The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  Keitel, who had acquiesced quite without forebodings to his appointment as Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, saw only gradually the thorns in the crown that had been placed upon his head. As time wore on, he was burdened with the additional functions of War Minister—without any kind of legal prerogative—together with those of the now non-existent War Minister’s undersecretary and his chief of staff.

  Even his most malevolent critics have not disputed his organisational prowess. Unfortunately, the head of state for whom he now had to work—and indeed for whom he wanted to work, as it was to him a duty and an honour—did not value simple structures and the unambiguous delimitation of military spheres of competence as highly as Keitel did. On the contrary: while Hitler certainly needed a head of his ‘military chancellery’—to whom he deliberately accorded no independent command authority—he also deliberately wanted the innumerable spheres of competence to overlap so that he could establish his own authority over every sphere according to his own whims. Keitel was the administrator of all the military—and above all Army—matters that needed administering. Upon his not entirely blameless shoulders there fell an enormous burden of work, and he bore the brunt of all the opprobrium directed by Hitler at such of his compliant and conscientious colleagues as upset him in any way, even by their looks.

  The field-marshal has himself dealt with the strange and entangled thicket of OKW spheres of jurisdiction in these Memoirs, but the point which must be repeatedly stressed is that he possessed no command authority himself. As modern warfare necessitated the mobilisation of every field of a nation’s endeavour, the Chief of the OKW, who was in Hitler’s eyes the formal representative of the Armed Forces, became entangled in innumerable matters which were no real concern of his. And as the Chief of the OKW was an officer with a strongly marked sense of duty, he felt unable to reject any of these demands upon his time.

  It is appropriate to recall once more the terms of the Führer’s decree of 4th February, 1938:

  The authority of command over all the armed forces is from now on to be exercised by me, directly and in person.

  The hitherto Armed Forces Office of the Reich War Ministry is transferred to my immediate command as ‘The High Command of the Armed Forces’, my own military staff.

  Thus spake Adolf Hitler in 1938, before any annexations and before any conquests; it was a natural climax in the process of accumulation of all the influential offices of power of the old traditional state, from Reich Chancellor and Reich President down to the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, because, as observation would seem to confirm, this is apparently the modous vivendi of such autocratic systems. One consequence of this could not be ignored, a point which was stressed by Professor Hermann Jahrreiss, a German constitutional and legal expert at the time of the Nuremberg Trial, and that was that if the Führer-State, the autocracy, came into existence in what was ostensibly a constitutional and legal manner, then the will of the autocrat became law.*

  It was indicated to Keitel’s candidate for the Command of the Army, General von Brauchitsch, during the 1938 national crisis, that one of his duties would be to associate the armed forces more closely with the National Socialist State; he had as little objection to this as did Keitel. For them the problem was not so much National Socialism as such, as Hitler himself. For these soldiers the decisive factor was not the prevailing political system but the personality at its head.

  From memory, Keitel has quoted a speech delivered by Hitler on 30th January, 1939, apparently to a number of senior officers. (The recollected version is among his defence counsel’s papers.) Hitler expanded upon the lack of fortune which had dogged Germany’s attempts hitherto in her search for world-power status. The armed forces, he continued, would have to stand fast until 1942. The ‘main conflict’ with Britain and France was inevitable and he would instigate it all in good time. With strong words he censured the ‘pessimistic element’ in the military commands, the ‘intellectual-mindedness’ which had existed since Schlieffen, the one-sided intellectual ‘over-breeding’. According to Hitler, there would have to be an ‘absolute and radical’ change. The Officer Corps was steeped in pessimism (an allusion to its demeanour during the Sudeten crisis). Hitler cited the Adam case and commented indignantly: ‘What a state we are in if such a spirit is being spread from above’. He demanded a new system of officer selection: in future he wanted only officers who had faith in him. Verbatim, he said: ‘I want no more warning memoranda from anybody’ (a reference to the war of memoranda waged by General Beck in 1938). It was to be Brauchitsch’s task to give the officer corps new purpose. He closed with the appeal: ‘I beseech you all to try and recognise the task before us.’

  That was really all that Hitler ever did have to ask of them. During his preliminary American hearings, Keitel later explained that it gradually dawned on him that Hitler often did not mean his words to be taken as violently as he had spoken them, and that Hitler had often deliberately exaggerated in speeches to his officers—a symptom of his inward uncertainty. The realisation brought little solace to Keitel then.

  In these preliminary hearings of October, 1945, which have been published (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B, p. 1284 et seq.) under the title ‘Keitel’s Analysis of Hitler’s Character and Traits’ he gave inter alia a number of illustrations of Hitler’s fixation that he always had to regard everybody with the utmost suspicion.

  The first concerned Hitler’s relationship with the Army’s oldest and most respected officer, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt. Von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South, was on 3rd December, 1941, at his own request relieved of his command by Hitler because he had refused to obey a number of orders from Hitler demanding the impossible of him. In 1942, after the illness and resignation of Field-Marshal von Witzleben, he was recalled and appointed Commander-in-Chief West (Army Group D).

