Word: keitel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...leaders who actually stood trial, eleven were sentenced to hang, seven received prison sentences, three were acquitted. Condemned to death, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring committed suicide by poison in his prison cell. Ten Nazis-including Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Armed Forces Chief Wilhelm Keitel, and General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's chief military adviser-died on the gallows...
...MEMOIRS OF FIELD-MARSHAL KEITEL, Chief of the German High Command, 1938-1945, edited by Walter Gorlitz. Completed just before the author was hanged as a war criminal, this memoir by Hitler's top military man gives a fascinating account of the last days of the Wehrmacht as well as a chilling insight into the moral myopia that afflicted the Nazi high command...
...Soup. Keitel's stiff, drill-field prose comes alive only during his account of the War's last month. As the Russians swarmed across the Oder to ward Berlin and Hitler took sullenly to his bunker, Keitel and his faithful driver took off on a quixotic swing to rally the shattered Wehrmacht forces around the capital. He relished the experience: hasty lunches of pea soup in a forest command post, ducking into ditches to avoid strafing Allied fighters, brave speeches to the scared kids and old men in ill-fitting Volkssturm helmets who had been left to defend...
Then came Hitler's suicide in the Berlin bunker. Keitel was baffled. He had followed Hitler's every order in the naive belief that the Führer would accept responsibility for his actions. While more cynical generals like Gotthard Heinrici, commander of the Vistula Army Group, beat a retreat toward the American lines, Keitel went back to Berlin to sign the surrender document that he had never believed would be written. All around him the other evil men of Nazidom were taking the easy way out: Hitler was followed in suicide by Himmler, Goebbels and Goring...
...Shortcomings. Keitel considered it himself but decided against it. "The armed forces," he wrote in his Nürnberg cell, "would have labeled me a deserter and a coward. Hitler himself chose death rather than accept responsibility. For him to have committed suicide when he knew he was defeated . . . for him to have left it to a subordinate to account for his auto cratic and arbitrary actions, these two shortcomings will remain forever incomprehensible to me. They are my final disillusion...