The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  Halder claims that on 19th December, 1941, the day of Brauchitsch’s dismissal, Hitler told him: “Anybody can do what little operational commanding there is to be done. The job of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army is to see to the national-socialist training of the Army. I know of no general able to do that in the way I have in mind. So I have decided to take over supreme control of the Army myself.”

  5: The Russian Campaign, 1941–1943.

  Field-Marshal Keitel completed this section of his Memoirs on 30th September, 1946, and sent them to his counsel, Dr. Nelte, with a covering note which read: ‘Enclosed is a description of Hitler’s leadership of the Army as its Commander-in-Chief from 19th December, 1941, covering the period up to the winter of 1942–1943. This will supplement my testimony and amplify the descriptions I gave both at the Trial and during my interviews with you.’

  The Reichstag session on Japan’s entry into the war (page 166) was on nth December, 1941 (Keitel: ‘9th December’).

  Hitler’s ‘first order to the eastern front’ during the winter crisis was the ‘Halt Order’ already referred to; it was dated 16th December, 1941, and called for ‘fanatical resistance’. Three times in his original manuscript Keitel mistakenly writes ‘Field-Marshal von Bock’, where it has now been corrected to ‘von Kluge’; the Hoepner (Keitel: ‘Hoeppner’) affair had occurred at the turn of the year, 1941–1942; General Erich Hoepner’s reprimanding was on 8th January, but the command of Army Group Centre had already been transferred to Field-Marshal von Kluge on 18th December, after Bock had been advised to go on leave to recover his shattered health. General Hoepner himself had been Commander-in-Chief of the Fourth Tank Army (ex-4th armoured group); on 8th January, 1942, he was discharged from the armed forces for withdrawing sections of his front, an action which had been unavoidable, but which he took on his own responsibility. He was a leading conspirator in the 20th July, 1944, bomb plot, and he was executed on 8th August, 1944.

  Colonel-General Adolf Strauss (page 167), Commander-in-Chief of the Ninth Army, was relieved of his post on health grounds on 15th January, 1942. Engineer-General Foerster was commanding general of the Sixth Army Corps and persona non grata with Hitler who had already (unjustifiably) had him dismissed once in 1938, from the position of Inspector of Fortifications.

  Keitel’s manuscript originally puts the year of Todt’s death (page 168) as 1941; he has frequently written 1941 instead of 1942 in the following pages, and each time it has, of course, been corrected.

  For Hitler’s summer offensive, see Führer’s Directive No. 41, ‘Operation Blue’, dated 5th April, 1942; Field-Marshal von Reichenau had died on 17th January, 1942, as the result of a heart attack suffered at the headquarters of the Army Group South at Poltava.

  The Roumanian army was never fitted out with modern German equipment to any great extent; as for the French equipment, it had already shown its inadequacy in 1940. King Michael I of Roumania (born 1921) had ruled since 6th September, 1940; he was forced to abdicate by the Soviet’s Union on 30th December, 1947. Queen Helene of Roumania (born 1896) had been the wife of King Michael’s father, King Carol II; their marriage was dissolved in 1928. After her son’s accession to the throne she assumed the style of ‘Queen Mother’. Helene Lupescu became the morganatic wife of ex-king Carol II in 1947.

  The operation in which Hitler ‘intervened’ (page 177) to scoop victory from the jaws of defeat was the second battle of Kharkov in May 1942, during which the Russian attempt to strike at the Germans as they advanced ended with a decisive defeat for Marshal Timoshenko; but it was not Hitler, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, but his C.G.S., General Halder, who had reached the right conclusions here; Hitler merely authorised them.

  Hitler’s visit to Army Group South (page 179) must have been on the 4th or 5th July, 1942. Colonel-General Maximilian Freiherr von und zu Weichs a.d. Glon took over as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B (ex-South) on 15th July, 1942, commanding it until 12th February, 1943. Army Group A had been formed from parts of Army Group South, the Seventeenth Army and the First and (sometime) Fourth Tank Armies, together with Roumanian and Czechoslovakian units. Field-Marshal Wilhelm List was Commander-in-Chief of Army Group A from 15th July, 1942, until 10th September, 1942. He was never given a new command. His Army Group A was directed personally by Hitler as Commander-in-Chief of the Army from Vinnitsa until 22nd November, 1942. General Konrad (Keitel: ‘Conrad’) was commanding general of the Forty-Ninth Mountain Corps.

