The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  After Dönitz had left the ship, I was received by them; the American general disclosed to me that I was to surrender as a prisoner of war, and would be flown out at two o’clock that afternoon, in two hours’ time. I was to turn over my official business to Colonel-General Jodl; I was to be permitted to take one companion and a personal batman, as well as 300 pounds of luggage.

  I stood up, saluted briefly with my field-marshal’s baton and drove back to headquarters with Bürkner and Böhm-Tettelbach, who had both accompanied me during this ‘audience’. I took leave of Dönitz who had already been briefed on what was to happen and selected Mönch and Lieutenant-Colonel von Freyend as my companions, thereby ensuring a considerably less arduous captivity for them. I handed my personal papers and keys to Jodl and entrusted Szimonski with one or two personal objects for my wife, with a letter to her, to be flown down to Berchtesgaden in the courier plane. Unfortunately the British seized everything from the brave ‘Schimo’ subsequently—even my keys and bank pass-book, and the letter to my wife as well.

  We took off for a destination that was not disclosed to us, and after flying right across Germany landed early that evening at Luxembourg airport; there I was treated as a prisoner of war for the first time, and transferred to Park Hotel at Mondorf, which had been converted into an internment camp. Seyss-Inquart had arrived before me.

  In Flensburg I had been my own master; as I drove in my own car to the airfield together with General Dethleffsen, in those two unguarded hours I could have put an end to my life and nobody could have stopped me. The thought never occurred to me, as I never dreamed that such a via doloris lay ahead of me, with this tragic end at Nuremberg.

  I began my term as prisoner of war on 13th May, 1945, at Mondorf; I was transferred to a prison cell at Nuremberg on the 13th August, and am awaiting my execution on 13th October, 1946.

  Finis, 10th October, 1946.

  * In Keitel’s original manuscript there follow further charges against the Commandant of Krampnitz, which could in any case not have been defended for lack of manpower, something the Field-Marshal overlooked in his anger; the passage has been omitted by the Editor.

  * The correct text of this signal has been inserted here to replace Keitel’s remembered version, which is slightly different.

  9

  Afterthoughts

  KEITEL’S THOUGHTS ON SUICIDE

  SUICIDE: how often I have found myself seriously confronted with this as a possible way out, only to reject it because—as suicides have always demonstrated—nothing is changed and nothing bettered by such action. Quite the contrary, the armed forces, whose counsellor and mediator I had so often been, would have labelled me a deserter and branded me a coward.

  Hitler himself chose death rather than accept responsibility for the actions of the OKW, of Colonel-General Jodl and myself. I do not doubt that he would have done us justice and identified himself wholly with my utterances; but for him—as I learned only later—to have committed suicide when he knew he was defeated, shunning thereby his own ultimate personal responsibility upon which he had always laid such great stress and which he had unreservedly taken upon himself alone, instead of giving himself up to the enemy; and for him to have left it to a subordinate to account for his autocratic and arbitrary actions, these two shortcomings will remain for ever incomprehensible to me. They are my final disillusion.*

  EXTRACTS FROM LAST LETTERS

  To his eldest son, Lieutenant-Colonel Karl-Heinz Keitel, 12th January, 1946.

  You will already know what has happened to me. The Trial will last for weeks yet; it is a severe ordeal for my nerves, but my final duty to the Nation and to History . . .

  To his counsel, Dr. Nelte, 21st May, 1946.

  My defence has entered a new phase and under wholly altered circumstances as a result of Grand-Admiral Raeder’s devastating attack on my character and on my rôle in office. One can defend oneself against attacks and allegations of an objective nature, or from strangers, or at least one can earn the Tribunal’s respect for trying to defend oneself; but Raeder never mentioned any shortcomings to me [during the war] despite his clear duty to do so if he really had serious cause to believe that my behaviour compromised the interests of the armed forces. In Berlin I was often present at ministerial discussions with him when the most diverse matters were brought up, and I sat in on most of his Naval Conferences with the Führer, so he had numerous opportunities either to tell me plainly or hint to me what dangers he saw in my official demeanour, especially as I approached him on several occasions for advice, in an endeavour to build up his confidence in me.

