An operational architect of Nazi Germany's war
On 30 June 1940 he wrote, “The final German victory over England is now only a question of time.”
Alfred Jodl was a career officer who served throughout the Second World War as chief of the Operations Staff of Germany's Armed Forces High Command, translating Nazi political decisions into military directives. In 1940 he judged final victory over Britain to be only a matter of time, while the OKW examined pressure and invasion options and coordinated the associated operational preparations and orders. He signed or circulated the Commissar and Commando Orders and bore responsibility for forced evacuation and the destruction of homes in occupied territory. Convicted on all four counts at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, he was hanged in 1946.
Also known as: Alfred Josef Ferdinand Jodl
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1910Entered military service in the 4th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment
- 1914–1918Artillery officer on the Western Front in World War I
- 1932–1935Served in the Army Operations Department
- 1935–1939Chief of the National Defense Section in the OKW
- 1939–1945Chief of the OKW Operations Staff
- 1944Promoted to Generaloberst
- 1945Defendant at Nuremberg and signatory of Germany's surrender instrument
- 1946Hanged at Nuremberg
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarArtillery officer on the Western FrontHe served as an artillery officer on the Western Front during the First World War.
- 1940.07–1941.05Battle of BritainChief of Operations of the OKWHe reviewed options to pressure Britain and prepared for invasion, coordinating operational plans.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarInvasion planning and transmission of destruction ordersHe helped plan Operation Barbarossa and in October 1941 signed the order refusing surrender offers from Leningrad or Moscow and demanding their destruction.
Surrender in May 1945: the signatory without command authority
Hitler's suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945 left Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of state, and in a hopeless military situation Dönitz attempted a partial surrender to Britain and the United States. He sent Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command, to Allied headquarters in the French city of Reims. Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower read this as an attempt to rupture the agreement among the Allies and insisted on an immediate and unconditional surrender to all Allied troops. Dönitz had to give way, and in the early hours of 7 May the unconditional surrender of the entire German Wehrmacht was agreed at Reims. Jodl signed the German Instrument of Surrender there on behalf of the OKW.
Jodl's position mattered here: his post was a staff post, and it carried no power of command. An additional protocol required ratification of the surrender by higher-ranking officers in a second act, with the British in particular fearing that the German military leadership would try to shift the blame for the lost war, as it had done at the end of the First World War. That ratification took place on 8 May at Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst. The Soviet side demanded that the act of surrender be concluded at the seat of the government from which German aggression had been launched; at this ceremony Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was the highest-ranking German representative. The signature of an officer with actual command authority over the Wehrmacht was what the second act supplied.
The episode connects directly to Jodl's responsibility at Nuremberg. The Russian-language record of his interrogations states that he invoked the position that a soldier cannot be held responsible for the decisions of politicians, the familiar defence of having only followed orders. Yet after the Moscow Declaration, signed on 30 October 1943 by the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, unlawful acts committed on the order of a commander or a government were recognised as no longer exempting the person who carried them out from responsibility. He was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to death, and was executed on 16 October 1946. On 13 May, with Keitel's arrest, he succeeded to the post of Chief of the OKW, by which time most of the substance of the office had already been lost.