When one bears in mind that all our previous plans for the attack on Russia, the campaign in Greece and aid for Italy were just dropped for the time being and new dispositions, troop movements, redistributions, the agreements with Hungary about the operations, the transit of German troops and the organisation of the whole supply system had to be improvised from scratch, and despite all this the invasion of Yugoslavia—coupled with an air strike on Belgrade—followed only nine days later, the achievement of the operations staffs of the High Command, the War Office, and the Air Force can only be termed an outstanding performance, of which admittedly the lion’s share was borne by the Army General Staff. Nobody knew this better than the Führer, but he gave no voice to his gratitude. I would have liked him to have given credit where it was due; the General Staff had deserved their share of praise, instead of the recriminations for which they were so often the butt.
Imperial Administrator Horthy was more than dubious about Hungary’s ability to participate: he was reluctant to mobilise in the middle of the season for spring cultivation, as he could not deprive his peasants of their horses and manpower. The Führer was very put out by this answer. But the General Staff conferences did eventually result in at least a partial mobilisation in Hungary, with the Hungarian government raising a small army to sally forth into the ‘Banat’ to collect their little morsel for themselves (although they gave the German troops the honour of going in ahead while they themselves wrought their revenge in the rear). The Führer wrote Horthy a letter to explain that while the Hungarian troops were to fit into the overall scheme of operations, he himself was commanding them, but he would so co-ordinate them in advance with Horthy as Supreme Commander of the Hungarian forces that the latter’s sovereign authority was not usurped. So the last reefs barring the way to a coalition war had been successfully and formally cleared, while still taking the old man’s vanity into account. Hitler’s political dexterity even enabled him to wean Croatia out of the united enemy front and to inspire her to sabotage the Yugoslav mobilisation decree.
As we had no permanent Führer’s headquarters prepared and were unable to build one in the very few days available, the Führer’s special train was brought into use as a cramped headquarters; it was shunted onto a single-track spur near a small hostelry, which latter offered the OKW operations staff modest accommodation and working space, while only Jodl and I lived with our lieutenants in the Führer’s headquarters train; the command coach served us as a permanent office. Our signals communications functioned beyond reproach, another achievement of the signals officers permanently attached to the Führer’s headquarters and of the Chiefs of Military Signals, Generals Fellgiebel and Thiele, who really were technically superb and who often succeeded in performing the impossible. I truly never had cause for complaint in this respect.*
From the Führer’s headquarters train we guided first the Yugoslav and then the Greek campaigns to their victorious conclusions; both countries had surrendered within rather less than five weeks. The following events have particularly remained in my memory: I recall Horthy’s visit to us in the cramped confines of our special train; the visit passed off in the closest harmony, because the Führer had turned on his charm at full power and knew how to flatter the old gentleman—a talent to which the latter was very susceptible; Horthy moreover was not unnaturally in a charmed world, seeing one of his lifelong dreams come true: the clock was being turned back and the Banat—one of the most beautiful and fertile provinces of the former kingdom—was returning to his regency. I was not able to sample this new atmosphere myself until lunch in the narrow dining-car, where I sat next to Horthy at the common dining-table; he dominated the table talk with his beaming countenance and innumerable anecdotes on his experiences as a naval officer and as a farmer, horse-breeder and racing-stable owner. I led his conversation round to hunting anecdotes, although I knew that hunting was a theme anything but dear to the Führer’s heart: he always said that hunting was nothing but cowardly murder, as the deer, the most beautiful of Nature’s creatures, was unable to defend itself; the poacher, on the other hand, he lauded as one of his heroes and the very best type of soldier; he would dearly like to form an élite battalion of poachers, he said.†
After the surrender of Yugoslavia had been accepted [on 17th April, 1941] by Field-Marshal List on the Führer’s behalf and in accordance with the OKW’s directives, Hitler brought his personal influence to bear on the armistice with Greece, while still looking to Italy’s interests and Mussolini’s inordinate vanity, by dispatching General Jodl to take charge. The Führer was basically minded to give the Greeks an honourable settlement in recognition of their brave struggle and of their blamelessness for this war: after all the Italians had started it. He ordered the release and repatriation of all their prisoners of war immediately they had been disarmed; the poor countryside was to be preserved and the country’s production was not to be touched except where it might be used to aid the British, who had landed in Greece in March. If there still had to be fighting on Greek soil then it was with one aim only: to mop up every last Englishman in Greece and to drive them out of every island they had seized. After we had won the battle of Mount Olympus, defeated the British at Thermopylae and driven them out of Athens, we chased their scattered remnants into the Ismuth of Corinth and drove them out of every corner of the country, bar a handful of Aegean islands and the main British base on Crete. The quarrel over the troops’ victorious entry into Athens was a chapter to itself: Hitler wanted to do without a special parade, to avoid injuring Greek national pride. Mussolini, alas, insisted on a glorious entry into the city for his Italian troops (who first of all had to be rushed up to the city as they had dawdled several days’ march behind the German troops who had expelled the British forces). The Führer yielded to the Italian demand and together the German and Italian troops marched into Athens. From the Greeks this miserable spectacle, laid on by our gallant Ally whom they had honourably beaten, must have produced some hollow laughter.