  It is probable that there was more to Hitler’s angry outburst (page 181) than just this difference of opinion at Stalino; this was his first realisation that the capture of the Caucasus oil fields was out of the question, and it was this that Hitler had, during his visit to the headquarters of Army Group South at Poltava on 1st June, 1942—before the offensive—declared to be the prerequisite of its successful conclusion.

  General Georg Thomas (page 183) was head of the Economic Warfare department of the OKW from 1st October, 1942, onwards.

  Colonel-General Halder was dismissed his office as Chief of the Army General Staff on 24th September, 1942, and given no new command; after 20th July, 1944, he was arrested.

  Keitel’s revelation of Rommel’s earlier illness (page 185) throws new light on the reasons for Rommel’s being in Germany at the time of the British counter-offensive in October, 1942. His deputy, General Georg Stumme, was killed in action at the onset of the second battle of El-Alamein. Keitel included in his original manuscript his views on the north African campaigns, which have been omitted as of no consequence.

  In his original text, Keitel put the date of the Russian counter-offensive (page 185) as December, 1942; in fact the counter-offensive in the Stalingrad area was launched on 19th November, 1942. As far as is known to the editor from verbal descriptions of the war conferences late in November, 1942, Keitel failed at the time to make any outspoken proposal for a break-out attempt to the west.

  8: The Last Days under Adolf Hitler, 1945.

  The General Krebs (page 198) was infantry General Hans Krebs, entrusted with the command of the Army General Staff between 29th March and 30th April, 1945; he died or committed suicide in Russian captivity in about May, 1945.

  Keitel’s adjutant was Air Force Major Gerhard von Szymonski; Lieutenant-General Paul Winter was chief of the OKW’s central office; Ferdinand Schörner had been a Field-Marshal since 1st March, 1945, and commanded Army Group Centre (ex-A) from January to May, 1945. The tank General Walter Wenck had been chief of the operations division and then the ‘command group’ in the War Office from July 1944 to February 1945, when he suffered an automobile accident; since 10th April, 1945, he had been C.-in-C. of the newly-raised Twelfth Army. Colonel-General Guderian had been Chief of the General Staff from July 1944 to March 1945, when he had been sent on permanent leave by Hitler after violent disputes. Keitel’s description (page 200) of the weakness of the senior commanders when faced with Hitler can be compared with General Wenck’s statement that he probably thought there was some prospect of success for the attack on Berlin, but he was far too clever not to realise after a very few days that his only function now would be to establish an escape route to the west for the encircled remnants of the Ninth Army.

  Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici (page 201) had been C.-in-C. of the Vistula Army Group fighting in the region from north of Berlin to the Pomeranian coast of the Baltic from 1st March, 1945.

  Field-Marshal Keitel does not refer to Hitler’s ‘collapse’ witnessed by several officers on the 22nd April, and expressly referred to by Major-General Christian (chief of Air Force operations staff) together with the news that Hitler was having his personal papers burnt. Vice-Admiral Voss, the Admiralty’s representative in the Führer’s headquarters made a similar comment later.

  General Koehler was commanding general of the Thirtieth Armoured Corps, and had his headquarters at Wiessenburg to the south-west of Belzig.

  Hitler’s story to Keitel of ‘peace negotiations with England’ (page 206
) was of course a downright lie.

  SS-General Steiner (page 208) had been C.-in-C. of the Eleventh Tank Army, and then of the ‘Steiner’ Army Group formed to create a mobile reserve. Steiner himself was very short of manpower; Field-Marshal Keitel was suffering from the same brand of optimism for which he had earlier castigated General Wenck! In Berlin Steiner had been pressed to mount his attack on the capital, but he had rejected the attack as hopeless. He wrote: ‘At 5.00 a.m. on 22nd April, Field-Marshal Keitel again endeavoured to bring me round to this idea, but he did it without any inner conviction and probably only from an innate sense of duty.’

