NUREMBERG — Alfred Jodl, the German general who served as Adolf Hitler’s chief military adviser and signed the orders that sent countless soldiers and civilians to their deaths, was hanged here today after the International Military Tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was 56 years old.
The former Colonel General of the German Armed Forces High Command, known as the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, died on the gallows at Nuremberg Prison alongside nine other senior Nazi leaders sentenced by the tribunal in the first and most consequential of the postwar war crimes trials. His execution came less than a year after the proceedings began and nearly seventeen months after Germany’s unconditional surrender ended the Second World War in Europe.
Jodl’s final words, spoken moments before the trapdoor opened beneath him, were reported as “I salute you, my eternal Germany.” What followed was neither swift nor merciful. According to accounts from the execution chamber, the drop was miscalculated, and the fall failed to break his neck.
Witnesses described a prolonged death by strangulation that lasted approximately eighteen minutes, during which the condemned man’s body convulsed in the noose.
The hangman, United States Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods, had no documented prewar experience as an executioner. His handling of the Nuremberg executions has since been the subject of intense scrutiny, with some historians and observers asserting that the insufficient drops were deliberate, intended to make the condemned suffer for their crimes.
The ten men hanged that night died slowly, in some cases taking many minutes to expire.
Jodl’s path to the gallows began in the Bavarian city of Würzburg, where he was born out of wedlock on May 10, 1890. His father, a member of a Bavarian military family, could not marry his mother, Therese, because she was a farmer’s daughter and was deemed unsuitable for an officer’s wife. The couple married only in 1899, after his father had retired from military service, and it was only then that the boy took the Jodl name.
He joined the 4th Field Artillery Regiment of the Bavarian Army in July 1910 and was commissioned as a lieutenant two years later. In September 1913 he married Countess Irma von Bullion, a union that produced no children. When the First World War erupted in the summer of 1914, Jodl was wounded in the thigh at the Battle of Saarburg and did not return to his troops until March 1915.
He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for gallantry and later received the Iron Cross First Class after being transferred to the Western Front as a General Staff officer in 1918.
In the Weimar Republic that followed Germany’s defeat, Jodl remained a professional soldier, transferring to the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin in 1924. Between 1928 and 1932 he taught tactics and war history. In February 1932, Wilhelm Keitel, his superior and later his co-defendant at Nuremberg, promoted him to major.
By June of that year he was a group leader in the Operations Department of the Truppenamt, the covert agency that concealed the existence of the prohibited German General Staff.
The tribunal found that Jodl was significantly involved in secretly planning, reorganizing, and enlarging the German army in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Even after Hitler came to power in January 1933, German rearmament remained largely covert, conducted through front organizations including glider clubs for pilot training and Nazi militia groups for infantry instruction. This policy was later expanded openly and on a massive scale.
On August 23, 1939, one week before the invasion of Poland, Hitler appointed Jodl Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command. The High Command, established in 1938, unified control of Germany’s air force, navy, and army under Hitler’s personal command. Keitel served as its chief, making him the second most powerful figure in the military hierarchy, and Jodl became the next officer in line, Hitler’s primary military adviser, and the man responsible in large measure for the strategy and conduct of operations.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The campaign ended on October 6 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the entire country. Jodl acted as chief of staff during the invasion of Denmark and Norway, codenamed Operation Weserübung, which began on April 9, 1940.
Denmark fell in less than six hours, the shortest German campaign of the war, while Norway held out for two months before surrendering on June 10, 1940.
In the wave of promotions that followed the fall of France that same month, Jodl rose directly to the rank of General, skipping the rank of Lieutenant General entirely. In the months that followed, he was occupied with drawing up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, which became known as Operation Barbarossa.
Jodl signed the so-called Commissar Order on June 6, 1941, less than three weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union began. The order instructed the Wehrmacht that any political commissars, Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw military units and reported directly to party leaders, were to be shot on principle when captured in battle or offering resistance. The order was cancelled in May 1942 at the urging of German field commanders who encountered fiercer resistance once Soviet soldiers learned of the routine shootings.
