The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Read online

  In general, it is astonishing that despite the great mental strain of the weeks between his sentencing and execution the field-marshal should have been capable of writing such a coherent account of his life and description of his modus operandi during these decisive years in Germany’s history. But perhaps this work was a labour of love for a man who had had perforce to accustom himself to military desk-work in the previous two decades, and it was a diversion too, for it gave him something else for his mind to dwell on. Nobody will claim that the field-marshal was a born writer, nobody will recognise the work of a great historian in his writings. The diction of this, his first and only book, is often cumbersome and involved; possibly he would have altered and re-cast much of it had he had the time to do so.

  But if he little valued the prospect of writing a dramatic and colourful account, one can also recall that in his wartime memoranda and written orders he always tried to express what he had to say in a few honest and well-chosen words; it will be well to bear this simplicity in mind, in reading his Memoirs.

  * Erich von Manstein, Aus einem Soldatenleben (Bonn, 1958), p. 111.

  * Statements made by Keitel in affidavits for his defence counsel; 1/2 (Keitel Orders); and 1/3 (Keitel’s relations with Hitler).

  PART II

  The Memoirs

  of

  Field-Marshal Keitel

  2

  The Blomberg–Fritsch Crisis, 1938

  FOR the winter of 1936 to 1937, Blomberg had ordained that the armed forces were to hold joint manoeuvres: these were to enable us to make a study of the unified control of the armed forces in time of war, and clarify the problems latent in the dispute between us and the Army General Staff; the manoeuvres would put to a severe practical test the relative distributions of authority within the upper echelons of the military structure. As chief of the national defence department, General Jodl directed the manœuvres in close collaboration with myself. Blomberg, Jodl and myself hoped that they would resolve the conflicting points of view that prevailed, although we fully realised that we were tackling an extremely delicate subject for which we would reap not thanks but charges of treachery from the General Staff; I was fully aware that as the departmental chief responsible for the decisions to hold the manœuvres I would become a natural object for their enmities: I would be regarded as the spiritual originator of such an innovation [manœuvres directed by a joint operations staff].

  Blomberg held a final conference with his service generals and admirals, in Hitler’s presence.* The result was an outburst of unrestricted indignation from the Army General Staff: the cat was out of the bag. As Hitler and Blomberg left the room together, Fritsch forced his way through to me and announced that these plans for high-level control of the Army’s operations were insupportable. I believe it was the only time his wrath boiled up so much that he could not refrain from spontaneously venting his anger on me; we never spoke about this incident afterwards. In the eyes of the General Staff it was quite insupportable for the ‘Army Minister’ to aspire to exercise a command function; and the Army Directorate [Heeresleitung] announced it would refuse to recognise Blomberg’s absolute authority over the armed forces. They just would not hear of it. I was too simple, too innocent and too logical to see that by having spoken out for the solution which seemed to me the most obvious one, I had invited such enmities or hung such a millstone round my neck. After all, Blomberg had under Heye been Chief of the Army General Staff—called Troop Office [Truppenamt] at the time—and as such he had been a predecessor to Adam and the present office-holder, Beck, with whom my hitherto amicable relations had now been wrecked beyond repair.

  I had interviews with Beck that lasted often for hours on end, but none of my endeavours availed me in my efforts either to obtain his sanction for the decrees that Blomberg was about to issue on the unified control of the forces, or to take his objections into account. For example, I visited him several times with the draft of Blomberg’s first ‘Mobilisation and Battle Directive for the Armed Forces’ finally issued in the summer of 1937; I gave him the draft to look over and got it back from him with numerous marginal notes. They were largely of a formal nature, but they clearly betrayed his suppressed annoyance that anybody should dare to issue directives to his Army. When he told me finally that the General Staff had no intention of making any such ‘preparations’ as those Blomberg demanded on Hitler’s insistence, doubtless because of the General Staff’s political and strategic assessment of the situation, I altered the word ‘prepare’ to ‘review’, a very weak compromise, but one which Blomberg obviously overlooked when he eventually signed the document. Jodl and Zeitzler, his chief of operations, were very indignant at the time about my capitulation to Beck.

  In fact, the Army General Staff proceeded to bury the directive in a safe somewhere and took no action whatsoever. At the Nuremberg Trials the document has been accorded exaggerated importance, and the accounts Jodl and I have given of its origins have met only with sympathetic disbelief. In actual fact there was no Otto contingency plan [Fall Otto], no Green or Red contingencies, but only the most tenuous defence of our frontiers to the east and to the west, and preparations for the evacuation of the endangered frontier areas to the west of the Rhine and the east of the Oder. What we and Blomberg earnestly feared at the time was the possibility of sanctions of which we had become aware from Italy’s Abyssinian campaign; they continued to hang over us like the Sword of Damocles all the time that our rearmament programme was still only at the organisational stage; it must be remembered that we no longer had even a seven-division army on a war-footing, as it had been split up throughout the Reich since 1st October, 1935, to provide the nuclei for the formation of the new thirty-six-division army.

