The man known to history as Wilhelm Keitel
was born on the 22nd of September 1882 at the Keitel family estate in Helmscherode,
near Gandersheim, in the lower Harz Mountains of north central Germany. His father was Carl Keitel, who, despite being
a middle class land owner in possession of a 650 acre estate at Helmscherode, struggled
to make ends meet, due to the poor soil quality, and difficulty in managing his large tract
of land. Wilhelm’s mother, Apollonia Vissering, came
from an old established family of tenant farmers in the Harz Mountain region. Wilhelm would barely know her, however, as
she died in childbirth while bringing his younger brother, Bodewin, into the world,
when Wilhelm was just six years old. The Keitel family had acquired their lands
at Helmscherode in 1871. It was a significant date. This was the same year that the thirty or
so small and medium sized states which ruled Germany were united together into a German
Empire, under the leadership of the most powerful German state, Prussia. This momentous event in Europe’s political
history was the work of the Prussian statesman, Otto von Bismarck, following a series of wars
against Austria, Denmark and France. The unification of Germany into a state which
included much of what is now western and northern Poland created a behemoth in Central Europe,
one which upset the balance of power across the continent. With its territorial, military, political
and economic power, the new German Empire was a state which could challenge Europe’s
foremost power, Great Britain. And so it would. As Wilhelm was growing up in the 1880s and
1890s Europe was dividing into two camps, one led by Germany, allied with the Empire
of Austria-Hungary, and the other between France and Russia. Britain remained aloof for the time being,
but it was the beginning of a long, slow drift towards a cataclysmic continental war. Wilhelm’s early years did not involve much
politics at all. The Keitels’ interests were largely limited
to agriculture, horses and hunting. What happened in Berlin largely only impacted
them when it affected protective tariffs on agricultural activity. For his education, Wilhelm had a private tutor. He only proved an average student, although
his teacher deemed him to be bright all the same. Later, he narrowly graduated from the Gottingen
gymnasium, something which concerned him little, as he believed his future lay with the family
pursuits and that he would take over part of the Keitel farm in later years. Something changed in his late teenage years,
however, and Wilhelm set his mind on a military career instead. This was perhaps a sign of the times, as Europe’s
armies were increasing in size and nations sought to swallow up what parts of the world
outside of Europe were not occupied by them already. Wilhelm’s decision to join the Prussian
military, which still maintained a distinct identity within the German Empire, was perhaps
doubly surprising, for the one constant of the Keitel family’s politics was its dislike
of Prussian dominance of the federal German Empire, a background which would set him apart
from many of his fellow officers in the German army in years to come. In 1901 Wilhelm joined the 46th Prussian Field
Artillery Regiment near Brunswick, not far from home. Because of his middle class background he
was quickly made a junior officer and he soon proved himself by his intelligence and efficiency. He was serving as a Second Lieutenant and
his superiors had noted his disposition for making good organizational and tactical decisions,
a vital trait in an effective commander. As a result he was promoted again to a Staff
Captain in the late 1900s when he was still just in his mid-twenties. He also married at this time. In 1909 he was wedded to Lisa Fontaine, the
daughter of an affluent farmer whose lands were not far from Hanover in northern Germany. The union was something of a meeting of opposites. Lisa was cultured, well read and fond of music. Wilhelm was a much more dour character, of
whom long-term acquaintances noted that he had probably never read a book that didn’t
concern military tactics or the history of warfare. They welcomed their first child, a girl they
named Nona, in 1911, followed by several more, including three boys, Karl-Heinz, Ernst and
Hans-Georg, who would all follow their father into the German military. Wilhelm’s life, like that of millions of
other Europeans, altered dramatically in the 1910s. Between 1910 and 1914 a series of regional
crises had arisen across the continent and in parts of Africa, such as Morocco, each
of which had threatened to turn the long simmering tensions between Europe’s powers into a
full blown war. By this time Britain had thrown in its lot
with France and Russia and the battle-lines were fairly clearly drawn, with these countries
on one side, and the combined forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other. The Balkans, in particular, had proved a volatile
area, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire’s control in the region. The new states that emerged vied with each
other, with Austria-Hungary and with Russia for control of the territory. Two small scale wars occurred here in the
early 1910s, but what really ignited tensions was the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on the streets of Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914, by a
Serb nationalist. A regional conflict developed in the weeks
that followed, between Austria-Hungary, Serbia and Russia, and this escalated by late July
to include Germany, France and Britain. With negotiations failing, Austria-Hungary
declared war on Serbia on the 28th of July 1914, following which Europe’s powers each
declared war on each other. By the 4th of August, Germany and Austria-Hungary
were at war with Britain, France and Russia. With the commencement of the First World War
in the months that followed, Keitel was deployed with the 46th Artillery to Flanders in Belgium,
which Germany had invaded in order to provide a route into north-eastern France. Most of the fighting on the Western Front,
between the Germans and the French and British, would take place in this region of France
over the next four years, in a large strip of land between Paris and the Belgian border. Keitel though did not see much action at the
beginning. Not long after he arrived on the Western Front,
he was injured in his right arm in a shrapnel explosion in September 1914. However, he soon recovered, and when he did,
he was appointed to the General Staff of the German military. His superiors had been told about his exceptional
organisational abilities, and brought Keitel into the central planning on the Western Front. His promotion was also based on his background
in the Artillery. As the war became a largely static conflict
between armies dug into underground trenches in north-eastern France, artillery became
