The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  Friedrich, Count von der Schulenburg (page 60) (1865–1939), a former artillery general and member of the National Socialist Party with an honorary rank in the SS.

  Colonel-General Freiherr von Fritsch (page 61) was acquitted on 13th March, 1938. On Canaris, Keitel wrote that he had always been ‘a riddle and a book with seven seals’. In this case, Keitel’s mistrust was unjustified; the prosecution witness had been executed without a court hearing.

  On 5th May, 1938, General Beck had on his own initiative composed a memorandum on ‘Thoughts on the Military and Political Position of Germany.’ In view of Britain’s attitude, Beck held that a political alliance against Germany would be a likely outcome of the Czech developments; he warned against belligerent actions and stressed that Germany could never win a European war. The 1937 memorandum referred to had originally been drafted by Lieutenant-General von Manstein and was newly tabled by the C.-in-C. Army on 7th March, 1938.

  Dr. Fritz Todt (page 64), Air Force Major-General and Inspector-General of German road construction, was entrusted with the construction of the West Wall in 1938; in 1940 he became Reichminister of Armaments and Munitions. Pioneer-General Foerster was responsible for the construction of fortifications, not the General Staff.

  Keitel’s chronology is a bit obscure at this point (page 65). Beck himself read out his memorandum of 16th July, 1938, to the commanding generals in the presence of Brauchitsch early in August. In July, Beck had tried verbally to convince Brauchitsch of the dangers of the ‘SS and gangster-ocracy’. All this therefore refers, not to the memorandum of 5th May, 1938, but to yet a third memorandum of Beck; its predecessor had been a memo of 3rd June, 1938, in which he had expressed the view that even if the Czech campaign were to be successful, Germany would lose the major war and he turned sharply against the existing ‘anarchy’ in the leadership of the armed forces. On 18th August, 1938, Beck asked the C.-in-C. Army to relieve him of his office as Chief of General Staff. On 27th he handed over to his successor General Halder. His final discharge from the army followed on 31st October, 1938. Despite the Führer’s categoric refusal to post Beck elsewhere (page 65), Beck was earmarked for the war command of Third Army Group until the time of his final discharge. There are two possible reasons for Keitel’s bitter tirade: firstly, in Keitel’s view, Beck refused to take seriously the plans which Keitel and Jodl had worked out for the reform of the services’ command structure; secondly, Beck had a faculty for cool and considered judgement which Keitel had often observed to his own discomfort. Beck certainly did not ‘make common cause’ with Germany’s enemies (page 66). Beck has recorded that the concepts of revolution and mutiny must find no place in the German soldier’s dictionary, but in contrast to Keitel, he did consider it to be part of the soldier’s duty to dabble in politics.

  The visit paid by British Prime Minister Sir Neville Chamberlain to the Berghof took place on 15th September, 1938.

  Lieutenant-General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel acted as Chief Quartermaster under Halder. A close friend of Beck, he had already been initiated in the secret plans to prevent Hitler starting a new war.

  The Münich talks referred to (page 70) were on 29th September, 1938.

  Edouard Daladier was French Prime Minister; André François-Poncet was French Ambassador to Berlin. Czechoslovakia—not represented at these Münich talks—was obliged to agree to the cession of the Sudeten land on 30th September.

  General Ritter von Leeb had been relieved of his post as C.-in-C. Second Army Group during the Fritsch crisis. General Adam himself asked to be relieved of his post. He had already been dismissed from the Troop Office because of his negative attitude to National Socialism.

  General Erwin von Witzleben (1881–1944) commanded the Third Army Corps in Berlin; in October he succeeded Adam as C.-in-C. Second Army Group; he was deeply involved in the September crisis and the plan for a coup d’état. He was hanged after the Bomb Plot of 1944.

  The OKW ‘Directive for Deployment and Battle’ referred to by Keitel (page 75) is an allusion to the ‘Directive to the Armed Forces, 1939–1940’. Part II set the objective of readiness by 1st September, 1939, to destroy ‘Poland’s defence potential’ if relations with Poland were to deteriorate. There was in other words a very offensive ‘defensive purpose’.

  Colonel Rudolf Toussaint was commander of the army district of Bohemia and Moravia from 1944 to 1945. Emil Hacha (1872–1945) was President of the Czech Republic from 1938 to 1939; 1939 to 1945 he was President of the Government of the Bohemian and Moravian protectorates.

