The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  All this could only be attributed to this autocrat’s disorderly thinking processes and modus operandi; but in this way I found myself dragged into almost every sphere of activity of the State and Party machinery, without once having taken the initiative myself, hard-pressed as I was with my own proper duties. God knows, I had my work cut out trying to ward off all the work which was obviously nothing to do with my office; I and my adjutant could list innumerable cases where visitors, correspondents and telephone-callers have all made some demand or other upon my time, adding the stereotype justification: ‘The Führer has referred me to you for this!’ Or: ‘When I outlined this to the Führer, he declared that the same ought to go for the Armed Forces too.’ Or: ‘You are to announce the following to the Armed Forces’s’ and so on. Or: ‘To whom in the OKW should I address this particular matter?’ and all the other standard formulae they used.

  For all these outsiders, whether OKW or War Office, the ‘Armed Forces’ meant one man: Keitel. It is so symptomatic that the head of the High Command’s legal department Dr. Lehmann, had to explain to my Defence Counsel that I allowed my name to be invoked by every imaginable quarter in matters which were no concern in the least of mine.

  What was I to do? When Hitler personally gave me such instructions during his war conferences, was I to answer in the hearing of twenty-five people ‘My Führer, that is nothing to do with me . . . tell your Secretary what it is you want.’ Would it have been possible for those people who had been conferring with Hitler on their projects, and had been told by him to talk them over first with me, to have replied, ‘We won’t do that . . . Keitel will only throw us out on our ear?’ Things just were not as simple as all that; it was not my bonhomie or my stupidity that was to blame, the whole system was wrong.

  Could I have foreseen all that when this abortion of an office—Chief of the High Command—came into being? Did they give me time after the 4th February, 1938, to modify the weaknesses in the organisational structure which was only really designed to combine Hitler’s power and executive authority with a military expert as his secretary?

  In the Royal Prussian tradition, a real field-marshal was too good for that, and the office would have been too humble for promotion to field-marshal. Since my last and happiest military service as a divisional commander I have become a ‘chair-borne’ general; in the First World War I was the senior divisional general-staff officer for almost two years, and proud to share with my commanders the responsibility—as we saw it in those days—for our brave soldiers. In the Second World War I ended up a field-marshal, unable to issue an order to anybody outside the actual structure of the OKW, apart from my driver and my batman! And now, to be called to account for all those orders that were issued against my advice and against my conscience: what a bitter pill it is to swallow, but at least it will be an honourable one if in so doing I can shoulder responsibility for the whole OKW.

  Hitler’s intention was to bring home to his immediate entourage the significance of the Armed Forces, by having them represented by a field-marshal. General Schmundt, on the other hand, told me after my promotion that the Führer had desired to show me his gratitude in this way for bringing about the armistice with France. Be that as it may! My traditional background gives me cause to regret that the rank of field-marshal ceased to be restricted solely to generals who had shown particular mettle in the face of the enemy.

  Soon after our first victorious battles, however, the same old quarrels began to break out between Hitler and the War Office. Hitler’s strategy called for a variation of that propounded by the War Office: while the latter had advocated that Army-Group Centre should punch its way through with the aim of taking Moscow and capturing the Valdai heights to the north, thereby severing communications between Leningrad and the capital, Hitler wanted to hold back along a general line running from Odessa to Lake Peipus through Orel and Smolensk; having done that he would draw off some of the strength from Army Group Centre (by far the most formidable and heavily armoured of the Army Groups) and use a reinforced Army Group South to deprive the enemy of the whole Donets basin, and of the Maikop and Krassnodar oil fields; then he would seize Leningrad using a similarly reinforced Army Group North and link up with Finland. The latter two Army Groups would not have been strong enough to perform these tasks without reinforcement.

  BARBAROSSA—THE GERMAN INVASION OF RUSSIA, 1941

  Hitler visualised these targets on the flanks as being of great economic value in the case of the Donets basin, and political and naval value in the case of Finland and the Baltic: from the point of view of military strategy he was not so much concerned with the city of Leningrad as such, or with its world status as a city of a million inhabitants, as with the naval base at Kronstadt and its elimination as a key naval base; it presented a considerable threat to our communications and submarine training in the Baltic. The War Office, on the other hand, believed that in their proposal lay the key to a rapid termination of the war. The Führer remained unconvinced.

  He decided to fly out to the headquarters of Army Group Centre (at Borisov) having summoned the commanders of two Tank Armies, Hoth and Guderian, to meet him there. I accompanied Hitler, and took part in the ensuing conference between the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, von Bock, and the two tank generals, each of whom he [Hitler] wanted to siphon off to the neighbouring Army Groups as the first of the reinforcements. He came up against a blank wall of refusal, the two tank generals even going so far as to announce that their units were so battle-weary that they would need two or three weeks to regroup and to overhaul their tanks before they would be fully operational again.

  Obviously we had no means of checking these claims; the two generals remained unco-operative—despite the award to them of the Oak Leaves to their Knight’s Crosses—and refused to admit any possibility of alternative employment for their units, at any rate on such remote sections of the front. Von Bock naturally had no desire to lose them and trumpeted the same story. All three of them were aware of the War Office’s plan of attack and saw it as their panacea; any weakening of Army Group Centre would jeopardise this plan, a plan which had electrified them all.

