The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Read online

  THE MEMOIRS OF

  FIELD-MARSHAL

  WILHELM KEITEL

  THE MEMOIRS OF

  FIELD-MARSHAL

  WILHELM KEITEL

  Edited with an

  introduction and epilogue by

  WALTER GORLITZ

  Translated by

  DAVID IRVING

  New introduction by

  EARL ZIEMKE

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2000

  This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of The Memoirs of Field-Marhsal Wilhelm Keitel is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1966, with the addition of a new introduction by Earl Ziemke.

  The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel

  Copyright © 1961 by Musterschmnidt-Verlag, Göttigen, Germany

  English translation by David Irving

  Copyright © 1965 by William Kimber and Co., Limited

  New introduction

  Copyright © 2000 by Earl Ziemke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

  New York, New York 10011

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keitel, Wilhelm, 1882–1946.

  [Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, Verbrecher oder Offizier? English]

  The memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel : Chief of the German High Command, 1938–1945 / edited with an introduction and epilogue by Walter Gorlitz ; new introduction by Earl Ziemke.—1st Cooper Square Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Rev. translation of: Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, Verbrecher oder Offizier?

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-8154-1072-0

  1. Keitel, Wilhelm, 1882–1946. 2. Germany. Wehrmacht

  Oberkommando—Biography. 3. Generals—Germany—Biography. I. Görlitz, Walter, 1913– II. Title.

  DD247.K42 A3 2000

  940.54’0092—dc21

  [B] 00-056999

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I

  1 The Background and Career of Field-Marshal Keitel, 1882–1946

  PART II

  2 The Blomberg–Fritsch Crisis, 1938

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

  4 Prelude to the Attack on Russia, 1940–1941

  5 The Russian Campaign, 1941–1943

  6 Extracts from Keitel’s Wartime Letters to his Wife

  7 The Bomb Plot, 20th July 1944

  8 The Last Days under Adolf Hitler, 1945

  9 Afterthoughts

  PART III

  10 The Indictment

  Notes

  Index

  MAPS

  1 The Invasion of France, 1940

  2 Barbarossa—The German Invasion of Russia, 1941

  3 The Black Summer of 1942

  4 The Battle for Berlin, 1945

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel were written in manuscript in prison at Nuremberg, beginning on 1st September, 1946. The original is in the possession of the Keitel family. His narrative covering the years 1933 to 1938 is included in the German edition, but in this English edition Keitel’s life up to 1937 is dealt with in the editor’s introduction which contains many extracts from Keitel’s own account of those years. The translation of the memoirs themselves here begins with 1937, on page 35. On the other hand, some passages from the original manuscript which were not included in the German edition appear in this translation, as for example the description of the Munich crisis and the planning discussions for the invasion of Britain.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Führer’s Shield Bearer

  On October 6, 1945, prosecutors at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal indicted twenty-four “major war criminals” on a possible four counts: waging a war of aggression (in various forms); conspiracy to wage a war of aggression; violations of the laws or customs of war; murder, extermination, enslavement, and other inhumane acts against civilian populations. The prisoner Wilhelm Keitel was one of fourteen charged on all counts, and after seeing the specific charges, he was convinced he would be found guilty in every instance. As the officer who had been closest to Adolf Hitler in the military chain of command, he decided at the outset therefore to accept full legal responsibility before the court and to appeal to the judgment of history for ethical and moral remission in the Memoirs, which he wrote in his spare time during the year of the trial. The Memoirs also had a second objective, namely, to refute what he considered to be slanderous opinions of himself widely held and expressed by his military colleagues during the war and in the court.

  The part of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel’s life with which the Memoirs is concerned begins in October 1935 when he, fifty-five years old and a major general (U.S. equivalent, brigadier general), became head of the Armed Forces Office in the German Defense Ministry. He was then in the thirty-fifth year of an atypical military career. In fact, he would all along rather have been a farmer and, having recently inherited his family’s farm, was on the verge of taking retirement. The Armed Forces Office would give broader scope to the two characteristics that had sustained his progress thus far—rigid devotion to duty and a voracious appetite for work—but its future was in doubt. The defense minister, Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg, whom Adolf Hitler had also named commander in chief of the Armed Forces, had instituted it as an embryo armed forces high command in the Defense Ministry. The army, navy, and air force high commands regarded it as a politically motivated encroachment on their spheres of responsibility. Blomberg was not disposed to challenge the service commanders in chief, particularly since one of them, Hermann Göring, was Hitler’s deputy and successor designate.

