00:00The 23rd of May, 1939, Nazi Germany
00:10Adolf Hitler announces his decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity,
00:17which he does on the 1st of September the same year, triggering the Second World War.
00:22After Warsaw officially surrenders to the Germans on the 28th of September,
00:26the Germans launch a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture,
00:32and to reduce the Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
00:38Hitler intends to Germanize Poland by replacing the Polish population with German colonists,
00:44and only enough Poles will be retained as unneeded for basic labor.
00:48The rest will be driven out or killed.
00:51One man who was involved in the planning of the invasion,
00:54while being fully aware of its criminal nature, is Wilhelm Keitel.
01:01Wilhelm Bordevin Johann Gustav Keitel, the eldest son of the landowner Karl Keitel,
01:06and his wife Apollonia, was born on the 22nd of September, 1882, in Helmshire Order,
01:12then part of the German Empire.
01:14Young Wilhelm spent his childhood on the family estate,
01:17and in 1889, when he was six years old,
01:20his mother died of childbed fever after the birth of his younger brother Bordevin,
01:25who later became an infantry general.
01:28Wilhelm Keitel was initially homeschooled.
01:31Later, however, he attended the gymnasium at Göttingen,
01:34and his academic performance was average for his class.
01:37Just like his father, Wilhelm Keitel wanted to become a farmer,
01:41but this was not possible because his father wanted to continue farming the estate himself.
01:46Therefore, after leaving school in 1901, he joined the Prussian army,
01:51as was customary for the sons of estate owners.
01:55For reasons of status and cost, Keitel decided against the cavalry
01:59and opted for service in the mounted field artillery, serving as adjutant from 1908.
02:04In April 1909, Keitel married Lisa Fontaine, a wealthy landowner's daughter.
02:12Some described Lisa as superior to her husband,
02:16having a decisive influence on the course of his career,
02:19as Keitel did not give up his dream of becoming a farmer on the family estate
02:23until the First World War and even later.
02:26The marriage produced six children, one of whom died young.
02:30The First World War began on the 28th of July, 1914.
02:36Keitel, who served on the Western Front as a battery commander and then staff officer,
02:41was seriously wounded by a shrapnel grenade in Flanders in 1914.
02:47After his recovery, thanks to his organizational skills,
02:50he served in the Army General Staff from the spring of 1915.
02:55During the war, Keitel received a total of 12 decorations.
02:58When the First World War ended on the 11th of November, 1918,
03:02peace negotiations began in Paris,
03:05and the conclusions were laid down in the Treaty of Versailles.
03:09Germany was considered mainly to blame for the devastating war,
03:12and the treaty imposed harsh penalties on the Germans,
03:15including the loss of 13% of its pre-war territories,
03:19extensive reparation payments, and the demilitarization of the Rhineland.
03:23The Reichswehr, the German armed forces, was restricted to 100,000 men.
03:29In the new Weimar Republic, which was the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933,
03:36Keitel was retained in the newly created Reichswehr,
03:39and played a part in organizing the paramilitary Freikorps units,
03:43which fought against communists and other groups they believed were responsible for German defeat.
03:48In 1924, Wilhelm Keitel was transferred to the Ministry of the Reichswehr in Berlin.
03:56Keitel, then a colonel, served in the Truppenamt, or the Troop Office,
04:00an agency which concealed the existence of the prescribed German Army General Staff.
04:05In October 1929, Keitel was again assigned to the War Ministry,
04:09this time as head of the Organization Department, T2.
04:14Keitel played a crucial role in the German rearmament,
04:17as in this capacity, he was responsible for secretly planning, reorganizing,
04:22and eventually enlarging the German Army, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
04:27Keitel was described as a conscientious and diligent officer,
04:31who often worked at the expense of his health.
04:33In the autumn of 1932, he suffered a heart attack and double pneumonia.
04:40In January 1933, when Hitler came into power,
04:43Keitel was in a Czechoslovak sanatorium in the High Tatras.
