Wilhelm Keitel

Wilhelm Keitel was Chief of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) from 1938 to 1945, the senior German military officer of the period and Hitler’s principal military adjutant. He signed the criminal orders that authorised the murder of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war by German army and SS units, and through which the Wehrmacht became operationally complicit in the Holocaust. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty, and hanged on 16 October 1946.

The criminal orders

Keitel signed the operational orders that turned the war on the eastern front into a war of racial annihilation. The 13 May 1941 Decree on the Conduct of Military Justice in the Barbarossa Area, signed by Keitel, removed the standard German military justice procedures for offences committed by German soldiers against Soviet civilians. Soldiers who killed civilians were not to be prosecuted as a routine matter. The 6 June 1941 Commissar Order, also signed by Keitel, instructed German army units to kill Soviet political officers on capture rather than treat them as prisoners of war. The 16 September 1941 Hostage Order authorised the killing of fifty to one hundred civilians as collateral retaliation for any German soldier killed by partisans. The 7 December 1941 Night and Fog Decree, also signed by Keitel, authorised the secret arrest and disappearance of suspected resistance figures across occupied Europe.

The four orders together produced the operational framework within which the Wehrmacht conducted the eastern war. The Einsatzgruppen operated alongside the Wehrmacht under the protection of these orders. The German army units carried out their own civilian killings under the protection of these orders. The Soviet POW death toll of around 3.3 million people, mostly from deliberate starvation and exposure, was made operationally possible by these orders. The orders were drafted at the OKW under Keitel’s authority and bore his signature.

The Holocaust connection

Keitel did not directly command Holocaust operations. The killing of Jews was the SS responsibility, not the Wehrmacht’s. But the criminal orders Keitel signed produced the operational environment in which the SS killings could happen at the scale they did. The Einsatzgruppen could not have operated in the rear of the German army without Wehrmacht cooperation. The Wehrmacht supplied the Einsatzgruppen units with logistical support, with the use of military communications, with intelligence on the location of Jewish populations in newly captured towns. Keitel’s OKW provided the institutional framework within which all this was possible.

Keitel was personally informed of the Einsatzgruppen operations through regular OKW intelligence briefings. The Einsatzgruppen reports filed in Berlin, listing the numbers of Jews killed, were circulated within the OKW. He never raised an objection. He never requested any change in the relationship between his Wehrmacht and the SS killing units. The Wehrmacht as an institution conducted itself, throughout the eastern campaign, as a willing partner in the killing programme.

The Nuremberg trial

Keitel was tried at Nuremberg as one of the senior defendants. His defence was the standard military argument: he had been a soldier following orders, the orders had come from Hitler, he had had no real choice in the matter. The defence had no substance under the legal standards of the Nuremberg charter. The criminal orders he had signed were not lawful military orders by any standard, and his signature was on them. He was found guilty on all four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judges noted that the criminal orders, particularly the Commissar Order, were among the most serious offences before the tribunal.

He requested execution by firing squad rather than hanging, on the grounds of his military rank. The request was refused. He was hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. He was 64.

What he was

Keitel is the case of the senior German military officer who turned the Wehrmacht into a willing partner in the killing programme. The German army did not need to murder Jews directly to be implicated. It needed only to provide the operational framework that made the SS killings possible. Keitel signed the orders that constituted that framework. The Wehrmacht had been the institution most resistant, in the early Nazi years, to the regime’s extreme racial doctrine; by 1942 it had become, under Keitel’s leadership, the operational partner of the Holocaust. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht uninvolved in the Holocaust, which dominated post-war German military memory until the 1990s, fails on the documents Keitel signed.

See also

Sources

  • Walter Görlitz (ed), The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel, Cooper Square, 1965
  • The Commissar Order, 6 June 1941; the Decree on Military Justice, 13 May 1941; the Night and Fog Decree, 7 December 1941
  • Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, exhibition catalogue, 1995
  • Nuremberg trial transcripts, Keitel cross-examination
  • USHMM: Wilhelm Keitel