the primary mode of striking the enemy through intense barrages, before a forward movement
from the trenches. It is unsurprising then to learn that many
of those who were promoted within the German military during the First World War came from
the Artillery regiments. Artillery or any other weapon could not win
the war for Germany, though its military was more effective than that of Britain, France
or Russia throughout the course of the war. The problem was a purely mathematical and
logistical one. Germany had fewer soldiers to fall back on
and was completely outnumbered once the United States joined the war on Britain and France’s
side in 1917. Moreover, the German economy was falling drastically
short on core goods which it needed to sustain the war effort. Unrest, both within the armed forces and amongst
the civilian population back home in Germany, eventually brought the war to an end before
the Germans were fully defeated on the battlefield. After a series of uprisings in Germany in
early November 1918, the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicated, bringing the German Empire to an
end. Two days later an armistice was signed, signalling
the end of the First World War. The peace agreements in the two years that
followed, notably the Treaty of Versailles, effectively stripped Germany of much of its
territory to create a newly independent Poland, and imposed huge war reparations on the country. Most significantly for Keitel, the German
republic was required to demobilise most of its armed forces and keep its army at a size
which would ensure it posed no further threat to Britain and France in years to come. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and
officers who would have wished to remain in the military were demobilised in 1919 and
1920, creating a huge number of disillusioned young and middle-aged German men, who began
joining paramilitary organisations in Germany in the early 1920s. Their resentments at Germany’s post-war
position and their own roles within it would be fostered by other embittered individuals,
with terrible consequences for Germany and Europe in the long run. Keitel was not amongst them. In the closing stages of the war he had received
successive promotions to become the First General Staff Officer of a reserve infantry
division and then the same commanding position of one of the Marine Corps stationed in Flanders. There he made the acquaintance of some of
the most senior commanders in the German military, and, as a result, he was included amongst
the one hundred thousand individuals that the new German government was allowed to keep
as part of its professional army under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Thus, after briefly considering retiring back
to the family estate at Helmscherode, Keitel joined the scaled back army of the new Weimar
Republic, so-named for the town of Weimar where its assembly had first convened. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles which
related to German demobilisation and disarmament were extremely restrictive. For instance, the new limited German military
force, named the Reichswehr, meaning ‘Reich Defence’, was not permitted to possess the
tanks that had been developed during the First World War, nor was it allowed to have an air-force. Artillery was allowed, but only with ordnance
which was capable of firing small 10.5 calibre shells. Moreover, the troops numbers were, as noted,
limited to 100,000 men, while the General Staff, the officer Corp which had run the
war for Germany, were prohibited. Consequently, Keitel and many other officers
in the Reichswehr were charged throughout the early 1920s by the new Chief of Staff,
General Hans von Seeckt, with finding ways around these regulations. Former members of the General Staff such as
Keitel were, for instance, simply re-classed as officers of a new Truppenamt, or ‘Troop
Office’. Keitel would serve as a Colonel and Branch
Chief within the Truppenamt until 1933. Throughout this time von Seeckt had commanders
like Keitel arrange their units in such a way that for every one man officially recorded
as a soldier in the Reichswehr there were two others who were unofficially trained and
could be quickly mobilised if needed. As a result the Reichswehr throughout the
1920s generally had three times more men than was allowed under the terms of the Treaty
of Versailles. While Keitel and his fellow officers were
trying to push the limits of the Treaty of Versailles as far as they could during the
1920s, the wider politics of Germany was going through many changes. In the early 1920s there had been huge discontent
amongst large sections of the population at how the war ended and particularly, as noted
earlier, amongst young and middle-aged men who had been in the military. Many of these joined the paramilitary units
such as the Freikorps or ‘Free Corps’ One of these, based out of Munich in Bavaria,
was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party for short. By 1923 they were largely led by an Austrian
demagogue by the name of Adolf Hitler, who had fought and been wounded in the war. In early November 1923 they even attempted
a regional coup or Putsch in Munich. It collapsed within hours and Hitler was subsequently
arrested, tried and sentenced to several years in prison, but the very fact that it was attempted
was a sign of simmering resentments amongst sub-sections of the German population at the
post-war settlement. The mid-1920s brought greater stability to
Germany’s politics. The country was beginning to reap the fruits
of the post-war economic boom which led to the period becoming known as the Roaring Twenties. Jazz was heard in every city’s music halls,
people often saw their first silent films at a picture theatre, and German Expressionism,
with its thriving heart in Berlin, became the foremost cultural movement in the world
during the 1920s. But this would not last. In the autumn of 1929 the stock markets on
Wall Street in New York City took enormous losses as the world’s economy cooled dramatically
after years of growth. A Great Depression followed and Germany’s
economy was hit particularly badly. Unemployment lines increased in size and soon
people began to run out of money. The wealthier in society soon had their life
savings eviscerated by rampant inflation. As this occurred, the centrist parties which
had controlled the Weimar Republic throughout the 1920s soon lost ground to more extreme
groups. On the left the Communists had increasing
support, while the Nazis were the primary beneficiary on the right. In the Reichstag elections in the summer of
1932 they won 37% of the vote, taking 230 seats in the 608 seat parliament. The centrist elements within government remained
determined to exclude them from power, but how long could that last? During these years Keitel was continuing to
