 to 1933, and bound to me by the ties of a close friendship. I was able to speak out openly to him on everything, including even the Führer’s special wishes, without having to fear that he would go telling Halder, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, about ‘interference’ by the Supreme Commander, which would only result in renewed ill-feeling towards me.

  General von Rundstedt also wisely recognised the difficulties of my position at that time and listened with great understanding to the tactfully moderate ‘hints’ I gave him, hints that had, in fact, originated from Hitler himself. My visits to him, which took place every day during the crucial days of the actual breakthrough, always passed in the closest harmony. I received the latest battle maps very early on each morning, and took them back to Hitler . . .*

  Italy’s entry into the war was more of a burden to us in the OKW than a relief. The Führer was unsuccessful in his attempt to hold Mussolini back at least for a while; we had a very considerable vested interest in his doing so, as for us to support their planned penetration of the French fortifications along the Alpine front would sap the strength of our own Air Force, and did in fact entail our dividing and weakening our Air Force, at the time of the fighting around Paris, in favour of the Italians. Even then, despite our assistance and the weakness of the French Alpine front, the Italian offensive very rapidly ground to a halt. These Italian allies of ours, who had suddenly recalled their treaty obligations to us only because they thought that France had been beaten, were to prove our most ill-starred and emptiest blessing as the war progressed, for nothing did more to impede our collaboration and entente with the French, even as early as the autumn of 1940, than our having to respect Italian aspirations and the Führer’s belief that we were obliged to subscribe to them.

  The signature of the Armistice with France, in the forest of Compiègne on 22nd June 1940, was the climax of my career as Chief of the OKW. The conditions to be imposed upon France had already been formulated at the OKW operations-staff level in advance of the collapse, and upon receipt of the French petition I had personally worked over them and drawn them up in what seemed to me to be the most appropriate form. In any case, we were at no pains to hurry ourselves, because the Führer wanted to see certain strategic objectives, like the reaching of the Swiss frontier, attained first of all.

  As soon as the date and place for the armistice negotiations had been fixed, the Führer called for my draft and retired for a day to go over it and, in many instances, to rephrase it, so that I found that while the content of my draft had not been changed, its original formulation had. The preamble was Hitler’s idea and flowed from his pen alone.

  The ceremonial signing of the armistice, at the same historic location in the forest of Compiègne where the Germans had sued for peace in 1918, a spot upon which the passing Gods of War had left no trace, had a strong effect both on me and, probably, on the other participants as well. My emotions were mixed: I had a feeling that this was our hour of revenge for Versailles, and I was conscious of my pride in the conclusion of a unique and victorious campaign, and of a resolve to respect the feelings of those who had been honourably vanquished in battle.

  After briefly and formally saluting the French delegation, which was led by the Alsatian General Huntziger, we climbed up into the railway coach which had been preserved there as a national memorial. The Führer sat at the centre of the table, while I sat down beside him with the actual surrender Instrument. The three Frenchmen sat facing us. The Führer opened the ceremony by inviting me to read out the preamble and the terms we were demanding. After that, the Führer left the coach with his five aides and departed from the scene, with the guard of honour presenting arms to him. General Jodl took a seat on one side of me and a staff officer of the military operations office on the other, with Minister Schmidt from the Foreign Office to act as our interpreter, which throughout the negotiations he did most admirably.

  The French asked for an hour’s respite to study our terms, and they withdrew into a nearby tent. They were in telephone contact with their Army High Command across the front lines, and the link functioned relatively well despite a number of interruptions caused by the fighting. During this interval I was able to raise with the Führer, who was waiting nearby, a number of points Huntziger had opened the talks with.

  As was to be expected, the French tried valiantly to moderate our demands, and in order to win time for the telephonic transmission of the document’s text—with which they had immediately begun—they claimed that they had to obtain Marshal Pétain’s decision on a number of matters. I had of course taken the necessary steps to ensure that we could unobtrusively listen in to their telephone conversations.

  The French exploited the talks to table further proposals, even after I had—with Hitler’s and Göring’s agreement—made certain concessions as far as the disarmament of the French Air Force was concerned. According to our own interception reports Pétain had demanded still easier terms which Huntziger in his reply had told him were quite out of the question, in view of my uncompromising attitude.

