The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  In this situation, I authorised General Wenck—whatever the danger on the Elbe front—to release at least one division for the main Berlin operation and to apprise the Führer of this decision by radio on my behalf.

  When I was about to drive through the little town of Rathenow on my way back to camp, about halfway between Brandenburg and Nauen, German troops blocked our path and announced that Rathenow was being attacked by the Russians and was under enemy gunfire. As I myself could detect no sound of fighting anywhere, I drove down the absolutely empty road further into Rathenow. A Volkssturm [People’s Levy] company had excavated a three-foot-deep trench in the market square, affording them a field of fire of barely a hundred yards over to the houses on the far side. Nobody knew anything about the enemy, except that an attack on the town was anticipated. I explained to the company commander the lunacy of his actions; I had the company mustered, addressed a short speech to them, and ordered the company commander to lead me to the city commandant.

  THE BATTLE FOR BERLIN, 1945

  On the way, I saw in various places every kind of artillery, field howitzers, infantry guns, 3.7 cm anti-aircraft guns, and so on, drawn up in courtyards, limbered up and obviously camouflaged against detection from the air; their tractors and crews were standing idly round them. It seemed that there was sporadic gunfire from an enemy battery aimed at the outskirts of the town.

  I found the commandant in a house some way off, issuing orders to some ten or twelve officers gathered round him. He was an active pioneer-troop officer, and my appearance not only amazed him but threw him into complete confusion. He told me that he had ordered the evacuation of the town and the mining of the bridge at its eastern end [sic] as the enemy was about to attack. I shouted at him that he must be out of his mind to decamp just because of a few rounds of long-range gunfire: what signs had he actually seen of the enemy? where was his battle-reconnaissance unit? what had they reported to him? and what, above all, was the whole point of having the artillery that was lying around in every courtyard of the city? I ordered the whole party out of the house and walked with them to the outskirts of the town where the enemy was supposed to be attacking; apart from a few puffs of shell bursts, there was nothing to be seen. Under my supervision, orders were issued for the defence of the town, the artillery was brought out and dug in, and this major was transferred to a command post from which he could see for himself out over the broad open spaces upon which there was no sign of an enemy.

  I made it plain to him that if he surrendered the town to a few cavalry patrols it would cost him his neck, and that I would visit him again next day and expect to find the defences properly organised. He was to send a despatch rider to General Holste at once to report to him my intervention and the orders I had issued to him. I drove back down the line of retreat this brave commandant had earmarked for himself, and found mile after mile of columns of troops of every kind already in retreat, convoys of lorries laden with guns, machine-guns, ammunition, and so forth. I stopped the lot of them and packed them off back into the town under the command of a few elderly military police officers I had culled from the rest. In view of the Havelland marshes to the east of it and the barren terrain, offering no hope of cover, Rathenow could never be seriously attacked from the east. But a vital line of communication to the northern part of Holste’s Corps and to Heinrici’s Army Group led [westwards] through this town to the territory east of the Elbe. Right up to 29th April, Holste reported to me every day that every enemy endeavour to take Rathenow had been beaten off. After that I am not aware what happened.

  Late that afternoon, I returned to camp at Neu-Roofen, and once again laid on a flight to Berlin for the coming night. As Jodl had already briefed the Führer by telephone on the developing situation, I decided to eschew telephoning him myself in view of my planned flight to Berlin. Unfortunately, the Reich Chancellery again forbade me to land at Gatow as this was already under intermittent enemy gunfire; for this reason Heerstrasse, the highway between the Charlottenburg Gate—where the Technical Institute was—and the Brandenburg Gate had been equipped as a runway for aircraft to land, and from dusk onwards an airlift of Junkers transport planes had been arranged to bring in every kind of munitions ordered by the Reich Chancellery and the commandant of Berlin as well as two companies of SS troops who had volunteered for action in the city. For this reason, my arrival was scheduled for after midnight, so that I could still take off again before dawn. From midnight onwards we waited at Rheinsberg airfield for clearance to take off; but we were instead categorically forbidden to make the flight, as fires had broken out in Berlin and were causing such a smoke haze over the Tiergarten area that it was impossible to land.

  Not even a personal telephone call from me availed anything; I was informed that because of the haze several aircraft had already crashed, and the ‘runway’ was blocked. When I again argued the point with the Reich Chancellery upon my return to camp, suggesting I flew in at dawn, I was told the Führer himself had forbidden me to, because on the previous evening Colonel-General von Greim had been badly injured as his plane came in to land just before dusk. Afterwards, I had a long and detailed telephone conversation with General Krebs: he told me on this occasion that Göring had been dismissed by Hitler from all his offices and from his rights as Hitler’s successor, as he had requested the Führer’s authority to begin surrender negotiations with the enemy. Krebs said a radio signal had been received to that effect from Göring in Berchtesgaden on the 24th and the Führer, beside himself with rage about it, had ordered his SS guards at the Berghof to arrest Göring: he was to be shot.