serve in a wide variety of roles within the German armed forces. A notable assignment came in 1931 when he
was sent to Moscow. The German government had established an arrangement
with the government of Joseph Stalin in the Communist Soviet Union during the 1920s, whereby
the officers of the Red Army were advised by the German officers who remained in the
Reichswehr, largely deemed to be the best tactical commanders in the world. In return, the Red Army allowed the Germans
to train soldiers in Russia, so they would not be officially listed as forming part of
the sanctioned hundred thousand strong Reichswehr back in Germany. During his secondment here in 1931 Keitel
was impressed by the extent of the Soviet Empire and the size of the Red Army. It was probably at this time that his belief
that Germany should never go to war was developed. But this period also brought some health problems. Keitel, who was nearing his fiftieth year,
ignored an inflamed vein in his leg while in Russia and it deteriorated so much over
the months that followed that it developed into severe thrombosis. As a result, in December 1932, he and his
wife travelled to a spa at High Tatra in Czechoslovakia for rest and recuperation, a stint which extended
into early 1933. It was while Keitel was away from Germany
on this period of leave that he learned of a rapid shift in the German political situation. After a failed minority government headed
by Franz von Papen as Chancellor and a new election just months after the earlier one
in the summer of 1932, the deadlock had still not been broken in Berlin. Therefore in January 1933 a coalition of individuals
including von Papen and the heads of the German business community had convinced the German
President, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as German Chancellor in a coalition
government of other centrist and right-leaning parties. The centrists believed they could control
Hitler, and, by bringing him into the government, they would also be able to stop any further
rise of the left-leaning parties such as the Communists. They were immensely wrong in this judgement. Within weeks a new election was called in
which the Nazis used intimidation to increase their vote share and number of seats. Then a fire at the Reichstag was blamed on
Communist subversives and used to argue the necessity of passing an Enabling Act which
allowed the Nazis to rule by decree. The passage of the act on the 23rd of March
1933 spelled the end of the Weimar Republic and the inception of Nazi Germany. Keitel was not an individual one would automatically
have earmarked for promotion within this new dispensation. Politically he favoured von Papen and was
wary of the Nazis. Nevertheless, they were now in charge of the
German state, within the army of which Keitel was a commander. However, the Nazis did not immediately gain
full control over the military. Rather they began rearming, but allowed the
German officer class to maintain a degree of independence throughout much of the 1930s. A change of personnel did occur at the very
top, with General Werner von Blomberg, the chief of the Truppenamt, now promoted to become
the Minister of Defence within the new regime and effectively placed in charge of Germany’s
armed forces. Von Blomberg and Keitel were old acquaintances,
having first served together in the First World War. Accordingly, despite his own reservations
about the Nazis, Keitel was soon promoted. On the 1st of October 1933 he was made a Major-General
and Infantry Leader stationed at the city of Potsdam, while a year later he was entrusted
with overseeing the formation of a new infantry division based out of Bremen in northern Germany,
as part of the Nazi’s immediate drive to exceed the quotas and restrictions imposed
on the German army under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. A major concern of Keitel’s at this point,
and one that was shared by many other senior officers within the German armed forces in
1933 and 1934, was that the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung, or
SA, headed by Ernst Rohm, would try to effectively take over the German army or supersede it. By 1934 the SA had grown to two million men
and if it was merged with the German armed forces, old career officers like Keitel would
be dwarfed by the SA commanders. However, Hitler had other ideas. Fearing Rohm’s growing power himself, on
the 30th of June 1934 a series of attacks known as the Night of the Long Knives commenced,
whereby the SA leadership was deconstructed, Rohm was killed and the SA was largely neutralised
as a threat to either Hitler or the German armed forces. Thereafter its numbers reduced by forty percent
during the 1930s and it lost ground politically as a paramilitary group to Heinrich Himmler’s
SS. The official German army was further strengthened
with an announcement on the 16th of March 1935 that it was to rearm, not by exceeding
the official one hundred thousand man cap, but by conscripting soldiers who would be
trained, but not employed as career soldiers. It was a technical way of getting around the
restrictions, one which mirrored some of the methods employed in the 1920s. In the meantime Keitel’s own personal views
on Hitler and the Nazis had shifted. This was not simply owing to the decisive
manner in which the Nazi leader had clipped the wings of the SA in 1934, but also to Keitel’s
first personal meeting with the German Chancellor. Keitel met Hitler at a conference of Nazi
leaders and army officers at Bad Reichenhall late in 1933, where they had a brief conversation. Fleeting as it was, this minor meeting seems
to have left quite an impression on Keitel. There is no clear way of explaining this. Many other senior members of the Nazi regime
recorded a similar enthrallment upon their first encounter with the Nazi leader, but
there is often little way of knowing whether this was the actual case or whether individuals
such as Keitel used it later as a means of deflecting from their actions between 1933
and 1945. Whatever the explanation for it was, thereafter
Keitel became a committed adherent of the Nazi cause. In 1935 a major change occurred in the management
of the German armed forces which had considerable implications for the remainder of Keitel’s
life. On the 21st of May that year the Reichswehr,
the armed force which had been created in the aftermath of the First World War, was
rebranded and reorganised into the Wehrmacht, meaning the ‘Defence Force’. Its name was misleading, for this marks a
significant moment in Germany’s military expansion towards an aggressive war. When Hitler announced its creation he touted
that it would have 36 divisions, a number which would have exceeded the one hundred
thousand cap imposed under Versailles by fivefold at least. Then, in December, General Ludwig Beck added
