The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  What wouldn’t these missing men have meant for the eastern front? It is simple arithmetic: one hundred and fifty divisions of three thousand men apiece, which would have increased the Army’s establishment by fifty per cent. Instead of which, its dwindling units were padded out with batmen and camp followers and the like, while their positions in the Army’s supply echelons were taken by volunteers from among the Russian prisoners of war.

  I have always been the first to realise that not only the maintenance of, but the greatest possible increase in munitions output is a vital prerequisite for a war, because the replacement of worn-out and obsolete equipment is the prerequisite for the maintenance of the fighting-strength of troops; I fully realised that the longer the war lasted and the more it began to resemble the static warfare of the First World War, with its colossal expenditure of munitions and material, the greater our own expenditure of munitions and armaments would be. But despite all that, I have always believed that in the final analysis it is the fighting man using the weapons who is the primary element in a battle-worthy army, and that its fighting spirit depends on him. Without him the best weapons and the most plentiful munitions in the world are poor compensation.

  It was characteristic of Hitler’s modus operandi that he achieved maximum effort by playing off opposing parties against each other, in this case playing off the Munitions Minister in the material sphere against myself as Chief of the High Command in the manpower sphere; he made demands on each of us which he himself knew to be impossible and then left it to us to fight it out. I needed soldiers, Speer needed munitions workers; I wanted to buttress our steadily declining front-line strengths, Speer wanted to avoid declining armaments production, and indeed to boost them in accordance with the orders given him. Both targets were mutually irreconcilable and impossible of fulfilment if the General Commissioner for the Utilisation of Labour failed to provide the workers. Small wonder that Speer and I both put the heat on Sauckel, for I would get no soldiers if Speer received no replacements for those of his workers called-up for military service, none of whom he would release before their replacements arrived.

  When Speer accused the armed forces before Hitler of employing far too many people in their ‘tail’, in the home-based Army, in the Air Force, convalescing in military hospitals, in convalescent units, in the communications zones, and so on, his protests were applauded; but when I declared that the war economy was hoarding and concealing manpower, so as to be ready for any eventuality—multiple-shift working, extra contracts and the like—I was reviled, because I as a layman could not possibly know anything about industrial production; I was told to flush out the ‘communications zones’—there were hundreds of thousands of shirkers and slackers skulking there. It was an unending tug-of-war because the bow had been stretched too far, although the rational exploitation of military and industrial manpower was in fact still not testing the extreme limits of practicability. Human inadequacy and the selfishness of those involved were all against it.

  I could write a book on just this one tragedy of the last three years of the war, without exhausting the subject. The consequences of the manpower shortage in the Army are clearly illuminated by two statistics: the Army’s monthly wastage rate in normal times—apart from major battles—averaged 150,000 to 160,000 men, of which on average some 90,000 to 100,000 could be replaced. The recruits of one age-group averaged 550,000 during the last few years; so if by express order the Waffen-SS was to receive 90,000 volunteers out of that (and nothing like that number ever volunteered) and the Air Force 30,000 men, and the Navy the same number, then that was already almost one-third of the age-group gone.

  Only as the season of spring mud began again in about April of 1942 did the sector attacks the Russians had been carrying out along our whole front until then begin to abate. It was obvious that their objective had been to leave us no real respite, by creating crisis points by attacking first here and then there, but with no visible major strategic target. The only really dangerous positions from the tactical point of view were the deep wedge driven south of Orel, and the Demyansk pocket. While the latter was eventually given up, the possibility did arise of our starting an encirclement action in the south, to the east of Poltava, especially as the ground and weather conditions would permit operations to commence there about four weeks earlier than along the central and northern sectors of the front, and the Russians obliged us by offering us a strategically worthwhile objective, by concentrating their troops and increasing their attacks there. Hitler accordingly decided to precede the summer operation he had personally planned by an independent offensive against the Russian wedge driving towards Poltava.

  Quite obviously Hitler’s plan of campaign—and he was its sole originator—could not involve any further resumption of the general offensive on the eastern front, in view of the drastic shortage of manpower and our responsibility for remaining on the defensive everywhere else; for this reason he had decided on a break-through on the northern flank of Army Group South, which had been under the command of Field-Marshal von Bock since Reichenau’s death [on 17th January 1942]. After an armoured break-through towards Voronezh-on-the-Don, the Army Group, steadily reinforcing its northern flank, was to roll up the Russian front along the Don and advance on Stalingrad with this flank while the southern flank advanced on the Caucasus, overrunning the oilfields of its southern slopes and capturing the passes over the Caucasus.

  THE BLACK SUMMER OF 1942

  While all the forces that could possibly be spared on the eastern front were to be withdrawn for this operation, particularly the tank armies, the Crimea was at the same time to be occupied in preparation for a crossing from the Kerch peninsula into the oil regions of the Caucasus; the War Office had been planning for this since March.

