Alfred Jodl

Alfred Jodl (1940)

Alfred Josef Ferdinand Jodl , in 1899 Alfred Joseph Baumgärtler (* 10. May 1890 in Würzburg ; † 16th October 1946 in Nuremberg ) was a German army officer (since 1944 Colonel General ) and during World War II as head of the Armed Forces Operations Staff in the High Command of the Armed Forces played a leading role in the planning of German military operations.

Alfred Jodl was one of the 24 people indicted in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals before the International Military Court . It was on October 1, 1946 in all four counts guilty to death by the strand convicted and executed with nine other condemned on 16 October 1946 in Nuremberg.

Life

family

Alfred Baumgärtler was the son of the Bavarian artillery captain (later colonel) Johannes Jodl and Therese Baumgärtler. His father came from a Bavarian , originally Tyrolean military family. The parents were not married because Therese, as a farmer's daughter, was not befitting a Bavarian officer. They did not get married until 1899, after his father retired from military service , and it was only from then on that Alfred bore his name. Jodl grew up with his younger brother Ferdinand Jodl ; three sisters died in childhood. His uncle was the philosopher Friedrich Jodl .

In September 1913 Jodl married Irma Countess von Bullion (born August 16, 1885), with whom he was married until her death on April 18, 1944. On April 7, 1945 he married Luise von Benda (* September 10, 1905, † January 26, 1998), a close friend of his first wife. Both marriages remained childless.

Kingdom of Bavaria and First World War

Alfred Jodl attended elementary schools in Landau in the Palatinate from 1895 and in Munich from 1899 . After attending the Theresien-Gymnasium in Munich until he was 13 , Jodl joined the cadet corps in Munich in 1903 . Due to fluctuating performance, he did not pass his Abitur until 1910 at the age of 20, as one of the best in his class.

In July of the same year Jodl joined the 4th field artillery regiment "King" of the Bavarian Army in Augsburg as an ensign . From 1911 to 1912 he was assigned to the Munich War School and on his return on October 28, 1912 was appointed lieutenant .

At the beginning of the First World War , Jodl and his unit took part in the battle of Saarburg (August 20, 1914) and was wounded in the thigh on August 24, 1914. Jodl was then awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class. Jodl was only able to return to the troops in March 1915. In 1916 Jodl was promoted to lieutenant and at the end of the year he was transferred to the Eastern Front . There he became battery commander in the 72nd k. Hungarian field cannon regiment. At the beginning of 1918 he was reassigned to the Western Front as a general staff officer. There Jodl was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class on May 3rd.

Weimar Republic

After the Compiègne armistice , Jodl remained in the army. In June 1919 he was transferred to the Battery Leader in the 22nd Light Artillery Regiment of the Provisional Reichswehr and on October 1, 1919 to the Reichswehr Artillery Regiment 21 in Landsberg am Lech . In 1921 Jodl was promoted to captain ; then he took part in the guide assistant course I in Munich. He was one of the ten best of the year and then head of the 4th Mountain Battery in the 7th (Bavarian) Artillery Regiment .

Jodl (second from right) during a 7th Division maneuver (1926)

On October 1, 1923, there was another command to attend the Guide's Assistant Course II in Berlin. In May 1924 Jodl was transferred to the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin, and in October he was assigned as a staff officer to the 7th (Bavarian) Division in Munich, where he worked until October 1927.

On October 1, 1927, he became chief of the 5th battery of the 7th (Bavarian) Artillery Regiment. From 1928 to 1932 he was a teacher of tactics and war history. On February 1, 1932, he was promoted to major , and on June 1, 1932, he was appointed group leader in the operations department in the Army Office of the Reichswehr Ministry.

time of the nationalsocialism

Pre-war period

On June 20, 1935, Jodl became head of the national defense department in the Wehrmacht leadership office (WFA); on August 1, 1935, he was promoted to colonel . In Bischofswiesen - Stanggaß , the place where the Reich Chancellery Berchtesgaden was built, Jodl stayed occasionally when Hitler was at the Berghof .

