The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  As far as prisoners of war were concerned, the OKW only had purely ministerial and supervisory functions. In any case, the air force and the navy maintained their own camps. But particularly after General Giraud’s escape, Hitler’s distrust had been awakened and it was nourished by the SS Reichsführer, who recommended that the prisoner of war system should be supervised by the police authorities, a demand that was impossible in international law.

  It happened that on the night of 25th March, 1944, eighty Royal Air Force officers made an escape attempt from Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, a prisoner of war camp of about twelve thousand men; among the eighty were a number of Belgian, French, Greek, Norwegian, Polish and Czech volunteers who had been serving with the R.A.F. They had dug a tunnel under the barbed wire to freedom. Four of them were captured in the tunnel itself, while the other seventy-six won an illusory freedom. Three of them were never traced again, while fifteen were picked up at once in the ensuing manhunt and returned to camp; this, thanks to Keitel’s intervention, saved their lives. Eight more fell at once, or soon after, into the hands of the secret state police, but were spared the fate of the remaining fifty officers who were picked up again at various locations in the Reich and shot, a crime which was laid at Keitel’s feet at Nuremberg.

  Mass escapes like that were a cause célèbre in the services; the finger was pointed at the camp commandant, Colonel Friedrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau, and he was relieved of his command for negligence of duty and sentenced to a period of fortress confinement by the Central Air Force Court. At the midday war conference at Berchtesgaden on 25th March, 1944, the SS Reichsführer zealously reported the escape of eighty British air force officers from Camp Sagan, and willingly depicted the consequences; the Landwacht, a paramilitary auxiliary police formation, would have to be alerted and that would cost millions of manhours and so on.

  Hitler’s reaction was immediate: the escapees were to be turned over to the police, and he added the outrageous afterthought that they were to be shot. Even those who had already been picked up were to be turned over to Himmler. Keitel replied sharply that that was a violation of the Geneva convention; all prisoners of war were after all servicemen, and according to their traditional code of honour escape attempts were virtually an unwritten obligation on them. According to Keitel, Hitler abided stubbornly by his own decision: ‘Himmler, don’t you let the escaped airmen out of your hands again.’

  This time the field-marshal stuck to his guns, but his only achievement was the concession that the airmen who had been picked up already and were back in camp would not be turned over to the Reich’s supreme chief of police. For the fifty other officers he could do nothing, and between 6th April and 18th May, 1944, they were all shot.

  After this incident, he himself summoned the OKW’s Inspector-General for Prisoner of War Affairs, Major-General von Graevenitz, and his prospective successor, Colonel Adolf Westhoff, the head of the Inspector-General’s general office, and talked very angrily to them about the affair. Both of the officers were deeply dismayed by the implications, as they knew full well that the summary execution of prisoners of war for trying to escape represented a breach of international law which might well bring unpredictable consequences for our own prisoners of war.

  After the war, Westhoff gave his own version of the affair to an American interrogator, Colonel Curtis L. Williams, who wrote an exaggerated report on the interrogation which gave the impression that Keitel had actually demanded that the escaped officers were to be shot. But a careful review of the evidence, and Major-General Westhoff’s testimony in court proved it impossible to blame Keitel for the execution of the fifty R.A.F. officers. As far as Keitel is concerned, both the Sagan case and the earlier charge of having planned to have Weygand and Giraud assassinated lack any kind of substance, as do the accusations that he ordered the tattooing of Soviet prisoners and prepared for the waging of bacterial warfare against the Soviet Union.

