Wilhelm Keitel was the eldest son of landowner Carl Keitel and his wife Apollonia. He was born on September 22, 1882, in Helmscherode, then part of the German Empire.
Young Wilhelm spent his childhood on the family estate. In 1889, when he was six years old, his mother died of childbed fever after the birth of his younger brother Bodewin, who later became an infantry general.
Keitel was initially homeschooled. He later attended the gymnasium at Göttingen, where his academic performance was average for his class.
Like his father, Keitel wanted to become a farmer, but this was not possible because his father wanted to continue farming the estate himself. After leaving school in 1901, he joined the Prussian Army, as was customary for the sons of estate owners.
For reasons of status and cost, Keitel decided against the cavalry and opted for service in the mounted field artillery. He served as an adjutant from 1908.
In April 1909, Keitel married Lisa Fontaine, a wealthy landowner's daughter. Some described Lisa as superior to her husband and as having a decisive influence on the course of his career.
Keitel did not give up his dream of becoming a farmer on the family estate until the First World War and even later. The marriage produced six children, one of whom died young.
The First World War began on July 28, 1914. Keitel served on the Western Front as a battery commander and then as a staff officer, and was seriously wounded by a shrapnel grenade in Flanders in 1914.
After his recovery, thanks to his organizational skills, he served in the Army General Staff from the spring of 1915. During the war, Keitel received a total of 12 decorations.
When the First World War ended on November 11, 1918, peace negotiations began in Paris, and the conclusions were laid down in the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was considered mainly to blame for the devastating war, and the treaty imposed harsh penalties, including the loss of about 13 percent of its pre-war territories, extensive reparation payments, and the demilitarization of the Rhineland.
The Reichswehr, the German armed forces, was restricted to 100,000 men. In the new Weimar Republic, the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933, Keitel was retained in the newly created Reichswehr and played a part in organizing paramilitary Freikorps units that fought against Communists and other groups they believed were responsible for Germany's defeat.
In 1924, Wilhelm Keitel was transferred to the ministry of the Reichswehr in Berlin. Keitel, then a colonel, served in the Truppenamt, or troop office, an agency that concealed the existence of the prescribed German Army General Staff.
In October 1929, Keitel was again assigned to the War Ministry, this time as head of the organization department T2. He played a crucial role in German rearmament, as in this capacity he was responsible for secretly planning, reorganizing, and eventually enlarging the German Army in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Keitel was described as a conscientious and diligent officer who often worked at the expense of his health. In the autumn of 1932, he suffered a heart attack and double pneumonia.
In January 1933, when Hitler came into power, Keitel was in a Czechoslovak sanatorium in the High Tatras. Shortly after his recovery, in October 1933, Keitel was appointed deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division.
Although officers of the Reichswehr were officially required to be politically neutral, Keitel clearly sympathized with Hitler and National Socialist ideas. He had first met Adolf Hitler in July 1933 and was very impressed by him.
After the death of his father on May 10, 1934, Keitel submitted a letter of resignation to the chief of the army command, General Werner von Fritsch. His decision to remain in the military was influenced not only by the prospect of a promotion, as in 1934 he was given command of the 22nd Infantry Division at Bremen, but also by his wife's desire to be the wife of an officer rather than a farmer.
In his new office, Keitel attempted to improve coordination between the Army, Navy, and Air Force through a joint command staff. However, his plan failed due to resistance from the generals.
From 1935, Keitel served as chief of staff to the then minister of war, Werner von Blomberg. On November 5, 1937, at a conference between the Reich's top military and foreign policy leadership, Hitler stated that it was time for war, or more accurately wars, as what Hitler envisioned would be a series of localized wars in Central and Eastern Europe in the near future.
Hitler argued that because the wars were necessary not only to provide the German nation with Lebensraum, or living space, but also because the arms race with France and the United Kingdom made it imperative to act before the Western powers developed an insurmountable lead. Keitel, his superior Blomberg, and several other military officers advised Hitler to wait until Germany had more time to rearm.
They did not have any moral objections to Hitler's strategy, with which they basically agreed; only the question of timing divided them. On January 21, 1938, Keitel received evidence revealing that von Blomberg's wife was a former prostitute.
Upon reviewing this information, Keitel suggested that the dossier be forwarded to Hitler's deputy and the head of the German Air Force, Hermann Göring, who used it to bring about Blomberg's resignation. The plan worked out, and on January 27, 1938, von Blomberg was forced to resign his posts.
When von Blomberg was asked by Hitler who he would recommend to replace him, he said that Hitler himself should take over the job. He told Hitler that Keitel was just the man who ran his office. Hitler snapped his fingers and exclaimed that was exactly the man he was looking for.
On February 4, 1938, Keitel was appointed head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, or OKW, which bore responsibility over the Army, Navy, and Air Force. This came as a surprise not only to the general staff but also to Wilhelm Keitel himself, as everyone knew that he was not suitable for the job.
However, Adolf Hitler quickly assumed supreme command of all German armed forces, thus almost immediately superseding Keitel's authority. The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces was in effect Hitler's military staff.