On account of his preoccupation with the supply lines of our troops fighting in North Africa—gradually expanding to the strength of an armoured division under Rommel’s command—the Führer began looking for ways to shield his lines of communication across the Mediterranean from attack by British naval forces and to afford them added safeguards. While Rommel had arrested the immediate danger threatening Tripoli by his bold and rapid action, the idea of seizing either Crete or Malta from the British, weakened as they were by their setbacks in Greece, began to germinate in Hitler’s brain; the project could come to fruition only by means of an airborne landing, combined with or followed up by a military assault from the sea, in which latter aspect the help the Italians might be able to provide seemed likely to be more than problematic. Quite possibly Hitler wanted to demonstrate to Mussolini what a real Mediterranean campaign looked like. Of the two possible objectives, I declared myself in favour of an operation against Malta, which both Jodl and I agreed to be the British base of greater strategic importance and danger to us. But the final choice was left to the Air Force, and Göring decided the assault should be on Crete, undoubtedly thinking it was the easier of the two alternatives. Hitler agreed.*
In the meantime, the Führer had decided that the new D-day for the invasion of Russia was to be about the middle of June. This involved the rapid release of the Army units engaged on mopping-up operations in the Balkans, and their re-injection into the troops massing behind our frontier with Russia. The consequence was a less than adequate pacification of the Yugoslav region, in which, in no time at all and incited by Stalin’s open appeals and enthusiastic support, partisan warfare broke out. Unfortunately, the few remaining troops were unable to strangle this guerilla warfare at birth, and as time went on a situation arose which actually demanded the reinforcement of our security forces there, as the arrogant Italians who were supposed to have relieved us of this burden deserted all along the line, and put new backbone into Tito’s partisan army, which helped itself
to their weapons.
Britain and Russia did all that was necessary to foment new seats of unrest and tie down our German troops there, while the new Croat State, filled with misgivings over its ‘Protector’ Italy, was only hampered in its attempts to restore internal order by Italy’s jealousy towards us. The Führer looked passively on at this tragedy, without making the least attempt to demonstrate his sympathy for the Croat people in the face of the intrigues which Mussolini was obviously inspiring. He let his Ally play his hand as he saw fit to keep him sweet, perhaps because other affairs seemed of greater moment to him then, or alternatively because he was prevented from acting by pledges he had given.
We returned to Berlin from Berchtesgaden at about the beginning of June 1941. At last the whole High Command was once more combined under my leadership, if only for a few weeks again. As I had been unable to be in two places at once, I had been obliged to accord the OKW, with the exception of its operations staff, a high degree of autonomy in many Berlin affairs, although communication by courier and telephone had, of course, provided a permanent link with me even in my absence. Perhaps I had erred in not accustoming Hitler to the necessity of accepting that the gravamen of my work lay in Berlin; but quite apart from that, he never left me to my own devices; he had me recalled if ever I was away more than two days at a time. It was impossible to separate the military operations staff (the command side) from the Führer’s remaining staff (the War Ministry side) within the High Command; some sort of connecting link was necessary, and nobody could replace me as that. If I had had the time once I had assumed office to elaborate some other organisational structure more suited to the requirements of war, there might have been some way out. Up to 1941 my periods of absence from Berlin were still tolerably brief; it was not until the permanent absence enforced by the war in the east began that I was faced with a problem which I was no longer able to resolve. In 1944 I had planned to solve it by making Warlimont my Chief of Staff and permanent representative in Berlin; but as a result of his illness for several months after the assassination attempt of 20th July, 1944, we never got round to it.
In the middle of June 1941 and for the last time before our attack on Russia, the Führer assembled all his senior frontline commanders and representatives of the various service High Commands, to hear him outline their tasks and to listen to a final speech in which he forcefully pressed his points of view on the imminent ‘war of ideologies’. Drawing attention to the massive resistance being offered to our pacification operations in the Balkans, he said this was the lesson to be learned from treating the civilian populace too leniently; the treatment had only been interpreted as weakness and this uprising was the logical outcome. He had made a study of the methods the old Danube monarchy had always had to employ to establish the authority of the State over its subjects; and we could expect far more trouble from the Soviet citizens, who would have been incited to acts of violence and terrorism by the . . .* For this reason, he said, the mailed fist would ultimately be the kindest way: one could only smash terror with counter-terror, not with military tribunal procedures. It was not with lawbooks that he himself had smashed the German Communist Party’s terrorist tactics, but with the brute force of his SA [Brownshirts’] movement.