  A further accusation which has to be examined, of a similar nature, is the charge that the Chief of the High Command recommended the application of lynch law against the so-called Allied ‘terror fliers’, and had paved the way for orders to that effect. The whole lynch-law complex, and the peculiar problems presented by the Allied area bombardment policies, provide a useful example of the unique position of the officer at the Führer’s headquarters, and of the need to exercise extreme caution in judging many apparently well-documented crimes of the Third Reich; often it will be found that the sole purpose of the central figures was to create a paper war around certain questions and prosecute this paper war for as long as was necessary for the whole matter to be dropped and filed, because Hitler had either forgotten all about it or had become interested in new problems.*

  The question of whether one ought to, and indeed could, emulate the terrorism of the ‘terror fliers’ first arose in Hitler’s mind early in the summer of 1944 in view of the virtually complete air superiority of the Allied bomber squadrons and long-range fighter escorts over the Reich. Once again, Hitler wanted to re-fashion what had previously been isolated and spontaneous acts of violence by the enraged local populations of blitzed cities against Allied airmen who had been shot down and were as prisoners of war in the protective custody of German troops, into a specific and systematic programme of deterrence. Hitler’s proposal greatly embarrassed Keitel and Jodl: members of the enemy air forces were servicemen and were only carrying out orders when they released their bombloads over German city areas or when they tried to paralyse the complex arteries of the German armaments industry, the traffic networks, by low-level machine-gunning attacks. Were not the members of the ‘anti-aircraft regiment’ responsible for launching V-1 flying bombs at London just as guilty of terrorist tactics? Where would this war end?

  Field-Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl advised that the concept of ‘terror flier’ ought first to be clarified in the light of international law. Hitler was indignant. The field-marshal then proposed that initially an ultimatum ought to be issued to the enemy countries, with warnings of reprisals to follow. Hitler grew even more indignant; perhaps he recalled Keitel’s suggestion that at least they ought to issue an ultimatum to Stalin before their attack on the Soviet Union. These generals, he said, were too ‘unpractical’; he wanted deterrence by ‘terrorism’.

  The only hope now lay in prevaricating by prolonging the debate. The following procedures were put forward in the lengthy debate that followed:

  1. Court-martialling the ‘terror fliers’.

  2. Turning the ‘terror fliers’ over to the police.

  3. Releasing the ‘terror fliers’ to the tender mercies of the populace and lynch law, as both the Party and the Führer wished.

  The field-marshal was later called to account for some of the marginalia on the various memoranda: he had noted, for example: ‘Courts martial? That won’t work.’ In his own view only low-level strafing attacks with some attempt at aiming at targets could properly be termed ‘terror attacks’. But in such instances there were only two outcomes: either the attack succeeded and the airman flew off, or he crashed and was killed. The field-marshal commented further: ‘If one is to permit lynch law, it will be hard to establish guidelines.’

  That was the decisive point: the Chief of the High Command, the Chief of the OKW’s operations staff and the normally reigning Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, Reichsmarschall Göring, were as one in this: in this case there was and could be only one answer, they could never agree to lynch law. But they were obliged to prevaricate endlessly until the matter was finally dropped, and on this occasion the field-marshal did agree to such tactics, although he normally strove for the utmost propriety in his dealings.

  There were lengthy discussions, involving the Reich Foreign Secretary and the Chief of the Reich Main Security Office, Kaltenbrunner; there is on record an extensive correspondence dating from June 1944, involving Keitel and the Chief of Air Staff General Korten, in which they tried first of all to define
what was meant by ‘terror flier’. In a telegram dated 15th June, 1944 to Göring’s adjutant, Keitel went into some detail with these terminological definitions, saying that one could consider only certain cases for ‘special treatment’ (in other words for turning over to the security service and execution) and these would be attacks on the civilian population, on individuals and on assemblies of individuals; firing on German airmen descending by parachute; machine-gun attacks on passenger trains, civilian and field hospitals and hospital trains.* Keitel asked in his telegram for Herr Reichsmarschall’s agreement, satisfied that the latter would find sufficient new matters to raise.

  Keitel’s defence counsel asked him outright: ‘Was such an order ever issued?’ Keitel replied: ‘No order was ever issued on this matter, and Hitler never returned to the question. He went out shordy afterwards to visit the eastern front and then, after 20th July, 1944, nobody mentioned anything about the affair any more.’

