Wilhelm Keitel

The Rise and Downfall of Hitler's Chief of the Wehrmacht

von Olly Cole

80 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

On the morning of October 16, 1946, a German field marshal climbed thirteen wooden steps to a Nuremberg gallows, convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Ten years earlier, he had been one of the most powerful men in Adolf Hitler's Germany.Wilhelm Keitel was never a fanatic, an ideologue, or a public face of Nazi power in the way Hitler, Goering, or Himmler were. He was something more unsettling: a capable, unremarkable career officer whose talent for organization and unwavering deference to authority carried him from a struggling agricultural estate in the Harz Mountains to the head of the entire German Wehrmacht. This book traces that improbable rise, and the devastating price it exacted, from his childhood in Prussia and his service in the trenches of the First World War, through the secretive rebuilding of German military power during the Weimar years, to his appointment as Chief of the OKW in 1938.What follows is the story of a bureaucrat who became indispensable to a regime bent on conquest and genocide. Readers will follow Keitel through the lightning campaigns that conquered Poland and France, the catastrophic decision to invade the Soviet Union, and the atrocities carried out under directives that bore his own signature, including the guidelines that opened the door to mass killing on the Eastern Front and the Night and Fog decree that made thousands of political prisoners disappear without trial. They will witness his unwavering loyalty to Hitler even after surviving the July 1944 assassination attempt within arm's reach, and his role in the brutal purge that followed.This is a book about how ordinary competence, stripped of independent moral judgment, can become one of history's most dangerous instruments. It offers a clear, carefully researched account of Keitel's military career, his complicity in some of the twentieth century's gravest crimes, and his eventual trial at Nuremberg, where his defense that he was merely following orders was tested and ultimately rejected, a verdict that helped define the legal boundaries of individual responsibility that still shape international law today.For readers drawn to the history of the Third Reich, the machinery of the Wehrmacht, and the moral questions raised by the Nuremberg trials, Keitel's story offers something rare: a window into how the Nazi regime's worst crimes depended not only on its most fanatical believers, but on the quiet, capable men willing to make them work.The gallows awaited him. This book explains how he got there.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174723351
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.09.2026
• Größe: 279 x 216 mm
• Verlag: Independently published