  I was horrified by this news, and could only rejoin to Krebs that there must be some misunderstanding, as on the evening of the 22nd the Führer had himself commented in my presence that it was a good thing that Göring was in Berchtesgaden, as he was better at negotiating than he, Hitler, was. Apparently Bormann was listening in to the telephone conversation between Krebs and myself, for suddenly his voice came on the line, shouting that Göring had been sacked, ‘even from his Reich Chief Huntsman job’. I made no reply; God knows, the situation was too grave for sarcastic remarks like that. I went to see Jodl to talk over this new development with him; he could only explain the query contained in Göring’s signal by reference to the mission on which he had sent General Koller. Koller would also have notified Göring of the Führer’s earlier comment. Now we realised why Colonel-General von Greim had been ordered to the Reich Chancellery anyway: to take over command of the German Air Force, as Göring’s successor.

  I did not sleep a wink that night, for this latest move of the Führer’s had suddenly illuminated for me the fearful mood prevailing in the Reich Chancellery, and above all the ascendancy of Bormann. He alone could have had his infamous finger in this; he had exploited the Führer’s frame of mind to bring his protracted feud with Göring to such a victorious conclusion. What would happen if as it now seemed the Führer was voluntarily to meet his end in Berlin? Had he deliberately chosen to kill off Göring with himself at the last moment? My resolve to fly to Berlin on the evening of the 26th, come what may, began to harden: if Greim had done it, then so could I.

  On 27th April, towards midday, Grand-Admiral Dönitz put in an appearance at our camp at Neu-Roofen; he had also radioed Himmler to attend. The four of us, including Jodl, discussed the situation privately, after both our guests had sat in on the war conference. It was obvious to us that the Führer was determined to stand fast and fight in Berlin, and that our duty would be not to abandon him so long as there remained any chance of backing him out. The fact that at least the Americans were still making no attempt to cross the Elbe downstream of Magdeburg and the additional circumstance that there had been sufficient consolidation of the front of Schörner’s Army Group for him to detach forces from his northern flank to secure against a Russian encirclement of Berlin from the south, as the Führer had commanded, contrived to impart to the situation—at least round Berlin—a more hopeful countenance, howeve
r grave the overall war picture might be. We took leave of one another.

  I resolved to give the Führer one last option during the coming night: get out of Berlin; or transfer Supreme Command to Dönitz in the north and Kesselring in the south; the OKW staff under Lieutenant-General Winter, deputy-chief of the OKW operations staff, had already placed itself at Kesselring’s disposal. But both commanders must be given complete discretion to act as they saw fit: it was not possible to go on like this.

  Although once again every preparation was made for me to fly to Berlin that night, once again I had to give up the endeavour at the last moment. There was said to be absolutely no question of any aircraft flying to Berlin and landing along the east-west Axis that night.

  Not only transport planes, but fighters and spotter planes were turning back from Berlin: the city was shrouded in smoke, fog and low cloud, and even low-flying planes had failed to see the Brandenburg Gate. Even the now Field-Marshal Greim’s take-off had been abandoned.

  This was the position when I telephoned the Führer, and proposed that at least the altered command structure I considered necessary should be approved. He rejected such a measure as uncalled-for: he had no intention of relinquishing command so long as there was no interruption of wireless communications. He equally rejected the subordination of the Italian theatre and the Eastern Front—the Army Groups commanded by Schörner, Rendulic and Löhr—to Kesselring: Kesselring had more than enough on his plate with the Western Front. He [Hitler] would hold Berlin as long as he himself was in command there; I was to look after munitions supplies, he asked no more than that of me. I kept my demand for him to leave Berlin to myself; he had gathered that from our conversation anyway, and I hesitated to mention it at all specifically by telephone.

  After Dönitz and Himmler had departed, [on 28th April] I drove over to Colonel-General Heinrici, commanding officer of the Vistula Army Group, to put myself in the picture on the defence of the Oder, which he was directing from Schorf heath right up to Stettin. Hitherto, this front had been directed by General Krebs from the Reich Chancellery on account of its coherence with the defence of Berlin; responsibility for the defence of Berlin had been detached from the Army Group and turned over to the commandant of Berlin, who in turn received all his orders direct from the Führer.

  For some days General Heinrici had been pressing a demand for Steiner’s armoured group and particularly Holste’s Corps to be subordinated to him: he planned to use them at least as a screen for his southern flank. Colonel-General Jodl had repeatedly refused this request, for the obvious reason that Wenck’s Army would be wholly exposed on its northern flank and at the rear. Towards one o’clock I joined Heinrici at his command post in a forest encampment to the north-east of Boitzenburg, the estate of Count Arnim. Heinrici and his chief of staff General von Trotha gave me a thorough breakdown of the situation, which had worsened considerably as a result of the Russians’ break-through south of Stettin, as there were insufficient reserves immediately available to plug the gap. I agreed to examine whether we might be able to assist, but I again rejected once and for all this renewed demand for control of Holste’s Corps, giving all my reasons for doing so. In fact, I demanded that his Vistula Army Group should now finally be subordinated to the OKW, and ordered him to make immediate war reports to our operational headquarters. We parted like old friends, in complete concord.