  Joachim von Ribbentrop was German Foreign Secretary from 1938 to 1945. The reference to the Witkowitz region (page 79) is explained thus: during the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, Poland had annexed the Olsa region.

  The ‘independent Slovak state’ (page 87) had declared its independence of the Czecho-Slovak federation and had accepted the protection of the Reich; Josef Tiso became Prime Minister; Ferdinand Durczansky became Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister; Voytech Tuka became Minister of the Interior.

  Marshal Joseph Pilsudski (1867–1935) controlled Polish diplomacy from 1926. Colonel Joseph Beck (1894–1944) was Polish Foreign Secretary from 1932 to 1939.

  General Johannes Blaskowitz was commander-in-chief of the Eighth Army in Rundstedt’s Army Group South.

  That Hitler had asked for Stalin’s military intervention (page 98) has not hitherto been revealed. The Red Army began its invasion of Eastern Poland on 17th September, 1939, in order, as the Soviets officially claimed, to safeguard the western frontiers of the U.S.S.R.

  No documents relating to this first attempt by Keitel to resign (page 100) have come to light after the war; they were probably destroyed with Hitler’s private papers in 1945. Keitel’s repeated requests to be sent to the front have been confirmed by Colonel General Jodl among others.

  That there were lapses in discipline among the German troops (page 102) is shown by the extra regulations drawn up in November 1939 and April 1940.

  Keitel’s insistence on Hitler’s authorship of the tactical plan of attack on France (page 103) is more than the facts would seem to warrant. The latter had—in line with his own ideas—developed a plan to mass a second armoured attacking force in the middle of the front with Sédan and the Ardennes as the general direction of its thrust; this plan only took detailed shape in the draft of Lieutenant-General von Manstein, then chief of staff to Army Group A (Keitel: Army Group Centre). Hitler admittedly undertook to work to this plan and probably began to regard it as his. Tank-General Heinz Guderian commanded the Nineteenth Army Corps; General Paul von Kleist was commander in chief of the ‘armoured group’ subordinate to Army Group A.

  Vidkun Quisling (page 104) headed the Norwegian government during the occupation; he was also Reich Commissioner. Keitel exaggerated the operation as purely naval; the Army General Staff was not called in, but the operation could not have been executed without the Air Staff.

  Josef Terboven (1898–1945), a former bank clerk, became Gauleiter of Essen; from 1940 to 1945 he was Reich Commissioner for Norway and committed suicide in 1945.

  Keitel’s description of the courier to the Queen of the Netherlands refers to Captain Kiewitz’s mission (page 106). Kiewitz was not arrested; the Dutch government refused to allow him to enter the country. Adolf Freiherr von Steengracht was Under-Secretary at the German Foreign Office from 1943 to 1945.

  Admiral Canaris was not the ‘traitor’ in this instance, though he may have known that Colonel Oster had passed information to the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. The Dutch chief of Intelligence did not believe that the warnings were genuine because he thought that no German staff officer would betray his country in this way.

  Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was French Prime Minister at the time and headed the new French government at Vichy.

  4: Prelude to the attack on Russia, 1940–1941.

  Marshal Graziani was Italian Commander-in-Chief, Libya, in succession to Marshal Italo Balbo, who had be
en shot down by his own anti-aircraft guns. The Innsbruck Conference took place on 14th and 15th November, 1940.

  Colonel Freiherr von Funck was commander of the 5th light infantry division; he left for Libya on 15th January, 1941, after his division had been detailed to act as a ‘blocking force’ in north Africa.

  The whereabouts of the important memorandum (page 122) are not known. It can be assumed that it was burnt, either with Hitler’s private papers or with those of the OKW operations staff. His version here can be compared with his statement at Nuremberg: “At that time, as has been briefly discussed here by the Foreign Secretary, I wrote a personal memorandum containing my thoughts on the subject, I should like to say, independently of the experts working in the General Staff and the Armed Forces operations staff, and wanted to present this memorandum to Hitler. I decided on that method because, as a rule, one could never get beyond the second sentence of a discussion with Hitler; he took the words out of one’s mouth.”