  No order was ever issued. Only in one detail was Keitel mistaken: as was testified at Nuremberg by Major (G.S.) Herbert Büchs, the Air Staff Officer attached to the Chief of the military operations staff, Jodl, during March 1945 the question was raised once again at a bunker conference in Berlin, over which the last shadows were already lengthening; Hitler, after some prodding by the head of the party chancellery Martin Bormann, issued an order to Kaltenbrunner that all ‘bomber crews already arrived’ and all bomber crews ‘arriving’ in the future were to be turned over to the security service by the Air Force and ‘liquidated by the security service’.

  After the Führer’s conference, Büchs jumped on Keitel and said: ‘The Führer’s order is crazy.’ Keitel replied: ‘That may well be.’ Büchs stressed that the Air Force would be keeping its banner clean, it would not execute the order. Keitel explained that Hitler did not want to sign such orders, so that it would all get hooked onto the OKW all the time: ‘I am to be the devil who issues such orders.’

  Later, Major Büchs was telephoned by Reichsmarschall Göring, asking him: ‘Tell me, is Hitler quite out of his mind now, then?’ The conversation ended with the Reichsmarschall saying: ‘That’s all quite crazy, it can’t be done.’ Apart from Field-Marshal Keitel, General Koller, the Chief of the Air Force Operations Staff, was also against the ‘lynch order’, and it was never actually issued.

  The struggle against such ‘special orders’, the conflict between one’s judgment and the sheer impossibility of allowing one’s judgment full play, and the necessity of launching paper wars in order to establish one’s dutifulness while all the time trying to prevent or at any rate to modify totally illegal and dishonourable orders occupied by no means all of the time at the Führer’s headquarters. But in the rarified atmosphere of Security Zone I of the Wolf’s Lair it did have a strange effect on the officers brought together in Hitler’s name to direct the affairs of the armed forces, and the effect grew more pronounced as each incident was followed by the next. To all this was now added the recognition that a normal victory in the traditional, Old Prussian sense was now out of the question, while it was equally impossible to establish a normal peace by negotiations and concessions, not only because of Hitler’s whole character and attitude but because of the rigid demands for unconditional surrender formulated by the enemy nations. For senior officers like Keitel, who had been through both the defeat of 1918 and the ‘peace’ of Versailles this was a situation fraught with uncertainty.

  The two most senior officers within this security zone, Field-Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl, were its prisoners, overwhelmed day after day by the enormous bureaucratic machinery of a war waged by eighty million Germans with an army of millions of soldiers, by the deskwork and the hourlong ‘war conferences’ which were in themselves microcosms of Nazi party conventions complete with speeches by the Führer. They were permanently overworked, like the directors of some vast industrial giant, and constantly exposed to Hitler’s extraordinary ability to awaken false hopes in men and inspire their ‘faith’ in him. But as the flood tide of defeat rose and the crisis worsened, they were equally overwhelmed by the oppressive feeling that this one man alone might still find some way out; after all, he had survived so many crises before.

  Keitel’s basic attitude did not alter by one whit. He considered it his duty to associate himself publicly with the Führer’s express orders, whatever bitter or even insulting exchanges might have preceded them, and thanks to his brusque insistence that these were ‘the Führer’s orders’, he gave the impression to the worried frontline commanders protesting against them that he was just an ‘amplifier’ for Hitler’s intentions. This above all was the cause of his extraordinary unpopularity among the General Staff; after the war he found no advocates among these latter, one-time comrades who now cursed his name and called him everything from ‘Yes-Keitel’ to ‘the nodding ass’. But nobody was eager to lever Keitel out of office and take it upon himself; nor did Hitler believe that doing one’s duty as a soldier was express proof of ‘faith’; and he was probably never completely able to get over a certain lack of confidence in Keitel.

  When the time-bomb detonated in the guest barracks, the so-called teahouse at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters, shortly after 12.30 p.m. on 20th July, during the midday war conference, the last bastions which Keitel had sought to maintain were finally torn down. Colonel-General Jodl, who suffered head injuries in the blast, has described how Field-Marshal Keitel (also lightly wounded) carefully and solicitously helped the Führer, who had been only slightly scratched, out of the wrecked barracks; if one considers how cold had been the relations between Keitel and Hitler, it must have been a strange scene. According to the testimony of one of the Reichstag stenographers attached to the Führer’s headquarters Hitler afterwards privately commented that it was only after this that he realised that Keitel was ‘reliable’ after all.

