Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm

Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm (1883–1946),German Army officer who, as head of the German Armed Forces High Command (OKW) from 1938 to 1945, ratified the unconditional surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945. He was Hitler's closest military adviser as well as being one of his greatest admirers. ‘He had ambition but no talent, loyalty but no character, a certain native shrewdness and charm, but neither intelligence nor personality’ (  J. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945, London, 1964, pp. 429–30).

Keitel, a professional soldier, served as an artillery officer on the Western Front during the First World War and then as a staff officer. From 1926 to 1933 he was head of the organization branch of the Truppenamt, the clandestine replacement for the German General Staff which had been banned by the Versailles settlement, and from 1935 to 1938 headed the Armed Forces Office (Wehrmachtamt), being promoted during this time to maj-general and then lt-general. In February 1938 he became head of the newly formed OKW and that November was promoted general. He personally conducted the French armistice negotiations after the fall of France in June 1940 and was promoted field marshal the following month.

Keitel was second only to Hitler in the military hierarchy, but was despised by his contemporaries who nicknamed him ‘Lakaitel’ (Lakai, lackey). From being ‘an honourable, solidly respectable general,’ as one of Hitler's entourage described him, ‘he had developed in the course of years into a servile flatterer with all the wrong instincts’ ( A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, New York, 1970, p. 244). Hitler said he was ‘as loyal as a dog’ and refused to countenance his chief adjutant's wish to replace him. The relationship between them was finally sealed when in July 1944, after the bomb planted in Hitler's HQ had exploded (seeSchwarze Kapelle), Keitel, against all convention, rushed to embrace Hitler, exclaiming: ‘Mein Führer, you're alive, you're alive.’ He subsequently presided over the Court of Honour which expelled from the army those officers implicated in the assassination plot so that they could be turned over to the People's Court.

In his slavish devotion to Hitler, Keitel went far beyond the bounds of his military duty. On 6 June 1941 he signed the Kommissarbefehl, Hitler's order that all Soviet commissars be shot once the invasion of the USSR (see BARBAROSSA) had got under way, and in July 1941 he signed an order which began the SS reign of terror in German-occupied Soviet territory. He was also responsible for the Night and Fog decree, for encouraging German civilians to lynch captured Allied airmen, and for other acts against humanity. For these crimes he was arraigned at the Nuremberg trials, found guilty, and hanged.

Bibliography

Keitel, W. , The Memoirs of Field Marshal Keitel (London, 1965).