48 tank battalions to the prescribed build-up and these measures, combined with Hermann
Goering’s establishment of a German air-force called the Luftwaffe from the spring of 1935,
made it clear that Germany was now re-arming in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Moreover, as the organisational body which
would have central oversight of the armed land forces, or Heer, the air-force, the tank
battalions and the navy, or Kriegsmarine, the Wehrmacht would be the central organisation
involved in overseeing Germany’s rearmament in the coming years, a process which Hitler
initially wanted completed in a decade and then scaled back to as little as four years. The new Wehrmacht was headed by General von
Blomberg whose ministerial title was also now changed from Minister of Defence to Minister
of War. However, the organisational running of the
Wehrmacht would be placed in another individual’s hands. The man von Blomberg recommended to Hitler
was Wilhelm Keitel. The proposal was seconded by General Werner
von Fritsch, the Commander in Chief of the German land forces. But Keitel was initially unhappy. While this was certainly a promotion it would
be a return to a desk job in Berlin as an administrator, whereas he had enjoyed his
time in charge of infantry divisions at Potsdam and Bremen. Despite these reservations, and at the urging
of his wife, Lisa, who wished to return to Berlin, he accepted the position and was appointed
as Chief of the Wehrmacht, junior only to von Blomberg within it and effectively in
charge of the day to day running of the body which had overall oversight of all branches
of the German military. In tandem he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant
General on New Year’s Day 1936, shortly after taking up the new position in Berlin. Keitel’s task was an arduous one. When he assumed office in October 1935 his
predecessor as the most senior bureaucrat of the German military, Major-General Walter
von Reichenau, had met him wearing his tennis gear and handed him a dossier of what he said
were the most vital documents he would need. Then von Reichenau went to play tennis and
Keitel was left in charge of administering a rapidly expanding Wehrmacht. Yet the chief problem he faced was not the
paperwork itself, but the conflicting jurisdictions of individuals within the various organisations
which the Wehrmacht oversaw. For instance, as head of the German air-force,
the Luftwaffe, Herman Goering was theoretically Keitel’s junior to whom Keitel could issue
directives. But Goering was simultaneously the deputy
leader of Germany as Hitler’s second in command. As a result, it was difficult for Keitel to
issue him with commands and impossible for him to impose them if Goering decided he did
not want to comply. Similar overlapping jurisdictions made his
job difficult, notably with General von Fritsch, who believed that the German land forces should
run their own affairs without any operational oversight. This problem was compounded by Hitler’s
unwillingness to intervene, as he was convinved that competition between his ministers and
generals was an effective way of avoiding anyone becoming too powerful. Despite these limitations, the German armed
forces continued to grow at pace in the course of 1936 and 1937. By 1938 the 36 divisions which Hitler had
proclaimed would be recruited and trained in 1935 had become a reality and the land
forces of the Nazi state had risen to 600,000 men from the cap of 100,000 a few years earlier. Hundreds of German Panzer tanks were being
produced and the Luftwaffe had grown to over a thousand operational aircraft, consisting
of a mixture of bombers and fighters, while the Kriegsmarine was constructing new U-boat
submarines and had begun construction in 1936 of two enormous battleships, intended to be
the largest military boats afloat in the world, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz. Keitel was the man at the top of all this
activity. From his office in Berlin he oversaw staff
members who ensured resources were directed to the shipyards and airfields to construct
ships and planes, while the Wehrmacht’s central offices were also charged with overseeing
details regarding bullets and artillery ordnance. Effectively, Keitel was the logistician who
oversaw the nuts and bolts of German rearmament between 1935 and 1939, in the run up to the
second world war. A major development impacted Keitel early
in 1938. For all that Hitler and the Nazis controlled
the German state, the military had always maintained a level of independence, with von
Blomberg and von Fritsch willing to push back on commands from the Nazi leadership. As the impending war neared, Hitler wished
to remove these two. A perfect opportunity presented itself in
early 1938. On the 12th of January that year, von Blomberg,
whose wife had passed away some years earlier, remarried to Erna Gruhn. Within days the Berlin police had obtained
information that Gruhn possessed a long criminal record and had once posed for pornographic
photographs, as well as being arrested on charges of prostitution years earlier. This was deemed unacceptable for a Minister
and the Commander of the Wehrmacht and von Blomberg was asked to annul the marriage by
Hitler. Von Blomberg refused and instead resigned
on the 27th of January. These events inspired Goering and Himmler
to concoct allegations of homosexuality, which was illegal in Nazi Germany, against von Fritsch,
who was an unmarried bachelor. Following this, von Fritsch was also removed
as head of the German land forces in early February, completing the removal of the two
figures Hitler had become to view as impediments to a more aggressive German military build-up. The Blomberg-Fritsch Affair led to a shaking
up of the command structure of the German military. Keitel had played a central role in bringing
to light the revelations about von Blomberg’s new wife and he was increasingly in favour
with Hitler. He had already begun to earn the reputation
of a biddable ‘yes-man’, which would come to define him in subsequent years. Therefore it was he who was chosen to succeed
von Blomberg in the aftermath of the affair. Hitler took over direct control of the Wehrmacht
himself in anticipation of the impending war, but Keitel remained as head of the organisational
wing and succeeded von Blomberg as War Minister in all but name. He was not given a ministerial rank but was
appointed to the government cabinet as de-facto War Minister. Hitler is deemed to have wanted Keitel for
the job because he was advised that he was an efficient bureaucrat, who would not seek
to prevent Hitler from calling the shots with regards to the Wehrmacht. For his part Keitel was also made a Colonel
General shortly afterwards and was awarded the Nazi Golden Party Badge, a distinction
usually awarded to individuals who had been party members back in the mid-1920s, when
