The 1st of October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany. After more than 10 months on a trial, 21 defendants
who are among the most important political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany,
hear their sentences read. These high-ranking representatives of the criminal Nazi regime have
to finally take responsibility for their crimes and answer before an International Military
tribunal who would punish them for unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World War.
It is only the first of many war crimes trials held after the Second World War and would become a
warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere. Once the true extent of the German atrocities,
especially against Jews, are revealed, 12 defendants out of the 21 are sentenced
to death by hanging. One of them is a German general Alfred Jodl.
Alfred Jodl was born out of wedlock on the 10th of May 1890
in Würzburg then part of the German Empire. His father, who came from a Bavarian military
family 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. 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. In 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 the 28th of July 1914. In August the same year, Jodl was took
part in the bottle 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.
In 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 the same year he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 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 the 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, which was 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. While between
1928 and 1932 he was a teacher of tactics and war history, in February 1932 Wilhelm Keitel,
his superior, appointed him as a major. In June the same 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 the 11th and 13th of March 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 the 23rd of August 1939,
just one week before the German invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler
had appointed Jodl Chief of the Operations Staff of 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 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The campaign
in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same 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 the 9th of April 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 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 2 months on the 10th of June 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 upcoming 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 had
signed on the 6th of June, 1941, less than 3 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 the 22nd
of June 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 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 the 18th of April 1944, his wife Irma died. He remarried one
year later on the 7th of April 1945 when he married Luise von Benda who had been
a close friend of his first wife Irma. This marriage also remained childless.
On the 20th of July 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 the 28th of October, 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 the 30th of April 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 the 7th of May 1945 in Reims, France.
A few hours later, a response was received from the Soviet High Command stating that
the Act of Surrender in Rems 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 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 the 8th of May 1945,
Nazi Field Marshall 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 the
British Troops on the 23rd of May 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 the 1st of October 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 death.
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.
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