While a stronger personality might have challenged Hitler, Keitel was Hitler's loyal yes-man, willing to do everything the Führer demanded of him. Keitel became known as the blindingly loyal toy of Hitler.
His peers would call him that behind his back. In the Army he acquired the nickname "Lakeitel," derived from the German "Lakai," meaning lackey, and his surname. Keitel's peers did not respect him; they only considered him a sycophant and a stupid follower of Hitler, as they often called him, and frequently bypassed him, going directly to their Führer.
Adolf Hitler did not value Keitel for his capabilities but because he was as loyal as a dog, as the Führer once said. Hitler knew of Keitel's limited intellect and nervous disposition but appreciated his diligence and obedience.
A few days after Keitel became head of the OKW, he helped Hitler redraw the post-war international borders which the Nazis considered unfair and illegitimate. In early 1938, under increasing pressure from pro-unification activists, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg announced that there would be a referendum on a possible union with Germany versus maintaining Austrian sovereignty, to be held on March 13.
Hitler threatened an invasion and ordered Keitel to conduct military maneuvers near the Austrian border to make it appear an invasion was imminent. Chancellor Schuschnigg resigned his office on March 11.
On March 12, 1938, German troops entered Austria, and one day later Austria was incorporated into Germany. Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler for his participation in the annexation, which became known as the Anschluss and which was the Nazi German regime's first act of territorial aggression and expansion. Wilhelm Keitel was awarded the Anschluss Medal.
The Second World War started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. On September 7, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the German security police, stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered. On September 12, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list.
As a result, in the first three months of war, from the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1940, some 60,000 former government officials, military officers in reserve, landowners, clergy, and members of the Polish intelligentsia such as scientists, teachers, lawyers, and doctors were executed region by region in the so-called Intelligenzaktion, including over 1,000 prisoners of war.
Keitel was involved in planning the invasion and was fully aware of its criminal nature, as mass arrests, population transfer, and mass murders had been planned long before. When the officer corps started to complain about the atrocities committed in Poland and other countries conquered by Nazi Germany, Keitel ignored them until the local commanders and their soldiers became morally numb to the horrible events they were witnessing.
After the invasion of Poland, Wilhelm Keitel received a bonus of 100,000 Reichsmarks for his loyalty. The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands started on May 10, 1940, and became known as the Battle of France. These countries, along with France, were conquered within six weeks.
After Germany defeated France, Keitel described Hitler as the greatest warlord of all time. In order to further humiliate France, Hitler ordered the document of armistice to be signed in the same rail car in which the representatives of the then-defeated Germany signed the Armistice at the end of the First World War.
Hitler had this rail car removed from the museum where it had been stored and brought it to the Compiègne forest, the same place where the 1918 Armistice with Germany had been signed. In this manner, the location of Germany's 1918 humiliation became the symbolic site of the Third Reich's victory over France.
The Armistice was signed on June 22, 1940, by General Keitel for Germany and General Charles Huntziger for France. Shortly after, Wilhelm Keitel was promoted to the rank of field marshal.
However, this did not change the way the high-ranking Nazis would look down on him and despise him. Hermann Göring even said that Keitel had a sergeant's mind inside a field marshal's body.
During the upcoming months, Wilhelm Keitel was busy drawing up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, which became known as Operation Barbarossa. Before the invasion, Hitler asked for war studies to be completed, including the study on economic matters.
The study of Georg Thomas, Hitler's chief economic strategist for the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, detailed a few serious problems, such as logistical delays due to the fact that Russian railways were of a different gauge than German ones, insufficiency of German transport vehicle tires for the task ahead, and most significantly, the Germans only had two months' worth of fuel oil and petrol to support the advancing assault.
Wilhelm Keitel bluntly dismissed the problems, telling Thomas that Hitler would not want to see them. This influenced Thomas's second study, which offered a glowing recommendation for the invasion based upon fabricated economic benefits.
Operation Barbarossa began on Sunday, June 22, 1941. Prior to the invasion, Keitel issued a series of criminal orders which went beyond established codes of conduct for the military and broadly allowed the execution of Jews, civilians, and non-combatants for any reason. Those carrying out the murders were exempted from court-martial or later being tried for war crimes.
On June 6, 1941, the German Armed Forces High Command issued the Commissar Order, which ordered German soldiers to shoot Soviet Communist Party officials who had been taken prisoner. Political commissars were Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw its military units and reported directly to party leaders.
Operating as they did outside the military hierarchy, commissars acted as a conduit from the party to the ranks of the ordinary soldiers, transmitting political propaganda and preventing dissension. To the Germans, commissars represented the true pillars of opposition, the link between the Bolshevik ideology and the minions in the military who the Nazis believed fought blindly for Bolshevism. For that reason, German soldiers were ordered to shoot any political commissars who were taken prisoner.
In September 1941, Keitel issued an order to all German commanders stating that the soldiers on the Eastern Front had to use unusual severity to stamp out resistance, and a response to a loss of one German soldier was the execution of 50 to 100 Communists. Keitel added that human life was less than nothing in the East.
Keitel was also increasing pressure for a more ruthless reprisal policy in German-occupied territories. In October 1942, he also signed the Commando Order, which ordered and authorized the killing of enemy special operations troops. The Allied commanders were to be killed without trial, even when captured in uniform or if they attempted to surrender.
