The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  Field-Marshal Keitel, who personally objected to the whole idea of an attack on the Soviet Union, has admitted in his Memoirs that these were ‘highly controversial’ innovations. He himself was against committing these measures to paper at all, but somebody nevertheless wrote them down in black and white. Most of the senior generals were opposed to the Courts Martial and the Commissar Orders. But at Hitler’s last two major Russian campaign speeches delivered to his senior commands in March and June of 1941, nobody spoke out openly against these revolutions in conventional warfare, although most of them did afterwards privately reproach the Chief of the OKW for not having protested and prevented them. So they passed the buck to one another, instead of openly admitting that when it was a question of moral weakness, in fact, none of them had any right to reproach anybody.

  As far as the ‘special duties’ of the SS Reichsführer’s organisation in the east were concerned, Hitler once indicated brusquely to Keitel that these were no concern of his, they were purely police concerns. The security service’s ‘action squads’—allocated to each of the three army groups fighting on the Eastern Front—and the security service’s special squads—formed for ‘dealing with’ the commissars and the so-called fanatical communists found in the reception camps for Russian POWs—carried out the mass-murder orders. It is illuminative of Hitler’s reasoning that it was not until the autumn of 1941 that he lifted his veto on the employment of Soviet prisoners in the Reich, because of the shortage of manpower. He had feared that they would collaborate with communist cells among the German labour force or else they would re-instil communistic ideas in them. The Commissar Order was complied with to a varying degree, particularly during the first—decisive—months of the war in the east; but it was then gradually and quietly dropped, so that by 1942 it was no longer valid. As an honourable man, Field-Marshal Keitel did not try to deny his moral complicity in the issuing and forwarding of these orders, although not of their origination. But these special orders did their damage: they opened up abysses which could never be bridged again.

  The second group of incriminating orders, including the Partisan Warfare decree of September 1941 and the ‘Cover of Darkness’ and ‘Commando’ Orders, and the OKW’s Italian Orders of the autumn of 1943 (which remarkably did not rate any mention at Nuremberg, although they did come into the American trial of the so-called ‘South-East’ generals) were possessed of a different character: they resulted not from Hitler’s objective planning processes, but from his reactions to the multifarious manifestations of partisan and guerilla warfare and sabotage squads operating behind the front lines.

  Although prior to the Reich’s attack on the Soviet Union on 22nd June, 1941, the war had seen some stirring of what might be called national and restorational resistance movements, in the occupied territories and above all in Poland, the communist partisan guerilla bands blossomed out everywhere with the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet entente; the Western Powers gave them active support with Britain as their base and buttressed the nationalist and democratic forces in Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, France and Belgium. Everywhere ‘white’ and ‘red’ partisan bands sprang up, very often not easily distinguishable from each other at first, but with a tendency to establish ‘Common Fronts’: units which in Poland and in Serbia, and in the closing stages of the war in France as well, as willingly made war upon each other as on the enemy.

  In the Soviet Union itself partisan warfare was highly organised behind the German front lines as they initially swept eastwards across Russia. The partisans received massive reinforcements as soon as the population realised—thanks to the activities of the Security Service’s ‘action squads’ and of the German regimes at once set up by the Party officials—that they had only exchanged the terror of the Communist Party for the new terror of the National Socialists.

  During the summer of 1941 the inadequately occupied and pacified Balkans, and above all southern Serbia, the Sandshak, Bosnia and Herzegovina, saw the emergence of guerillas under the leadership of a communist official of Croatian origin, Joseph Broz, who went by the nom de guerre of Tito in Party circles. In view of the weakness of the Germans and the indifference of many of the Italian security forces, and of the circumstances that most of the German divisions were tied down on the Eastern Front, Hitler resorted to his usual expedient, brutality, in a September 1941 order on combatting communist guerillas. The order abounded in ruthless sentiments and grim equations: it demanded that for every German soldier killed, fifty or a hundred hostages were to be shot; and of course the order was issued via the OKW. If we disregard for the moment the question—which has never been satisfactorily clarified in international law—of whether and when and under what circumstances an occupying power is entitled even to take hostages, let alone to kill them (although it has always been the custom of belligerent powers!) this kind of ratio of hostages to victims was obviously excessive.

  In addition, the Soviet Union made repeated and successful attempts to parachute agents into both the Reich territory and the occupied or allied countries; an example of this would be the dropping of the Soviet Colonel Radinov into Bulgaria on nth August, 1941, to take over control of the ‘anti-fascist’ partisan units fighting in this kingdom co-operating in the Balkans with the Reich. Radinov himself was soon captured and executed, but that did not kill off the ‘Fatherland Front’; it gave it added momentum.

  All this may go some way to explaining the prevailing situation. The decree contained in the OKW order of 16th September, 1941 relating to the ‘Communist Resistance Movement in the Occupied Areas’* came long before the guerilla activity had reached its climax, which is clear proof of the futility of all such orders: they were only grist to the mill of the partisan movement.