  That evening, Heinrici telephoned me to report that the gap torn in his front had become worse; he asked me to place at least one armoured division from Steiner’s group at his disposal. I promised him a decision as soon as I had spoken with Jodl and with Steiner himself. I established that SS General Steiner had arranged for the 7th armoured division, which was still in the process of being moved up, to carry out its attack as ordered only during the coming night. I ordered the division to be ready to stand at my disposal, so that it could if necessary be diverted to another direction. To have to abandon Steiner’s attack, on which the Führer had laid such great hopes, came very hard to me. But in view of the situation on Heinrici’s front, with the enemy being able within two to three days to sweep round to the rear of Steiner and the southern flank of the Vistula Army Group, Jodl and I were convinced that the only proper course of action now was to throw the 7th armoured division across the gap from the south, and into the Russians’ flank. So I released the 7th armoured division to Heinrici, but with stringent conditions attached to its line of attack and its objective, in order that I could gather it up again afterwards whatever the outcome, as a reserve. The orders were confirmed by Heinrici; Jodl apprised the Führer of what had been done. It must have been a bitter disappointment to him.

  Early on 28th April, at four o’clock in the morning, I drove over to SS General Steiner. I had hoped either to find the headquarters of the 7th armoured division there, or to ask him where it was; I also wanted to discuss with Steiner how and if he was going to execute his attack, even without the 7th division. But it turned out that the division had been intercepted by the [Vistula] Army Group itself, and had never even reached the assembly area I had designated; nobody had reported to Steiner for orders.

  After Steiner had explained to me how he planned to resume the attack after regrouping, even without the 7th armoured division, I drove down the approach road I had ordered for it, without seeing a soul in sight. It began to dawn on me that either the division had been delayed or else it was being operated elsewhere.

  As I drove along another road, I encountered squads of infantry and horse-drawn artillery. When I asked after the 7th armoured division and what was happening here, I learned that two nights before the southern flank of Heinrici’s Army Group—without having sighted the enemy at all—had taken to its heels westwards across the Schorf heath, and would be flanking Fürstenberg during the course of the day, 28th April; there the artillery was to be dug in again.

  I nearly had a fit! During our conversation the afternoon before, Heinrici had not breathed a word to me about this orderly retreat—in full sway even then. So the 7th armoured division had also been deployed quite differently—and that was the reason for his having pressed for Holste’s Corps to be subordinated to him as well.

  At about eight o’clock I returned to our operational headquarters, to confer with Jodl on this completely altered situation, whereby we and our camp—at the very latest by the next day—would have been delivered up unawares and defenceless to the Russians. I ordered Heinrici and General von Manteuffel to attend on me at a rendezvous north of New Brandenburg and then drove off while Jodl had a first, very harsh altercation with the [Vistula] Army Group’s chief of staff. On my drive north, I finally found the 7th armoured division and after a long search the divisional headquarters. At that moment the Army Group’s liaison officer, an engineer staff-officer, was there and he was just outlining to the divisional commander by means of a map the next stages of the retreat, and the distances envisaged for each day. That was all I needed: to overhear the Army Group’s general plan of retreat like this, something of whose existence neither the OKW, the Führer nor General Krebs had even suspected. The actual orders had been issued that evening, after my departure from the Army Group’s headquarters, so it had already been decided on by then. Their promulgation without the permission of either the OKW or the Führer himself was the consequence of my frank discussion with Heinrici, who had drawn the conclusion that the Führer was no longer in any position to intervene and that he could thus do as he thought fit, his primary purpose being to get his Army Group across to the Elbe and surrender it to the Americans. All this I learned only later, from Heinrici’s successor; today I know that his chief of staff, General von Trotha—whom I dismissed that very evening—was the originator of the master plan.

  Anyway, in accordance with its orders the 7th armoured division dug in to a purely defensive position in order to relieve the enemy pressure on [Heinrici’s] units as they retreated from their front; to the great astonishment of the surprised divisional commander, I flew i
nto a temper about this way of using an armoured division: it wasn’t for this ignoble rôle that I had reached the agonising decision to withdraw the armoured division from General Steiner’s command at the very moment of its decisive attack to the south, on which not only the Führer but we had placed so much hope in view of what General Wenck had attained with the Twelfth Army.

  As soon as the divisional commander had briefed me on the situation that had arisen through the collapse of the front—it was similar in enormity to the Russian break-through across the Oder—I brought it home to him that as a tank officer defensive operations were no concern of his, and that his real strength would lie only in counter-attack. He naturally agreed, but pointed out that to put his division on a footing for such an attack now would cost much time, and that he would take so long merely to regroup that the attack would go off at half cock. Despite his plea, I ordered him to use his weapon in the manner for which it had been designed: anything else was futile.