04:48Shortly after his recovery, in October 1933,
04:51Keitel was appointed as Deputy Commander of the 3rd Infantry Division.
04:56Although officers of the Reichswehr were officially required to be politically neutral,
05:00he clearly sympathized with Hitler and National Socialist ideas.
05:05Keitel had first met Adolf Hitler in July 1933, and was very impressed by him.
05:12After the death of his father on the 10th of May 1934,
05:16Keitel submitted a letter of resignation to the Chief of the Army Command,
05:19General Werner von Fritsch.
05:22Keitel's decision to remain in the military was influenced not only by the prospect of a promotion.
05:26In 1934, he was given command of the 22nd Infantry Division at Bremen,
05:32but also by his wife's desire to be the wife of an officer rather than a farmer.
05:37In his new office, Keitel attempted to improve coordination between the Army, Navy, and Air Force
05:43through a joint command staff.
05:44However, his plan failed due to resistance from the generals.
05:49From 1935, Keitel served as Chief of Staff to the then Minister of War, Werner von Blomberg.
05:55On the 5th of November 1937, at the conference between the Reich's top military foreign policy
06:02leadership, Hitler stated that it was time for war, or more accurately, wars, as what Hitler
06:08envisioned would be a series of localized wars in Central and Eastern Europe in the near future.
06:14Hitler argued that because the wars were necessary not only to provide the German nation with Lebensraum,
06:19meaning living space, but the arms race with France and the United Kingdom made it imperative
06:24to act before the Western powers developed an insurmountable lead in the arms race.
06:29Keitel's superior, Blomberg, and several other military officers advised Hitler to wait until
06:34Germany had more time to rearm.
06:37They did not have any moral objections to Hitler's strategy with which they basically agreed,
06:41only the question of timing divided them.
06:43On the 21st of January 1938, Keitel received evidence revealing that von Blomberg's wife
06:51was a former prostitute.
06:53Upon reviewing this information, Keitel suggested that the dossier be forwarded to Hitler's deputy
06:58and the head of German air forces, the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, who used it to bring about
07:03Blomberg's resignation.
07:05The plan worked out.
07:07On the 27th of January 1938, von Blomberg was forced to resign his posts.
07:12When von Blomberg was asked by Hitler who he would recommend to replace him, he had said
07:18that Hitler himself should take over the job.
07:21He told Hitler,
07:22Keitel is just the man who runs my office.
07:25Hitler snapped his fingers and exclaimed,
07:28That's exactly the man I'm looking for.
07:30On the 4th of February 1938, Keitel was appointed head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces,
07:38or the OKW, which bore responsibility over the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
07:44This came as a surprise not only to the general staff, but also to Wilhelm Keitel himself,
07:49as everyone knew that he was not suitable for the job.
07:52However, Adolf Hitler quickly assumed supreme command of all German armed forces,
07:56thus almost immediately superseding Keitel's authority.
08:01The supreme command of the armed forces was in effect Hitler's military staff.
08:05While a stronger personality might have challenged Hitler, Keitel was Hitler's loyal yes-man,
08:11willing to do everything the Führer demanded of him.
08:14Keitel became known as blindingly loyal toady of Hitler, as his peers would call him behind his back.
08:21In the army, he acquired the nickname, La Keitel, a pun derived from German lackei, meaning lackey, and his surname.
08:30Keitel's peers did not respect him.
08:32They only considered him a sycophant and a stupid follower of Hitler,
08:36as they often called him and frequently bypassed him going directly to their Führer.
08:43Adolf Hitler did not value Keitel for his capabilities,
08:46but because he was as loyal as a dog, as the Führer once said.
08:49Hitler knew of Keitel's limited intellect and nervous disposition,
08:54but appreciated his diligence and obedience.
08:57A few days after Keitel became the head of the OKW,
09:01he helped Hitler redraw the post-war international borders,
09:04which the Nazis considered unfair and illegitimate.