  After everything that has now been said about me to the Tribunal I have seen my character so grievously smeared by a very senior representative of the armed forces—who can after all only be taken seriously—that I can no longer expect to meet with any understanding from this Tribunal as far as the unbridgeable antithesis between what I honestly desired myself and my sheer, shattering inability to do or refrain from doing anything at all on my own initiative [as Chief of the High Command].

  As far as I can see my defence will now be less easy than ever to conduct. I fully appreciate the noble motives that have inspired you to act for my defence here, but if I can in any way lighten your burden in making up your mind, then I would like you to know that I would fully understand it if you were now to entertain the most earnest second thoughts about whether you ought to drop the defence of such a questionable figure as myself.*

  I feel too ashamed of myself to be able to tell you this personally.

  To Luise Jodl, wife of Colonel-General Jodl, 9th June, 1946.

  I feel that I must and should write to tell you how delighted I have been with the course of the defence during this last week. [Your husband’s] constancy and dignity, and the way he has preserved his honour as a soldier, were as impressive as his clear and irrefutable answers were convincing. The great effort you have made with your co-operation has also repaid itself a hundredfold. The things I have not managed to say or had forgotten to mention are now a matter of record, and the things that were most incriminating for me he has been happily able to refute. I will recall this historically unforgettable day with the deepest satisfaction and sense of gratitude.

  To his defence counsel, 1st October, 1946.

  The death sentence has come as no surprise to me, but I am very deeply upset about the way it is to be executed. I beg of you under these circumstances to avail me of your selfless assistance once more, to help me make a plea for my execution to be changed to a soldier’s death by firing squad. I consider it pointless to ask more than that. My faith in your defence, and in the multifarious suggestions you made to me, is completely unshaken. No other defence counsel applied himself to client in such a selfless, tireless and personal way.

  From Frau Lisa Keitel to Dr. Otto Nelte, the Field-Marshal’s defence counsel, 1st October, 1946.

  I have just finished writing a last letter to my husband; I hope you will still be able to get it to him. We heard the judgment, but it was only as we expected. I hope that my husband’s plea for a military execution will be granted him and Jodl. Otherwise, please, no plea for clemency.*

  Keitel to his eldest son, Karl-Heinz, 3rd October, 1946.

  This will probably be my last letter to you. According to my calculations, the death sentence will be executed in fourteen days’ time, in other words once it has been confirmed. It has been a great help to me in facing up to the Tribunal as I did that I have for a long time been aware of what my fate would be. I regret nothing that I said at my Trial, and I would never take back a word I said; I spoke the pure truth, the whole time, to every question and on every occasion. That is something I can still be proud of, and for all time in history.†

  Vice-Admiral Leopold Bürkner to Keitel 4th October, 1946.

  Field-Marshal! It has been written that ‘by his works ye shall know him’; all the good that you have done in your past life and even in this hapless war will not crumble into no
thingness, even if at present it may seem so. In any event, I would like to thank you for all the good you did for me and doubtless to your many subordinates; these latter will be thinking of you now, just as I am doing. It is hard to believe that the last word will have been spoken about your onerous office.

  Keitel to the Allied Control Council for Germany, 5th October, 1946.

  I will willingly give up my life in the expiation demanded by my sentence, if my sacrifice will speed the prosperity of the German people and serve to exonerate the German armed forces from blame.

  I have only one plea: to be granted a death by firing squad.

  I hope that those members of the Allied Control Council who have been soldiers will have some understanding for my guilt, which was born of a virtue recognised in every Army of the world as an honourable and necessary basis for being a good soldier. Even if I failed to recognise the proper limits that ought to have been set upon this soldierly virtue, at least I do not feel I have therefore forfeited my right to atone for this error by the mode of execution that is the right of the soldier in every other army in the world upon whom sentence of death is pronounced as a soldier.*

  * From a note written by Keitel for his defence counsel at Nuremberg on 24th October, 1945, on The Responsibility of the Chief of the High Command.