Hitler and his followers were little more than a small collection of disaffected misfits
living in Bavaria. All of this was occurring as the drift to
war was accelerating. The rearmament of Germany had been followed
by the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936, but thereafter German aggression
had been rather limited. It quickly accelerated early in 1938 as pressure
was applied on Austria internally to build support for a union with Germany. The Austrian government had faced pressure
from Austrian Nazis operating from just over the border in southern Germany since 1933,
but by early 1938 the pressure for unification was so strong that a referendum was declared
on the matter. Hitler pre-empted the result by moving German
troops into Austria before the vote was held and it passed overwhelmingly thereafter, following
which Austria was subsumed into a ‘Greater Germany’ in March 1938. Thereafter pressure was building for Germany
to be allowed to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia, which had a large
ethnically German population. Britain and France caved to these demands
in the autumn of 1938, but this did not stop Hitler from effectively annexing the remainder
of Czechoslovakia anyway in the spring of 1939. This was the final act of appeasement and
it was now being made clear to Berlin that if the Nazis moved against Poland as they
proposed, there would be a war. As all of this was occurring, Keitel was overloaded
with work. Hitler was a hard taskmaster, doubly so when
he determined that Keitel would always make himself available at any hour of the day. It was not uncommon for the chief bureaucrat
of the Wehrmacht to receive phone calls at home at night from Hitler about various operational
matters. Moreover, as Chief of the Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht, or OKW, and the de-facto Minister of War, Keitel was also expected to appear
at many social events in Berlin, which further stripped him of his time. All of this was compounded by a lack of strategic
planning about the expansion of the army from early 1938 onwards. For instance, when the German land forces
moved into Austria in the spring of that year Keitel was somewhat horrified to discover
there had been no prior strategy for how all of this would be organised through his office. He was simply expected to make it up as events
unfolded. This process repeated itself many times in
the years that followed, but Keitel never complained. He remained timidly loyal to the Chancellor
and had become known as ‘Lakeitel’, a play on “lackey” and “Keitel”. It was all a thankless challenge for him and
quite revealingly there is no evidence of anybody ever trying to displace Keitel or
coveting his office as Chief of the OKW. The first steps that would lead to Keitel
being implicated in war crimes were also beginning at this time. It seems to have taken the head of the Wehrmacht
aback, when, in the lead up to the intervention in Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler mused
that if the Czechs were to kill the German ambassador in Prague, it would provide a good
justification for intervention in the country. The import of the statement was clear. Hitler was considering having Germany’s
own ambassador to Czechoslovakia killed as an excuse for intervening in the country. Events like this and many others would later
form the basis for charges that Keitel had been directly involved in fomenting war in
Europe. Yet, there were other more glaring developments. The Nazis had always been rabidly Anti-Semitic
and, shortly after coming to power, had introduced the Nuremburg Laws, pieces of legislation
that effectively disenfranchised Germany’s Jewish people. Now on the night of the 9th of November 1938
pogroms occurred all across Germany as gangs of Nazis and other Germans attacked thousands
of German Jews and their businesses, murdering many, injuring many more and doing untold
amounts of damage to Jewish synagogues and property. It’s difficult to tell what Keitel made
of all of this in 1938, but years later he would become complicit in the Nazi state’s
Anti-Semitism when it took an ever more sinister turn. The war which had been brewing for two years
finally came in September 1939. For months Germany had been making noise on
the international stage about its supposed rights to parts of western Poland, in the
same way it had with Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938. This time Britain and France were clear that
there would be no concessions. However, they were caught unawares when, in
late August 1939, news broke of a major diplomatic agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. Fascism and Communism were ideologically opposed
and yet a Non-Aggression Pact had been worked out, with secret clauses allowing for Berlin
and Moscow to effectively carve up the lands between their nations in Eastern Europe between
them. Russia would take much of the Baltic States
and some of Poland, while Germany would take the bulk of Poland. A few days later a false flag operation was
conducted on the German-Polish border to make it seem that the Poles had been the aggressor. There probably was no need for this latter
act, as nobody was fooled. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st September
1939 in retaliation for this concocted act of hostility, both Britain and France responded
by declaring war on Germany two days later. The Second World War had commenced. Two days prior to the invasion of Poland,
Keitel was appointed by Hitler to the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich. This was a six man committee which has been
viewed by some as a species of War Cabinet. In addition to Keitel it consisted of Herman
Goering, who chaired the Council and was head of both the Luftwaffe and the war economy;
Rudolf Hess, the deputy Fuhrer to Hitler in the Nazi Party; Wilhelm Frick, the Minister
of the Interior; Walter Funk, the Minister for Economic Affairs; and Hans Lammer, the
Chief of the Reich Chancellery, who would act as Hitler’s representative on the Council. Within this was a smaller subcommittee consisting
of Goering, Keitel and Frick which could issue decrees. There has been widespread debate as to how
much authority the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich actually had. It certainly could and did oversee many matters
relating to the production of war material and other logistical issues, but it would
be untrue to claim that it had any major decision-making role in the strategic planning of the war. Once the Second World War broke out Hitler
was in charge of it and the decisions were made by him and whichever generals, ministers
and officials he chose to consult with at a given time. Initially the war went exceptionally well
for Germany. Poland was conquered in a matter of weeks