  I therefore decided at five o’clock that evening to give Minister Schmidt [Chief Foreign Office Interpreter] an ultimatum to hand to the delegation, which had again withdrawn for consultations; the ultimatum would be timed to expire at six o’clock. When the French finally appeared again and began making fresh demands—probably inspired by Pétain—I announced that I was not prepared to entertain any further discussions and that I would be forced to break off the talks as inconclusive if by six o’clock I had not been informed of their readiness to sign the treaty in its present form. Upon hearing this the French withdrew again for final consultations; a few minutes after six o’clock they had completed their last telephone conversation, and Huntziger announced to me that he had been authorised to sign.

  When the ceremony was over, I dismissed all the participants in the discussions and remained with General Huntziger alone in the saloon of the railway coach. In a few military phrases I informed him that I had complete understanding for his position and the difficult duty which he had had to perform. He had my sympathy as an officer of the defeated French Army and I expressed to him my own personal esteem; then I shook hands with him He rejoined that he would like to apologise for having failed at one time to maintain the required degree of reserve, but that my disclosure shortly before the document was signed that this would only come into effect at such time as the appropriate armistice had also been signed with Italy had deeply shocked him: the German armed forces had conquered France, but the Italians had never done so. He saluted shordy, and left the room.

  That evening there was a brief celebration in the mess diningroom at the Führer’s headquarters. A military tattoo was followed by the hymn Nun danket alle Gott—Now thank we all our God. I addressed a few words to the Führer as our victorious warlord, and at the end of my speech there was general acclaim for the Führer from all sides; he just held out his hand to me, and left the room. That day was the climax of my career as a soldier . . .*

  While the mass of our armies in the west completed their broad sweep to the south, the King of the Belgians was surrendering in northern France and Belgium, and the British Army was embarking at Dunkirk. Of co
urse, the disaster which could have been meted out to them had not occurred, although the signs of the rout visible all along the roads leading to Dunkirk offered the most devastating picture I have ever seen or even thought possible. Even if the mass of the British troops had succeeded in reaching their ships and saving their bare skins, it was only a wrong assessment of the enemy’s movements and of the terrain that had prevented von Kleist’s Tank Army from capturing Dunkirk by the short route from the west.

  For purposes of historical accuracy, I would like here to deal briefly with my own knowledge of the circumstances of the decision [to halt before Dunkirk], because the versions given by the Army General Staff and its Commander-in-Chief have—as I heard even at the Trial—unjustly credited Hitler with the responsibility for making the wrong decision. I was present at the vital briefing conference with the War Office when a decision on this question was demanded from Hitler: the fact was that they did not have the guts to accept responsibility for it themselves if, as might happen, the operation failed. However little they were otherwise disposed to depend upon Hitler and accept his advice, in this particular case they unshouldered the burden of responsibility on to him.

  Uppermost in everybody’s mind at the time was how in 1914 the low-lying Flanders plains between Bruges, Nieuport-Dixmuiden and so on, had flooded, a circumstance which had checked the German northern flank and bogged it down. There are the same general features in the terrain to the south and south-west of Dunkirk, with an extensive low-lying plain, intersected by thousands of waterways, and all well below sea-level.

  Kleist’s Tank Army was standing by to the west of the low ground, ready to lunge through this zone along two or three roads, and this was the situation that was outlined to the Führer; his attention was drawn to the fact that the armoured units would have to keep to the roads in view of the innumerable trenches and canals lying across the land; in other words, in the event of any serious resistance or of the roadblocks which one might expect, there would be no opportunities for them to deploy and display their real fighting power. Had the enemy made such provisions—something which obviously nobody could predict for certain—the consequences might then under certain circumstances be lengthy fighting around the bottlenecks and, if the worst came to the worst, even a retreat and a detour round the impassable terrain, with an inevitable loss of time.

  So they left the decision to Hitler, and he—who is above reproach of any lack of dash or daring—determined that it would be preferable not to attempt the raid, but to make the detour around the sure but narrow coastal strip instead. If the competent commanders-in-chief had really been sure of their stuff, they would never have checked back with him but just acted. There is now no doubt that the Führer’s order was in the final synthesis wrong: for the Tank Army’s diversion and attack made very heavy going of the narrow coastal strip and the British were able to hold Dunkirk and the port long enough for the greater part of their troops to embark, thanks largely to the gallant stand made by the French, who fought us to the finish there.

