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Wilhelm Keitel, the eldest son of the landowner Carl Keitel and his wife Apollonia, was born 22 September 1882 in Helmscherode, then part of the German Empire. Keitel was described as a conscientious and diligent officer, who often worked at the expense of his health. In the autumn of 1932, he suffered a heart attack and double pneumonia. In January 1933, when Hitler came into power, Keitel was in a Czechoslovak sanatorium in the High Tatras. From 1935, Keitel served as Chief of Staff to the then Minister of War Werner von Blomberg. On 4th February 1938 Keitel was appointed head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces or the OKW, which bore responsibility over the army, navy, and air force.
This came as a surprise not only to the General Staff but also to Wilhelm Keitel himself as everyone knew that he was not suitable for the job.
However, Adolf Hitler quickly assumed supreme command of all German armed forces, thus almost immediately superseding Keitel's authority. The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces was in effect Hitler’s military staff. On the 12 March 1938, German troops entered Austria, and one day later, Austria was incorporated into Germany. Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler. For his participation in the annexation, which became known as the Anschluss and which was the Nazi German regime’s first act of territorial aggression and expansion, Wilhelm Keitel was awarded the Anschluss Medal. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
This came as a surprise not only to the General Staff but also to Wilhelm Keitel himself as everyone knew that he was not suitable for the job.
However, Adolf Hitler quickly assumed supreme command of all German armed forces, thus almost immediately superseding Keitel's authority. The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces was in effect Hitler’s military staff. On the 12 March 1938, German troops entered Austria, and one day later, Austria was incorporated into Germany. Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler. For his participation in the annexation, which became known as the Anschluss and which was the Nazi German regime’s first act of territorial aggression and expansion, Wilhelm Keitel was awarded the Anschluss Medal. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
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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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