  When the Allied invasion forces succeeded in June 1944 in their invasion operations, as was only to be expected, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt was again sent into the wilderness by Hitler, and Keitel heard Hitler say of him: ‘He is an old man, he has lost his nerve. He isn’t master of the situation any longer, he’ll have to go.’ Some eight weeks later, Hitler was telling Keitel: ‘I would like very much to see Field-Marshal von Rundstedt and have a talk with him to see how far he has recuperated his health.’

  Rundstedt was ordered to call at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, where he waited for three days, and finally asked Keitel in rather a disgruntled voice what kind of game it was, and why they had sent for him. Keitel had no other recourse than to ask him to be patient. He had asked Hitler what plans he had for the field-marshal; Hitler had replied: ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ On the following day, Hitler had waved Keitel away saying: ‘I have no time for him today.’ It was not until the third day that he said: ‘Come round this afternoon at such-and-such a time, bringing Field-Marshal von Rundstedt.’ (In fact, as we now know, Rundstedt’s successor on the western front, Field-Marshal von Kluge, had committed suicide as he expected to be called to account for his complicity in the conspiracy of 20th July, 1944).

  Hitler disclosed to Rundstedt: ‘Herr Feldmarschall, I would like to entrust you once more with command of the Western Front. Rundstedt replied, ‘My Führer, whatever you may command I will do my duty to my last breath.’

  The tight and all-embracing shackles of a soldier’s duty and his attitude to the head of state were as binding upon von Rundstedt as they were upon Keitel; von Rundstedt belonged to those senior officers whom Keitel harshly described—at least once he was in captivity—as ‘Yes-Generals’. And all the rage that Rundstedt was able to summon up for angry outbursts about Hitler on the telephone did not prevent him from presiding over the Court of Honour that passed judgment upon the generals and staff officers who had lifted their hands against the Führer or were suspected of having done so.

  On 5th September, 1944, Rundstedt replaced von Kluge’s immediate successor, Field-Marshal M
odel, as Commander-in-Chief West. After Hitler’s interview with Rundstedt in the Führer’s headquarters, Hitler said to Keitel: ‘You know the respect Rundstedt enjoys not only in the army, but in the other services too, in the navy and air force, is absolutely unique. He can get away with anything, and I have nobody who enjoys quite the same respect as he.’

  After Hitler’s last grand offensive, the second Ardennes offensive of December 1944, had collapsed he reverted after some hesitation to his old assessment of Rundstedt: he was too old, he had lost his grip, he was unable to control his generals, and so on. He, Hitler, would have to let him go again. Keitel added to this that Hitler always prided himself on being a perfect judge of people, but in fact he never was.

  Keitel gave another illustration of Hitler’s character, an interview with Hitler on armament problems. Hitler had asked him: ‘How many light field howitzers are we producing monthly?’ Keitel had replied: ‘About a hundred and sixty, probably.’ Hitler: ‘I demand nine hundred!’ And he continued to inquire: ‘How many 88-mm anti-aircraft shells are being turned out monthly?’ Keitel: ‘About 200,000.’ Hitler: ‘I demand two million!’ When Keitel protested: ‘How on earth can we do that? Every single round has to have a clockwork time-fuse, and we have not enough of those. We only have a few factories turning out clockwork fuses for them’, Hitler replied: ‘You fail to understand me; I will talk it over with Speer, and then we will build the factories and within six months we will have the fuses.’

  That was Germany’s supreme warlord, the man with whom the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces not only had to work, but wanted to work, because in his view there could be no question of ducking out.

  Keitel’s Memoirs show the extent to which the compartmentalisation of every sphere of jurisdiction within the OKW was carried out. And they also show how much the field-marshal really was only Hitler’s chef de bureau. On the other hand, the multiplicity of organisations immediately subordinated to the Führer and concerned with economic policy and war administration, above all in the eastern territories, meant that matters lying far beyond the scope of the armed forces were constantly being dragged up to the field-marshal by the SS, the Party and the Todt Organisation or by the vast apparatus built up since 1942 by the Reich Plenipotentiary for the Direction of Labour, Gauleiter Sauckel. If he was to remain the master of all these fields, if he were not to lose sight of the whole vast complex, he was obliged to concern himself actively with thousands upon thousands of problems without even the slightest real prerogatives of command. It took immense energy on his part to master all this work, but he devoted himself to his office with all the vitality he had. The only thing he failed to realise was how indispensable he had in fact become, even to Hitler; that, he was probably too modest to see. He was too little aware of his own value.

  There were probably times when Keitel’s adjutants asked why such an expert on farming had not been made Minister of Agriculture. His interest in agriculture endured despite all his desk work, and a job which gave him no respite, no mealbreaks, and only a brief midday pause and time for a modest stroll. Probably there were times when they asked themselves, and him as well, why he stayed on at all, when the orders he had to issue really demanded of any soldier that he should offer his resignation. Even if we ignore the fact that Hitler would never have permitted Keitel to go because he realised that without this chef de bureau he would have been unable to manage anything as far as military administration was concerned and even if we also ignore the fact that Keitel considered it unethical to resign one’s office in wartime, the field-marshal was perfectly aware of what would happen if he did go. No Army general would be taking his place: ‘The next one after me is Himmler!’