  The order relating to the communist resistance movement referred to the occupied territories in the east and south-east. It contained the typical Hitler justification:

  It is to be borne in mind that a human life is of no value in the countries concerned and that a deterrent effect can be achieved only by unusual severity.

  Keitel went to some trouble to get the hostage-ratio reduced, but Hitler reinserted his own original figures, of from fifty to a hundred per German life. In accordance with the regulation Keitel had imposed upon himself, he put his own signature to the order, but with the preliminary formula:

  The Führer has now directed me that henceforth . . . etc.

  By which the Chief of the High Command intended it to go on record that lengthy disputes had preceded the issuing of the order.

  In contrast to the above order the second such 1941 order, the infamous so-called ‘Cover of Darkness’ decree of 7th and 12th December, 1941, was intended for the western territories and above all for France, which from the military and organisational point of view was technically under a military government subordinated not to the OKW but to the War Office, and more particularly to the Army’s Quartermaster-General. In France, too, communist subversive activities had strongly increased with the outbreak of the war with the Soviet Union. All these activities were actively supported by Britain, who parachuted sabotage and command units into France, Belgium, Holland and Norway, mainly in close collaboration with the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries, and of the armed units they had formed. One of their greatest triumphs was the assassination in May 1942 of the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS-General Reinhard Heydrich; this operation was carried out by Czech agents parachuted into Bohemia from a British aircraft and resulted in Hitler’s Commando Order in the autumn of 1942.

  The modus operandi of the communists in France was characterised by one of their first murders, that of the military commandant of Nantes, Lieutanant-Colonel Hotz. Here they were able to remove a capable officer, who was particularly popular with the local population, and thereby caused actual damage to the occupying power; secondly, an officer well-fitted to prevent any flowering of their underground movement was eliminated; and t
hirdly, the stupidity of Hitler’s occupation regime being what it was, it could be expected that the execution of hostages would follow which again would not have any effect on the communists as by ancient custom the hostages were always rounded up from among the most prominent citizens.

  The Nantes assassination was not an isolated incident. According to a note written by Keitel for his defence counsel* Hitler insisted that they alter their methods of combating such attacks, not only on people but also on industrial plant, railway installations, high-tension lines, and so on: death-sentences, he now said, only created martyrs and they were to be pronounced only in those cases which could be established beyond any shadow of doubt. Otherwise, all suspects in cases which could not be cleared up at once were to be transferred immediately to Germany after a court martial investigation of the charges; in Hitler’s terminology, they were to be hauled across the frontier under ‘cover of darkness’ (bei Nacht und Nebel). The hearing was to be kept secret, especially from the defendant’s next of kin, while the cases themselves were to be disposed of in Germany.

  There were bitter disputes around this order. Keitel and the head of his legal department both had the most cogent objections to it. During the debates Hitler reproached Keitel that nobody could suggest that he, Hitler, was not a full-blooded revolutionary or that he did not know how to set about starting revolutions; so who was there to know any better than he how to set about suppressing them?

  Keitel finally issued the order, with the significant preamble that it was ‘the carefully weighed and considered will of the Führer that . . .’ and so forth. By this sentence he meant it to go on record that much controversy had preceded the issuing of the order, but that the Führer’s will had proved unshakeable. Keitel himself believed that by insisting on a preliminary court martial review of the evidence on whether to pass judgment at once or transport the defendants to Germany, and by instructions that the secret state police were to deliver the prisoners to the courts immediately they had arrived at their German destination, he had built sufficient safeguards into the order to maintain the correct legal procedures. He himself doubted whether the order as a whole would have any effect. In fact it led to a series of disputes both with the French authorities and with the German Armistice Commission in France as the French asked for the next-of-kin to be notified at least in the event of death-sentences. That this order gave the secret state police the opportunity to channel large numbers of prisoners into the concentration camps was unknown to Keitel until he learned of it for the first time at the International Military Trial at Nuremberg.

  In his note on the genesis of the ‘Cover of Darkness’ decree, he commented:

  Obviously, for my name to have been linked with this decree is highly incriminating against me, although it is a clear case of an order issued by the Führer . . .

  But it was no part of the Chief of the High Command’s responsibilities to modify the terms of application of such decrees. For him to have had the authority to require reports on the procedures adopted in at least the first such cases would have required his being granted a much broader insight into the methods of the secret state police and the concentration-camp system than he ever actually commanded. He assumed that the OKW’s orders were being obeyed to the letter.

  Quite apart from the strategic air offensive against German cities, the methods whereby Britain initially prosecuted her war against her Continental enemies—involving the dropping of paratroop commandos supported by sabotage units comprised of members of the armed forces of the governments-in-exile, and major or minor armed reconnaissances of the French and Norwegian coasts—evoked new and explosive reactions from Hitler.

  One consequence was the OKW’s ordinance issued on 4th August, 1942, on ‘Combatting Lone Parachutists’, signed by Keitel, and the ‘Commando Order’ of 18th October, 1942, which Hitler himself signed.

