The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel by Walter Gorlitz & David Irving & Earl Ziemke

Author:Walter Gorlitz & David Irving & Earl Ziemke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 2000-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

BARBAROSSA—THE GERMAN INVASION OF RUSSIA, 1941

Hitler visualised these targets on the flanks as being of great economic value in the case of the Donets basin, and political and naval value in the case of Finland and the Baltic: from the point of view of military strategy he was not so much concerned with the city of Leningrad as such, or with its world status as a city of a million inhabitants, as with the naval base at Kronstadt and its elimination as a key naval base; it presented a considerable threat to our communications and submarine training in the Baltic. The War Office, on the other hand, believed that in their proposal lay the key to a rapid termination of the war. The Führer remained unconvinced.

He decided to fly out to the headquarters of Army Group Centre (at Borisov) having summoned the commanders of two Tank Armies, Hoth and Guderian, to meet him there. I accompanied Hitler, and took part in the ensuing conference between the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, von Bock, and the two tank generals, each of whom he [Hitler] wanted to siphon off to the neighbouring Army Groups as the first of the reinforcements. He came up against a blank wall of refusal, the two tank generals even going so far as to announce that their units were so battle-weary that they would need two or three weeks to regroup and to overhaul their tanks before they would be fully operational again.

Obviously we had no means of checking these claims; the two generals remained unco-operative—despite the award to them of the Oak Leaves to their Knight’s Crosses—and refused to admit any possibility of alternative employment for their units, at any rate on such remote sections of the front. Von Bock naturally had no desire to lose them and trumpeted the same story. All three of them were aware of the War Office’s plan of attack and saw it as their panacea; any weakening of Army Group Centre would jeopardise this plan, a plan which had electrified them all.

Although the Führer could see right through their ploy—no great feat for anybody—he hesitated to command the War Office to override their pleas and release the two tank generals as he had wanted, even though the period they were demanding for recuperation would delay his planned operation by some four weeks. The War Office, Army Group Centre and the tank commanders had managed to put up a united front to their Führer. He was convinced that they did not want to do it and had just claimed that they were not able to; that was what he himself told me at the time.

Inwardly he was once again very annoyed at the War Office as a result of all this, but he managed to swallow his bitterness. There was a compromise, which, of course, shipwrecked Hitler’s great strategic master plan, at any rate in so far as Leningrad to the north was concerned. Hitler for his part vetoed the attack

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