The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Read online

  But it was the army that was in the forefront of the protest. General Beck, the chief of the Army General Staff, detached one of his most gifted General Staff officers, the Bavarian Alfred Jodl, to the National Defence Department in the pious hope that Jodl would champion the army’s interests. But Jodl, a brilliant thinker, also went over to the new ideas. Beck’s abomination of Keitel became deadly, insofar as such a harsh expression can be used of a man as elegant as Beck.

  Even more of a problem was how to bring the German Air Force into line: this third and newest branch of the armed forces had as its Commander-in-Chief the former air force captain Hermann Göring, a freshly minted colonel-general enjoying a position of unique political power in his simultaneous capacities as Reich Aviation Minister, Prussian Prime Minister and Commissioner for the Four-Year-Plan, quite apart from being close to Party circles.

  Keitel’s relationship with Blomberg was amicable but cool and impersonal. They tolerated each other well, they never quarrelled or even disagreed; but between the two there was a lack of any of the personal contact that one would have expected from the long years they had known each other since 1914; Keitel himself always attributed this to the way in which Blomberg withdrew into himself after the death of his wife in the spring of 1932. His relations with von Fritsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, were on the other hand always friendly, warmhearted and trusting. At the latter’s initiation, they often spent evenings alone together, talking and reminiscing over a glass of wine.

  In 1936 Keitel was promoted to lieutenant-general; the year was occupied very fully with the reconstruction of the German armed forces and brought the highly dramatic days of the German military reoccupation of the Rhineland on 7th March, 1936, upon which Hitler had, says Keitel, decided only a very few days before actually putting it into effect:

  It was a highly risky operation, for there was an acute danger of sanctions being imposed by the French. The Western Powers’ sharp protests led Blomberg to suggest to Hitler the withdrawal of the three battalions which were our only forces actually to have crossed the Rhine, and which had proceeded as far as Aix-la-Chapelle, Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken. The second battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment had entered Saarbrücken and was drilling on the market square while French guns were actually trained on the town. Hitler rejected any idea of withdrawing the battalions: if the enemy attacked they were to fight, and not to give way an inch. Orders to that effect were then issued.

  Our three military attachés in London raised the most violent protests. Fritsch and Blomberg lodged renewed complaints with Hitler, but he refused to entertain any idea of yielding to threats. Our Foreign Office received a Note from London demanding assurances that no fortifications would be constructed west of the Rhine, but very much against my advice Blomberg had flown off to Bremen that day. In his absence, the Führer called Fritsch, Neurath [Reich Foreign Secretary] and myself before him. It was the first time—apart from the first occasion on which I had reported to him along with numerous other generals—on which I stood before him. He asked what proposals Fritsch and Neurath had to make for our answer to the Note, and finally he asked me. Up to that point I had only been a silent listener. Upon his asking me, I suggested we answer that for the time being we would construct no permanent fortifications there: we could say that with a perfectly clear conscience, as from technical considerations alone it would take us at least a year to do anything there. The Führer listened calmly to me, and appeared at first to be disinclined to accept my suggestion; then he decided to answer the Note evasively: we would say that we would bear their demand in mind, although we had been entertaining no such plans as we saw no need for them at present. In view of the way we had already commenced the construction of fortifications along the rest of our western frontiers, even if they were only part of a long-term programme designed to last until 1950, nobody recognised better than the French the non-binding subterfuge we were searching for in our terminology.

  Neurath was directed to make this answer, and Fritsch and I were dismissed the Führer’s presence. That was my first official encounter with Hitler. In the subsequent days the tension relaxed: Hitler had played with fire and won, and against his soldiers’ advice he had avoided committing himself in any way. He had shown the stronger nerves and the more highly developed political instinct. Small wonder that he soared in our estimation.