  * All this refers to a document written by Grand-Admiral Raeder while interned in Moscow, for his own private purposes; Colonel Pokrovsky, for the Soviet prosecution, tried to introduce this into the Trial against Keitel as Exhibit U.S.S.R.-460; naturally the document was also made available to the defence. It dealt with the Grand-AdmiraFs views on Keitel (and, in fact, both officers were very akin in character). Raeder had sharply criticised Keitel for his ‘failure’; written for his own use, the document had not been intended for publication, but his Soviet custodians naturally took it away from him (see IMT, Vol. XIV, p. 243). It was refused a public reading. It had never occurred to Grand-Admiral Raeder, who was basically a very honourable and upright officer, that they might ride rough-shod over his rights like that; in his hearing of 25th May, 1946 (an affidavit by Colonel Pokrovsky) he tried to weaken the effect of his statements about Keitel, by stating that naturally nobody had any prospect of stopping long with the Führer if he was ‘to have a dust-up with the Führer every other day’.

  * As far as can be ascertained, Lisa Keitel’s last letter to her husband never reached him.

  † On 13th October, 1946, three days before his execution, the Field-Marshal sent one last letter of good wishes to his son; he commented that only the women of the family had written to him, and added: ‘Enough said. What cowards we men are.’

  * Field-Marshal Keitel’s request to be executed by firing-squad was rejected by the Allied Control Council for Germany and, together with Alfred Jodl, he was hanged at Nuremberg on 16th October, 1946.

  PART III

  The Indictment

  10

  The Indictment

  by

  Walter Görlitz

  IN 1945 the ‘International Military Tribunal’ at Nuremberg, representing the United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, charged Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the former Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, with having participated in a conspiracy, with having committed crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, or alternatively with having ‘authorised’ or ‘directed’ such crimes. He was accused of complicity in the murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territories, and of ordering their deportation as slave labourers; he was accused of having ordered the execution of hostages, and the persecution of specific sections of the population for political, racial or religious reasons. An additional charge against Keitel and his twenty co-defendants was the accusation of having looted public and private property.

  Of the men who really held power during the Third Reich, very few ever reached the dock at Nuremberg: the most prominent among the defendants was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Adolf Hitler, Führer, Reich Chancellor and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and of the Army; Heinrich Himmler, S.S. Reichsführer, Reich Minister of the Interior, Chief of the German Police and Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army; and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, had taken their own lives and could therefore not be called to account. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Head of the Party chancellery and éminence grise of the Third Reich, had been ‘missing, presumed dead’ since 1st May 1945.

  The leaders of the Third Reich had accumulated a mountain of guilt upon their beings; they were responsible for crimes unique in their enormity. And the culpability of the German leaders was not lessened one whit by the fact that the International Military Tribunal met to pass judgment only upon those war crimes with which they could charge the vanquished Germans, while turning a blind eye on all the war crimes committed by every one of the other belligerent parties.

  The civilised world was crying out for revenge. The legal basis for such a trial, an innovation in the history of civilised peoples, had been established by the London Charter of 8th August 1945 for the ‘Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis’, an Agreement drawn up as a result of lengthy and complex preliminary talks over the years 1942 to 1944. The charter itself represented an important violation of one of the western world’s fundamental legal doctrines: nulla poene sine lege. Legal teaching on the one hand and the demands for the expiation of the terrible crimes against justice on the other seemed to be difficult to reconcile.* But the National Socialists’ war methods had involved such violations of international law that they cried out for requital even if the legal basis for such requital had first to be fashioned post facto. Nevertheless there was a real weakness in the Nuremberg Tribunal, and that was that here it was the victors who were sitting in judgment only upon the war crimes of their vanquished.

  On 19th October, 1945, Field-Marshal Keitel was handed the Nuremberg indictment; he considered it a foregone conclusion that he would be found Guilty, although he pleaded Not Guilty from the dock.