He also drafted the Night and Fog Decree, which provided that in occupied territories civilians who had been accused of crimes of resistance against the army of occupation would be tried only if a death sentence was likely; otherwise they would be handed over to the Gestapo for transportation to Germany.
German authorities applied the decree principally in German-occupied Western Europe: Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Germans abducted suspected members of the resistance by night so that they effectively vanished without a trace.
German occupation authorities and their collaborators arrested approximately 7,000 individuals under the provisions of this decree. After capture they were interrogated and frequently tortured. Those who survived were taken to concentration camps such as Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler.
The decree was meant to intimidate the local populations into submission by denying friends and families of the seized any knowledge of their whereabouts or their fate. In addition, Keitel also signed orders authorizing reprisals against the families of Allied volunteers.
On September 8, 1942, Keitel ordered French, Dutch, and Belgian citizens to work on the construction of the Atlantic Wall. He was present on January 4, 1944, when Hitler directed Fritz Sauckel to obtain four million new workers from the occupied territories. Sauckel was Plenipotentiary General for the Deployment of Labor, responsible for providing forced laborers to meet Germany's increasing war production needs.
In the order from December 16, 1942, in connection with a partisan war in Yugoslavia, Keitel declared the following: the troops are authorized and obliged to use every means in this fight without restriction, even against women and children, if only it leads to success.
Hitler rewarded Keitel's loyalty in 1942 with a cash grant of 250,000 Reichsmarks, an equivalent of almost 2.4 million United States dollars today, and in October 1944 with 246 hectares of forest property in Lams Springer worth 739,340 Reichsmarks, an equivalent of more than 7 million United States dollars today.
However, Keitel was also affected by the war. His youngest son, Hans Georg, was killed in July 1941 during the German attack on the Soviet Union, and his elder son, Karl Heinz, was made a prisoner of war by the Russians on July 20, 1944.
Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. After the bomb had exploded, Keitel personally led the wounded Hitler out of the room.
In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for conspirators which continued for months. In the end, more than 7,000 people were arrested and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest evidence.
Wilhelm Keitel not only sat on the Army court of honor that handed over many officers for show trials to the notorious German People's Court presided over by the fanatical judge Roland Freisler, but on Hitler's orders he sent two generals to Erwin Rommel, a German field marshal known as the Desert Fox whose participation in the assassination attempt remains ambiguous until today, offering him the choice of suicide or a court-martial to protect his family. Rommel chose the former and committed suicide using a cyanide pill.
In April and May 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, Keitel called for counterattacks to drive back the Soviet forces and relieve Berlin. However, there were insufficient German forces to carry out such counterattacks.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 7, 1945, in Reims, France, Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, on behalf of Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state, signed Germany's unconditional surrender on all fronts.
A few hours later, however, a response was received from the Soviet High Command stating that the act of surrender in Reims was unacceptable. They insisted that not Jodl, deputized by Dönitz, a civilian head of state, but the Supreme Command of all German forces, Wilhelm Keitel, should personally sign the document.
One of the reasons was a fear of a new stab-in-the-back myth, which maintained that the imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front, especially Jews and Communists, who they claimed had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace.
As a result, a second signing was arranged in Berlin on the night of May 8, 1945. Wilhelm Keitel signed the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, which was the legal document that effected the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on all fronts and ended World War II in Europe.
Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, said that Keitel groveled to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who succeeded Adolf Hitler as president, in the same way as he had done to Hitler. On May 13, Wilhelm Keitel was arrested at the request of the United States.
Justice finally caught up with Keitel when he was tried at the Nuremberg trials, which were held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Keitel admitted that he knew that many of Hitler's orders were illegal, and his defense relied almost entirely on the argument that he was merely following orders. Prison psychiatrist G. M. Gilbert said that Keitel had no more backbone than a jellyfish.
On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Wilhelm Keitel guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging. His request for a military execution by firing squad was denied due to the criminal rather than military nature of his acts.
On October 16, 1946, the day of Keitel's execution, he told the prison chaplain, "You have helped me more than you know. May Christ my Savior stand by me all the way. I shall need him so much." He then received communion and was executed later that day by American Army Sergeant John C. Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman.
It is believed that Woods was deliberately bad at his job to make the 10 Nazi war criminals that he executed that day suffer, as they all died a long agonizing death. The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their deaths by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes.
With Wilhelm Keitel it was even worse. After he had said his last words, "I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than 2 million German soldiers went to their death for the Fatherland before me. I follow now my sons, all for Germany," Keitel was hanged, but because the trapdoor was too small it caused him painful head injuries, and as he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his horrible convulsing lasted 28 long minutes before he died. He was 64 years old.
After that, his corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Wenzbach, a small tributary of the river Isar. Sergeant Woods later not only insisted he had performed all executions correctly but also stated he was very proud of his work.
Joseph Malta, the US Army military policeman who held the noose as John C. Woods carried out the executions, said 50 years later, "It was a pleasure doing it. I'd do it all over again." There were no tears shed for Wilhelm Keitel.