In February / March 1938, as a result of the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis, the top Wehrmacht was reorganized and the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) was founded, which was manned by reliable National Socialists. The Wehrmachtführungamt (WFA) with Jodl as the new boss was now part of the OKW and was directly subordinate to its boss, General Wilhelm Keitel . In accordance with the schedule, on October 1, 1938, Jodl was transferred from his previous staff position to a troop command as the artillery commander of the 44th Infantry Division . Jodl's previous deputy head of the WFA, Walter Warlimont , took over Jodl's duties.

After half a year in the troop service, Jodl was appointed major general on April 1, 1939 . It was planned that he should take over as commander of the 4th Mountain Division in October 1939 . Due to the mobilization order valid for him until September 30, 1939 , he was recalled to his old position as head of the Wehrmacht leadership office (from 1940 Wehrmacht leadership staff) before his appointment as division commander on August 23, 1939.

Second World War

Hitler's staff in 1940 with Jodl (right next to Hitler)

General Jodl Signs the Unconditional Surrender of the Wehrmacht in Reims (May 7, 1945)

The arrest of Jodl on May 23, 1945 when sports school in Flensburg - Mürwik , perched on the edge of the Naval Academy Mürwik is

It was only after the beginning of the war against Poland that Jodl met Adolf Hitler personally for the first time on September 3, 1939, during a trip to the front in a special train .

While the war against Poland was planned solely by the High Command of the Army (OKH), the attack on Denmark and Norway (cover name: company Weser Exercise ) was ordered by the OKW under Jodl because of the rather skeptical attitude in the OKH in connection with the Western campaign planned. Even later, all operations in the west and in North Africa were so-called OKW theaters of war, only the eastern front remained operationally under the control of the OKH.

In the great wave of promotion after the victory over France , Jodl was promoted to general of the artillery on July 19, 1940 , where he jumped the rank of lieutenant general .

In the following years, Jodl was soon busy working out plans for a campaign against the Soviet Union . The instruction no. 21 of 18 December 1940 under the code name Operation Barbarossa outlined the attack on the USSR, came largely from Jodl and his staff in the Armed Forces Joint Staff. Jodl was also involved in the drafting of the commissioner 's order, which was contrary to international law and ordered in particular: “These commissioners [i. e. “Political commissars as organs of the enemy troops”] are not recognized as soldiers; the protection under international law for prisoners of war does not apply to them. They are to be dealt with after they have been separated. ”In March 1941, Jodl spoke out in favor of the task force subordinate to the SS having to render Soviet commissars and“ Bolshevik chiefs ”in the operational area“ harmless ”without delay (see commissar order). In fact, the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD committed crimes of unimaginable proportions after the attack on the Soviet Union .

During the German summer offensive in 1942 (the Blau case ) there were repeated disagreements between Jodl and Hitler. Even in the planning phase, Jodl considered the planned strengths to be too weak to be able to achieve the far-reaching goals. Hitler's intervention in the planning of operations and the associated division of Army Group South at the beginning of July he strongly criticized (“splitting up of the forces”), but ultimately unsuccessful. When the German attack in the apron of the Caucasus got stuck, Jodl opposed Hitler's accusation that the local commanders were to blame for the situation; they merely obeyed Hitler's orders. In view of this open confrontation, Hitler planned to replace Jodl with General Friedrich Paulus as soon as he had conquered Stalingrad . From the outside, Jodl hid the conflict and explicitly praised Hitler for his strategic foresight. In a lecture on the strategic situation on November 7, 1943 in Munich to the Reich and Gauleiter, he cited the “natural feeling of the people that in this war there is only a fight to the end. Surrender is the end of the nation, it is the end of Germany. ”Confidence in the final victory is unbroken and is justified by the fact that“ the genius is at the head of the leadership ”.

Nonetheless, on January 30, 1943, Jodl received the NSDAP's golden party badge .

