On the first of October 1946, in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, a moment of profound historical reckoning began to unfold. After more than ten months of grueling testimony, legal argument, and the slow, painful unveiling of some of the most horrific crimes ever committed in human history, twenty-one defendants stood before the International Military Tribunal. These were not ordinary prisoners; they were among the most important political, military, and economic leaders of the fallen Nazi regime.
They were the high-ranking representatives of a criminal state that had plunged the world into a catastrophic war and orchestrated the systematic murder of millions of innocent people.
For over a year, the world had watched as the evidence mounted against these men. The tribunal, established by the victorious Allied powers, was tasked with delivering justice for the unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World War. The defendants, who had once wielded immense power over life and death across the European continent, were now forced to sit in the dock and answer for their actions.
They had to take responsibility for the crimes that had been committed under their command and with their approval. This trial was not merely a legal proceeding; it was a warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere that their actions would not go unpunished, and that the international community would hold them accountable for their deeds.
As the court clerk read the sentences, a heavy silence fell over the courtroom. The judges had deliberated long and hard, weighing the evidence and the testimony. Once the true extent of the German atrocities, especially the systematic genocide against the Jewish people of Europe, was fully revealed, the verdicts were clear.
Twelve of the twenty-one defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. Among those condemned to die was a German general named Alfred Jodl, a man whose military career had been inextricably linked to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Alfred Jodl was born out of wedlock on the tenth of May 1890 in Würzburg, a city that was then part of the German Empire. His birth was shrouded in a social 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 of the time. His father, who came from a proud Bavarian military family, was not married to Alfred’s mother, Therese.
The reason for this was rooted in the rigid class distinctions of the era; as a farmer’s daughter, Therese was considered not good enough to marry a Bavarian military officer. This social barrier prevented their union for many years. It was only in 1899, after his father had retired from active military service, that the couple was finally able to marry.
It was only from that point onward that Alfred legally bore his father’s name.
Alfred grew up in a household that valued military tradition and discipline. He had a younger brother, Ferdinand, who would also follow in the family footsteps and eventually become an army general. His uncle, Friedrich Jodl, took a different path in life and became a well-known philosopher, adding a layer of intellectualism to the family background.
In July 1910, the young Alfred joined the 4th Field Artillery Regiment of the Bavarian Army, beginning his long and fateful military career. In the following year, he was assigned to the military school in Munich, where he received his formal officer training. His dedication and aptitude were recognized, and in October 1912, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
In September 1913, Jodl married Countess Irma von Bullion, a union that would remain childless throughout their lives.
The First World War began on the twenty-eighth of July 1914, a conflict that would redraw the map of Europe and shatter the old order. In August of that same year, Jodl took part in the Battle of Saarburg, his first taste of combat. However, his participation was cut short when he was wounded in the thigh.
He was unable to return to his troops until March 1915. For his gallantry in action, he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class, a decoration that marked him as a promising and brave officer. At the end of 1916, Jodl was transferred to the Eastern Front, where the war against Russia was being fought with equal ferocity.
In 1917, he became a battery commander of the 72nd Hungarian Field Artillery Regiment, gaining valuable experience in command. At the beginning of 1918, he was transferred back to the Western Front, this time serving as a General Staff officer, a role that placed him at the heart of military planning and strategy. In March of that same year, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, a testament to his continued service and bravery.
The First World War ended on the eleventh of November 1918, when German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. The war had been devastating on an unprecedented scale. The introduction of new weapons like the machine gun and gas warfare led to enormous losses, and the conflict claimed the lives of ten million soldiers.
Property and industry losses were catastrophic, leaving much of Europe in ruins. As a result, the victorious powers imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated powers. Among these treaties, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and liable for massive material damages.
The treaty imposed harsh penalties on the Germans, including the loss of thirteen percent of its prewar territories, extensive reparation payments, and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. The Reichswehr, the German Army, was restricted to a mere 100,000 men, a humiliating limitation for a nation that had prided itself on its military might.
In the new Weimar Republic, which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, Alfred Jodl continued his career as a professional soldier. He adapted to the new political reality and worked diligently within the constraints imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1924, Jodl was transferred to the Ministry of the Reichswehr in Berlin, placing him at the center of military administration.
Between 1928 and 1932, he served as a teacher of tactics and war history, sharing his knowledge and experience with a new generation of officers. In February 1932, his superior, Wilhelm Keitel, appointed him as a major. In June of the same year, Jodl was appointed a group leader in the Operations Department of the Truppenamt, an agency which cleverly concealed the existence of the proscribed German Army General Staff.