The Germans killed not only political commissars but also enormous numbers of Soviet prisoners of war, whom they regarded as part of the so-called Bolshevik menace.
Jodl also signed the Commando Order, which authorized the killing of enemy special operations troops without trial, even when they were captured in uniform or attempted to surrender. These orders formed a central part of the prosecution’s case that Jodl had participated in the systematic commission of war crimes.
During the planning of the Case Blue offensive in southern Russia in the summer of 1942, Jodl clashed repeatedly with Hitler. He considered the German forces allocated to the operation too weak and sharply criticized Hitler’s interference in operational planning and the splitting of Army Group South in early July 1942. When the German attack stalled in the Caucasus, Jodl countered Hitler’s accusation that local commanders were to blame, pointing out that they had merely followed the Führer’s orders.
Hitler planned to replace Jodl with General Friedrich Paulus once Stalingrad fell, but that never happened. Despite the cooling of their relationship, Jodl remained loyal, praising Hitler’s strategic foresight and carrying out whatever he was ordered to do.
In February 1944, Jodl was promoted to Colonel General. His wife Irma died on April 18, 1944. A year later, on April 7, 1945, he married Luise von Benda, a close friend of his first wife.
That marriage also remained childless.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair field headquarters. Jodl was present and was slightly injured when the bomb exploded. In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for the conspirators.
More than 7,000 people were arrested and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest evidence.
On October 28, 1944, Jodl ordered by teletype the evacuation of the Norwegian population and the destruction of all houses east of the Lyngenfjord as part of Operation Northern Lights, so that they could not assist the advancing Russians. More than 40,000 people in northern Norway were forcibly evacuated and thousands of homes were destroyed.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Following regional surrenders of German forces, Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state, sent Jodl to sign a surrender limited to the forces still fighting the Western Allies. American General Dwight Eisenhower demanded the complete surrender of all German forces, including those fighting in the East, and was prepared to seal off the Western Front to prevent Germans from fleeing westward to surrender, leaving them to the advancing Soviet forces.
Dönitz ordered Jodl to sign, which he did on behalf of the German Armed Forces High Command on May 7, 1945, in Reims, France.
Hours later, the Soviet High Command rejected the Reims instrument, insisting that not Jodl, deputized by a civilian head of state, but the supreme commander of all German forces, Wilhelm Keitel, should personally sign the document. A second signing was arranged in Berlin. On the night of May 8, 1945, Field Marshal Keitel signed the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, the legal document that effected the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on all fronts and ended the Second World War in Europe.
British troops arrested Jodl on May 23, 1945. He was tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which had been convened to hold representatives of the defeated Nazi regime accountable for unspeakable atrocities committed during the war. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Additional charges included unlawful deportation and abetting execution.
His wife Luise joined his defense team. At trial, Jodl claimed to have known nothing of the death camps at which nearly six million European Jews met their deaths, and he pleaded not guilty before God, before history, and before his people. The tribunal rejected his denials.
On October 1, 1946, after more than ten months of proceedings, the International Military Tribunal found Alfred Jodl guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging. His request for execution by firing squad, made alongside similar requests from Keitel and Hermann Göring, was denied because his acts were criminal rather than military in nature.
He was executed by Sergeant Woods, who hanged ten Nazi war criminals that night. The condemned fell from the gallows with drops insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in deaths by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. For Jodl, the agony lasted approximately eighteen minutes.
His corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in the river Isar. There were no tears shed for Alfred Jodl.
The Nuremberg trials were only the first of many war crimes proceedings held after the Second World War. They established the principle that individuals, including heads of state and senior military commanders, could be held personally accountable under international law for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The judgment against Jodl and his co-defendants has since served as a warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere that the reach of justice can extend beyond the battlefield and beyond the fall of a regime.