Jodl was also involved in the deportations of European Jews to the extermination camps. In the autumn of 1943, for example, Jodl noted in a letter from the German Wehrmacht commander in Denmark, Hermann von Hanneken , who did not want to see the state of emergency being used as a pretext for the deportation of Jews: “Chatter. It's about state needs. "

On January 30, 1944, the anniversary of the Nazi regime's seizure of power , Jodl was promoted to Colonel General. On April 18, 1944, his wife Irma died in Königsberg . Jodl was slightly injured in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 . On April 7, 1945, Jodl married Luise Katharina von Benda (1905–1998), a friend of his first wife and a former secretary at the OKH. This marriage also remained childless.

On October 28, 1944, he ordered the complete and ruthless deportation ( evacuation ) of the Norwegian population and the destruction of all accommodation east of the Lyngenfjord as part of the Northern Lights operation . The order was carried out in most places with the harshness and thoroughness ordered, and caused the greatest migration and destruction on Norwegian soil. In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals, the order was considered one of the cases in which Jodl had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity .

End of the war and the Nuremberg Trial

56-year-old Jodl as a defendant in the Nuremberg Trials (1946)

Jodl's body after an executed death sentence (1946).

The day before the capitulation, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz awarded Jodl the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on May 6, 1945 . In the early morning hours of May 7th, Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht at the headquarters of the western Allied forces in Reims , ratified on May 8th by the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army , Air Force and Navy in Berlin-Karlshorst .

After Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was arrested by the Allies on May 13, 1945 , Jodl was entrusted with the management of the OKW's business . On May 15, 1945, he used the preventive war thesis to justify expected accusations from the victorious powers:

"We [...] did not lead the attack against Russia because we wanted the space, but because day after day the deployment of the Russians continued tremendously and would ultimately have led to ultimate demands."

On May 23, 1945, Jodl was arrested by British troops in Flensburg - Mürwik together with members of the executive government and interned in POW camp No. 32 ( Camp Ashcan ) in Bad Mondorf , Luxembourg, together with other members of the Wehrmacht and NSDAP, before moving to Nuremberg was transferred.

In the war crimes trial Jodl was in all four counts charged and finally - found guilty in all four counts, and - after nearly a year of negotiations sentenced to death . This judgment was also controversial among the Allies and was called a false judgment by the French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres . Professors Franz Exner and Hermann Jahrreiß took over the defense . Jodl's application, not by the train , but by a firing squad to be executed, was - as well as the relevant applications Keitel and Goering - rejected.

On 16 October 1946 Alfred Jodl was in Nuremberg, along with nine other condemned in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice prison by hanging executed. His body was cremated a day later in the municipal crematorium in Munich's Ostfriedhof ; the ashes were scattered in the Wenzbach , a tributary of the Isar .

After the Second World War

Arbitration Chamber Proceedings

1953 by the Bavarian Minister for Political Liberation Otto Weinkamm a denazification process arranged against Jodl's estate. According to Art. 37 of the Law on Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism (so-called Liberation Act ), proceedings for the entire or partial confiscation of the estate located in the country could be carried out if the person concerned is to be regarded as the main culprit or incriminated person within the meaning of the Liberation Act. Regardless of his conviction as a war criminal in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals, the confiscation of the estate located in the state of Bavaria was refrained from, since Jodl would not have been classified as either the main culprit or the incriminated by the judging chamber under the presidency of a Berlin lawyer during his lifetime. The public plaintiff waived his right to appeal, whereupon the verdict became final on March 2, 1953.

However, the decision of the main court was not accepted by the US occupation authorities. The High Commissioner of the United States , on the grounds that the Arbitration Chamber violated the judgment of the International Military Tribunal , obtained Minister Weinkamm's order in May 1953 that the legally concluded Jodl estate proceedings be resumed.

Following the intervention of Jodl's widow, the US side indicated that they might refer to the law of the Allied High Commission No. 13 on the Allied rights of reservation in the field of German criminal justice. According to Article 3 of Law No. 13, the German authorities were not allowed to contradict a decision of the occupation authorities and, for example, to revise the Nuremberg judgment. If the American authorities take the decision, classify Jodl himself and decide on his responsibility and involvement in atonement, the decision will most certainly not be in Jodl's favor or his widow.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Finally, Luise Jodl's lawyer and a representative of the Americans agreed to release the estate and grant the widow the right to a pension, without the US side seeing the Nuremberg judgment impaired.

