The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  That was why, while the Führer welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf’s Lair, Keitel zealously set about countering all the orders for the coup d’état which had late that afternoon finally gone out to the Military District commanders. It has been said that this was a coup d’état by telephone and teleprinter; in the same way the coup d’état was crushed by telephone. For several hours that evening Keitel could and did issue orders again for the first time since his years at Bremen, and those were the hours that decided Germany’s fate.

  After the Hitler bomb plot, Field-Marshal Keitel wrote his first will, dated 2nd August, 1944; it expressly observed that he had escaped death in the bomb plot only by a miracle. He laid down in his will that Helmscherode, his main estate, should pass on to his eldest son; and he mentioned the £20,000 gift Hitler had made him on his sixtieth birthday, a sum which he had deposited untouched in his Bank in Berlin.

  Keitel himself has described the end of the Third Reich in his Memoirs. In his final chapter of Memoirs, it is noticeable how little talk there is of any remaining concrete hopes; there could be no further hope of a diplomatic solution. In its stead the field-marshal tried to the very last to maintain the figure of Hitler as the supreme leader of the Reich, although Hitler himself was already determined to die in the battle of Berlin and was interested in diplomacy no longer. The field-marshal probably had the impression that only one man could end the war now, and that was Hitler himself: if the Führer went, the Reich might crumble into anarchy. That Hitler might evade his ultimate responsibility by committing suicide was a possibility of which he never dreamed. It was because of his preoccupation with the prospect of the total collapse of law and order, if the worst came to the worst, that he was desperately worried about losing touch with the Führer’s bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, even during the OKW’s hazardous flight to Mecklenburg; it was a terrible blow when he learned it was no longer possible to fly in to Berlin.

  On the other hand this final scene awakened the true soldier which had slumbered within him. The hands of the clock were standing at midnight, and there was not much more commanding to be done, but the field-marshal won back his independence, drove out to the front line, directed, gave orders, sent back commanders who seemed to have lost their head into the battle, and tried everything to accomplish the relief of Berlin. He refused to see how far the fighting spirit of the eastern armies had been ground away in almost four years of terrible fighting, how great had grown their naked fear of the Russians with their indescribable ravaging, their hordes of tanks and artillery divisions. The impetus of 1940 and 1942 was long spent, and the will to resist even more markedly consumed. Strict orders alone were no longer enough; only new squadrons of aircraft and fresh armoured divisions with full fuel tanks and munition racks could still have achieved something. But these the field-marshal could not supply, for there were none.

  Then it was as though his long nightmare had come to an end: the news came that Hitler was dead. He realised that the war had to be ended.

  Without doubt Field-Marshal Keitel was a changed man as, two weeks after Hitler’s death, he was led off into captivity as a prisoner of war; but even as a ‘war criminal’ at Nuremberg he did not seek to save his own skin but only to expiate the actions of the German armed forces.

  At the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, despite his outward lack of liberty as a prisoner and the often difficult conditions of prison life, the field-marshal was at last a free agent again after his long years as an officer dependent on a man he found so profoundly despotic. That he would be found guilty, whatever he might bring up in his own defence, he had realised as soon as he set eyes on the indictment, which was handed him on 19th October, 1945. The world was up in arms against him, against the Germans, after five and a half years of a terrible war with its terrible crimes against all natural law. He was no longer concerned to haggle and bargain for his own skin; his main objective was to establish his honour, and not only his own personal honour: he believed that it was his duty to uphold the honour of all German troops, because he was too honest not to admit to himself that he had frequently proved inadequate in his defence of the traditional concept of Prussian military honour; in addition to that, he wanted to make his own contribution to establishing historical truth. This and nothing more was what he endeavoured at Nuremberg.

  On 1st October, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found him guilty on all four counts of the indictment: conspiracy to wage a war of aggression; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging, and this sentence was executed on 16th October, 1946.

  * For the text of the indictment, see the International Military Tribunal proceedings, Volume I.