  The OKW ordinance defined that where there were security-police and security-service agencies in the Reich and in the occupied territories, the combatting of parachutists was to be left to them. Parachutists captured by members of the armed forces were to be handed over to the security service; if it transpired that the prisoners were enemy servicemen, then they were to be turned over yet again to the Air Force authorities. Hitler found this ordinance too feeble.* After the August 1942 Anglo-Canadian landing at Dieppe, an armed reconnaissance for possible later invasion operations, it was reported that the enemy had shackled German prisoners of war and that regulations existed to kill the prisoners if they were found to be too much of a burden for the Allied troops to withdraw with them. Hitler’s anger was particularly roused by this: against fierce opposition, above all from Colonel-General Jodl, the ‘Commando Order’ was formulated, decreeing that all members of commando or sabotage units were to be killed. They were to be wiped out either in the course of the fighting or while trying to escape, whether they were armed or not. Any prisoners were to be turned over to the security service where they had been apprehended by security patrols, and the security service was to hand them over to the armed forces. If such people were to surrender voluntarily to military units, they were to be shown no mercy. Any officers contravening this order were threatened with the direst punishments.

  That was a blow to every accepted military tradition.

  Keitel describes how both he and Jodl intended to refrain from reporting any further on such incidents, in order to let the thing blow over. Thereupon Hitler himself drafted the order. It was complied with only to varying extents, as by its very nature it needed to be constantly brought up to date. For example, with an order dated 30th July, 1944, Keitel was obliged expressly to forbid the application of the Commando Order to members of enemy military missions operating with partisan groups in the south-eastern and southwestern military regions, the Balkans and Italy respectively.†

  On the other hand it did have tragic consequences in the initial stages: when for example on the night of 20th November, 1942, a glider which had been flown across from England crashed at Egersund in Norway, together with its towing aircraft, a Wellington bomber, causing the death of several members of the crew, the remaining fourteen men, who were all more or less severely injured, were taken prisoner and on the orders of the commanding officer of the 280th infantry division they were all shot in accordance with the Commando Order.*

  Even more violently did Hitler react to the overthrow of the fascist government in Italy and the crossing of the legitimate government under King Victor Emanuel III and his Prime Minister, Marshal Badoglio, into the Allied camp. He decreed that officers of the Italian armed forces, who were in accordance with his orders to be interned, were to be treated as ‘insurgents’ if they offered armed resistance, and shot. This cost the lives of both General Antonio Gandin, commander of the Acqui infantry division on the Greek island of Cephalonia, and known to Keitel from his dealings with the Italians, and his deputy; both fell to the bullets of a German firing squad.

  Everywhere the picture was the same. Hitler reacted explosively to any methods adopted by the enemy of which he disapproved, and often they were methods of a very illegal nature. In the state of excitement into which he then worked himself it was virtually impossible to point out obstacles of an objective or legalistic nature. Often there were wearying debates, which almost always ended with capitulation to him. The fundamental problem was this: the war in the east was producing terrible acts of cruelty committed by the Russians against German injured soldiers and prisoners of war; by its very nature partisan warfare was unrestricted. But for a country which was claiming so loudly to be the saviour of western civilisation it would have been more fitting to have insisted on the most rigid maintenance of traditional discipline and military honour.

  Where troops or their individual commanders had spontaneously reacted with violence then it would normally have been up to their superiors, even by establishing courts martial, to establish whether the proper scale of reprisals had been exceeded. Hitler went exactly the opposite w
ay: he normalised what would otherwise have been occasional, and under certain circumstances pardonable, acts of violence and made terrorism the order of the day. Once again one is forced to ask whether the Chief of Hitler’s military chancellery was obliged to go along with all this. Certainly he was not. But Hitler would never have permitted this field-marshal, who had become so indispensable to him in so many ways, to go. Several times Keitel demanded to be posted elsewhere, but each time in vain.

  The more fiercely the war was prosecuted, the more the so-called ‘Severity Orders’ multiplied. There still remain several accusations which were unjustly brought forward against Keitel, but which also illuminate the difficult position of the Chief of the High Command.

  It proved impossible, but not for lack of effort on the prosecution’s part, to implicate the field-marshal in having planned or even ordered the murder of two of France’s leading generals, General Weygand and General Giraud. It was in fact the Giraud case—in 1942 the general had managed to escape from Königstein fortress near Dresden—that had called Hitler’s suspicious attention to what seemed in his view to be certain shortcomings in the prisoner-of-war system.* It was a fact that in this field the old customary military proprieties were still observed. Among the files of Keitel’s defence counsel are references to one case where the Munich secret state police authorities had complained about the commander of the prisoners of war in Military District VII, Bavaria; the latter, Major-General von Saur, was accused of impeding the work of a special squad of secret state police working in the POW’s camps to single out the communists, Jews and intellectuals among the Soviet prisoners for ‘special treatment’, in other words for liquidation.