  Keitel was unable when writing his manuscript to recall the name of Rathenow, and just wrote ‘X-town’ each time.

  Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim (page 124) had previously been AOC-in-C. the Sixth Air Group (Eastern Front); he had been flown into Berlin by the aerobatic pilot Hanna Reitsch on 26th April; Hitler promoted him to Field-Marshal and named him Supreme Commander of the German Air Force in Göring’s place. In his original manuscript, Keitel implied that Greim shot himself in the leg when his plane landed in Berlin, but, according to General Koller, the field-marshal was shot through the foot by rifle fire just as the plane came in to land. Greim committed suicide in May, 1945.

  Göring asked for Hitler’s agreement to his taking over complete control of the leadership of the Reich (on the basis of the Succession-to-the-Führer Act of 29th June, 1941) on 23rd April; he intended to fly to General Eisenhower’s headquarters the next day to take up negotiations; by signal that evening, Hitler forbade Göring’s projected assumption of authority over the Reich, and on the 24th Göring and Koller were arrested by the SS for treason.

  According to Keitel’s reckoning the visit to Heinrici (page 215) would have been on 26th April, but there is no doubt that it was on the 28th. The phrase ‘To have to abandon Steiner’s attack . . .’ (page 216) originally read ‘to have to abandon Heinrici’s attack . . .’—clearly a slip of the pen by Keitel. (There was never any suggestion of Heinrici delivering any attack, while all their hopes had been pinned on the success of that by Steiner.) General Hasso von Manteuffel was C.-in-C. of the Third Tank Army.

  At this stage of the narrative, Keitel’s memory put the dates one day earlier than was actually the case; all the dates have been corrected in the printed text to avoid confusion.

  Field-Marshal Busch (page 225) had been C.-in-C. North-West since 15th April.

  SS-Lieutenant-General Hermann Fegelein had been the SS-Reichsführer’s representative at the Führer’s headquarters; he was married to Grete Braun (Eva Braun’s sister) and was thus Hitler’s brother-in-law. He was executed on Hitler’s orders, as the Führer harboured private suspicions that he had been planning to slip out of Berlin in plain clothes, and he was aware of the secret talks that had taken place at the end of April between the SS-Reichsführer and a representative of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte.

  The telegram from Bormann (page 226)—‘Testament in force . . . etc.’—reached Grand-Admiral Dönitz at 10.15 a.m. on 1st May. The telegram added that Bormann would endeavour to report to Dönitz personally as soon as possible; it was not to be made public until then. The first of the two telegrams mentioned by Keitel (original manuscript slightly incorrect) was signed ‘Goebbels. Bormann’ and reached Plön at 3.18 p.m. on 1st May. It continued: ‘Testament of 29th April confers the office of Reich President on you.’ It added a list of Ministers.

  In his description of the Flensburg-Mürwick interlude (page 228), Field-Marshal Keitel ignored the controversy over whether he should remain Chief of the OKW. One general (of whose identity the Editor of this book is aware) told Jodl he refused to work any longer under Keitel. At first Colonel-General Jodl answered him very curtly and ordered him out of the room; but later he had him called back and commiserated with him that he fully understood his views, as he, Jodl, had ‘suffered’ enough himself in the six years he had worked with him.

  Jodl later quoted a view expressed by Dr. Lehmann: ‘Lehmann once said on this point that Keitel is brave enough to take on a lion in bare-fisted combat; but faced with Hitler he is as helpless as a babe.’ To which Jodl commented: ‘His own will-power was not very strongly developed, and inferior to the unusually marked will-power of the Führer.’ In the early phase of the war Keitel had indeed often put up a ‘very energetic opposition’ to Hitler, but then he had become resigned, especially when Hitler began to get aggressive and insulting. In fairness to Keitel one is obliged to point out that Colonel-General Jodl can hardly be said not to have become equally resigned himself.

  Colonel-General Karl Hilpert was the C.-in-C. of the Courland Army Group; he died in Russian captivity in 1949. Lieutenant-Colonel (G.S.) Ulrich de Maiziere was in the operations division of the Army in the combined OKW-operations-staff-plus-Army-General-Staff. General Franz Böhme was C.-in-C. of the German Twentieth Army in Norway.