  † For Nelte’s defence speech see IMT, Vol. XVII, p. 654 et seq. and Vol. XVIII, p. 7 et seq. See also Dr. Nelte’s pamphlet, ‘Die Generale. Das Nürnberger Urteil und die Schuld der Generale’ (Hanover, 1947).

  * Papers of Dr. Nelte, file 1/7: Reserve (a)/General Questions on the planning of Wars of Aggression.

  * The Nelte Papers: Hermann Jahrreiss’ legal opinion on the Führer-State.

  * IMT, Vol. XIII, pp. 243–4.

  * The document, reference number WFSt./Abt.L (IV/Qu) Nr. 002060/41 g.Kdos., is among the papers of Dr. Nelte.

  * Folder III/15, among the Nelte Papers: Nacht und Nebel, a handwritten note by Keitel dated 12th February 1946.

  * Folder III/16, Nelte Papers: Commando operations, re: Nuremberg Documents PS-553, the leaflet of 4th August, 1942, and PS-503, the Führer’s order of 18th October, 1942. Keitel’s answers to questions put by Nelte on 23rd March, 1946.

  † Nuremberg Document PS-537.

  * See Nuremberg Document PS-508, a minute reference WFSt./Op.(L) dated 21st November, 1942, among Dr. Nelte’s papers; the report sent in by Captain von Liliensk-joeld, intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Group (Norway).

  * This is based on file on the Sagan incident among the Nelte papers, and a file on POWs; also on Nuremberg Document R-178 (Von Saur case).

  * For the question of the treatment of Allied airmen, see folder III/17 among Nelte’s papers (lynch law), and Colonel (G.S.) Herbert Büchs’s testimony at Nuremberg, IMT, Vol. XV.

  * See Nuremberg Document PS-729, a memorandum signed by Keitel, reference number OKW Nr. 771793/44 g.K.Chefs. II Ang.F.St.Qu. (Verw. 1): ‘Treatment of enemy terror fliers’.

  * Based on a folder among Dr. Nelte’s papers, entitled ‘General Thomas File: the Oster case’.

  Notes

  2: The Blomberg-Fritsch Crisis, 1938.

  Colonel-General Wilhelm Heye (page 36) (1869–1946) Chief of the Reichswehr’s Army Directorate (Heeresleitung) from 1926 to 1930.

  Colonel-General Wilhelm Adam (1877–1949), Chief of the Troop Office from 1930 to 1933, as a Lieutenant-General; from 1935 to 1938 he was commandant of the Military Academy.

  Lieutenant-Colonel (G.S.) (later Colonel-General) Kurt Zeitzler of the national defence department was chief of the Army General Staff from September 1942 to June 1944; he was relieved of his post on 20th July, 1944.

  No details of the quarrels between Keitel and Beck, both of them poles apart in character, have hitherto come to light. All that is known is Beck’s memorandum on the supreme command of the Armed Forces, dated 9th December, 1935 (‘The Commander-in-Chief of the Army and his Immediate Adviser’).

  General Halder was at the time a lieutenant-general and commanding officer of the 7th infantry division. He was entrusted with the direction of the armed forces’ manoeuvres and posted as Chief Quartermaster II to the General Staff in the autumn of 1937.

  The appearance of a company of war correspondents at the manoeuvres (page 38) is explained by the fact that the units later to become famous as Propaganda-Kompanien were being tried out for the first time.

  Lieutenant-General Erich Hoepner, the chief of staff to Rundstedt, later commander-in-chief of the Fourth Tank Army; in January 1942 he was dismissed the army by Hi
tler for ‘disobedience’. He was involved in the 20th July, 1944, conspiracy; he was condemned to death on 8th August, 1944, and hanged.

  Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) Commander-in-Chief of the First Army Group.

  Major-General Oshima (page 40) was the Japanese military attaché in Berlin and later the Japanese ambassador; he was a disciple of the Japanese army, which aspired to a military treaty with Germany.

  General Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) was from 1922 to 1936 Chief of the Army Directorate; he visited China in 1933 and then again from 1934 to 1935, ending up as President Chiang-Kai-Shek’s ‘general adviser’.

  Marshal Chiang-Kai-Shek was president of China from 1929 to 1949.