Mock grave

Translucent grave Jodl at the tomb of his two wives on the woman island in the Chiemsee , 2013.

His family's estate in Gstadt am Chiemsee had great emotional significance for Jodl . In the community cemetery on the nearby Fraueninsel , a mock grave in the shape of a large, centrally positioned stone cross with his name, his military rank and his life dates in the lower area reminds Jodl between the graves of his wives .

In 2015 and 2016, the cenotaph was the subject of protests by the Munich artist Wolfram Kastner several times . Among other things, on September 2, 2016, he poured red paint over a large area of ​​the lower area. At the beginning of December 2018, the Munich Regional Court sentenced Kastner in a second instance to reimbursement of the cleaning costs. Kastner damaged the substance of the stone cross during his actions. The freedom of art must subordinate to the fundamental right of property . Kastner has lodged a constitutional complaint against this.

At the request of the municipal administration and individual islanders, the entire grave site was to be closed when the right to use the grave expired in January 2018. However, in response to a lawsuit from those who were still living entitled to grave, the municipality was obliged by judgment of the Munich Administrative Court on March 26, 2019 to extend the right to use the grave by 20 years. In order to maintain the peace of the cemetery, the plaintiff had agreed to remove the “stumbling block”, namely Alfred Jodl's name and life data, and thus “did everything to remove any appearance of a memorial and to remove the grave in memory of the to receive actually buried deceased there. "

Meanwhile, a tree of life planted in front of the stone cross hides Jodl's name.

literature

• Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, Hermann Weiss (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . 3., corr. Edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-608-91805-1 (5th updated and expanded edition, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, dtv, Munich, 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-34408-1 ).
• Luise Jodl: Beyond the end: The way of Colonel General Jodl. Langen Müller, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-7844-2145-8 (written by Jodl's widow, see Sebastian Haffner's review in der Zeit , No. 49/1976).
• Axel Kellmann: Colonel General Alfred Jodl - Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff: A contribution to the discussion about the relationship between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi regime. Pirrot, Saarbrücken 2004, ISBN 3-930714-95-7 .
• Guido Knopp : Hitler's manager. Goldmann, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-15423-4 .
• Kenneth Macksey: Colonel General Alfred Jodl. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. Volume 1, Primus, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-89678-083-2 , pp. 102-111.
• Bodo Scheurig : Alfred Jodl: Obedience and Doom. Propylaen, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1991. Licensed edition Bublies, Schnellbach 1999, ISBN 3-926584-66-1 .
• Friedrich-Christian Stahl:  Jodl, Alfred. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 449 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Alan Wilt: Alfred Jodl - Hitler's conference officer. In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): The military elite of the Third Reich. Ullstein, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-548-33220-X , pp. 236-250.