  For Hitler the operation’s first essential was to mislead the Russians about his real objective by means of the advance on Voronezh, about half-way between Moscow and the Donets region, so as to give them the impression of a deliberate wheel to the north and towards Moscow and trick them into holding their reserves there. Secondly, he planned to sever the various north-south railway links between Moscow and the industrial and oil regions, and then by suddenly and unexpectedly wheeling southwards along the Don, to overrun the Donets region itself, seize control of the Caucasus oil fields and block the Volga near Stalingrad to river traffic destined for inner Russia; this was because that river carried Russia’s oil supplies, with hundreds of tankers from Baku. Our allied troops, those of Roumania, Hungary and Italy, were to screen the long northern flank of our Army along the natural obstacle presented by the river Don with their thirty divisions or so, which could be presumed to be shielded from the danger of attack by the river itself.

  During my October [1941] visit to Bucharest for the victory parade held to celebrate the capture of Odessa, I had already discussed in detail Roumanian military aid for 1942 with Antonescu. Intoxicated with his recapture of Bessarabia and the occupation of Odessa—an old Roumanian dream—Antonescu was not difficult to bring to terms: again it involved a certain amount of horse-trading, with his troops being exchanged for armaments and munitions from us, but the sore spot was still the Vienna Award which had obliged Roumania to cede to Hungary what was, in fact, the greater part of Transylvania.

  Antonescu was therefore demanding that Hungary should provide an equal contingent of troops for 1942. If the latter country did not make a decisive contribution, he foresaw a danger for Roumania, for the score would have to be settled with Hungary: the latter country was maintaining strong troop concentrations on the frontier with Roumania, so Roumania would have to do the same against Hungary, which would considerably restrict the scale of her contribution to our attack on Russia.

  I protested that during a war with the Soviet Union, which would liberate both countries from the immense danger presented by Bolshevism, any talk of hostilities between Roumania and Hungary was absolute madness; but my protests had no effect on him, even though the most immed
iate danger threatening both of their countries had only really been eliminated a very few weeks before. Or was it, in fact, just because of that that they were now so belligerent?

  In any event, Antonescu pledged his further participation in our war on Russia with a contingent of fifteen divisions, if we would guarantee to modernise and completely re-equip them, which I naturally agreed to, hard though it would be for us. In fact, the Roumanian Army was easier to satiate, as it had originally been largely equipped with standard weapons from the French armament industry and we were able to satisfy their requirements many times over from the booty we had taken there.

  The way my visit to Bucharest had come about was this: Hitler had rejected an invitation from them, and Göring had been reluctant to go as he had put Antonescu’s back up over the question of Roumania’s petroleum deliveries; the result was that I went as the representative of the German armed forces at the victory parade. I stayed as the young king’s guest at the royal castle, where, together with Antonescu, I had an audience with the king and the queen mother (the wife of the exiled king, who had long found a suitable replacement for her in his mistress, Mme Lupescu). At twenty-one, the king was a tall, slim and good-looking youth, still rather awkward in his manner but not unlikeable; the queen mother was still a very attractive and worldly woman. Antonescu put an end to our superficial conversation with the remark that it was time for us to leave for the parade and its preliminary investiture ceremony.

  Several times Antonescu asked me for my opinion on the march-past, which by German standards was more than ragged. I hastened to point out to him that, of course, one should not use our great German peacetime parades as a standard of comparison, as these troops now had come straight from the front; I said that what mattered was not the discipline of their drill but the expressions on their faces as they gazed upon their highest leaders; and that had made a very favourable impression on me.*

  As a result of my talks in Budapest, Mussolini’s vanity was put to a sore trial with not only Roumania but Hungary too contributing to our 1942 campaign in Russia: he could not see Italy put to shame like that. Accordingly he offered us an unsolicited contingent of ten infantry divisions; it was an offer the Führer could hardly refuse. According to our general in Rome, General von Rintelen, they were to be élite divisions, including four or six Alpini divisions, or at any rate the best that the Italians had. Transport complexities made it impossible for us to move them up until the advent of the summer, as our railways had first to handle the German troop concentrations for the summer offensive.

  The railway transport system was never really equal to the needs of the armed forces or a war economy, despite the fact that the German Reich Railways not only expended vast quantities of material on modernisation but also put its best railway engineers and directors to work on the system. The railway’s performance during the winter of 1941–1942 can only be termed disastrous; from December 1941 to March 1942 it grew so critical that only the establishment of a special motor transport organisation staved off the complete collapse of the vital supply system for our troops. On 1st January 1942, Minister Dorpmüller [Reich Transport Minister] and his Under-Secretary, Kleinmann, spent the whole day from early in the morning until late in the evening at the Führer’s headquarters. For hour after hour their conferences with the Führer and myself went on, and the Chief of Military Transport, General Gercke, was also called in. The situation demanded the adoption of special measures, particularly for the protection of the locomotives and of their water-tanking stations which were totally unsuitable for the sub-zero temperatures of the unusually cold spell. There were days when as many as a hundred locomotives broke down; German locomotives were just not designed for a climate like that; we had been forced to re-bed all the railways to the standard German gauge, because virtually no Russian rolling stock had fallen into our hands at all.

