Hitler's Drudge

THE MEMOIRS OF FIELD-MARSHAL KEITEL, Chief of the German High Command, 1938-1945. Edited by Walter Goerlitz. 288 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.

To his Allied captors at Nuernberg, the Field Marshal seemed to be the essence of all that was evil in Junkerdom. Tall and taciturn, a monocle screwed tight in one chilly pale eye, his boots gleaming with metronomic precision as he paced the stone floor of his cell, the prisoner never complained and never begged for mercy. When the gallows trap was sprung on Oct. 16, 1946, and Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel dropped to his death, it is doubtful that he had any regrets. Keitel had long before reached the end of his rope.

If Eichmann demonstrated the banality of evil, Keitel proved its myopia. Actually, the chief of Hitler's high command was neither a Prussian nor a very convincing "war criminal." Keitel was a frustrated farmer who, on his rare wartime leaves, loved nothing more than to muck about his Brunswick estate of Helmscherode, buying new farm implements or hunting roebuck and wild boar. Almost coincidentally, he signed his name to Hitler's orders decreeing the deaths of millions. As another Nazi general wrote of Keitel later, "He was certainly not wicked au fond, as one occasionally reads of him."

Keitel's memoirs, written at Nuernberg during his trial and completed just before his execution, reveal a mind that was both humorless and unimaginative; he did, however, have a vast capacity for administrative drudgery--and all were qualities that Hitler recognized as essentials in a subordinate if his own plans were to work. Keitel not only carried out the Fuehrer's orders with diligence, but did not even permit himself--much less his own subordinates--to question their morality. The infamous Nacht und Nebel order of 1941, under which Resistance suspects from France to Rumania were hauled to their deaths in German concentration camps under cover of "night and fog," met with Keitel's most self-righteous concurrence. It-was the only way to combat "a kind of warfare launched by gangsters, spies and other skulking vermin." When Hitler suspended military laws against looting and pillage by German troops in Russia, Keitel's only objection was the fear that such license might be damaging to traditional troop discipline.

Pea 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 a crossroads. Keitel devotes five fat paragraphs to a description of how he revamped the defenses of Rathenow, a sleepy hamlet that was threatened by the Russians.

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 Fuehrer 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.

Two Shortcomings. Keitel considered it himself but decided against it. "The armed forces," he wrote in his Nuernberg 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."

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