The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel

The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel Edited with an Introduction and Epilogue by WALTER GÖRLITZ Translated by David Irving First published in the United States of America in 1966 by Stein and Day/Publishers © William Kimber and Co., Limited, 1965 English translation copyright © 1965 by David Irving Classic edition Copyright © 2010 Parforce UK Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed by email to Permissions, [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-14954 Irving, David John Cawdell, 1938– The Memoirs of Field Marshal Keitel. © Musterschmit-Verlag, Göttingen, Germany 1961 p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-872197-20-3 1. Keitel, Wilhelm, 1882– 1946. 2. Statesmen– Germany– Biography. 3. National socialists– Biography. 4. Germany– History– 1933– 1945. I. Title. DD247.K42 A313 1966 943.086´092´4– dc19 Printed in the United States of America focal point publications Windsor SL4 6QS (UK) Focal Point Classic Edition A Note by the Translator The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel were written in manuscript in six weeks in the prison at Nuremberg, beginning on September 1, 1946. The original was (as of 1961) in the possession of the Keitel family. His full narrative of the years 1933 to 1938 was included in the German edition, but in this English edition Keitel’s life up to 1937 is dealt with in the editor’s introduction, which contains sufficient extracts from Keitel’s own account of those years. See our website at www.fpp.co.uk/Keitel for the omitted passages, and further items from the Keitel Papers. The translation of the Memoirs proper begins with 1937, on page 35. Balancing these omissions, some passages from the original manuscript which were not included in the German edition appear in this translation, as for example the description of the Munich crisis and the planning for the invasion of Britain (see appendix, page 287, for an explanation). I have corrected name spellings, added accents, and inserted in the index the missing first names where possible. I would add that some of editor Walter Görlitz’s 1961 notes might seem over-pedantic and politically attuned to the temper of those times. Thus he minimizes the real number of Polish officers massacred by the Soviets at Katyn, which was in fact 22,500 (page 99); he insists that Manstein, not Hitler, sired the victorious strategy against France, he makes dutiful reference to “Hitler’s fearful blunders,” and he allows himself a robust comment (page 124n) that Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union was “an unprovoked aggression” – a view which contrasts with Keitel’s, and cannot be so blithely sustained in the light of Soviet-era documents since obtained. Published as it was before the 1971 “watershed” when the word Holocaust first began to appear, and before the subsequent revelations by historians, readers will find only sparse references to that atrocity in either the manuscript or the editor’s notes; and there is not a hint that Keitel or the German High Command ever realised the extent to which their secret codes had been compromised and were virtually transparent to their enemies – a fact still secret in the 1960s, and which the British and American Joint Chiefs of Staff vainly ordered in a September 1945 directive should remain so in perpetuity, to prevent the Germans from ever claiming they had been defeated unfairly – to kill off another “Dolchstoss” (stab-in- the-back) legend at birth, as the chiefs of staff put it. — david irving, Windsor, April 2010 From a photo by Walter Frentz Wilhelm Keitel wrote these extraordinary memoirs in the six weeks before he was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. Here, surely, is one of the most dramatic publications of the post-war years; as Chief of the German High Command between 1938 and 1945, Keitel was second only to Hitler in the direction of the most devastating war of modern times. The revelations in this book include the background to the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, as well as an interlacing of the rivalry (spiced by a moral scandal) between the traditional German officers and the Nazi S.S. We see Keitel at Hitler’s side throughout the fateful month of August, 1939, when the future of the world was balanced on a knife-edge. Then the holocaust: the campaign against Poland, the low countries, and the blitz-conquest of France – the whole astonishing run of military successes seen through the eyes of the triumphing German leaders. he MeMoir 8 FiELD MArHAL KeiteL Introduction and Epilogue by WALTER GÖRLITZ Translated by David Irving F FOCAL POINT CONTENTS PART I 1 The Background and Career of Field-Marshal Keitel, 1882 – 1946, by Walter Görlitz 11 PART II 2 The Blomberg – Fritsch Crisis, 1938 35 3 From Austria to the end of the French Campaign, 1938 – 1940 54 4 Prelude to the Attack on Russia, 1940 – 1941 120 5 The Russian Campaign, 1941 – 1943 165 6 Extracts from Keitel’s Wartime Letters to his Wife 187 7 The Bomb Plot, July 20, 1944 192 8 The Last Days under Adolf Hitler, 1945 196 9 Afterthoughts.. 