  It is not clear why Keitel repeatedly speaks of a ‘preliminary treaty’. The surrender of the German armed forces had already been signed in the Allied headquarters at Reims; it was merely that the Russians insisted on the repetition of the ceremony in Berlin. The American general who broke the news to Keitel that he was to consider himself as a prisoner of war (page 234) was Major-General Rooks: ‘Keitel made no comment on the disclosure, but merely explained that he had put his signature to the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender and was well aware of the consequences now . . .’

  Lieutenant-General John von Freyend, one of Keitel’s companions into captivity (recorded by Keitel in his agitation as Lt.-Col. ‘von John’) was the senior adjutant to the Chief of the OKW.

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

  Abbeville

  Abyssinia

  Adam, Maj.-Gen.

  Africa, North

  Aix-la-Chapelle

  Albania

  Albrecht, Cdr.

  Alcazar, The

  Alexandria

  Alsace-Lorraine

  Amen, Col.

  America and the Americans, the United States of America

  Antonescu, Gen.

  Ardennes, The

  Armies:

  Army Group A

  Army Group D

  Army Group Centre

  Army Group North

  Army Group South

  Army Group West

  Second Army Group

  Second Tank Army

  Fourth Army Group

  Sixth Army Corps

  Eighth Army

  Ninth Army

  Eleventh Army

  Twelth Army

  Sixteenth Army

  Red Army, see under Russians

  Vistula Army Group

  Arnim, Count von

  Artois

  Athens

  Atlantic

  Attolico, Bernardo, Italian Ambassador

  Austria and the Austrians

  Bad Godesberg

  Bad Nauheim

  Badoglio, Marshal

  Bad Reichenhall

  Bad Wiessee

  Balkans, The

  Baltic, The

  Banat, Province of

  Bardossy, Prime Minister von

  Bartha, Gen. von

  Bavaria

  Beck, Col. Joseph, Polish Foreign Sec.

  Beck, Gen. Ludwig

  Belgium and the Belgians

  Belgrade

  Below, Col. von

  Berchtesgaden and the Berghof

  Bergen

  Berghof, The, see under Berchtesgaden

  Berlin

  Bessarabia

  Bismarck, Chancellor

  Black Forest

  Black Sea

  Blaskowitz, J., Gen.

  Blomberg, Lt. Axel von

  Blomberg, Dorothea von
/>
  Blomberg, Erna von

  Blomberg, Sibylle von

  Blomberg, Minister Werner von

  Bock, Field Marshal von

  Boehm, Admiral Hermann

  Bohemia

  Böhme, Gen. Franz

  Böhm-Tettelbach, Lt. Col.

  Boitzenburg

  Bomb Plot, The, 20th July 1944

  Bordeaux

  Boris II, King of Bulgaria

  Borisov

  Bormann, Martin, Head of Party Chancellery

  Bosnia

  Brandenburg

  Brauchitsch, Gen. von

  Braunau

  Bredow, Maj.-Gen. von

  Bremen

  Breslau

  Briesen, Gen. von

  Britain and the British

  Broz, Joseph, alias Tito

  Bruges

  Bruly-de-Pesche

  Brüning, Reich Chancellor

  Brunswick, Duchy of

  Bryansk

  Bucharest

  Büchs, Col. Herbert

  Budapest

  Bulgaria

  Burgdorf, Gen. Wilhelm

  Bürkner, Felix

  Bürkner, Vice-Admiral Leopold

  Busch, Field Marshal

  Bussche-Ippenburg, Capt. von dem

  Busse, Gen.

  Canaris, Admiral

  Carol II of Roumania

  Carpathians, The

  Cassel

  Caucasus, The

  Cephalonia

  Chamberlain, Mr. Neville

  Channel, The English

  Chiang Kai-shek

  China

  Chvalkovsky, Frantisek, Czech. Foreign Secretary

  Ciano, Count, Italian Foreign Secretary

  Compiègne, Forest of

  Coral H.Q.

  Courland

  Crete