We review “Marshal Keitel” by Wilhelm Keitel – Archives of History | Your disclosure page

In January 2020, the Esfera de los Libros publishing house brought to the Spanish publishing market «Marshal Keitel», the memoirs of the Marshal and head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht during 1938-1945. A memoir he wrote six weeks before he was executed after the Nuremberg trials for war crimes.

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What we think of “Marshal Keitel” in Archivos de la Historia

An indispensable part of History are the memoirs and recollections published by the great characters who have been relevant in it. The memoirs we are reviewing today, memoirs written by Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, fall into this classification. This German officer became head of the Wehrmacht high command during World War II, and one of Adolf Hitler’s closest collaborators. In January of this year 2020, the Esfera de los Libros publishing house brought to Castilian these interesting memoirs that were written by Keitel while he awaited the sentence received after the Nuremberg trials.

The memoirs are written chronologically and are centered from the year 1938 to 1945. That is, it is not an autobiography. In them, the marshal begins to narrate the most important events in which he was immersed as a high-ranking officer. The first chapter is not written by Keitel, but by the German historian Walter Görlitz who makes a great biographical sketch of the German marshal.

The first episode narrated by Keitel in his memoirs is the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis that occurred in 1938, which caused the departure of Werner von Blomberg as Minister of War, and of Werner von Fritsch as Commander-in-Chief of the Heer. After talking about the Blomberg-Fritsch Keitel crisis, he talks about the first three campaigns that Germany launched between 1938-1940: Austria, Poland and France. The author focuses on all the memories of him from then on in the Russian Campaign, to which he dedicates the fourth and fifth chapters. The narration of this ends in the year 1943 to then move on to other topics.

Among them, the sixth chapter is a compilation of excerpts from letters sent by the protagonist to his wife during the war. This part is quite curious because the German generals and officers were actually more honest with their wives than with their subordinates. Finally, the work deals with the famous attack against Hitler on July 20, 1944 and the last days of the German chancellor. The final chapter is some “afterthoughts” that Keitel realizes about everything that happened until then. In the last chapter, that is, the tenth, the German historian Walter Görlitz makes an appearance again, telling us about the accusation that fell on the German marshal once the war was over.

On a technical level, the work is very well edited and contains interesting graphic material. Reading is enjoyable and fast due in large part to the good translation of the title that Javier Alonso has done. The typography is also correct. Esfera de los Libros has done a magnificent layout job by bringing this book in a simple paperback edition.

So do we recommend it?

From Archives of History we recommend reading “Mariscal Keitel”. A really good volume considering that these memoirs were written from an exculpatory perspective seeking to justify the acts of a convicted man, as well as trying to distance himself from the government he had served. With this in mind “Marshal Keitel” is a way to approach an important historical figure of the Second World War. We classify as correct that the Esfera de los Libros publishing house has dared to translate this title into Spanish.