The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [289]
‘Why did the generals who have been so ready to term me a complaisant and incompetent yes-man fail to secure my removal?’ Keitel wrote in his self-pitying memoirs before he was hanged at Nuremberg. ‘Was that all that difficult? No, that wasn’t it; the truth was that nobody would have been ready to replace me, because each one knew that he would end up as much of a wreck as I.’ There is some justification to this; certainly Kleist felt that because ‘Hitler wanted a weak general in that powerful position in order to have complete control of him,’ other generals could not have borne the job. ‘If I had held Keitel’s position under Hitler,’ Kleist later claimed, ‘I wouldn’t have lasted two weeks.’50 Yet had Keitel and Jodl shown more backbone with the Führer, as Guderian did, they might have been able to instil a sense of proportion into his strategy, but Keitel’s attitude was summed up in his remark to his Nuremberg psychiatrist in May 1946, when he said: ‘It isn’t right to be obedient only when things go well; it is much harder to be a good, obedient soldier when things go badly and times are hard. Obedience and faith at such time is a virtue.’51 Hitler had plenty of people still willing to give him obedience and faith, the human nullity Wilhelm Keitel at their head, when what he most needed were constructive criticism and sound advice.
Late in 1942 Hitler decided that every word spoken at his military conferences needed to be preserved for posterity. He accordingly ordered six (and eventually eight) of Germany’s parliamentary stenographers, who had been idle since the Reichstag was mothballed that April, to take down in shorthand and then transcribe everything that was uttered at these meetings. If the Germans had won the war, this book would today be the equivalent of Nazi holy writ. Verbatim, unvarnished and contemporary, the pure raw material of history, they reveal the Führer as a painstaking, calculating, inquisitive dictator, with a phenomenally good memory and a great interest in the mechanics of armaments, and even as rather a good listener. At least three-quarters of the meetings were taken up with the answers given to his incisive questioning by such senior Reich figures as Rundstedt, Rommel, Guderian, Keitel and Jodl, Zeitzler, Dönitz, Göring and Goebbels.
Because the verbatim reports open on 1 December 1942, with the battle of Stalingrad effectively lost, and end on 27 April 1945, three days before Hitler’s suicide, the picture is one of Germany in retreat and eventual defeat, although it is impossible to tell from the Führer’s remarks exactly when it dawned upon him that he would lose the war, and with it his own life. It possibly came at the end of the battle of the Bulge at the close of 1944, for on 10 January 1945 he had the following conversation with Göring over the problems with the production of secret weaponry:
HITLER: It is said that if Hannibal, instead of the seven or thirteen elephants he had left as he crossed the Alps… had had fifty or 250, it would have been more than enough to conquer Italy.
GÖRING: But we did finally bring out the jets; we brought them out. And they must come in masses, so we keep the advantage…
HITLER: The V-1 can’t decide the war, unfortunately.
GÖRING:… Just as an initially unpromising project can finally succeed, the bomber will come, too, if it is also—
HITLER: But that’s still just a fantasy!
GÖRING: No!
HITLER: Göring, the gun is there, the other is still a fantasy!52
The use of a surname between people on close terms is a sure sign of intended emphasis. Hitler knew what was coming.
Although there were often up to twenty-five people in the room during these F