09:07In early 1938, under increasing pressure from pro-unification activists,
09:13Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg announced that there would be a referendum
09:16on a possible union with Germany versus maintaining Austria's sovereignty
09:21to be held on the 13th of March.
09:24Hitler threatened an invasion and ordered Keitel to conduct military manoeuvres near the Austrian border
09:29to make it appear an invasion was imminent.
09:32Chancellor Schuschnigg resigned his office on the 11th of March.
09:36On the 12th of March, 1938, German troops entered Austria,
09:40and one day later, Austria was incorporated into Germany.
09:44Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler.
09:47For his participation in the annexation, which became known as the Anschluss,
09:52and which was the Nazi German regime's first act of territorial aggression and expansion,
09:57Wilhelm Keitel was awarded the Anschluss Medal.
09:59The Second World War started on the 1st of September, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
10:08On the 7th of September, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the German security police,
10:14stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered.
10:19On the 12th of September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list.
10:24As a result, in the first three months of war, from the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1940,
10:32some 60,000 former government officials, military officers in reserve, landowners,
10:37clergy, and members of the Polish intelligentsia such as scientists, teachers, lawyers, and doctors,
10:43were executed region by region in the so-called intelligentsia action,
10:48including over 1,000 prisoners of war.
10:50Keitel was involved in planning the invasion and was fully aware of its criminal nature as mass arrests,
10:58population transfers, and mass murders had been planned long before.
11:03When the officer corps started to complain about the atrocities committed in Poland
11:07and other countries conquered by Nazi Germany, Keitel ignored them until the local commanders
11:12and their soldiers became morally numb to the horrible events which they were witnessing.
11:16After the invasion of Poland, Wilhelm Keitel received a bonus of 100,000 Reichsmarks for his loyalty.
11:25The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands started on the 10th of May 1940
11:31and became known as the Battle of France.
11:33These countries, along with France, were conquered within six weeks.
11:38After Germany defeated France, Keitel described Hitler as the greatest warlord of all time.
11:43In order to further humiliate France, Hitler ordered the document of armistice to be signed in the same railcar
11:49in which the representatives of the then-defeated Germany signed the armistice at the end of the First World War.
11:56Hitler had this railcar removed from the museum where it had been stored and brought it to the Compiègne Forest,
12:02the same place where the 1918 armistice with Germany had been signed.
12:06In this manner, the location of Germany's 1918 humiliation became the symbolic site of the Third Reich's victory over France.
12:14The armistice was signed on the 22nd of June, 1940, by General Keitel for Germany and General Charles Hunziger for France.
12:23Shortly after, Wilhelm Keitel was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal.
12:28However, this did not change the way the high-ranking Nazis would look down on him and despise him.
12:33Hermann Gehring even said that Keitel had a sergeant's mind inside a Field Marshal's body.
12:41During the upcoming months, Wilhelm Keitel was busy drawing up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union,
12:47which became known as Operation Barbarota.
12:51Before the invasion, Hitler asked for war studies to be completed, including the study on economic matters.
12:57The study of Georg Thomas, Hitler's chief economic strategist for the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces,
13:04detailed a few serious problems, such as logistical delays due to the fact that Russian railways were of a different gauge than German ones,
13:12insufficiency of German transport vehicle tires for the task ahead of them,
13:16and most significantly, the Germans only had two months' worth of fuel oil and petrol to support the advancing assault.
13:22Wilhelm Keitel bluntly dismissed the problems, telling Thomas that Hitler would not want to see them.
13:29This influenced Thomas' second study, which offered a glowing recommendation for the invasion based upon fabricated economic benefits.
13:38Operation Barbarossa began on Sunday, the 22nd of June, 1941.
13:43Prior to the invasion, Keitel issued a series of criminal orders, which went beyond established codes of conduct for the military
13:51and broadly allowed the execution of Jews, civilians, and non-combatants for any reason.