  Keitel, as always, strove mightily to carry out his mission, but was frustrated at every turn and soon became enmeshed in a comic-opera sort of affair without a happy ending. In January 1938, Blomberg, then fifty-nine years old, with Hitler as his best man, married a much younger woman who was subsequently found to have a record with the Berlin police morals squad. To avoid the embarrassment of having the news become public knowledge, Hitler gave Blomberg a world tour as a “wedding present,” abolished the Defense Ministry, made himself commander in chief of the Armed Forces, and renamed the Armed Forces Office the High Command of the Armed Forces. To placate the service commands, he assured them that Keitel, whom he appointed chief (not commander in chief) of the Armed Forces High Command, would not be his deputy or chief of staff; would have no authority to issue orders to the service commands; and would be solely concerned with the routine administrative matters that had formerly been the defense minister’s responsibility. By and large, Hitler kept his word, probably because, having soon advanced himself to supreme commander of the Armed Forces, he did not propose to delegate any of his power. He subsequently established a small operations staff that was nominally subordinate to Keitel but responsible only to himself. Its chief, General Alfred Jodl, although always one gra
de below Keitel, functioned independently as Hitler’s personal chief of staff.

  Except as a dream, the Blomberg affair terminated the idea of a unified armed forces command; however, the subsequent reorganization lifted Keitel, in the tables of organization at least, to the military position closest to Hitler. Although Keitel could not give orders, he also did not take orders from anyone other than Hitler. In less than three years, Keitel rose four grades, from the lowest to the highest general officer rank, field-marshal. The call of duty was clear and the farm no longer a viable alternative.

  The anomalies of his position continued unabated: although he could not exercise it, he was at the absolute center of power. On March 12, 1938, a week after Keitel’s appointment, Hitler summoned him to Berchtesgaden, where the Führer was engaged in bullying Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg into surrendering his country. Keitel did not participate in the negotiations, only in the lunch and coffee breaks when nothing substantive was discussed. Nevertheless, he says, “It dawned upon me during the course of this day that . . . I was by my very presence acting as a means to an end, my very first major rôle in life.” (p. 57) Thereafter, he was a silent presence at Hitler’s meetings with foreign leaders, accompanied Hitler whenever he traveled, and throughout the war attended Hitler’s twice-a-day situation conferences at which he was seldom called upon to speak. Of the signing of the armistice with France on June 22, 1940, he says, “That day was the climax of my career as a soldier.” (p. 114) He saw it as “the hour of our revenge for Versailles” (p. 112), but was apparently most stirred by Hitler’s having allowed him to act as the master of ceremonies.

  His proximity to Hitler did not result in close association. Keitel was concerned with infrastructure, personnel, armament, and other bureaucratic aspects of armed forces development with which Hitler did not wish to be bothered. Those were, in fact, very large responsibilities with respect to which his silent attendance on Hitler was, for the most part, a waste of time, but one that was flattering and that, as Keitel saw it, provided a further opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for work. Recognizing operational and strategic planning to be beyond him, he was content to let Jodl become Hitler’s advisor in those areas.

  On July 19, 1940, Hitler recognized his generals’ contributions to the victory in the Low Countries and France with promotions and decorations. Keitel received the marshal’s baton and the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Both were customarily awarded only for achievements on the field of battle. Keitel was pleased to have them, he says, but embarrassed as well, since he had no part either in the planning or execution other than occasionally delivering messages from Hitler to the commanding generals.

  The victory over France permanently dispelled any doubts Keitel may have had about Hitler’s qualifications as a war leader. Henceforth, content to be his Führer’s shield bearer, he took his mission to be to support Hitler without question in all circumstances—in other words, to provide an unimpeded scope for Hitler’s genius. Keitel’s abiding concern was the services’ refusal to accept full unification and their insistence on immediate access to Hitler, which he saw as giving them opportunities to claim credit for Hitler’s successes and to blame him for their failures. The use throughout the Memoirs of “War Office” as a synonym for “Army High Command” is, no doubt, meant to put the Army High Command, in his opinion, in its proper place as a subordinate office of the Armed Forces High Command.

  The war had sharpened the divisions in the command structure. In the field headquarters Keitel and Jodl took their meals with Hitler, which gave them an advantage over the service chiefs, who saw Hitler only by appointment. A shared concern with operations brought Jodl closer to Hitler than Keitel; however, like Keitel, he always supported Hitler’s views as soon as they became known. Jodl also had no authority to issue orders outside his own bailiwick. The occupation of Norway and Denmark (May–June 1940) was the only operation independently managed by the Armed Forces Operations Staff, mainly because the operation was small enough to be organized and executed by an army corps staff borrowed from the army. The composition of Führer directives (strategic directives Hitler issued to initiate planning and preparation for major operations) was the Armed Forces Operations Staff’s principal task. These organizational peculiarities presented opportunities to meddle in the service commands’ conduct of operations, which Jodl frequently exploited and Keitel generally tolerated. As a result, only Hitler could make final decisions, which suited him exactly.

  In late July 1940, Hitler put another kink in the chain of command: he set the army General Staff to work on planning an invasion of the Soviet Union and gave the army exclusive responsibility for the eastern front that would ensue. But he did not change the procedure with regard to the Führer directives; consequently, when he and Jodl issued his directive for what was to be called Operation BARBAROSSA, they found that the army was too far along with an altogether different plan to change without having to delay its start. (The army proposed to strike toward Moscow, Hitler toward Leningrad and Kiev). Hitler allowed the army to proceed, but—even though Jodl supported the army plan—the Führer put the army on notice to expect a switch to his plan after the operation started. Consequently, the army went into the Soviet Union with two incompatible objectives: to defeat the Soviet forces forward of Moscow or to seize Leningrad and the natural resources of the Ukraine and the Caucasus.