235 PART III 10 The Indictment, by Walter Görlitz 241 Notes 270 Appendix: The Translator Recalls 287 Index 291 MAPS 1 The Invasion of France, 1940 109 2 The German Invasion of Russia, 1941 149 3 The Black Summer of 1942 173 4 The Battle for Berlin, 1945 211 1 The Background and Career of Field-Marshal Keitel 1882–1946 by Walter Görlitz The photographs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, signing the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender at Karlshorst near Berlin, show him to have been just the kind of Junkers type that the Western Allies had always made him out to be – a tall, broad shouldered man, his face a little haggard but proud and set, and a monocle firmly screwed into his left eye. At the hour when the totalitarian regime in Germany finally collapsed he was acknowledging that he was an officer of the old school, although there was nothing about him characteristic of the make-up of the indomitable Prussian officer. Even the skilled American psychologists who analysed and inter- rogated him during his period of confinement were inclined to see in him the prototype of the Junkers, of the Prussian militarist; perhaps they had never had any real opportunity of making any study of the Junkers class of Prussia. Keitel, in fact, came from an entirely different milieu. The middle-class Hanoverian Keitel family, a family of landowners, came from a region with a marked anti-Prussian tradition: the field- marshal’s grandfather was a Royal Hanoverian crown land lessee and was closely connected with the House of Hanover that Bismarck overthrew. Military tendencies and traditions were completely alien mmoirs of fild-marsal kitel to the family, and in silent protest against Prussia’s annexation of the kingdom of Hanover in 1866 the grandfather had bought the 600-acre estate of Helmscherode in the Gandersheim district of the duchy of Brunswick in 1871, while still detesting everything that was Prussian: and when his son, the field-marshal’s father, served for a year as a volunteer in a regiment of the Prussian Hussars he was strictly forbidden when he came home on leave to cross the threshold of Helmscherode while wearing the hated Prussian uniform. There is little similarity between a Brunswick estate like Helmscherode and the great manors east of the Elbe; their lords cannot simply be classified as Junkers. Carl Keitel, the field-marshal’s father, led a life no more pretentious than that of any well-to-do farmer. In contrast to his son, who was an enthusiastic huntsman and loved horses and riding, he believed in the maxim that a good farmer could never be a huntsman; the two were incompatible. At the bottom of his heart the son wanted nothing more than one day to be able to manage the Helmscherode estate himself; farmer’s blood coursed strongly through his veins. He knew a little about agriculture and as the descendant of a long line of crown- land lessees and estate owners he had inherited a talent for organising and administering the affairs of large establishments. Several times Keitel was later to toy with the idea of giving up the soldier’s life, but always he heeded what he believed to be his duty, perhaps abetted by the counsels of his ambitious and strong-willed wife. The obstinacy of his father, who had no intention of relinquishing control over Helmscherode as long as he was of sound body, and the increasing tendency among the landed gentry to take up military careers, particularly after the victorious Franco-Prussian War of 1870– 1871, produced the opposite effect. The heir of Helmscherode, Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel, born on September 22, 1882, became an officer; there is a family story that he was almost in tears as he finally decided to give up all hope of ever being a farmer. There was another reason for the decision, characteristic of the rising generation of middle-class farmers: if one could not be a farmer then the officer’s was the only profession appropriate to one’s rank. But the officer cadre, in the small northern and central German provinces at least, was of purely Prussian stock.

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