  Although the Führer could see right through their ploy—no great feat for anybody—he hesitated to command the War Office to override their pleas and release the two tank generals as he had wanted, even though the period they were demanding for recuperation would delay his planned operation by some four weeks. The War Office, Army Group Centre and the tank commanders had managed to put up a united front to their Führer. He was convinced that they did not want to do it and had just claimed that they were not able to; that was what he himself told me at the time.

  Inwardly he was once again very annoyed at the War Office as a result of all this, but he managed to swallow his bitterness. There was a compromise, which, of course, shipwrecked Hitler’s great strategic master plan, at any rate in so far as Leningrad to the north was concerned. Hitler for his part vetoed the attack on the Valdai heights as a typical example of the General Staff’s obsolete ‘high-ground’ tactics. Hitler’s full fury did not really manifest itself, however, until Army Group Centre executed a small-scale operation to secure the necessary freedom of movement it needed on its southern flank for the attack on Moscow, and Guderian’s armoured group miraculously ‘recuperated’ enough for the operation within a remarkably short span of time.

  This time Hitler himself intervened with the result that, to the east of Kiev, Army Group South opened its most devastating battle with the Russians. How often I had to hear him ranting on about the insubordinate, arbitrary generals who had thrown his whole master plan out of joint. In the interval so much time had been wasted on this not altogether unsatisfactory victory to the east of Kiev that in view of the approaching late autumn with its attendant bad going and mud, Hitler himself had had to drop this entire strategic master plan, because the regrouping alone had taken up so much of our costly time.

  For this reason he authorised Army
Group Centre’s double encirclement action at Vyasma and Bryansk, the prerequisite for the plan—still not abandoned by the War Office—to invest Moscow before winter closed in. The fate of the latter operation, and the developing catastrophe in the snow and ice of the cruellest winter experienced by central Russia since the beginning of the 19th century, are adequately known. It would, however, be an interesting military study for somebody to analyse what prospects Hitler’s original plan would have enjoyed, and what the consequences would have been for our Russian campaign in 1941, especially if—as I was told by a Russian Staff Officer—they really had anticipated the War Office’s intentions in the autumn of 1941 by concentrating all their major reinforcements, together with their Far East divisions and their Reserve Army, about Moscow for months beforehand. What would have been the consequence of that move for the Hitler plan? Would it not have greatly improved its chances of success? At present it is to me still an open question, but it has certainly given me food for thought: errors in grand strategy can never be redeemed in the same war. By that I am not claiming that the War Office plan was itself an error: the real mistake was to adopt a compromise, if the respite demanded by Army Group Centre before they could attack was not, in fact, a vital prerequisite to re-establishing the fighting quality of its troops. For the Führer’s plan of attack would certainly have demanded immediate and gruelling route-marches; and one must never forget the generals’ dogma: ‘My army can attack, but it can’t go on marching.’

  During the summer of 1941 the civilian population’s resistance to our occupation forces intensified perceptibly in every theatre of war, with sabotage incidents and attacks on German security troops and installations. While partisan warfare began to assume a more menacing aspect in the Balkans where it was openly encouraged by Britain and the Soviet Union, and obliged us to launch full-scale operations against partisan centres, acts of sabotage became horrifyingly frequent in France and even in Belgium. Widespread air drops of agents and of disguised sabotage-troops, bomb incidents, the dropping of guns, ammunition, radio transmitters and spies were the order of the day. There was no doubt that, in the west, Britain’s hand was behind all this: she was trying to incite the population to harass the occupation forces, destroy industrial, public-utility, transport and power-supply installations, and to create general unrest and disturb the public order; she hoped to incite the population to passive resistance and even to provoke reprisals from us which, in turn, would manure the ground for the growth of a future resistance movement. While the French police initially co-operated very efficiently with us in the prosecution and elimination of saboteurs in France, very soon a palpable change came over them, often evidenced by their sympathies with the wrongdoers and even by a degree of high-level participation in the guerilla war against our security forces.

  The call for reinforcements for our security forces and the police units became increasingly urgent in time, and the early attempts at improvising security measures by taking hostages and exacting reprisals on them eventually became the order of the day. As the Balkans were also crying out for troop reinforcements, and the security forces allocated to the daily expanding occupied territories of the Soviet Union were no longer able to cope either, the Führer insisted on the employment of Draconian reprisal measures and ruthless action to deter the terrorists before things got out of hand—before the resistance movements could succeed in siphoning off so much of our manpower that the thing outgrew the capabilities of the occupying authorities altogether.

  The summer and autumn of 1941 accordingly saw the issue of the first orders designed to combat these new techniques of stab-in-the-back, sabotage- and commando-warfare, a kind of warfare launched at the behest of dark forces—the ‘secret service’ [sic.]—by gangsters, spies and other skulking vermin, and later reinforced by idealists, all of whom are now jointly idolised as great and patriotic national ‘heroes’.