  In 1938 Lieutenant-General Keitel, the then head of the Armed Forces Office, had been recommended to Hitler by the departing Reich War Minister von Blomberg as his new chef de bureau. (That is how Blomberg described the position in an official document.) Blomberg could recommend him with a clear conscience. The Armed Forces Office was already a peculiarly hybrid structure: normally Blomberg would have had an under-secretary in his capacity as War Minister and a ‘Chief of Staff’ in his capacity as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces; but in an autocratic Führer state with no parliamentary life but only the occasional plebiscites held from time to time, the position of an Under-Secretary of State had lost importance, and even during the years of the Weimar Republic, with its civil Secretaries for Defence, there had been no such office. Informally, the head of the Reich Defence Minister’s Central Office had taken over such duties himself.

  During the Blomberg era, the ministerial secretariat and the chief of staff’s offices were rolled into one. Thus the Armed Forces Office united under one head a strategic planning office, a military command office, the national defence department and numerous other departments handling all the signals, Intelligence and administrative functions of the Ministry as well as its controversial joint armed forces command function. The systematic expansion of the Office to which Keitel aspired was rudely interrupted by Blomberg’s overthrow early in 1938, as was the continuous development of its national defence department to a genuine joint ‘operations staff’ for all three services, army, navy and air force.

  Keitel has explained that he never guessed what awaited him as—without any hesitation—he agreed to accept the position Hitler offered him as ‘Chief of the Armed Forces High Command’ although admittedly he expressed the view that logically the official title should have been ‘Chief of Staff to the High Command of the Armed Forces’. They may have thought that his willpower was not all that strong; but during the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis he pushed through the appointment of his own candidate as Fritsch’s successor with surprising obstinacy and with final success.

  His candidate was Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, the product of a Silesian family that had furnished Prussia with a dozen generals over the previous hundred and fifty years; he called him up to Berlin from Leipzig, where for some time he had been in command of the Fourth Army Group. Brauchitsch, brought up in the Corps of Cadets and the Field Artillery Guards, met with the full approval of the other senior generals and above all of the very Junker-ish General von Rundstedt; on the other hand his appointment sealed the fate of the outstanding and talented Chief of the General Staff, General Beck. Keitel probably never did have any warm feelings towards this latter officer, and Brauchitsch certainly had no desire to work with the Chief of the General Staff.

  Again, Keitel doggedly insisted on the appointment of his brother as Chief of Army Personnel and on the removal from Hitler’s entourage of the latter’s Army adjutant, the dynamic and self-assured Colonel Hossbach. Hossbach had shamelessly but skilfully upheld the traditions of the Prussian General Staff and championed the ideas of General Beck, who believed that the command of the armed forces was a matter for the old classic General Staff alone. In close collaboration with the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Keitel hoped to achieve a breakthrough in the front of the other two Commanders-in-Chief, and establish a uniform overall command of the armed forces.

  In any event, Keitel’s victory over Hitler’s own candidate, Reichenau, was a Pyrrhic victory: there is a danger in retrospectively analysing the crisis and the intrigues surrounding Blomberg and Fritsch that one will overlook the fact that at the time Hitler
was still by no means the ogre he was to prove himself to be during the war. At the time Hitler had behind him a whole string of diplomatic victories and Keitel himself has very objectively commented on how far simple soldiers could be impressed by such successes.

  Keitel thought he knew Brauchitsch well, and he had held him in high regard since the time both of them had been departmental heads in the Troop Office, and both had travelled to the Soviet Union. But though Keitel was in no position to assert himself with Hitler, Brauchitsch was even less well suited to this than he: Brauchitsch was a well-educated and even a sensitive man of the old school.

  By his appearance, by his good education, by his bearing as a senior officer and by his mannerisms, Keitel was the complete antithesis to Hitler. Outwardly, Keitel looked like a landed Junker: he liked eating well; he did not reject a glass of wine, seldom though one might appear on his own table; he liked to smoke a cigar from time to time, and he was an excellent horseman and an enthusiastic huntsman.

