Alfred Jodl defended his actions as chief of the operations staff of Nazi Germany's armed forces during World War II as those of an officer who obeyed his superiors, but an International Military Tribunal sentenced him to death for war crimes in October of 1946. As a key strategist and planner of German offensive moves, Jodl was deemed guilty of the widespread destruction of property and loss of life caused by aggressive Nazi policies during the war. Little is known about Jodl before his career in the German army. He was born in 1890 in the city of Weirzburg, and entered the Bavarian army during World War I. He became an artillery expert during the conflict, but the Treaty of Versailles that concluded the hostilities called for severe restrictions on German military strength. Nevertheless, Jodl remained in the new army of the Weimar Republic, and served at the Ministry of War headquarters for a number of years. Like some other junior officers, he joined the fledgling Nazi Party as it gained popular support during the 1920s. In 1932, he left his bureaucratic post at the Ministry of War to become head of the Army Operations Department. In this capacity, he was closely involved in the secretive rearmament plans after Adolf Hitler seized power in January of 1933 and proclaimed the Third Reich. This military buildup was in violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Now a colonel in the Reichswehr, Jodl was appointed head of Department L, or Home Defense, in 1935. Beginning in 1938, he served as chief of the Army Command Office and was closely involved in fooling negotiators in the days before Germany annexed Austria that year, leading them to believe the German army was undertaking military measures near the border.
Documents also reveal that as an artillery commander of the 44th Division posted in Vienna and Brno, a city in Czechoslovakia, Jodl had planned an invasion of Czechoslovakia, but this proved unnecessary when European leaders agreed to allow Hitler to annex a northwestern section of the country called Sudetenland. With the onset of World War II in September 1939, Jodl advanced to the crucial post of chief of the operations staff for the army. He strategized with other top commanders about Germany's air war on Britain and its invasions of France, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece; he personally oversaw Norway's capitulation. He also negotiated for the German side at Salonika, Greece, in 1941, and signed off on Hitler's order of October 7, 1941 that called for the total destruction of the cities of Moscow and Leningrad should the Soviet Union try to negotiate.
The battle on the eastern front, however, robbed Nazi Germany of the resources needed to win the war, and when the situation grew increasingly dire, several of Hitler's generals plotted to kill the people with a briefcase bomb during a strategy meeting in the summer 1944. Jodl was wounded in what became known as the "July 20 Plot." By the following April, the war was over, and Germany had been defeated by advancing American and British troops on the western front and Soviet forces who marched from the east to take Berlin. Hitler committed suicide, and command of the army passed to Karl Doenitz, admiral of the German Navy. Jodl was sent by Doenitz to Reims, France to sign the official surrender of the German forces, but was instructed to stall for time. The commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, refused to negotiate with Jodl at all and grew increasingly irate, since the delay allowed German soldiers in Eastern Europe to flee westward in order to surrender to the Americans; Russian troops were known to treat their German counterparts brutally. Finally, Eisenhower threatened to close the front in the West, which would mean that German troops might be permanently stranded in the East, and so Jodl signed at 2:38 a.m. on May 7, 1945. It was said that the maneuver allowed a million German soldiers to evade Russian capture and reprisal.
Jodl then returned to Flensburg, the seat of the Doenitz government, and both he and Doenitz were arrested on May 23. A few months later, proceedings of the International Military Tribunal began in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, and Jodl was targeted with particular rancor by the Russian representatives for his stalling tactics at Reims; it was also revealed that Jodl had been party to a wartime decree that allowed German units in Russia to conduct themselves with heedless brutality. Other charges about Jodl's conduct during the war, thanks to the efficiency of the German bureaucracy that left a telling paper trail, were equally condemnatory. In late 1944, for instance, Jodl worried about a possible Russian invasion of Norway from the north, and so ordered Norwegian villages in the region to be evacuated and the homes burned. On the stand, Jodl was stoic, claiming that he had only followed orders from his superiors and from Hitler, as any loyal soldier would have done. His wife had walked a great distance to attend the trial in Nuremberg, and even petitioned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to intervene, asserting that her husband had followed a universal officers' code of conduct and was being unfairly prosecuted. The tribunal, however, declared otherwise and ordered him hanged on October 16, 1946. Seven years later, an appeals court in West Germany exonerated Jodl on the charge that he violated international law.
This is the complete article, containing 908 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