It was now that I began to perceive what I described for my defence counsel in a memorandum over Christmas 1945: Hitler had become obsessed with the idea that his mission was to destroy Communism before it destroyed us. He considered there was no prospect in relying on permanent non-aggression pacts with Russian Communism; he had recognised that if he failed to smash the iron ring which Stalin—in conjunction with the Western Powers—would be able to forge about us at any time if he so saw fit, it would lead to Germany’s economic collapse. He disdained suing the Western Powers for peace at any price, and staked everything on the one card: war! He knew that if the cards should turn against him, the world would be up in arms against us. He knew, too, what a war on two fronts would mean. But he shouldered the burden because he had wrongly assessed the reserves of Bolshevism and of the Stalin State, and it was thus that he brought about the ruin of himself and the Third Reich he had created.
Even so, during the summer of 1941 it almost seemed as though the eastern Colossus would succumb to the mighty blows inflicted by the German Army, for the first and probably the best Soviet front-line army had, in fact, been all but wiped out by that autumn, and they had suffered enormous losses in manpower and material: thousands of heavy guns and armoured vehicles littered the battlefields of the first encirclement actions and the prisoners numbered many more than a million. One wonders what army in the world could have withstood such annihilating blows, had the vast expanse of Russia, her manpower reserves and the Russian winter not come to its assistance?
As early as the end of July Hitler was already believing not only that the Red Army in the field had been beaten, but that the nucleus of their defences had been so gravely afflicted that it would be impossible for them to recover their enormous material losses before the country was overwhelmed by total defeat. For this reason—and this is of high historic interest—he was by the end of July or early August already ordering considerable sections of the Army munitions industry (apart from tank construction) to be switched over to accelerating munitions production for the Navy (submarines) and the Air Force (aircraft and anti-aircraft batteries) in anticipation of an intensification of the war with Britain, while on the Eastern Front the Army was to keep the defeated enemy in check using the weapons on hand, but with twice the armoured strike capacity.
It was not until the night of 21st to 22nd June, 1941, that the Führer’s train, with a number of his closest staff including Jodl, myself and our adjutants, reached the Führer’s new headquarters at a forest camp near Rastenburg. The War Office’s operational headquarters had been accommodated in a very large forest encampment some thirteen miles away, while Göring, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Air Force, had had his headquarters train shunted into another encampment in the Johannesburg forest nearby; the result was that the various High Commands were now able at a moment’s notice to engage in personal exchanges of thoughts, while within the space of an hour (or considerably less using their light Storch aeroplanes) they could all be assembled at the Führer’s behest.
The OKW operations staff was in a special camp detached at a distance of a thousand yards from the Führer’s headquarters proper, Security Zone I. I have often flown over the site at various altitudes, but despite my precise knowledge of its location I was never able to spot it from the air, except perhaps by virtue of the lane leading through the forest and a single-track railway spur which had been closed to public traffic. About two or three miles away a landing-ground had been laid out and the Führer’s aircraft, courier units and the aircraft of the OKW itself were parked around it. I wish I knew how many flights I made from there between 1941 and 1944. I only ever heard of one fatal aircraft accident on that airfield, when [Munitions] Minister Dr. Todt was killed in a Heinkel 111 which crashed on take-off in February 1942.
Each midday a war conference was held in the Führer’s presence, to discuss the morning telegrams from the various High Commands, which, in the case of the War Office, were in turn based on each evening’s terminal despatches from the Army Corps. Only the Commanders-in-Chief in Finland, Norway and North Africa reported directly to the OKW, with copies for information to the War Office.
It was the custom for Colonel-General Jodl to outline the war situation including the Army aspect except when the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Chief of the Army General Staff were themselves participating; on these occasions General Halder dealt with the Army’s situation. After 19th December 1941, when the Führer himself assumed the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Army [see page 164] the Chief of General Staff had to brief him each day on the Eastern Front and personally collect the Führer’s orders; as the situation grew more tense, he [Halder] was obliged to appear at the evening war conferences towards midnight a
s well, at which Colonel-General Jodl otherwise outlined the situation to a small circle of officers by himself. Any instructions the Führer might issue on these occasions were afterwards despatched that same night by the OKW operations staff to the quarters concerned, by teleprinter, after their gist had already been conveyed by telephone.
These briefing conferences performed the secondary function of enabling the Führer to issue a stream of orders relating not only to the problems of strategy, but to any field with even the most tenuous bearing upon the military conduct of the war. As Hitler could never keep to the point on these occasions, but repeatedly diverged on still further problems as they were introduced by other parties, the midday war conferences lasted an average of three hours and the evening ones never less than one hour, although the strategic and tactical questions should not as a rule have consumed more than a fraction of that time. As a result I, who had already had to brief myself on the morning or evening war situation by reading the operations staff’s summaries or by attending Jodl’s evening briefings, could never afford to absent myself from these time-wasting conferences held by the Führer, as at any moment all kinds of questions, directives and measures were being invoked by Hitler, matters not even remotely concerned with strategy or diplomacy, but which had to be taken in hand, and for which he turned to me as his military Chief of Staff, however little they might come within the competence of the High Command.
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Page 19