  Molotov (page 123) visited Berlin on 12th to 13th November, 1940. Keitel’s reference to Stalin purging his military ‘elite’ (page 124) refers to the execution in June 1937 of Marshal Tukhachevsky and a series of other senior generals who had for the most part been participants in the close collaboration with the German Reichswehr, and to Stalin’s subsequent purge of the Red Army’s officer corps.

  The Führer’s meeting first with Pétain and then with General Franco took place in October, 1940 (Keitel: ‘Early in September’). Pierre Laval was at the time the French Prime Minister. Franco and Hitler met on 23rd October, 1940, at Hendaye (Keitel: ‘Andechnel(?)’), on the Spanish frontier. Serrano Suñer was the Spanish Foreign Secretary from 1939 to 1941.

  Mussolini’s letter to Hitler announcing his plan to attack Greece (page 126) reached the German Führer on 25th October, 1940, at Yvoir, south of Namur. The instigator of the plan was not the Italian Foreign Secretary, Count Ciano, but Mussolini himself. Hitler, in his now well-known table-talk in the Berlin bunker in 1945, even went so far as to say that Mussolini’s ‘encore’ in Greece was the reason why he, Hitler, had lost the war: it was the beginning of the end.

  Keitel’s reference to the ‘Vienna Award’ (page 128) concerns the agreement reached on the delimitation of the frontier between Hungary and Roumania on 30th August, 1940. The King who went into exile from Roumania (page 128) was King Carol II, who abdicated in favour of his son Michael on 6th September, 1940. The new Head of State was General Jon Antonescu, Chief of the General Staff, who had been declared ‘Condocaturul’ (Head of State) two days earlier, keeping this office under King Michael until 23rd August, 1944. King Boris III (King of Bulgaria from 1894 to 1943) was the son-in-law of King Victor Emanuel III of Italy.

  Yugoslavia joined the Axis Pact on 25th March, 1941 (page 131–2), the Yugoslav Prime Minister Zvetkovic signing on behalf of his country and aligning his country thereby with the German Reich, Italy and Japan.

  Air-Force General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen was at the time commanding general of the Eighth Air Corps. General Vigon was chief of the Spanish Secret Service. The plan of attack for Felix, the Spanish campaign, provided for the operation of the Forty-Ninth Army Corps under infantry General Kübler, and Richthofen’s Eighth Air Corps. Field-Marshal von Reichenau was to be placed in overall command. There is no doubt that Admiral Canaris did not exhort Franco to comply over Gibraltar. In any event, Spain was in no position to fight a war and nobody knew that better than General Franco. Hitler did not—as Keitel assumes—want only transit permission for his troops, but also a military alliance between Spain and the Reich; it was simply the law of survival that compelled the Spanish to keep out of the affair, and it was this that General Franco made plain to Canaris on 7th December, 1940.

  The conference at which Halder outlined plans for the attack on Russia (page 134) was probably the Führer conference of 3rd February, 1941. The subsequent conference at the end of March’ was on 30th March, 1941, in Berlin.

  Keitel’s reference to that clause of the ‘Directions’ referring to Himmler (page 136) is explained by the content of the OKW’s ‘Directions’; according to these, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was entrusted with ‘special’ duties of the autonomous nature appropriate when war broke out between two ‘diametrically opposed ideologies’. So the formulation of these ‘special duties’, the basis for the later activities of the ‘special operations’ units of the Security Service, had commenced even before Hitler’s address of 30th March, 1941! Hitler’s Decree on Liability to Courts Martial in the Barbarossa area was circulated on 13th May, 1941; according to this, excesses committed by German troops were not necessarily to be punished if they were committed against the civil population.

  In both cases (i.e. the ‘Commissar’ and the ‘Liability to Court Martial’ orders) the orders were indisputably ‘OKW-orders’.

  Keitel wrongly wrote ‘Zimowice’ for Zvetkovic (page 138). General Zimowic was the leader of the military Putsch in Belgrade on 27th March, 1941, by which Prince-Regent Paul of Yugoslavia and his Prime Minister Svetkovic were overthrown. Demetrius von Sztojay (text: ‘Sztoyay’) was the Royal Hungarian Minister in Berlin.

  For Hungary the position was not entirely as Keitel saw it in his recollections (page 140). She was being obliged to abandon the Imperial Administrator’s chosen course of non-intervention in the war.

  Tank-General Erwin Rommel (page 142) was C.-in-C. of the German Africa Corps in Libya, comprising one light infantry and one armoured division. Keitel’s description of the battle for Crete has been drastically edited, as it contained little of consequence.