13:58Those carrying out the murders were exempted from court-martial or later being tried for war crimes.
14:03On the 6th of June, 1941, the German armed forces' high command issued the Commissar Order,
14:10which ordered German soldiers to shoot Soviet Communist Party officials who had been taken prisoner.
14:16Political Commissars were Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw its military units and reported directly to party leaders.
14:23Operating as they did outside the military hierarchy, Commissars acted as a conduit from the party to the ranks of the ordinary soldiers,
14:32transmitting political propaganda and preventing dissension.
14:36To the Germans, Commissars represented the true pillars of opposition,
14:40the link between the Bolshevik ideologies and the minions in the military who the Nazis believed fought blindly for Bolshevism.
14:47For that reason, German soldiers were ordered to shoot any political Commissars who were taken prisoner.
14:54In September 1941, Keitel issued an order to all German commanders,
14:59stating that the soldiers on the Eastern Front had to use unusual severity to stamp out resistance,
15:05and a response to a loss of one German soldier was the execution of 50 to 100 Communists.
15:12Keitel added that human life was less than nothing in the East.
15:17Keitel was also increasing pressure for a more ruthless reprisal policy in German-occupied territories,
15:22and in October 1942, he also signed the Commando Order,
15:27which ordered and authorized the killing of enemy Special Operations troops.
15:32The Allied commandos were to be killed without trial, even when captured in uniform or if they attempted to surrender.
15:39He also drafted the Night and Fog Decree,
15:42that provided that in occupied territories, civilians who had been accused of crimes of resistance against the Army of Occupation
15:48would be tried only if a death sentence was likely,
15:51otherwise they would be handed over to the Gestapo for transportation to Germany.
15:56German authorities applied the decree principally in German-occupied Western Europe,
16:00Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
16:05Germans abducted suspected members of the resistance by night so that they effectively vanished without a trace.
16:11German occupation authorities and their collaborators arrested approximately 7,000 individuals under the provisions of this decree.
16:19After capture, they were interrogated and frequently tortured.
16:24Those who survived were taken to concentration camps such as Grossrosen and Natzweiler Struthoff.
16:30The decree was meant to intimidate the local populations into submission
16:34by denying friends and families of seized persons any knowledge of their whereabouts or their fate.
16:38In addition, Keitel also signed orders authorizing reprisals against the families of Allied volunteers.
16:47On the 8th of September 1942, Keitel ordered French, Dutch, and Belgian citizens to work on the construction of the Atlantic Wall.
16:55He was present on the 4th of January 1944, when Hitler directed Fritz Zaukel to obtain 4 million new workers from the occupied territories.
17:03Zaukel was plenipotentiary general for the deployment of labor, responsible for providing forced laborers to meet Germany's increasing war production needs.
17:13In the order from the 16th of December 1942, in connection with a partisan war in Yugoslavia, Keitel declared the following.
17:21The troops are authorized and obliged to use every means in this fight without restriction, even against women and children, if only it leads to success.
17:30Hitler rewarded Keitel's loyalty in 1942 with a cash grant of 250,000 Reichsmarks, an equivalent of almost 2.4 million United States dollars today.
17:41And in October 1944, with 246 hectares of forest property in Lumsbringer, worth 739,340 Reichsmarks, today an equivalent of more than 7 million United States dollars.
17:55However, Keitel was also affected by the war.
17:59His youngest son, Hans Georg, was killed in July 1941 during the German attack on the Soviet Union, and his eldest son, Karl Heinz, was made a prisoner of war by the Russians.
18:12On the 20th of July 1944, Klaus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Hitler.
18:18After the bomb had exploded, Keitel personally led the wounded Hitler out of the room.
18:24In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for conspirators, which continued for months.
18:29In the end, more than 7,000 people were arrested, and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest evidence.