  I saw Paris once only during the war, and that was after the signing of the Armistice with the French, when I was able to accompany the Führer on a tour of the main points of interest in the city. We took off at four o’clock in the morning, and landed at Le Bourget, arriving in the city itself in the early hours as Paris still slept. After looking out over the city from Montmartre, we visited the Arc de Triomphe and the other main points of interest—admittedly only those of architectural interest. The Führer dallied longest at the Opéra, with whose internal architecture he was more familiar than the French guide, and of which he knew and wanted to see details of whose existence the Frenchman did not even dream. Then, with enormous reverence he paid a visit to Napoleon’s tomb. As Paris gradually came to life around us, we left the city and flew back to our headquarters. That was the occasion on which I first became acquainted with the later Minister of Munitions, Professor Speer, who was accompanying the Führer in his capacity as an architect.

  Some days later we left our one-time headquarters in France and transferred to the Black Forest, where Todt had built a second headquarters for us during the winter of 1939–1940.

  During our stay there, military preparations for an invasion of Britain feverishly gathered momentum. It was the job of the Armed Forces High Command to co-ordinate the efforts of all three services for this combined operation. Nobody was in the dark about the risk we would be running; everybody was well aware that its success would demand a maximum effort by army, navy and air force, but everybody realised that the longer the invasion was postponed, the stronger the British defences would become.

  Nobody feared the British Army since its collapse and its enormous material losses at Dunkirk; but the Royal Air Force and the vastly superior Royal Navy were factors which could not be ignored. The War Office was accordingly strongly in favour of risking the operation and made every possible effort to promote its execution: for the first time, Hitler found himself under considerable pressure from that quarter, a circumstance to which he was totally unaccustomed. The air force was also ready, and confident of its ability to provide an umbrella over the naval and landing operations, but they rightly insisted on a period of good weather as being a pre-condition for the success of the whole operation. Our Navy, on the other hand, the service on which would fall the onus of ferrying the ground forces, and fulfilling anti-aircraft and supply rôles, as well as providing a screen against the enemy’s naval forces, rightly expressed grave fears not only of the great naval superiority of the enemy, but also of the Channel, whose navigability in changeable weather conditions provided at best an indeterminable element of danger. The latter factor was particularly important, as for our ‘invasion fleet’ we disposed only of small canal tugs and barges from the Rhine and the Franco-Belgian waterways; above a wind speed of two or three knots none of these craft would be manageable. Moreover, for us to concentrate them in sufficient force was also a considerable problem because, as a result of the destruction of the lock gates and bridges, large sections of the canal system were closed and in consequence those barges that were available to us could not be moved up to the loading and embarkation points. We also had to shield them from enemy air reconnaissance; convert them for the easy loading and unloading of artillery; and we had to equip them with anti-aircraft guns, and with engines to enable them to sail under their own power.

  It is remarkable when one considers how much was done along these lines in the short time available: the navy and army engineers vied with each other to produce the necessary craft and even the air force helped, mounting the ‘Siebel project’ [named after Colonel Siebel of the Air Force] for the rapid development of self-propelled craft for the invasion equipped with anti-aircraft guns. They also put up a consistent umbrella over the invasion ports to guard against prying eyes and controlled our own camouflage measures to prevent any carelessness.

  The army worked out the tactical arrangements and the correct order of precedence in the invasion down to the smallest detail, and embarkation and disembarkation exercises rounded off the preparations. But even though the army pressed ahead as fast as it could for the invasion, overcoming all the misgivings that were expressed about whether it would succeed, the preparations could not really be regarded as complete until the end of August. The navy had the greatest misgivings about it all: theirs was the responsibility for safeguarding the troop transports as the armada sailed, but they lacked the necessary seaworthy escort vessels for this, and if the weather were to turn out unfavourable the air force umbrella would also fold up. It seemed an enormous risk to be taking, particularly in view of the losses the navy had sustained in the Norwegian campaign.

  So the responsibility for the final decision was left to Hitler alone. Plans were laid for the operation (Sea Lion) to be executed during the first half of September, which decades of Channel observation had shown to be the last fine-weather period before the autumn storms and mists closed in on Britain. Although th
e Führer appeared to be throwing himself into all the preparations with great enthusiasm, and demanded the adoption of every conceivable improvisation to speed the preparations, I could not help gaining the impression that when it came to the question of actually executing the operation, he was in the grip of doubts and inhibitions: he was wide awake to the enormous risk he would be running, and to the responsibility he was being called upon to shoulder. The multiplicity of imponderables was too large, the necessary conditions for success were dependent on too many coincidences, for him to bank with any degree of certainty on the chance satisfaction of all the prerequisites. I also had the feeling that not only was Hitler appalled by the thought of the senseless loss of human life a failure would entail, but above all he was reluctant to countenance the inevitable loss of his last chance of settling the war with Britain by diplomatic means, something which I am convinced he was at that time still hoping to achieve.