  At any time our neighbours would have been able to invade our frontiers with impunity and demand our disarmament. Our army disposed over neither tanks nor heavy artillery, and it was still insufficiently equipped with infantry weapons; our navy was of no significance and our air force was still being laboriously built up. Any kind of military intervention would have made light work of us. Nobody knew that better than Hitler, and it was in accordance with these dangers that he had adjusted his foreign policy.

  Blomberg’s next step in his campaign for closer control over the armed forces was to direct me to prepare military manœuvres involving the navy and the air force as well. During a Scandinavian voyage aboard the Grille, Blomberg defined the objectives of the manœuvres, which Jodl was to direct. When I later briefed Fritsch [Commander-in-Chief of the Army], as naturally the army would be bearing the lion’s share of the manœuvres, he just smiled sympathetically at the ‘war-situation’ foreseen and declared that the region of Mecklenburg earmarked for the manœuvres was quite inadequate. I asked him to select a controlling headquarters staff for the army, and units to reconnoitre the manoeuvre areas. He agreed to both requests, and selected General Halder, the then chief of the training department, to take over command of the headquarters staff. General Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, was naturally far too lofty to lend himself to such a venture, which he regarded as doomed from the start. As I only hovered in the background the whole time and played little part in the laborious preparations and direction of the manœuvres, I am in some position to pass judgment on them: I would regard the whole venture as having been highly successful; Jodl merits the greatest possible credit for them.

  A number of prominent guests had accepted Blomberg’s invitation to attend, including [Field-Marshal Sir Edmund] Ironside, the British Chief of Imperial General Staff and his staff, the Italian Head of State Mussolini and his entourage, and missions from various other countries and all the military attachés in Berlin. We showed off our fleet and submarine force for the first time, attacking Swinemünde; we showed our air force bombers in land- and naval-support operations, carrying out high-level and dive-bombing attacks; and we showed a weak armoured division equipped with light tanks mounting only machine-guns, as at the time we had no heavier models.
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  Blomberg’s guests met for coffee afterwards at the mess on the air force base at Tutow, where we had set up our manoeuvre headquarters during the last days of preparation. General Halder deserves particular credit for the success of this, our first attempt at combined operations, and for their having passed off so smoothly; he mastered his onerous rôle in exemplary fashion and made the biggest contribution to its overall success.

  The only note of discord that I was called upon to iron out was the sudden appearance at the ‘Blue’ party’s headquarters of a special battalion of military correspondents and war reporters raised by the Ministry of Propaganda. [Colonel-General von] Rundstedt’s chief of staff threw the gentlemen out with little ceremony, and the result was that they were deeply offended and said they wanted to go home at once. I had to go over there and soothe the party, which was being cared for by an officer provided by my Armed Forces Office anyway, and re-establish the peace between them and Hoepner, the chief of staff concerned, so that the correspondents could resume their activities and obtain the information they wanted.

  It was from Tutow that I paid my first visit to Chief-Forester Müller in the Darss peninsula, which had been declared a game reserve and to which Göring had invited me for a shot at a deer in the rutting season. I was very hospitably received, and I at once forged with him what was later to blossom into a warm friendship which brought me many happy hours in the peninsula. Early in October I bagged my deer.

  After the armed forces manœuvres, Mussolini rounded off his visit in Berlin where he was the guest of the Führer. In Berlin there was a parade in his honour, with a mass demonstration that evening at the Reich stadium with first Hitler and then Mussolini addressing the crowd of almost a hundred thousand from the rostrum, the latter speaking in German. The vast crowd broke up in a cloudburst and it rained very heavily, while for almost an hour we tried in vain to reach our motor car so that we could drive home.

  On 1st October, [1937] I partially reorganised the Armed Forces Office which by the enforced expansion of its functions had already begun to sprawl in several directions: I grouped what had hitherto been small departments into larger offices and branches, with the creation of an Armed Forces operations office [Wehrmacht-Führungsamt], an office for economics and armaments, an Intelligence office with three departments (I—Intelligence service; II—Sabotage, and III—Counter-espionage), to which latter office our foreign department was subordinated.

  Finally, I formed from the various branches which had formerly come under the general category ‘Inland’ a ‘General Armed Forces Office’. The offices were headed by generals given great latitude for independent action. This was our first, quite unintentional step towards what was later to become the OKW, the High Command of the Armed Forces, although at the time I had quite different motives for laying these foundations. My own idea, which was in close accordance with Blomberg’s line of thinking and to which he fully subscribed, was to distinguish more clearly between his command and his purely ministerial functions so that as Supreme Commander and the ultimate embodiment of military leadership he would have an Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, a High Command of the Armed Forces, while in his capacity as Minister he would have a kind of ministerial secretariat; he would then issue his orders and decrees under appropriate letter-headings, one as ‘Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces’, and the other as ‘Reich War Minister’. This second function would to all intents and purposes be transferred to me in all non-basic decisions; I would be a kind of ministerial Under-Secretary of State, while the former office would establish his command function more clearly than hitherto.