  Hitler, on the other hand, was a vegetarian, keeping to a singular and scanty diet; he did not drink, and strongly disapproved of people smoking in his presence (which everybody accordingly avoided as far as possible); he hated horses and regarded the noble hunt as the murder of innocent fauna, upon which subject he was liable to lapse into gross sentimentality in his conversation. The corporal, moreover, was moved by an instinctive mistrust of all senior officers, always dreading that they might not be taking him seriously.

  In answer to a questionnaire put to him by his defence counsel, Keitel himself stressed how hard it was to deal with his new superior:

  I was naturally entitled to give voice to my own opinions. But the Führer usually cut me short and told me what he thought and what his own views were. It was no easy task then to contradict him. Often I was able to make my point only on a later occasion.

  Again, Keitel described Hitler’s remark whenever he raised any objections:

  I don’t know why you are getting so het up about it. You are not answerable for this, the responsibility is mine alone.*

  To both Dr. Nelte, his defence counsel, and one of the American interrogators Keitel described how distressed he had been at the tone of Hitler’s dealings with him at first. In this respect too, Hitler had been the ‘revolutionary’ and Keitel the soldier of the old school. Unfortunately this often robbed him of the confidence he needed to stand up against Hitler’s methods and blustering—‘We looked at things in different ways.’ He added that he never gained the impression that Hitler had any real confidence in him; but he considered it his duty to ‘sit out’ Hitler’s attacks on the Officer Corps and on the Army. ‘I was,’ he commented, ‘Hitler’s lightning conductor.’

  On the other hand, Keitel the soldier was convinced that the man at the pinnacle of the Reich and Armed Forces was possessed of no mean talents; Hitler did indeed have unusual gifts in many fields, disposing over the power of seductive oratory, a copious memory for detail even in military affairs, and tremendous imagination, willpower and audacity. In Keitel’s view the traditional loyalty due to the sovereign transferred automatically to this new captain of Germany’s fate; this was the same attachment to the person of the monarch which had for centuries ruled the thinking of the officer corps of every German state. The ‘Führer’ became unconsciously a kind of ‘Ersatz-Kaiser’. And though the sovereign might be difficult, or behave abnormally and, in the opinion of many, incomprehensibly too, he was taboo. To voice criticism of him, either publicly or in private, was dishonourable; one might out of a sense of duty express doubts about the propriety of certain orders issued to one. But once the sovereign had decided upon them, then the officer had a duty to comply with the orders and to associate himself with them.

  This creed was not so much a leftover of the Old Prussian Junkers era of the eighteenth century, as an expression of the rationalisation of the concept of loyalty that had sprung up in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm. In the case of a leader like Hitler this creed was especially dangerous; but it was nevertheless the creed by which Field-Marshal Keitel abided. There was more to it than that: Hitler had the gift of being able to influence people; it was a gift which he often used upon Keitel, although the field-marshal was in himself a very courageous officer. Inwardly he felt himself defenceless against a man so generously endowed with such enormous powers, the more so as for a long time he was bound to agree that Germany’s ‘Führer’ was assessing individual situations more accurately than were his trained soldiers:

  At the bottom of my heart I was a loyal shield-bearer for Adolf Hitler; my political conviction would have been National Socialist.

  That was how Keitel described himself to Colonel Dr. Bohuslav Ecer, of the Czechoslovakian Judge Advocate’s Office, in a preliminary interrogation on 3rd August, 1945. But he stressed that earlier, during the Kaiser’s Reich and the Weimar Republic, he had had no political inclinations and had taken no part in political activities; so he had not then been a ‘Nazi’, he added.