18:38Wilhelm Keitel not only sat on the Army Court of Honor that handed over many offices for show trials to the notorious German People's Court,
18:45presided over by the fanatical judge Roland Freisler, but on Hitler's orders, he sent two generals to Erwin Rommel,
18:52a German field marshal known as the Desert Fox, whose participation in the assassination attempt remains ambiguous until today,
18:59offering him the choice of suicide or a court-martial.
19:03To protect his family, Rommel chose the former, and committed suicide using a cyanide pill.
19:08In April and May 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, Keitel called for counter-attacks to drive back the Soviet forces and relieve Berlin.
19:19However, there were insufficient German forces to carry out such counter-attacks.
19:24Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945.
19:28On the 7th of May 1945, in Reims, France, Alfred Yordle, chief of the operations staff of the German Armed Forces High Command,
19:36on behalf of Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state, signed Germany's unconditional surrender on all fronts.
19:44A few hours later, however, a response was received from the Soviet High Command stating that the act of surrender in Reims was unacceptable.
19:52They insisted that, not Yordle, deputized by Dönitz, a civilian head of state,
19:57but the supreme commander of all German forces, Wilhelm Keitel, should personally sign the document.
20:03One of the reasons was a fear of a new stab in the back myth,
20:07which maintained that the imperial German army did not lose World War I on the battlefield,
20:12but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front, especially Jews and communists,
20:17who they claimed had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace.
20:22As a result, a second signing was arranged in Berlin.
20:26On the night of the 8th of May 1945, Wilhelm Keitel signed the definitive German instrument of surrender,
20:32which was the legal document that affected the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on all fronts,
20:37and ended World War II in Europe.
20:41Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production,
20:43said that Keitel groveled to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz,
20:47who succeeded Adolf Hitler as president, in the same way as he had done to Hitler.
20:52On the 13th of May, Wilhelm Keitel was arrested at the request of the United States.
20:58Justice finally caught up with Keitel when he was triad at the Nuremberg Trials,
21:03which were held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany.
21:07He was convicted of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace,
21:10planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
21:16Keitel admitted that he knew that many of Hitler's orders were illegal,
21:21and his defense relied almost entirely on the argument he was merely following orders.
21:26Prison psychiatrist G.M. Gilbert said that Keitel had no more backbone than a jellyfish.
21:32On the 1st of October, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Wilhelm Keitel guilty and author counts,
21:41and sentenced him to death by hanging.
21:44His request for a military execution by firing squad was denied,
21:47due to the criminal rather than military nature of his acts.
21:50On the 16th of October, 1946, the day of Keitel's execution,
21:57Keitel told the prison chaplain,
21:58You have helped me more than you know.
22:01May Christ, my Savior, stand by me all the way.
22:04I shall need him so much.
22:07He then received communion,
22:09and was executed later that day by American Army Sergeant John C. Woods,
22:13who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman.
22:16It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job
22:20to make the ten Nazi war criminals that he executed that day suffer,
22:24as they all died a long, agonizing death.
22:28The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods
22:30fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks,
22:34resulting in their deaths by strangulation,
22:36that in some cases lasted several minutes.
22:39With Wilhelm Keitel, it was even worse.
22:43After he had said his last words,
22:44I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people.
22:49More than two million German soldiers went to their death
22:52for the fatherland before me.
22:54I follow now my sons, all for Germany.
22:58Keitel was hanged.
22:59But because the trapdoor was too small,
23:01it caused him painful head injuries,
23:03and as he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck,
23:07his horrible convulsing lasted 28 long minutes before he died.
23:12He was 64 years old.
23:16After that, his corpse was cremated,
23:18and the ashes scattered in the Wenzbach,
23:20a small tributary of the River Izzar.
23:24Sergeant Woods later not only insisted
23:25he had performed all executions correctly,
23:28but also stated he was very proud of his work.
23:30Joseph Malta, the U.S. Army military policeman
23:34who held the noose as John C. Woods carried out the executions,
23:38said 50 years later,
23:39It was a pleasure doing it.
23:41I do it all over again.
23:42The U.S. Army military policeman
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