The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [328]
*
On the morning of Saturday, 31 August 1946, the 216th day of the trials at Nuremberg, General Alfred Jodl addressed his judges and posterity. Knowing that his fate was going to be death by hanging, the former OKW Chief of Staff directed his remarks to ‘later historians’ as much as to the President and bench of the International Military Tribunal. Speaking for the German High Command – or ‘the higher military leaders and their assistants’, as he put it – Jodl effectively set out their case, arguing that they had been:
confronted with an insoluble task, namely, to conduct a war which they had not wanted under a Commander-in-Chief whose confidence they did not possess and whom they themselves only trusted within limits; with methods which frequently were in contradiction to their principles of leadership and their traditional, proved opinions; with troops and police forces which did not come under their full command; and with an Intelligence service that was in part working for the enemy. And all this in the complete and clear realization that this war would decide the life and death of our beloved Fatherland. They did not serve the powers of Hell and they did not serve a criminal, but rather their people and their Fatherland.6
To what extent was Jodl right? It was certainly true that few in the High Command wanted war with Britain and France in 1939, although they were happy enough to fight Poland, which led inexorably to it, given the British guarantee to that country of April 1939. It was also true that the generals did not possess Hitler’s confidence, but understandably so considering that some of them tried to kill him on 20 July 1944. The ‘methods’ the German officer corps permitted to be used against civilian populations, especially on the Eastern Front, were far worse than Jodl’s weasel words implied, and those officers were almost universally deeply implicated in monstrous abuses of every canon of the rules of war, written and unwritten. Jodl’s explanation that the partisans ‘used every – yes, every – single means of violence’, and that the Allies ensured that ‘hundreds of thousands of women and children were annihilated by layers of bombs’ cannot excuse the Axis methods of warfare. Every German general knew that the war in the east was to be one of extermination rather than a conventional military engagement; the oral and in some cases written orders, and indeed the very notion of Lebensraum, brooked no alternative explanation.
Jodl was also right that the fragmented nature of authority in the Nazi state – with the SS and other state institutions in particular being kept deliberately separate from the Wehrmacht – could be operationally frustrating for the generals. It was also true that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, thought Hitler a ‘madman’ and had been in communication with the Allies towards the end of the war, although his organization did not systematically aid the enemy, as Jodl alleged.7 If Jodl had known the true story of why Allied intelligence so regularly outwitted the OKW – owing to the Ultra information gained from decrypting the Enigma codes – he would undoubtedly have added another line of defence for the High Command. Ultimately, however, Jodl’s excuses do not convince: the German generals did indeed serve ‘the powers of Hell’ and ‘a criminal’, as well as the Volk and Fatherland.
The reasons why so many outwardly dignified professional officers served the Nazis so efficiently and seemingly enthusiastically were many and complicated. Their fathers and grandfathers had shot French francs-tireurs without