in September 1939. Then, after a winter of consolidation, in
the spring of 1940 Denmark and Norway were occupied in two targeted campaigns, placing
Germany in a strong position in the North Atlantic. With this done, in early May 1940 the German
armed forces steam-rolled through the Low Countries for the second time in 26 years
to invade France. A campaign spearheaded by the German Panzer
tank divisions quickly captured Paris and pushed the British Expeditionary Force to
the north coast around Dunkirk, from where they just managed to pull off a daring naval
retreat to Britain. Even with this limited success, Britain stood
alone by the end of June 1940 against Germany in western Europe and Nazi flags were flying
over capital cities from Paris to Warsaw. Keitel oversaw the armistice negotiations
with the French that summer which resulted in the creation of a puppet state that governed
southern France for the duration of the war. All of these conquests seem to have deeply
impressed Keitel, who was now rumoured to have proclaimed that Hitler was ‘the greatest
general of all time’. That assertion would be tested and proved
profoundly wrong in the years that followed. Keitel was rewarded by Hitler in the aftermath
of the conquest of Western Europe. He was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal
on the 19th of July 1940. At the same time he was provided with an endowment
of 100,000 Reichsmarks, a huge sum which he seems to have been embarrassed by, claiming
that one was typically not made a Field Marshal after years of filling out paperwork at a
desk. He deposited the money in a bank account and
never went near it. But there were also some changes which seemed
to undermine his position in the summer of 1940. It was at this time that Dr Fritz Todt was
placed in charge of a new ministry of war production, with responsibility for manufacturing
war material and armaments. This was a core remit of Keitel’s office
and could have been viewed as a snub to the Office of the OKW, but from a practical perspective
made sense in terms of the ever growing mountain of responsibilities which Keitel had foisted
upon him. In the summer of 1940 Keitel was also drafted
into planning for a proposed German invasion of Russia. The Nazis had long viewed the Bolshevik Communists
of the Soviet Union as their ideological enemies and the treaty they had agreed to in 1939
was nothing more than a temporary marriage of convenience between the two nations. Thus, a conference was held on the 31st of
July 1940, just weeks after the conclusion of hostilities in Western Europe, where Hitler
consulted with Germany’s senior military commanders about how an invasion of Russia
could be launched and what the probability of success would be. Keitel was included along with others such
as Alfred Jodl, Keitel’s close associate in the OKW, and Erich Raeder, the head of
the German navy, the Kriegsmarine. At the meeting they generally protested, arguing
that German military capacity could not match Russia’s at full strength and that any proposed
invasion should certainly wait until Britain had been conquered or brought to accept terms. Despite their reservations, they were commanded
to report back to Hitler on the logistics involved. The report that was produced pointed towards
difficulties that Germany would face in continuing to obtain supplies of vital war materials,
such as rubber, once they declared war on the Soviet Union. Despite his general reservations about the
feasibility of a German invasion of Russia, Keitel had these sections omitted from the
report, claiming that Hitler would not want such negativity obstructing him. In the end the invasion went ahead. In the summer of 1941 Germany initiated the
largest land invasion ever undertaken in military history, sending hundreds of thousands of
men into eastern Poland and the Ukraine towards Russia. As in Western Europe the previous year, Operation
Barbarossa, as it had been codenamed, initially went very well. Through the August of 1941 the German front
lines surged ever further north-eastwards towards the two major targets of Leningrad
and Moscow. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, considered
negotiating peace terms which would surrender huge tracts of land in Poland and Ukraine
to Germany, but eventually determined not to. It was a wise decision in the long run. As winter set in, the German advance stalled
before taking the two major Russian cities. Then as it got ever colder the Germans realised
they had inadequate clothing for the harsh Russian winter. Keitel was centrally involved in the logistical
work needed to remedy this situation in the weeks that followed, but in the end it was
not the cold but sheer manpower that would prove decisive. As 1941 turned into 1942 the Germans failed
to end the conflict, and, as ever more Russians were drafted into the Red Army, and their
war economy went into overdrive, the tide began to turn. When a final push by the Germans to take the
southern city of Stalingrad failed the following autumn, the movement of soldiers switched
direction and slowly, from early 1943, the Russians began pushing the Germans back towards
Berlin. Throughout these years Keitel continued to
act as Chief of the OWK, overseeing much of the logistical and organisational work of
the Wehrmacht with his staff in Berlin. He was also regularly dispatched to capitals
such as Budapest, Bucharest and Helsinki, to handle Germany’s negotiations with its
smaller military allies in Europe, such as Hungary, Romania and Finland. By this time he was increasingly unhappy with
his position, remarking in his private notes that he wished to be relieved of his duties. Indeed, he had tried to resign on at least
three occasions before the end of the war, but Hitler had refused to allow him to do
so, despite the ever growing frequency of their arguments. This interpersonal conflict was a regular
feature of life for the senior German generals between 1941 and 1944. Ensconced in his Wolf’s Lair, his base on
the Eastern Front in Poland, Hitler was becoming an irrational, bitter individual, plagued
by numerous serious physical ailments and a growing addiction to a combination of hard
drugs, including amphetamine, cocaine and morphine. This was the individual that Keitel had to
engage with throughout the remainder of the Second World War. Yet we should have little sympathy for him,
for Keitel was also profoundly complicit in the ever growing litany of war crimes and
atrocities being committed by the Nazi regime. He had been fully aware as early as the invasion
of Poland in the autumn of 1939 of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, effectively SS death
squads that were sent into areas after the initial advance of the German Heer to carry
out the mass murder of groups who were deemed enemies of the Nazi state. In 1941 he would have known that their actions