  The Chief of Military Transport had complained bitterly—and rightly—about our Reich Railways for not replacing the locomotives as they broke down; their lack of protection from the frost was not his fault. During the evening, with the Führer in the chair, the only possible solution was arrived at: the Reich Railways would take over responsibility for the entire railway system in occupied Russia right up to the Army’s railheads from which the supplies would be distributed to the front-line issuing depots direct; the network would no longer be the Chief of Military Transport’s responsibility.

  On the face of it it was a unique and quite remarkable solution, as the direction of the entire transportation system in the occupied territories was otherwise the Chief of Military Transport’s pigeon. But General Gercke was wise enough to accept this suggestion of the Führer’s because the Transport Minister had available quite different means of eliminating stoppages and because he, Gerçke, would now be liable for them no longer. Instead the Minister was required to report to the Führer in person each day on how many trainloads he had turned over to the Chief of Military Transport at the railheads. The following figures will give some idea of the size of the problem: the Army by itself (i.e. not including the Air Force) had a requirement for 120 trainloads of supplies every twenty-four hours, assuming that no particular operations were in hand demanding increased munitions supplies and hospital transport; but with a supreme effort, the railway’s carrying capacity could be brought up finally to only one hundred trains a day and that for only brief periods. Besides, there were violent fluctuations which could be attributed to the endless railway stoppages caused by the partisans; often there were more than a hundred stretches of railway line blown up in one night.

  The spring offensive began in the Poltava region at the very last moment, before the deep Russian penetrations could break through our weak and increasingly extended defence forces. Field-Marshal von Bock wanted to use the reinforcements allocated to him for the counter-offensive—some of them still in the process of being moved up—to defend the area where the danger of a Russian break-through to the west seemed most imminent; but the Führer, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, insisted on the counter-attack’s being launched in such a way as to strike at the root of the enemy bulge and cut across it along its ‘chord’; he would excise the cyst like that. Von Bock, on the other hand, feared that all this was being tried too late.

  Hitler intervened and simply ordered the operation to be carried out as he had said. He was proved right, with the result that in this hour of crisis the battle turned into decisive defeat for the Russians who lost unexpectedly large numbers of prisoners to us.

  There is not much time left to me, so I will refrain from depicting the progress of the Hitler offensive as it ground to a halt in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad—the prelude to the turn of the tide against us in the east. I would like to restrict my narrative to some particular episodes and personal experiences of that period.

  The first, and completely inexplicable, event was the publication in the newspapers of the Western Powers of certain copies of our plan of attack. They reproduced at least one sentence of the Führer’s ‘basic directive’ so accurately that there could be no doubt but that there had been treachery somewhere along the line. The Führer’s mistrust of the staffs entrusted with the preliminary study found new sustenance: he renewed his charges against the General Staff, who, he said, could be the only source of this betrayal.

  In fact, as was discovered during the following winter, the guilty party was a renegade officer on the Air Force operations staff, who had been employed in their Intelligence section and who had established contacts with the enemy’s espionage network. During a big trial before the Reich Military Tribunal in December 1942, a number of sentences were passed, because a major organisation of traitors and spies had been uncovered in Berlin. Even though they were largely civilians involved, both men and women, the most important of the enemy’s sources of military intelligence had been this Air Force officer, a Lieutenant-Colonel Schulze-Boysen, and his wife. But until this had been established, Hitler continued to heap abuse on
the Army’s completely innocent General Staff.

  The second misfortune was when a divisional staff officer’s aircraft crashed in no-man’s-land on the eastern front; he had been carrying upon his person the order issued to General Stumme’s Army Corps for its attack during the big offensive due to begin very few days later. The hapless officer had lost his way in the plane and, together with the documents, fell into Russian hands; he himself was shot out of hand on the spot. Hitler’s indignation at the commanding officers concerned—the commanding general, his chief of staff and the divisional commander—resulted in a court martial before the Reich Military Tribunal presided over by Göring. It was thanks to him, and to my own collaboration, that the officers under sentence were all variously pardoned and later resumed their duties elsewhere. The worthy General Stumme was killed in action some months later while deputising for Rommel in North Africa.

  After a three-day battle we succeeded in breaking through to Voronezh and the battle for the Don crossing into the city itself began; it was now that the first misgivings began to make themselves felt about von Bock’s leadership of his Army Group, because in Hitler’s view he was digging in for a batde there instead of wheeling southwards (without bothering about the fate of Voronezh or about his flanks and rear) and winning territory along the Don as fast as possible.