  Josip Broz-Tito (page 143), the present Head of State in Yugoslavia, was at the time leader of the communist partisan groups in southern Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina; Keitel’s accusations against the security forces of the Italian Ninth Army in the Balkans are unjustified; they may well occasionally have sought to establish contacts with the Serbian (anti-communist) Chetniks, but they never supported Tito.

  The conference held by Hitler in the ‘middle of June’ (page 144) prior to the attack on Russia was in fact on 14th June, 1941.

  Keitel refers (page 144) to a Christmas 1945 memorandum: no such document has been located among the private papers of Dr. Nelte. But clear insight into Hitler’s fearful blunders is given by those of the Field-Marshal’s numerous memoranda that have survived.

  Colonel-Generals Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth (page 150) were the Commanders-in-Chief of the Second and Third Armoured Groups, which had been allocated to Army Group Centre. Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock was Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre until 18th December, 1941. It should be noted that every major armoured advance required a definite pause after a certain time if the equipment was not to become totally unserviceable.

  The Nacht-und Nebel (Cover of Darkness) decree (page 153) was the OKW’s order dated 7th December, 1941, re: ‘Prosecution of Punishable Acts Committed against the Reich or the Occupation Forces’: this basically stipulated the death sentence for non-Germans committing punishable offences against the Reich or the occupation forces. If the trial and execution were not carried out as speedily as was desired in the occupied territories, the wrongdoers were to be transported to the Reich. Courts martial would be considered only if particular military interests demanded it. The only information permitted on the whereabouts of the deportee would be that he had been detained, and that no further information could be given as the matter was sub judice. Hence the term ‘Cover of Darkness’. The ‘Commando Order’ was somewhat similar, dated 18th October 1942: ‘British sabotage troops and their accomplices’ taking part in ‘commando raids’ in Europe or in Africa—even if they were soldiers in uniform—were to be ruthlessly ‘wiped out to the last man in the fighting or when attempting to escape’; prisoners were not to be spared. Individual commandos falling into the hands of the armed forces—either as agents or as saboteurs—were to be turned over to the Security Service. Commanders and officers failing to comply with this
order would be called to answer before courts martial.

  Apropos Keitel’s protest that the main orders in the Russian campaign were not initiated by the OKW, the fact remains that the orders that transgressed international law, for example the ‘Commissar Order’, were circulated by Hitler not via the War Office but via the OKW. Colonel-General Ritter von Schobert was C.-in-C. of the Eleventh Army; he was killed in action on 12th September, 1941.

  Lieutenant-General Erik Heinrichs was Chief of the Finnish General Staff. Colonel-General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst was Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in Norway. Marshal Carl Gustaf Freiherr Mannerheim was the Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish armed forces.

  General Franz Szombathelyi (‘Strombathely’) became Chief of the Royal Hungarian General Staff in 1941. Keitel’s Budapest visit (page 157) was probably at the end of January 1942; Keitel’s original text has been amended. The nine light infantry divisions and one armoured division (mobile corps) went into action on the southern part of the eastern front as the Second Hungarian Army, under Colonel-General Gustav Jany, from April 1942 to February 1943; but Keitel’s pledges to provide modern equipment could not be honoured as German tank and anti-tank gun production could not even meet the demands of the German forces. Horthy, whom Keitel terms ‘the old gentleman’, was at the time 74 years old.

  During the encirclement action at Vyasma-Bryansk—the first phase of the German autumn assault on Moscow, lasting from 2nd to 20th October, 1941, 600,000 Russian prisoners of war were taken. Field-Marshals von Rundstedt and Ritter von Leeb (page 160) were Commanders-in-Chief of Army Groups South and North respectively; von Leeb (page 162) was at his own request relieved of his command on 16th January, 1942, and went into enforced retirement; his successor was Colonel-General Georg von Küchler. As can again be established here (page 162), Keitel (writing without access to documentary material) has confused the timing of the events: on 7th December, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and the American Pacific Fleet; on 11th December, 1941, the German Reich and Italy declared war on the United States. But in fact, while the command crisis on the eastern front did begin on 3rd December, 1941, with von Rundstedt’s removal from command of Army Group South, all Hitler’s subsequent steps were after Japan’s entry into the war.