  General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the German military adviser, was recalled from China in 1938; from 1940 to 1944 he was military commander of Belgium and northern France.

  Lutz, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, was Reich Minister of Finance from 1932 to 1945; Kung Hsiang-hsi was the Chinese Finance Minister.

  The activity of the German military advisers to Chiang-Kai-Shek in China did not end until 1938.

  Field-Marshal Keitel has not referred at all to Hitler’s conference with the service Commanders-in-Chief and the Reich Foreign Secretary on 5th November, 1937, in which Hitler, according to Hossbach’s minutes of the meeting, dwelt upon a possible outbreak of war.

  Major Georg von der Decken was killed in action as a colonel in 1945. General (ret.) Erich Ludendorff had been the Chief Quartermaster General of the Army General Staff in the First World War, from 1916 to 1918; his state funeral took place on 24th December 1937 in Munich. Von Blomberg was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall on 20th April, 1936. Blomberg’s wedding took place on 12th January, 1938.

  The Chief of Berlin Police (page 43), SA-General and Cavalry captain (ret.) Wolf-Heinrich, Count von Helldorf (1896–1944) probably had his first interview with Keitel on 23rd January, 1938; Blomberg returned from Eberswalde to Berlin on 24th January, 1938, the day on which the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis began. Blomberg’s interview with Keitel must have taken place on 26th January, 1938; Jodl noted in his diary: ‘26th January: 12.00 noon, General Keitel informs me on his word of honour that the Generalfeldmarschall has been overthrown’. Keitel’s description tends to support the statement by Captain Fritz Wiedemann (who at the time of the crisis was Hitler’s personal adjutant) that in 1938 Göring had been aspiring to the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces in order to become the real ‘second man’ in the State.

  Keitel’s first interview with Hitler on the crisis (page 46) must have been on 26th January.

  Hjalmar Schacht (to whom Keitel wrongly refers in his original text as being ‘Minister of Finance’ as well as President of the Reichsbank) occupied the latter post from 1933 to 1939; from 1934 to 1937 he was additionally Reich Minister of Economics. It is clear that the name ‘Keitel’ meant nothing to Hitler at this time, for according to Hossbach, (page 131) he announced .that he wanted to have a talk with ‘this General von Keitel’.

  Hossbach’s (page 47) memoirs reveal nothing of any animosity towards Keitel in his period as adjutant to the Führer. Keitel, on the other hand, not without reason, thought Hossbach was a strong-man and champion of Beck’s policies who had somehow managed to work himself into a strong position at Hitler’s side.

  Franz Gürtner (1881–1941) had been Reich Minister of Justice since 1932 in the Cabinets of von Papen, Schleicher and Hitler. The document that Hitler showed Keitel can only have been a legal opinion by Gürtner on the file on Fritsch which had been cooked up by the secret state police authorities. The interview between Hitler and Colonel-General von Fritsch took place, on Colonel Hossbach’s insistence, as early as the evening of 26th January, 1938.

  Hitler’s version of the ‘recognition of Fritsch’ told to Keitel (page 48) was not accurate.

  There is evidence that Keitel was alive to the possibility that there had been an intrigue against the body of the Armed Forces; Jodl noted in his diary on 3rd February the remarks made by Schacht to the effect that the whole thing was obviously an SS intrigue aimed against the Armed Forces command. But Jodl drew no conclusions from this.

  On page 50 Keitel referred originally to von Brauchitsch as being in command of an ‘armoured group being raised in Leipzig’; this has been corrected to the ‘Fourth Army Group’.

  Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers had been Secretary of State and Head of the Reich Chancellery since 1933, a Reichsminister without Portfolio.

  The major Cabinet reshuffle accompanying the crisis (page 51) brought Joachim von Ribbentrop to the German Foreign Office in place of Freiherr von Neurath, while the latter was appointed President of a purely paper body, the Privy Cabinet Council, which never once met.

  The memorandum handed to Keitel by Blomberg must have been the one composed by Lieutenant-General von Manstein.

  Reinhard Heydrich, a retired naval lieutenant, was head of the Reich security service and chief of the Reich Main Security Office from 1939 until 1943 when he was murdered.