had escalated to such atrocities as the massacre at Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jewish victims were
murdered in the space of two days. Other targets were Soviet prisoners of war,
Romani people or those with disabilities. And it wasn’t simply that Keitel was aware
of these activities. He was actively involved in them. In May 1941 he was a signatory to the order
entitled ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia’, which designated
Bolshevik civilians and Jewish people in Eastern Europe as groups whom ‘ruthless measures’
could be used against. In September Keitel issued a follow-up directive
to ensure that these guidelines were being fully implemented and in correspondence from
these years he seemed to exhibit a personal Anti-Semitism, beyond simply reflecting Nazi
ideology. Just months later Keitel was the central figure
in the passage of the Night and Fog decree in December 1941. This was executed through the office of the
OKW and Keitel was the main individual who communicated Hitler’s directive. The decree stipulated that suspected political
dissidents in occupied territories throughout Europe, such as France, Poland and Austria,
could be detained and transported to Germany. They could then be interred there and questioned
according to military practice. The motive for this was to allow the deportation
of individuals of certain nationalities including from regions in France, the Low Countries
and elsewhere where the Nazis were still trying to disguise what was being carried out in
broad daylight in Eastern Europe. In practice the Night and Fog decree led to
tens of thousands of political prisoners being detained and sent to the network of concentration
camps the Nazis had established across Central and Eastern Europe. Here Europe’s Jews and other groups such
as the Romani people were being murdered by the Nazis by late 1941. In issuing the Night and Fog Decree in 1941,
and an extension of it known as the Terror and Sabotage Decree in 1944, Keitel actively
facilitated the work of the camps and increased the number of deaths that the regime was responsible
for substantially. This drive to slaughter as many of the supposed
enemies of the Nazi state as possible was taking place even as the war effort moved
from military reversals on the Eastern Front in 1942 to a more fatal state. By early 1943 it was not simply the case that
the Russians had begun to push the Germans back towards Poland and the Ukraine. The German expeditionary force in North Africa,
which had been sent there to aid Germany’s ally Italy, was also defeated that spring
by the British and their new allies, the United States, who had entered the war in the closing
weeks of 1941. Victory in North Africa was followed by the
invasion of Sicily in Italy in the summer of 1943 by the Western Allies. Then, when the Italian government removed
its Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, and attempted to negotiate peace terms with the
Allies, Hitler committed further resources into establishing a breakaway Italian government
in the north of Italy headed by Mussolini, but which was effectively a German puppet
state. And in the summer of 1944 the British, Americans,
Canadians and other Allied forces opened a Western Front in northern France. The conquest of France which followed was
only slightly slower than the rapidity with which Germany had occupied it in 1941. And as the Russians moved west throughout
Poland and the Ukraine the situation was dire. By the opening weeks of 1945 the Russians
were moving into Eastern Germany as the Western Allies headed into the Rhineland. The result of the war was inevitable now,
but it remained to be seen how the final chapter would play out. The worsening military situation did produce
some limited resistance within Germany. Noteworthy in this respect was a plot which
was hatched in the summer of 1944 by a group of German military commanders led by Colonel
Claus von Stauffenberg. This aimed to kill Hitler using a briefcase
bomb left next to him during a meeting at the Wolf’s Lair on the 20th of July 1944. The bomb detonated and injured nearly all
of the two dozen people in the room after Stauffenberg had left, but Hitler was not
killed, as the conference table absorbed much of the blast before it struck him. Keitel was instrumental in the hours that
followed in communicating with base commanders in Berlin and elsewhere to prevent Stauffenberg
from initiating the second part of the plan to launch a coup in Berlin and then attempt
to negotiate with the Allies. The plot was quickly suppressed as a result. Thereafter Keitel sat on the military court
which was responsible for questioning hundreds of military officers in an effort to determine
who had been involved with Stauffenberg. In the end, over 7,000 people were arrested
and approximately 5,000 were executed, many of them after being tortured in order to determine
how deep the plot ran within the military and civilian administration. The failure of the 20 July Plot ensured that
Berlin would have to endure a bloody siege by the Allies. Hitler had no intention of surrendering and
all efforts to implore him to consider negotiations by other individuals were deemed borderline
treasonous. Instead, old men and teenage boys were armed
with guns to try to slow the Russian advance into Berlin as Hitler spent his last days
in the Bunker of the Reich Chancellery in the centre of the city. The Battle of Berlin itself, once the Russians
had encircled the city and cut off supply routes, commenced in mid-April 1945. The city was shelled relentlessly and it was
defended by anything but an effective army, but still the Germans held out for over two
weeks. Keitel bizarrely called for counter-attacks
during this period to push the Russians back, a tactical impossibility by this time. By the last days of April it was clear that
the end was near. In the end, Hitler committed suicide in the
Reich Chancellery Bunker on the 30th of April 1945. The following day his designated successor,
the Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, did likewise. Berlin’s garrison surrendered on the 2nd
and fighting in the capital of the Reich, which was meant to last a thousand years,
came to an end. It now just remained for the peace to be agreed. In the dying days of the Reich, many senior
members of the regime and the military had begun leaving Berlin and headed toward northern
Germany and the Danish border. The Allies had not occupied this part of Germany
yet, due to the view of the British, Americans and other Western Allies that it was not strategically
significant enough to warrant diverting forces northwards during their eastwards drive to
Berlin. Thus, a government of sorts was established
at the town of Flensburg near the German-Danish border at the beginning of May after Hitler’s
