Alfred Jodl

From Metapedia

Alfred Jodl (May 10, 1890 – October 16, 1946) was a German military commander, attaining the position of Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during World War II, acting as deputy to Wilhelm Keitel. At Nuremberg he was tried, sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal.

[edit] World War II

Jodl became acquainted with Adolf Hitler in 1923. As a vocal NSDAP sympathizer, he was rapidly promoted and by 1935 headed the Abteilung Landesverteidigung im Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) (Chief of the National Defense Section in the High Command of the Army). In the build-up to the Second World War, Jodl was nominally assigned as a Artilleriekommandeur of the 44th Division from October 1938 to August 1939 during the Anschluss, but from then until the end of the war in May 1945 he was Chef des Wehrmachtsführungsstabes (Chief of Operation Staff OKW). Following the Hossbach Memorandum of November 5th in the previous year, Jodl changed the military tactics of German forces from a focus on defending against the French threat, to a more aggressive tactic focused on the takeover of Czechoslovakia. Jodl was therefore a key figure in German military operations from 1939, supplying advice and technical information directly to Hitler. He was injured during the July Plot. Due to his proximity in July Plot, Jodl was awarded the wounded cross alongside several other leading figures. He was also rather vocal about his suspicions that others had not endured wounds as strong as his own, often downplaying the effects of the plot on others.

Jodl's wife Irma died on April 18, 1944. During their last years together Alfred and Irma had been very distant and cold to each other. While Wilhelm Keitel called his wife almost every day, Alfred Jodl didn't seem to seek contact with Irma. On April 7, 1945 he married former secretary and mistress Luise Katharina von Benda (born 1905). She had been a close friend of his first wife.

[edit] Trial and Execution

Jodl was then arrested and transferred to Flensburg POW camp and later put before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. Jodl was accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war-crimes; and crimes against humanity. The principal charges against him related to his signature of the Commando Order and the Commissar Order; both of which ordered that certain prisoners were to be summarily executed. Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution. Presented as evidence was his signature on an order that transferred Danish citizens, including Jews and other civilians, to concentration camps. Although he denied his role in the crime, the court sustained his complicity based on the given evidence.

His wife Luise Jodl managed to attach herself to her husband's defence team. Subsequently interviewed by Gitta Sereny, researching her biography of Albert Speer, Luise Jodl revealed that in many instances the Allied prosecution made charges against Jodl based on documents that they refused to share with the defense. Jodl nevertheless managed to prove that some of the charges made against him were completely untrue, such as the charge that he had helped Hitler gain control of Germany in 1933. He was in one instance aided by a GI clerk who chose to give Luise a document showing that the execution of a group of British commandos in Norway had been legitimate. The GI warned Luise that if she didn’t copy it immediately she would never see it again; "…it was being 'filed'.

Jodl pleaded 'not guilty' "before God, before history and my people". Found guilty on all four charges, he was hanged, although he had asked the court to be executed by firing squad.

Jodl's Nuremberg verdict was controversial in U.S. military circles and in February 28, 1953, a West German court in Munich posthumously acquitted him of all charges. His property, confiscated in 1946, was returned to his widow. However, yielding to U.S. pressure the Bavarian government recanted the court's judgment: on September 3, 1953 the Bavarian state minister of "political liberation" overturned the earlier revocation of the Nuremberg judgment.

Jodl's last words were reportedly "My greetings to you, my Germany." His remains were cremated at Munich, and his ashes raked out and scattered into the Conwentzbach, a small river flowing into the larger Isar River (effectively an attempt to prevent the establishment of a permanent burial site to those nationalist groups who might seek to congregate there — an example of this being Mussolini's place of rest in Predappio, Italy). Jodl nonetheless possesses a cenotaph in the family plot in the Fraueninsel Cemetery, in Chiemsee, Germany.