  On the subject of Keitel’s comments that nobody was eager to replace him as Chief of the OKW (page 53) Vice-Admiral Leopold Bürkner recorded that he ‘never met one officer during the whole war who would have been prepared voluntarily to take over the thorny office of Chief of the OKW’.

  Generalfeldmarschall Milch has testified at Nuremberg that Blomberg was the only senior soldier who was in a position to resist Hitler, and who had done so very often: ‘This resistance could not be kept up by the men around Hitler later on. They were too weak for that. That is probably why he chose them.’

  3: From Austria to the end of the French Campaign, 1938–1940.

  Friedrich Hossbach had been simultaneously departmental head of Central Office of the Army’s General Staff and armed forces adjutant to the Führer.

  Admiral Karl Dönitz (born 1892) was promoted Grand-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy in January 1943, in succession to Grand Admiral Raeder.

  There were in fact a number of personnel changes in the War Office: the chief of army personnel, General von Schwedler; the Chief Quarter-master of the Army General Staff, Lieutenant-General von Manstein; and the armed forces adjutant Colonel Hossbach were all relieved of their posts. In addition, three commanding generals—von Leeb, von Kleist, and von Kressenstein—were dismissed. All of them were officers who were disinclined to meet Hitler’s requirements (with which Brauchitsch had concurred) that they should associate the armed forces more closely with National Socialist doctrines.

  Keitel’s brother (page 55) was Major-General Bodewin Keitel, Chief of Army Personnel from 1938 to 1942. Keitel’s account of the outcome of the Fritsch trial and the part played by Göring is very one-sided; the credit for Fritsch’s acquittal is largely due to his defence counsel, Count von der Goltz. Keitel had not realised in 1946 that Hitler himself was one of the first to exploit the smear campaign against Fritsch. The demands for Fritsch’s rehabilitation, summarised by General Beck, Admiral Canaris and Colonel Hossbach, were: Fritsch’s complete and public rehabilitation; an announcement of the reasons for his original dismissal and a review of the leadership of the SS and of the Secret State Police headquarters; Himmler, Heydrich, Dr. Best and a number of others were to be dismissed.

  Keitel’s description of General Beck’s activities are not accurate. To Keitel, it was unthinkable for a soldier in a responsible position to express conscientious opposition to his superiors. In 1938 Beck recorded his views: ‘A highly placed soldier would be deficient in greatness and would be failing to recognise his duty if at times like these he looked at his duties and functions only in the restricted sense of the military role he had been given to perform; exceptional circumstances demand exceptional methods . . .’ As for Colonel Hossbach, he was not so much ‘deeply embittered’ (see Keitel, page 56) as gravely worried about developments; Keitel had insisted upon his removal from Hitler’s entourage as a dangerous champion of Beck’s ideas.

  Keitel’s reference
to the ‘loss’ of Brauchitsch (page 56) is an allusion to the latter’s removal at his own request from the post of Commander in Chief of the Army during the crisis of the battle for Moscow on 19th December, 1941. Hitler himself then became C.-in-C. of the Army.

  Kurt Edler von Schuschnigg (born 1897), Federal Austrian Chancellor, from 1934 to 1938.

  General von Reichenau, Commander-in-Chief of the Fourth Army Group (Leipzig). Air Force General Hugo Sperrle commanded the Condor Legion in Spain and was Commander in Chief elect of the Third Air Group (Munich).

  Guido Schmid had been Austrian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs since 1936.

  Lieutenant-General Max von Viebahn was chief of the OKW’s embryo operations staff from February to April 1938. General Fedor von Bock was commander in chief of the Eighth Army, which was standing by to enter Austria.

  Nothing is known of a ‘telephone conversation’ (page 59) between Hitler and Mussolini at this time; on 13th March Hitler sent Mussolini a telegram from Linz: ‘Duce, I will never forget you for this. Adolf Hitler.’

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart was Federal Austrian Chancellor for two days from 11th to 13th March, 1938, before the union. From 1940 to 1945 he was Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands.