On October 1, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the sentences were read out for 21 defendants who had been among the most important political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany. After more than 10 months of trial, these high-ranking representatives of the criminal Nazi regime were finally made to answer before an International Military Tribunal for unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World War.
It was only the first of many war crimes trials held after the Second World War, and it would become a warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere. Once the true extent of the German atrocities, especially against Jews, was revealed, 12 of the 21 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. One of them was the German general Alfred Jodl.
Alfred Jodl was born out of wedlock on May 10, 1890, in Würzburg, then part of the German Empire. His father came from a Bavarian military family and was not married to Alfred's mother, Therese, because as a farmer's daughter she was considered not good enough to marry a Bavarian military officer. They married only in 1899, after his father had retired from military service, and it was only from then on that Alfred bore his name.
Alfred grew up with his younger brother Ferdinand, who would also become an army general. His uncle Friedrich Jodl was a philosopher. In July 1910, Alfred joined the 4th Field Artillery Regiment of the Bavarian Army. The following year he was assigned to the military school in Munich, and in October 1912 he was promoted to lieutenant. In September 1913, Jodl married Countess Irma von Bullion. The marriage was childless.
The First World War began on July 28, 1914. In August that year, Jodl took part in the battle of Saarburg, but he was wounded in the thigh and was not able to return to the troops until March 1915. For gallantry in action, he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. At the end of 1916, Jodl was transferred to the Eastern Front, where in 1917 he became a battery commander of the 72nd Hungarian Field Artillery Regiment. At the beginning of 1918 he was transferred back to the Western Front as a General Staff officer, and in March that year he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.
The First World War ended on November 11, 1918, when the German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. The introduction of new weapons like the machine gun and gas warfare led to enormous losses, and the war claimed the lives of ten million soldiers. Property and industry losses were catastrophic. As a result, the victorious powers imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated powers.
Among the treaties, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and liable for massive material damages. The treaty imposed harsh penalties on the Germans, including the loss of 13% of its prewar territories, extensive reparation payments, and demilitarization of the Rhineland. The Reichswehr, the German Army, was restricted to 100,000 men.
In the new Weimar Republic, the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, Alfred Jodl continued his career as a professional soldier. In 1924, Jodl was transferred to the Ministry of the Reichswehr in Berlin. Between 1928 and 1932 he was a teacher of tactics and war history, and in February 1932 Wilhelm Keitel, his superior, appointed him as a major. In June that year, Jodl was appointed a group leader in the Operations Department of the Truppenamt, an agency which concealed the existence of the proscribed German Army General Staff.
Alfred Jodl was significantly involved in secretly planning, reorganizing, and eventually enlarging the German army in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Even after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933, German rearmament, despite its scale, remained a largely covert operation, carried out using front organizations such as glider clubs for training pilots, sporting clubs, and Nazi SA militia groups for teaching infantry combat techniques. Later, however, this rearmament policy was openly and massively expanded.
One of the main objectives of the Nazi regime was to redraw the map of post-World War I Europe. Hitler and the Nazis considered the postwar international borders unfair and illegitimate. They claimed that Germans had been denied the right of self-determination. Redrawing Europe's borders would allow the Nazis to achieve two main goals: unite all Germans in a Nazi German Empire, and acquire Lebensraum, meaning "living space," in eastern Europe.
The annexation of Austria would help the Nazis achieve the first goal. The Anschluss, as the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich became known, took place over three days between March 11 and 13, 1938. The Anschluss was supported by many Austrians, among them Austrian Nazis, who saw it as a political, social, and cultural reunification with their brother country, Germany. Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler, the native son who was returning to his homeland.
Even though the leaders of the West saw the Anschluss as an invasion, not one government made a move to stop Hitler, who, without interference, felt free to embark upon the next step in his scheme to conquer all of Europe. At the end of 1938, Alfred Jodl was transferred to Linz in annexed Austria to take charge of the 44th artillery regiment as a commander.
On August 23, 1939, just one week before the German invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler appointed Jodl Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command. Established in 1938, the German Armed Forces High Command was a unified military command controlling Germany's air force, navy, and army. In reality, the establishment of the High Command allowed Adolf Hitler to consolidate power as commander-in-chief of the German military.
High Command was led by Wilhelm Keitel as Chief with the rank of a Reich Minister, which essentially made him the second most powerful person in the Armed Forces' hierarchy after Hitler. Alfred Jodl became not only the next officer after Keitel but also Hitler's primary military advisor in the High Command, responsible in large measure for the strategy and conduct of operations.
World War II started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The campaign in Poland ended on October 6 that year with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country. Alfred Jodl acted as a chief of staff during the invasion of Denmark and Norway, which was codenamed Operation Weserübung.
Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940. Strategically, Denmark's importance to Germany was as a staging area for operations in Norway. In Norway, Germany sought to secure naval bases for use against the British fleet in the North Sea and to guarantee vital iron-ore shipments from neutral Sweden, on which Nazi Germany was dependent.
While the invasion of Denmark lasted less than six hours and was the shortest military campaign conducted by the Germans during the war, Norway surrendered to Germany only after two months, on June 10, 1940. In the great wave of promotions that followed the "Fall of France" in June the same month, Jodl rose directly to General, skipping the rank of Lieutenant General.
During the following months, Alfred Jodl was busy drawing up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, which became known as Operation Barbarossa. Jodl was also involved in drafting the "Commissar Order," which he signed on June 6, 1941, less than three weeks before Operation Barbarossa began. This order instructed the Wehrmacht that any political commissars were to be shot on principle when captured, either in battle or offering resistance.
Political commissars were Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw its military units and reported directly to party leaders. Operation Barbarossa began on Sunday, June 22, 1941. In May 1942, however, the Commissar Order was cancelled at the urging of German field commanders, who came up against much stronger resistance when the routine shooting of the commissars became known to the Soviet soldiers.
The Germans killed not only political commissars but also Soviet prisoners of war whom they regarded as an integral part of the so-called Bolshevik menace, and killed them in massive numbers. Jodl also signed the "Commando Order," which ordered and authorized the killing of enemy special operations troops. The Allied commandos were to be killed without trial, even when captured in uniform or if they attempted to surrender.
During the planning of the Case Blue offensive in Southern Russia in summer 1942, there were repeated disagreements between Jodl and Hitler. Jodl considered the German forces planned for the invasion to be too weak. He severely criticized Hitler's intervention in operational planning and the associated splitting up of Army Group South in early July 1942, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
When the German attack stalled in the run-up to the Caucasus, Jodl countered the Führer's accusation that the local commanders were to blame for the situation, as they had merely followed Hitler's orders. In view of this open confrontation, Hitler planned Jodl's replacement by General Friedrich Paulus as soon as he would conquer Stalingrad, which never happened.
Even though his criticism led to a cooling of the relationship with the Führer, Jodl, the same as with his superior Wilhelm Keitel, remained loyal to Hitler, praising him for his strategic foresight and carrying out whatever the Führer ordered. In February 1944, Alfred Jodl was promoted to the rank of Colonel General. On April 18, 1944, his wife Irma died. He remarried one year later, on April 7, 1945, when he married Luise von Benda, who had been a close friend of his first wife Irma. This marriage also remained childless.
On July 20, 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Hitler. Alfred Jodl was present in the Wolf's Lair field headquarters, and he was slightly injured when the bomb exploded. In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for conspirators which continued for months. Many of them appeared before the notorious People's Courts for show trials, but this practice was ended as it gave conspirators a platform to condemn the regime. In the end more than 7,000 people were arrested, and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest evidence.
On October 28, 1944, by teletype, Jodl ordered the evacuation of the Norwegian population and the destruction of all the houses east of the Lyngenfjord in the course of Operation Northern Lights, so that they could not help the Russians. The forced evacuation of more than 40,000 people in Northern Norway took place shortly after, and thousands of houses were destroyed.
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Following regional surrenders of German forces in Europe, Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state, sent Alfred Jodl to sign the surrender, which was limited to only those forces still fighting the Western Allies. However, American General Dwight Eisenhower demanded complete surrender of all German forces, including those fighting in the East. If this demand had not been met, Eisenhower was prepared to seal off the Western Front, preventing Germans from fleeing to the West in order to surrender, thereby leaving them in the hands of 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. A few hours later, 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 commander 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, Nazi Field Marshal 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.
In the end, justice finally caught up with Jodl when he was arrested by British troops on May 23, 1945, and 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. Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution. His wife Luise joined her husband's defence team.
At the trial, Jodl claimed to have known nothing of the death camps at which nearly six million European Jews met their death, and pleaded not guilty before God, before history, and his people. However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Alfred Jodl guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging.
His request, as well as those of Wilhelm Keitel and Hermann Göring, for a military execution by firing squad was denied due to the criminal rather than military nature of his acts. He was executed by American Army sergeant John C. Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman. It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job to make the 10 Nazi war criminals that he executed on that day suffer, as they all died in long agonizing deaths.
The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. With Alfred Jodl, it was even worse. After he had said his last words, "I salute you, my eternal Germany," Jodl was hanged, but because he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his horrible convulsing lasted 18 long minutes before he died. He was 56 years old. After that, his corpse was cremated and scattered in the river Isar. There were no tears shed for Alfred Jodl.