  Grand-Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy from 1943 onwards, has testified that he avoided stopping too long at the Führer’s headquarters because of Hitler’s extraordinary powers of persuasion.* Even Reichsminister Speer, a sober and cultivated man with no kind of inclination towards mysticism, found Hitler’s powers of suggestion very sinister at times; but this was the man with whom Keitel had to work for nearly seven years.

  Among the service Commanders-in-Chief and the other senior officers serving in Hitler’s immediate vicinity there was a house rule to the effect that it was prudent to express one’s opposition to the Führer only à deux. That was also Grand-Admiral Raeder’s belief, according to his testimony at Nuremberg; he added that Hitler’s chief adjutant General Schmundt had advised him on this course. Hitler took a dim view of any collective opposition to his plans: his abysmal distrust being what it was he began to suspect that his ‘generals’ were conspiring against him. Even Keitel observed this rule, and indeed followed it so strictly that in the great controversies like that over the dropping or modification of illegal orders, he even refrained from asking his chief legal adviser, Dr. Lehmann, to accompany him when he saw Hitler.

  Colonel-General Jodl, the chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, compared the Führer’s headquarters in east Prussia with a concentration camp. Life within the Security Zone la at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ did indeed mean going without much that was part and parcel of everyday life. The enormity of the burden of purely formal work that fell upon a man like Keitel left him no time to form any effective overall picture of what was going on outside. Steering the mighty and inflated bureaucratic apparatus of the war administration consumed all his day and half his night as well, especially as the daily war conferences with Hitler swallowed up many hours by themselves. It is true that he came into contact with many individual matters from other fields of the war and war administration, quite outside his own office, but what he saw were only kaleidoscopic glimpses. What his supreme warlord did not want him to know, he did not find out; and that included a great deal, not only in the field of grand diplomacy but also the peculiar kind of warfare being waged by the SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler. The result of his unnatural life, tied to a writing desk at the heart of the war machine, was an unhealthy isolation from the everyday life of the outside world.

  An officer as highly placed as he was probably seemed from the outside to be a powerful man, although in actual fact the field-marshal would not have been able to march off so much as a company of soldiers on his own orders. He dissociated himself from gossip, rumours and the like. His adjutants gained the impression that he dissociated himself religiously from any kind of criticism of Hitler or of conditions under the Third Reich. He refused, at least in most of the cases, to cover up for officers in his command who had fallen foul of the secret police for making critical remarks about the Führer or the Party, for example; on the other hand, he himself would never denounce any officer who came to him with frank opinions or criticised his own attitude to him or raised complaints about conditions in Germany.

  The office which Keitel held could isolate its occupant and divorce him from the realities of life. Of course, the question arises, why did he not throw off this thankless burden of office? The head of the OKW’s central office, Lieutenant-General Paul Winter, once reminded him of the old Markwitz maxim: ‘Opt for disobedience if obedience brings no honour.’ But Keitel viewed the position differently. Firstly, he honestly believed that it was his duty to hang on to the office to prevent the SS from coming to power. And secondly, he knew full well that with the collapse of any hopes of a quick victory over Russia in 1941, their last hopes of any overall victory had gone; yet to throw off his office at a time of misfortune would have been the negation of all his principles. He stayed on to the bitter end, submitting to the processing and issuing of orders which he himself would never have issued.

  The orders with which we are concerned here fall, considered logically, into two groups. There will be little point in totting up a list of counter-recriminations here, or in insisting that the other sides were equally guilty of breaches of international law, as for example in the Allied air offensive against the civilian population of Germany: it can certainly be argued that two wrongs do not make a
right.

  The first group of orders embraces those whereby, months before any attack was launched on the Soviet Union, the character of the German mode of warfare was decisively altered. They include: the directive entrusting ‘special duties’ to the SS Reichsführer and his police and secret-police organs and units in the front-line and rearward areas; the order modifying the liability of German troops to courts martial in the Barbarossa zone, in other words in the projected fighting areas in Russia; and the so called ‘Commissar Order’. These three orders were issued in March, May and June of 1941, and they provided respectively for: the introduction of police squads, or more accurately of squads comprised of the National Socialist political police, of the SS and its security service into the fighting organisation for the purpose of carrying out mass murders of political or racial communities; an order to the troops that punitive actions conducted against the civilian population of the eastern territories foreseen for occupation were not normally to be made the subject of courts martial; and an order to the troops that the political commissars, who did after all belong to the Red Army machine, were to be sorted out from the bulk of Russian prisoners of war and liquidated. All these orders turned upside down the heritage of centuries of military tradition. For the troops the order modifying their liability to courts martial was probably the most far-reaching.