  The bomb had been placed by Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a staff officer who had lost an eye while fighting with an armoured division in Tunisia. Keitel had originally introduced him to Hitler during conferences on reserve issues. It has been testified of Hitler that after Stauffenberg’s first appearance he asked who this one-eyed Colonel was: he found Stauffenberg sinister.

  Keitel had no insight into the world in which this desperate and aristocratic revolutionary of such high ideals and grim determination had moved and thought; the only quality in him that he found impressive in retrospect was a quality which he termed ‘fanaticism’. The possibility that there could be an officers’ revolt, a revolt in which aristocrats had been cast in the leading rôles, was unimaginable to Keitel.

  During early 1943, Keitel was informed of the Oster case; it involved one of his own departments. Major-General Hans Oster, head of the central office of the OKW’s Foreign Military Intelligence branch, was accused of having wrongly placed persons on the reserved list and indirectly of currency offences as well. But he was in fact guilty of far more: he was the chief of staff of a secret conspiracy against Hitler which never came to fruition. Like Stauffenberg, Oster had been body and soul a revolutionary, just as Schulze-Boysen of the ‘Rote Kapelle’ had been in his own way. And like the latter he believed any means were justified provided they brought about Hitler’s overthrow, for he considered Hitler to be the nation’s destroyer. The political objectives of Oster and Schulze-Boysen were diametrically opposed to each other, but just as the latter had not hesitated to supply military Intelligence to the Bolsheviks, Oster did not hesitate to inform his friends in the west of, for example, the date of Hitler’s invasion of France and the Netherlands in advance of the actual event.

  The field-marshal only understood sufficient of the affair to see that it was apparently an embarrassment which had probably emerged from the kind of involved business which it was their Intelligence service’s duty to transact. When a judge advocate informed Keitel during the course of the affair that he believed he could furnish him with evidence that Admiral Canaris, the head of the Foreign Military Intelligence branch,
was guilty of nothing less than high treason, he handled him roughly as only Keitel could: how dare he suggest that one of the OKW’s departmental heads was guilty of high treason? German admirals did not do such things. He threatened the unfortunate officer with a court martial and the allegations were hastily withdrawn; Oster himself was quietly pensioned off.*

  Even when Admiral Canaris was arrested after the 20th July bomb plot and thrown into a concentration camp, the field-marshal still refused to believe he could be guilty in any way; he gave the admiral’s family financial support. In the same way he refused to believe anything wrong of General Thomas, the head of his Military Economy branch, who was arrested at the same time. It was not departmental pride which inspired this disbelief in him; Keitel was literally too naïve an officer to believe that anybody he had known for years on end could have been playing a double game.

  On the afternoon of 20th July, Colonel-General Fromm, Stauffenberg’s superior, telephoned Keitel from Berlin to ask whether it was true that the Führer was dead? Keitel replied in the negative: it was true there had been an attempt on the Führer’s life, but he was only slightly wounded. And he asked where Fromm’s chief of staff, Colonel Stauffenberg, was. The germs of suspicion were already there.

  Next to Keitel, Colonel-General Fromm, an enemy of longstanding, was the biggest figure on the Armed Forces organisational scene. That very afternoon he was relieved of his command, a move he had not expected, particularly as he had originally been arrested by the conspirators in Bendlerstrasse; his successor was SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Keitel had lost the last great battle for control of the army and armed forces. He had always seriously believed he must hold on if only to prevent the SS from coming to power, but that was what had happened now. Keitel has repeatedly and insistently come back to one point in notes written for his defence counsel: it would never have occurred to him to have acted as the conspirators did. For him Hindenburg’s words had always been emblazoned across his banner: ‘Loyalty is the mark of honour’. And at Nuremberg, in his hour of misfortune, the words were doubly important to him.