  Keitel’s treatment of the BARBAROSSA Plan and its failure is apparently a compulsive display of loyalty to Hitler. He traces the process of the 1941 summer campaign through several stages by means of which the army generals “shipwrecked Hitler’s great strategic master plan” (p. 151) at the gates of Moscow. He proposes a study to determine how the Hitler plan might have fared if it had not been sabotaged by the generals—and thinks its chances would have been greatly improved.

  He also sees a profound misjudgment of Hitler in the assumption made in the indictment that the invasion of the Soviet Union was an act of unprovoked aggression. From Hitler’s November 1940 meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, at which Keitel was present in his window-dressing role, he concludes that Hitler delayed the invasion until mid-1941 because he was seeking a peaceful solution, whereas, the German dictator’s sole concern was to avoid the Russian winter. He also contends that Hitler’s primary motive was to forestall Germany’s encirclement by the Soviet Union and the Western powers, and was hence defensive. By way of proof Keitel claims that the deployment for BARBAROSSA was not begun until March 31, 1941. In his position, it could hardly have escaped him that the majority of the troops were in fact deployed gradually between August 1940 and January 1941.

  All in all, he fails to mount a credible defense of Hitler and manages to demolish what was to have been the keystone of his and Jodl’s defense at Nuremberg: a contention that BARBAROSSA was a preventive strike and therefore a legal act of war. At one point he told the court he had attempted to persuade Hitler not to launch the attack because it was unnecessary—Germany was already benefiting mightily from its semi-alliance with the Soviet Union; war in the East would have overextended the German forces. Further on, he states that Soviet strength discovered after the operation began convinced him that “Stalin” would have been ready to attack “within a year or two” but for “our preventive war on Russia” (p. 131). The court was not convinced by die idea of a fortuitous preventive attack.

  On March 30, 1941, Hitler told the 250 or so highest-ranking officers that war with the Soviet Union would be a fight to the death between two incompatible ideologies and would therefore have to be conducted without regard for the laws and customs of war. Hitler then formulated—and Keitel subsequently formally promulgated—two decrees, later to be known as the BARBAROSSA Order and the Commissar Order. The first gave soldiers immunity from trial for offenses against Soviet civilians. The second denied Soviet military commissars (political officers) the right to prisoner-of-war status and required that all those captured be summarily
shot. In the Memoirs Keitel appears to have believed that the Commissar Order and the BARBAROSSA Order—there called “the Order on Liability for Court Martial in Soviet Territories” (p. 137)—should not have been put in writing and that he did so only at the behest of the Army High Command. However, his main concern seems to have been with keeping the orders secret, not with their illegality. Later, he signed agreements giving SS extermination squads authority to operate in occupied Soviet territory. As the war progressed, he issued various Führer orders specifying the same treatment for captured commandos, parachutists, and members of resistance movements in Western Europe as was applied to the commissars.

  In December 1941, when the onslaught of winter froze the German advance in its tracks and Soviet forces mounted a counterattack, Hitler abolished the post of army commander in chief and assumed the duties himself. Thereafter, the chief of the Army General Staff reported directly to him. But Hitler also retained the Armed Forces Operations Staff and continued to issue Führer directives through it. The hierarchical and structural change lost the Army its independence. The chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, a colonel general, had to represent the army while a grade lower in rank than Keitel and the other service chiefs.

  The plan for the 1942 summer campaign was entirely Hitler’s. In it he reverted to his original assumption that the Soviet Union could be defeated by seizing its resources—specifically the Caucasus oil fields. In the execution of his strategy he again divided his forces by sending one army group due east toward Stalingrad and another due south toward the oil fields on the Caspian Sea, thereby ensuring that he could not give either the required support to reach its objective. In August, when the southern army group became stalled in the mountains, Hitler, having no army commander in chief other than himself with whom to find fault, sent Jodl to take the army group commander, Field-Marshal Wilhelm List, to task. When Jodl reported List had performed as well as could be expected, Hitler dismissed List, berated Keitel for having recommended List for the command, and thereafter took his meals alone. Hitler also dismissed Halder, who had supported List; and he granted the request of Halder’s replacement, General of Infantry Kurt Zeitzler, that Keitel and Jodl henceforth be excluded altogether from eastern front affairs. The German dictator also proposed to get rid of Jodl as soon as Colonel General Friedrich Paulus could be released from command of the drive toward Stalingrad. On January 31, 1943, Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad. By then, Keitel’s and Jodl’s “betrayals” were beginning to look relatively insignificant to Hitler, and they stayed on in their respective positions to the end.