  These orders numbered among others the military commanders’ ‘hostage laws’, the Führer’s Nacht und Nebel—‘Cover of Darkness’—decree, which I myself signed, and all the other variations on those brutal directives of 1942 designed to emulate the enemy in his most degenerate mode of warfare, which could, of course, only really be appreciated in all its ferocity and effect at my central office into which all these reports flowed. The purpose was to make it quite plain to all those German officers, who had been brought up in a make-believe world of ‘chivalry’ in war, that when they are faced with methods like these the only one to keep his head is the one who least shrinks from exacting the most ruthless reprisals in a situation where an ‘illegal war of the shadows’ has unscrupulously systematised crime to intimidate the occupying power and terrorise the country’s populace at large. That these British secret service methods were so alien to us Germans, and to our mentality, went far to justify the existence of warnings like these to our men; but whether the proper way of bringing this home to them was by issuing the slogan, ‘Terrorism can only be combatted with terrorism’ is a point which seen in retrospect people may be right to dispute. All good Germans should learn to let the house catch fire around them before they start to sniff for smoke. . . .

  Early in June 1941, on my return to Berlin, I found Hans-Georg at our home there. His thigh injury had fully healed, but from the many operations on them the muscles and sinews were agony for him to ride on. So I finally gave him permission to transfer from his Halberstadt regiment to the 29th mobile artillery regiment, which belonged to the 29th (mobile) division. This was just what he had always dreamed of, being in a motorised unit, with the modern battle cavalry. Beaming with happiness, he left home once again, as his new regiment was urgently calling for him; after he had taken leave of his mother and sisters, who dreamt as little as he did himself what lay ahead, I accompanied him to the front door and with heavy heart bade him farewell. I said: ‘God be with you! Be brave, but don’t be foolhardy or reckless unless you have to.’ He probably did not understand, but he briefly embraced me and swung off happily down the lane with his case, his rifle and other kit. When I returned to the drawing room, my wife said: ‘How grave and different you were with him! What is the matter then?’ I had of course been unable to deceive the delicate perception of a mother. I avoided giving a direct answer, but muttered something about having warned him to be careful of his leg.

  All the harder fell the blow when the news came as early as 18th July that he had died in a field hospital from a serious injury suffered during a Russian strafing attack on the day before. My wife was at Helmscherode with the rest of the family: who was to tell her that her favourite son, for whom she had so often fretted, had been laid to rest in foreign soil, outside Smolensk? I sent Professor Nissen [the family doctor] to Helmscherode, charged with this sad mission, because I had some fears for how my wife would take it with her delicate heart. That was when I first found out how strong the hearts of wives and mothers are.

  The Führer’s own sympathy was expressed in a personal letter to my wife; she was very grateful for it. As both my wife and I were against publishing any obituary notice, the Führer ordered the Press to publish one, explaining to us that the German people ought to learn that the sons of high-ranking generals were also laying down their lives on the field of battle.

  With the commencement of the operations against Russia, the Führer had defined the operational command structure for the remaining theatres as making Finland, Norway, the west, North Africa and the Balkans immediately responsible to him, in other words to the High Command, in order to relieve the War Office of these burdens. During 1941 the only real hostilities were in Finland, North Africa and the Balkans; in the remaining so-called ‘OKW-theatres’ only guerilla warfare prevailed.

  The Führer had made this ruling because apart from on the Atlantic coast these theatres were engaged in ‘coalition’ wars for the direction of which Hitler had for political reasons assumed both the command and the responsibility for collaboration with our allies: he wished to keep all the negotiation
s with their heads of state and their general staffs firmly in his own hands. At the same time, the ruling brought considerable relief to the War Office, even though the Army’s organisation was still responsible for maintaining their fighting strength and for all equipment and quartermastering.

  In itself I considered the term ‘OKW-theatre’, which had crept into general usage, an unfortunate misnomer: it resulted in a wrong conception of the actual overall rôle of the High Command as the supreme court of command, superior to all three services in every theatre of war; this misconception was further amplified by the manner in which the Führer completely excluded his High Command from the direction of the offensive against the Soviet Union, apart from those matters involving Finland. The most unambiguous solution would have been to transfer the command of all three services in each individual theatre to an individual with a joint-service warrant giving him authority over army, navy and air force; each of these individuals would then be ultimately subject to High Command control. But that was something for which the Commanders-in-Chief and their staffs were not ready, and the C.-in-C.s of the navy and the air force refused to subordinate their local contingents to such an overall command.

  Here only the Führer had the power—both tactically and in mediation—to intervene: neither Raeder nor Göring had any desire to grant the Commanders-in-Chief of the various war theatres (of whom almost all were army generals) authority over their contingents, as they feared they would forfeit their own immediate influence over them, even though they themselves were obliged to appoint local commanders to whom they could not refuse to delegate wide powers of independent action. I never got further with this tentative re-distribution of authority that I proposed than one or two modest beginnings, while the overall operational command of the war at sea and in the air was left intact for the Commanders-in-Chief of the navy and air force respectively.