  In this way one really could prosecute a war: the Armed Forces operations office would acquire a Chief of General Staff in addition to myself, while I relieved the Supreme Commander of the greater part of his ministerial functions. Today I still consider that this solution was the correct one; the Commander-in-Chief of the Army did in fact proceed rather along those lines during the war in as much as he appointed a highly autonomous Commander of the Reserve Army to take over the main burden of the Army’s administrative work. It was plain to me that the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces needed a high-grade operations staff, although only quite a small one, and that the selection of its chief was a question of personality and trustworthiness which should, however, only be dealt with just before or on the outbreak of a war. I myself never had any personal ambitions for this office; I lacked the essential characteristics for it as a result of my military upbringing. Blomberg and I were in close agreement on that score; the reason why no such reorganisation ever took place during the Blomberg regime is well-enough known. The titles one would choose for the offices if such a reorganisation did take place were of marginal importance; I myself was thinking at the time in terms of ‘Chief of the OKW’ or ‘Quartermaster-General of the Armed Forces’.*

  My official contacts with the foreign military attachés were only of a loose and infrequent nature, as was the case with our own attaché office; I was glad that they did not burden me with official visits and, if these were unavoidable, I asked for the head of the Army’s attaché office to be present too, as he was familiar with how to handle such snooping around [Schnüffeleien]. Only Oshima [the Japanese military attaché] was a frequent and welcome visitor to my office; I looked forward to his visits, as I welcomed the opportunity of gathering information on their war in the Chinese theatre. It was he who told me during an official visit to us at about Christmas 1937 that in his view they could still take Nanking (its capture was imminent) and that they ought then to terminate their war with China by reaching a compromise whatever the cost. He was right, but unfortunately things went the other way as Tokio did not share his views and failed to recognise that war in vast spaces has no end if one is not easily satisfied as a victor, but must continually raise one’s sights and try to conquer more.

  With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War Hitler had finally written off the China policies pursued by Blomberg and Reichenau and had the German military mission recalled from China. Blomberg had prevailed upon Hitler to despatch Reichenau to China in the winter of 1935–1936; our go-between with China was a certain Herr Klein, a former banker and agent for the firm of Otto Wolff. He had built up hopes of very great trade with China whereby they would deliver raw materials for our re-armament programme in return for arms deliveries and the erection of munitions, small-arms and machine-gun factories and arsenals in China. Reichenau had been detailed to visit General von Seeckt out there, to get Herr Klein’s contracts with Chiang Kai-shek safely under lock and key and to familiarise himself with China.

  All that really was something for Reichenau’s political empire-building. While General von Seeckt was indeed the first adviser appointed by the uncrowned emperor of China [i.e. Chiang Kaishek] he had had to withdraw to the solitude of the mountains for health reasons and he was shortly replaced by General von Falkenhausen, the bustling head of the German military mission proper.

  Herr Klein’s contracts and the agreements signed by Reichenau on behalf of the German War Minister and therefore of the Reich government were never more than bits of paper, even though they did bring us a few shiploads of powdered egg and foodstuffs together with some thousands of tons of antimony, bismuth and other precious metals in scarce supply.

  It was left to me to set off our wasted gold investments against the account of our service budget with the Finance Minister. A high Chinese medal, presented on the occasion of a visit paid to Blomberg by the Chinese Minister of Finance, Kung, and his assistants was the sole estate bequeathed to us by our China policies.

  The Führer now insisted that we dismantle all the links between our countries, and that included sending home Chiang Kai-shek’s son, who was an officer in the Munich infantry regiment and lived with Reichenau, the Commander of Military District VII. The way was thus open for the German-Japanese rapprochement to which Hitler now aspired.

  Blomberg left me to visit General von Seeckt after his return from
China and inform him that the military mission there was to be wound up. General von Seeckt listened wordlessly to my statement, then imparted to me his own views on the situation in China and the Head of State’s plans for ending the incipient civil war. He declared that Chiang Kai-shek was the bitterest enemy of communism, and one ought not to overlook that fact. It was the last time I ever saw von Seeckt; he had probably observed that Blomberg avoided meeting him face to face. About six months later we buried him at the military cemetery.*

  [In January 1938 the engagement was announced between Field-Marshal Keitel’s eldest son, Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Keitel, and Dorothea von Blomberg, one of the War Minister’s daughters, with the blessing of both parents. Keitel made no attempt to hide the fact that with the engagement of his son to Blomberg’s daughter he was aiming at an entente with his superior, Field-Marshal von Blomberg himself.]

  I never dreamt that Blomberg was now on the lookout for a new wife for himself again; still less did I guess what was to follow. The only thing that had struck me was that twice he had driven out alone in his car to Oberhof, in the Thüringian forest, in civilian clothes, just leaving a note for me with his hotel and telephone number in case he was wanted urgently for anything on the telephone. His chief adjutant, Major von der Decken, merely shrugged his shoulders and told me there was nothing he could tell me in detail; he only knew that Blomberg was supposed to be visiting a lady who had broken an ankle skiing over there. I had my own ideas but I did not broach them to anybody, not even to my wife.