  On the other hand Keitel does admit that when he was asked about the costs of the German rearmament programme he ‘almost fell over backwards’ when he learned that on 1st September, 1939, during his first speech of the war, Hitler had put them at 90 milliard Reichsmarks, when in fact they could not have been more than 30 to 40 milliards at most. Such exaggerations and lies were all part of the make-up of this ‘Supreme Warlord’. For Keitel, Hitler—both the man and the Führer—was always an enigma. Hitler’s suicide at the end of the war and his evasion thereby of the sole responsibility which he had so vehemently and bluntly claimed for himself in his quarrels with Keitel were something that the field-marshal totally failed to comprehend. But even then, at the nadir of his misfortunes, he spurns to cast off his rôle as Hitler’s ‘shield-bearer’, even though he must pay for his loyalty with his life.

  The documents and letters reproduced in this book, in so far as they emanate from the papers left by Field-Marshal Keitel, are derived from two main depositories: firsdy, there is the correspondence placed on the file of his Nuremberg defence counsel, Dr. Otto Nelte, and the large numbers of letters written by the field-marshal’s wife to her mother, father and father-in-law; the letters have been reproduced verbatim, but for greater readability the normal dotted lines indicating omissions have been left out. Secondly, there are the Memoirs and reminiscences written by the field-marshal himself in his cell at Nuremberg, as he awaited sentencing and execution, written without access to any documents or material.

  Keitel himself depicted the strain of the last months before his trial and execution in a note on his life, at the end of which he pointed out:

  The conditions under which we have been living here for five months now [on remand in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice] are really less than enviable, since I know nothing at all about what has become of my country or my family, and indeed about what is to become of myself. For the last two months we have been permitted to write letters and postcards, but we have received no replies.

  That all these circumstances are not without their effect on my health, nerves and frame of mind is self evident. Since May [1945] I have lost two stone in weight, of which I have lost one stone in the last eight weeks here in prison at Nuremberg alone. Now I cannot lose any more.

  I can well understand the fact that we soldiers are to be called to account by the Allied military Tribunal and that we have to be kept apart while on remand for investigations, but I find that my being deprived of even the most humble necessities for my cell is a far greater burden to bear than the admittedly wearying interrogations, where every testimony I make—being under oath—has to be carefully weighed.

  I mention only a few of the deprivations. From 5.30 pm, or when it grows dark—which at present is considerably earlier than that—one must sit and brood in darkness, because they have taken away my glasses and it is impossible to read even by the glimmer of light coming in from the corridor outside. Secondly, one has only a bunk and a small table, with no desk or shelf, and
even the wooden chair is taken out. Thirdly, there is nothing to hang or lay one’s clothes and underwear on: one is obliged to lay it on the stone floor, so it is impossible to keep one’s clothes clean. Fourthly, the window which ventilates the cell and regulates the temperature cannot be operated from inside. Fifthly, one is restricted to ten minutes’ exercise in the open air each day.

  Those are only the worst deprivations, which seem to go some way beyond what is already a decidedly austere furnishing of a remand prison. The effects of all this on my frame of mind, and the uncertainty over my fate, are gradually taking their toll of my physical and mental capacities.

  I must stress that by drawing up this list of reasons for my unchecked physical and mental decline I am not raising any complaints, because I have no doubt as to the basically good intentions of my immediate custodians [the Americans] and because I have benefitted personally from the manifold help of the American military surgeons, and I must make my gratitude to them quite plain. But my permanent back pains are physical torture to a man of sixty who is not even permitted a chair with a back to it.

  As will be seen from the main body of the Memoirs, Keitel had no time to read through or revise his original manuscript and, as one would expect, there are many errors of chronology, spelling and detail, and occasionally sentences without verbs or without endings. Bearing in mind that this is a historical document of the highest importance, the Editor has thought it necessary to amplify the punctuation and occasionally to correct the grammar of the original; and in the English edition the wrong dates and incorrect spelling of names have been corrected, though where there is some doubt about Keitel’s exact meaning, this has been noted or the text left uncorrected. On occasion, suggested endings for sentences and explanatory phrases have been inserted by the Editor in square brackets. Keitel’s original underlinings have been indicated by italics.