and Goebbels’ suicides in Berlin. This was headed by Karl Donitz, the head of
the Kriegsmarine, who briefly became President of Germany following Hitler’s suicide. The Flensburg government had little purpose
other than to officially bring the war to an end. Originally Keitel’s close associate in the
office of the OKW, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, signed the surrender of the German armed
forces in the city of Reims in France on the 7th of May 1945, but after Joseph Stalin indicated
his unwillingness to accept a German surrender to the Western Allies in France, when his
country had borne the heaviest toll of the war, Keitel was sent to Berlin, where he signed
the final Instrument of Surrender on the 8th of May, which became known as Victory in Europe
Day. Perhaps the men at Flensburg who had overseen
the Nazi regime’s reign of terror across Europe since 1939 wondered what would happen
to them now. We know from accounts of the time and memoirs
that some believed the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would quickly come to blows
and that Germany would be quickly rehabilitated once this next war began. Some were even deluded enough to believe that
National Socialism in some form would survive in Germany. They were soon disabused of this notion. Keitel was one of the first to be arrested
on the 13th of May, just five days after signing the surrender in Berlin, on the orders of
US military police. He was quickly moved to the Palace Hotel in
Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg, where he was soon joined by many of the other senior
surviving members of the Nazi regime and the German military, notably Herman Goering; the
Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop; the leader of the General Government which
had ruled occupied Poland, Hans Frank; and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the SS commander who
had governed the occupied Netherlands during the war. Here these individuals were held captive in
what was codenamed Camp Ashcan until such time as the Allies were ready for them to
stand trial. Keitel; Goering; Frank; Seyss-Inquart; and
others such as the German Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the
senior surviving member of the SS, went on trial late in 1945 in what was the most significant
war crimes trial in the aftermath of the Second World War. As chief bureaucrat and organiser of the German
armed forces and the de-facto Minister for War between 1938 and 1945 it was undoubted
that Keitel was going to be tried with these senior ministers. They were charged with a multiplicity of crimes,
the most pivotal being fomenting war in Europe, committing war crimes and being cognisant
of and involved in the creation and administering of the concentration camp system. These individuals stood trial for nearly an
entire year at the city of Nuremburg between late 1945 and the autumn of 1946. It was difficult to find a German lawyer who
would represent Keitel, who had chosen to plead not guilty. His defence throughout the proceedings was
that, as a military officer, he was following the commands of his immediate superior, Hitler,
throughout the war, a defence which the Tribunal rejected on the basis that the crimes being
committed in the concentration camps and elsewhere, which Keitel was aware of and complicit in,
were so egregious that no command structure warranted obeying them. It was also explicitly noted that he had signed
and overseen implementation of the Night and Fog decree when he was sentenced. He was thus convicted and condemned to death. Keitel requested to be executed by firing
squad, as a German military officer would typically be, this request was declined, however,
on the basis that his actions were criminal, not military. Thus, he was to be hanged on the 16th of October
1946, just days after the trial concluded, along with others like Frank and Kaltenbrunner
who had been condemned to death. Goering committed suicide in his cell the
night beforehand and as a result Keitel was the second executed after the Foreign Minister,
Joachim von Ribbentrop. The method used by the American executioners
was a standard drop method whereby the prisoner would have a noose fitted around their neck
and would then be dropped through a trap door. However, Keitel’s execution was botched
and when he fell through the trap door his face cracked against the edge of it, breaking
his nose. Moreover, the American executioner, John C.
Woods, had miscalculated the amount of rope needed for some of the prisoners and, as a
result, several of those who were executed that day did not die quickly from having their
necks broken, but were strangled to death. In Keitel’s case it was 24 minutes before
his convulsions stopped fully. In later executions carried out after subsequent
trials at Nuremburg the method was changed so that there was no repeat of these botched
executions. Once the executions ended on the 16th of October,
Keitel and Goering’s bodies and the bodies of the other nine were cremated in Munich
and their ashes were scattered in the River Isar in southern Bavaria. Wilhelm Keitel is a difficult individual to
assess as one of the most senior ranking members of the Nazi regime. On the one hand he appears to have been a
powerful individual who was wholly complicit in the very many crimes committed by Nazi
Germany. During the mid-1930s he was responsible for
overseeing the bureaucracy involved in German rearmament, while between 1938 and 1945 he
was effectively the Minister for War and the head of the Wehrmacht, answerable only to
Hitler. But at the same time there is little escaping
the feeling that Keitel was often a powerless functionary, an individual who handled mountains
of paperwork and was deemed a lackey. This certainly was the opinion of many of
the higher ranking members of the regime and army, who often didn’t bother to salute
Keitel, their supposed superior. But however much these qualifications might
suggest that Keitel was simply a military officer following commands blindly, he still
had his own mind, however weak it might have been, and he was deeply involved on a personal
level in facilitating the actions of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front and initiating the Night
and Fog decree. Given all this the judgement of the Nuremburg
tribunal was surely correct, that no matter how much Keitel may have protested that he
was simply following orders as a military officer, it was his duty as a human being
to refuse to follow those orders. For that reason he was a war criminal just
as surely as the others that he stood trial with at Nuremburg. What do you think of Wilhelm Keitel? Was he a mere sycophant and mindless bureaucrat
or should he be viewed as an influential figure within the Nazi regime? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