Web links

Commons : Alfred Jodl  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Alfred Jodl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Alfred Jodl in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Markus Würz: Alfred Jodl. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
• Hubert Beckers: Alfred Jodl (1890-1946). Shoa.de, accessed on May 24, 2015 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Katharina Kellmann: No General for Television December 24, 2012.
2. ↑ Wolfgang Benz u. a .: Encyclopedia of National Socialism. 3rd edition, p. 250 (cf. digital edition: EdNS, p. 103).
3. ↑ See, for example, Helmut Krausnick: Commissioner's order and “Barbarossa court decree” in a new perspective. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Volume 25, Issue 4, 1977, pp. 682–738 (PDF) .
4. ^ Commissar order on Wikisource .
5. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 296 f.
6. ^ Office of Military Government for Germany (US): Case No. 9 - Task Force Trial. (PDF retrieved from the Library of Congress) Nurnberg Military Tribunals - Indictments, 1947, accessed May 19, 2020 . 
7. ↑ Manfred Overesch , Friedrich Wilhelm Saal (ed.): German history from day to day. Digital Library, Volume 39 (Directmedia), Berlin 2000, p. 11178.
8. ^ Alfred Jodl: The strategic situation at the beginning of the 5th year of the war. (PDF retrieved from the Library of Congress) In: Vol. XXXVII, pp. 637 - 676, here: p. 639. Trial of the Major War Criminals before The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November - 1 October 1946, 1949, accessed on May 25, 2020 . 
9. ↑ Manfred Wichmann: Alfred Jodl 1890–1946 Lebendiges Museum Online , September 14, 2014.
10. ↑ Jodl, Alfred . Lexicon of the Wehrmacht, accessed on September 5, 2018.
11. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 590 f.
12. ↑ Arnim Lang: Operation Northern Lights - The Destruction of Northern Norway by German Troops…. In: Robert Bohn, Jürgen Elvert (Ed.): End of the war in the north: from hot to cold war . Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-515-06728-0 .
13. ↑ The Nuremberg Trial, the grounds for the verdict against Jodl, war crimes and crimes against humanity . Zeno.org , accessed August 23, 2015.
14. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 421.
15. ↑ UNDERTAKING ( Memento of 26 September 2007 at the Internet Archive ) (Museum Karlshorst).
16. ↑ Percy Ernst Schramm (Ed.): War Diary of the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1940–1945 - A Documentation. Special edition in 8 volumes. Volume 4, Weltbild, Augsburg 1996, ISBN 3-7637-5933-6 , p. 1503. Here quoted from: Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? On the controversy about a pseudo-military history problem. In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauss: Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2002, p. 214.
17. ↑ Thomas Darnstädt : A stroke of luck in history . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 2005, pp. 128 ( online ).
18. ↑ Law No. 104 for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism of March 5, 1946. verfassungen.de, accessed on September 5, 2018.
19. ↑ Proceedings after the death of the person concerned, bulletin of the Bavarian State Ministry for Special Tasks BMittBl. 1947 No. 11/12/13 p. 52.
20. ↑ Jodl's main fault . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1953 ( online ).
21. ↑ Law No. 13 of the Council of the Allied High Commission. Jurisdiction in the Reserved Territories, November 25, 1949, accessed September 5, 2018.
22. ↑ Luise Jodl: Beyond the end: The way of Colonel General Jodl. New edition Munich and Vienna 1987, p. 313; quoted from R. Thiemann, H. Mayer: Memorial for Colonel General Jodl disappears January 20, 2018.
23. ↑ Thomas Thois: Renewed artist action against grave: "Bloody" cross on Fraueninsel HeimatZeitung.de, July 23, 2016.
24. ↑ BayernWelle Südost: The dispute over the Jodl grave continues on February 2, 2017.
25. ↑ Ute Wessels: Dispute over the grave cross of a Nazi criminal Die Welt, February 2, 2017.
26. ↑ Ute Wessels: How guilty was Hitler's chief advisor Alfred Jodl? Die Welt, December 5, 2018.
27. ^ Rudolf Stumberger: With color against the trivialization of war crimes. In: Neues Deutschland, December 7, 2018, p. 15.
28. ↑ Dirk Walter: The controversial Jodl tomb may remain Münchner Merkur , April 10, 2019.
29. ↑ Birgit Grundner: The local council has decided. Jodl gravestone on the Chiemsee Fraueninsel has to go . ( Memento from July 7, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Bayerischer Rundfunk , February 22, 2018.
30. ↑ Dagmar Bohrer-Glas, Gerhard Brack: Memorial stone for war criminals on Fraueninsel: Artist Kastner calls for Söder to act against Jodl-Keuz Bayerischer Rundfunk , June 13, 2018.
31. ↑ Dispute over memorial stone: Family of Nazi war criminal allowed to keep a sham grave Der Spiegel , April 8, 2019.
32. ↑ VG Munich, judgment of March 26, 2019 - M 12 K 18.1936 paragraph no. 40