  The field-marshal’s defence counsel, Dr. Otto Nelte, had originally been an industrial lawyer at Siegburg; in his speech for the defence on 8th July, 1946† he stressed that his client was concerned not with minimising the rôle he had played during the Third Reich, but to try to clarify the picture of his character. As Nelte put it: the defendant was fighting to save not his neck but his face. At the end of his exposition, the defence counsel declared that from the point of view of international law there was no answer to the question of under what circumstances, how far, and indeed if, a general was obliged to adopt a standpoint opposed to that of his own government. According to Nelte, obedience and loyalty had been Keitel’s only guiding principles. He did not ask for his acquittal, he pleaded only for his client’s tragic dilemma to be recognised and understood.

  In a memorandum compiled by his defence counsel during interviews with him on the subject of wars of aggression and the problem of Hitler’s influence over his senior officers, Keitel wrote a number of telling comments on the German officer’s position:*

  While the education of a professional officer is thorough, it is only one-sided; the intellectual and political education of the professional soldier is as a rule less complete. This has nothing to do with any question of intelligence and I do not mean to denigrate the officer corps in any way, but I want to stress the fact that the training of a good soldier was fundamentally different from an education for a purely liberal or academic profession. The officer’s profession is not a liberal profession: a soldier’s cardinal virtue is obedience, in other words the very opposite of criticism; the cardinal virtue of the liberal professions is the free interplay of forces for which criticism as such is a precondition.

  The consequence of all this is that the so-called ‘manic’ intellectual does not make a suitable officer, while on the other ha
nd the one-sided education of the professional soldier described above results in a lack of ability to make a stand against theses which are not part of his real territory.

  Nothing is more convincing to a soldier than success.

  There emerges from this a picture of the professional soldier of which the field-marshal himself was the very embodiment. It is in perfect accord with his character when Keitel admits that the head of state, in other words Hitler, did enjoy just such successes at first, but adds that it would have been out of the question for any ‘honourable officer’, indeed it would have been ‘disloyal’ for any officer to have broken faith with a head of state as soon as the wind changed.

  In his defence speech Keitel’s counsel stressed that the concepts of loyalty, of patriotism and of obedience are vital to every country’s existence, and there we have the key to the field-marshal’s attitude as a senior officer and gentleman. We know only one thing today of him, and that is that even as chief of Hitler’s military chancellery he was never once able to prevail upon Hitler to change his mind on decisive matters, despite Keitel’s often superior understanding of them; a second point is that although during the Third Reich there were often bitter and unscrupulous intrigues around the key positions of the government’s power structure and at times even inside the Officer Corps, there were never any intrigues with the declared aim of replacing Keitel as Chief of the High Command, for his was the most thankless office that there could ever be. Of all the senior officers who lambasted the Chief of the OKW for his ‘criminal weakness’ towards the Führer, nobody felt any compulsion to replace him in that office.

  In the book Gespräche mit Halder—‘Talks with Halder’—Colonel-General Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff from 1938 to 1942, was quoted as saying that one phrase keeps echoing back in his memory from the war conferences at Hitler’s headquarters: ‘You, Herr Feldmarschall . . .!’ The phrase was invariably addressed to Keitel, in Hitler’s half-Austrian, half-Bavarian dialect. Halder, upon whom Keitel throws a favourable light in these Memoirs, continued that Hitler had exploited Keitel as a rubbing-post to work his inner tensions off on. According to the same book, Halder once asked Keitel why he put up with it, and Keitel explained: ‘Halder, I am only doing it for you. Please understand me!’ And, according to Halder, there were tears in his eyes as he said this. The former Chief of the General Staff added: ‘That is how he came to be involved in such criminal actions; but he was certainly not wicked au fond, as one occasionally reads of him.’ A further incident lends weight to this assessment: during the 1944 Ardennes offensive, Lieutenant-General Westphal, chief of staff to the Commander-in-Chief West, took the Chief of the OKW to task over the critical fuel situation of the attacking forces. Keitel regretted that he had nothing to spare; Westphal did not let him go so easily: surely the OKW must have some reserves . . .? Keitel thereupon admitted that naturally he still had some in reserve, but . . . And, deeply distressed, he told Westphal, who had been a pupil of his at the Hanover Cavalry School: ‘Oh, I have been turned into such a scoundrel . . .’