In this role, Alfred Jodl was significantly involved in secretly planning, reorganizing, and eventually enlarging the German army in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Even after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933, German rearmament, despite its scale, remained a largely covert operation. It was carried out using front organizations such as glider clubs for training pilots, sporting clubs, and Nazi SA militia groups for teaching infantry combat techniques. This deception allowed Germany to build up its military strength without immediately provoking a response from the international community.
Later, however, this rearmament policy was openly and massively expanded, as Hitler threw off the shackles of the Versailles Treaty. One of the main objectives of the Nazi regime was to redraw the map of post-World War I Europe. Hitler and the Nazis considered the postwar international borders unfair and illegitimate.
They claimed that Germans had been denied the right of self-determination, a principle that had been promised but not fully delivered. Redrawing Europe’s borders would allow the Nazis to achieve two main goals: to unite all Germans in a Nazi German Empire, and to acquire Lebensraum, meaning “living space,” in eastern Europe.
The annexation of Austria would help the Nazis achieve the first goal. The Anschluss, as the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich became known, took place over three days between the eleventh and thirteenth of March 1938. The Anschluss was supported by many Austrians, among them Austrian Nazis, who saw it as a political, social, and cultural reunification with their brother country, Germany.
Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler, the native son who was returning to his homeland. Even though the leaders of the West saw the Anschluss as an invasion, not one government made a move to stop Hitler. This inaction emboldened the dictator, who, without interference, felt free to embark upon the next step in his scheme to conquer all of Europe.
At the end of 1938, Alfred Jodl was transferred to Linz in the annexed Austria to take charge of the 44th artillery regiment as a commander, a position that kept him close to the expanding German military apparatus.
On the twenty-third of August 1939, just one week before the German invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler appointed Jodl Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command. Established in 1938, the German Armed Forces High Command was a unified military command controlling Germany’s air force, navy, and army. In reality, the establishment of the High Command allowed Adolf Hitler to consolidate power as commander-in-chief of the German military.
The High Command was led by Wilhelm Keitel as Chief with the rank of a Reich Minister, which essentially made him the second most powerful person in the Armed Forces’ hierarchy after Hitler. Alfred Jodl became not only the next officer after Keitel but also Hitler’s primary military advisor in the High Command, responsible in large measure for the strategy and conduct of operations. This was a position of immense responsibility and immense moral weight.
World War 2 started on the first of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The campaign in Poland ended on the sixth of October the same year, with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country. The swift and brutal victory in Poland set the tone for the blitzkrieg tactics that Germany would employ across Europe.
Alfred Jodl acted as a chief of staff during the invasion of Denmark and Norway, which was codenamed Operation Weserübung. Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on the ninth of April 1940. Strategically, Denmark’s importance to Germany was as a staging area for operations in Norway.
In Norway, Germany sought to secure naval bases for use against the British fleet in the North Sea and to guarantee vital iron-ore shipments from neutral Sweden on which Nazi Germany was dependent. While the invasion of Denmark lasted less than six hours and was the shortest military campaign conducted by the Germans during the war, Norway surrendered to Germany only after two months, on the tenth of June 1940. In the great wave of promotions that followed the “Fall of France” in June of the same month, Jodl rose directly to the rank of General, skipping the rank of Lieutenant General, a sign of Hitler’s favor and Jodl’s perceived competence.
During the upcoming months, Alfred Jodl was busy drawing up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, which became known as Operation Barbarossa. This was to be the largest military operation in history, a campaign of annihilation that would ultimately seal the fate of the Third Reich. Jodl was also involved in drafting the “Commissar Order,” which he had signed on the sixth of June 1941, less than three weeks before Operation Barbarossa began.
This order instructed the Wehrmacht that any political commissars were to be shot on principle when captured either in battle or offering resistance. Political commissars were Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw its military units and reported directly to party leaders. This order was a clear violation of the laws of war, mandating the summary execution of prisoners.
Operation Barbarossa began on Sunday the twenty-second of June 1941. In May 1942, however, the Commissar Order was cancelled at the urging of German field commanders, who came up against much stronger resistance when the routine shooting of the commissars became known to the Soviet soldiers. The Germans killed not only political commissars but also Soviet prisoners of war whom they regarded as an integral part of the so-called Bolshevik menace and killed them in massive numbers.
Jodl also signed the “Commando Order,” which ordered and authorized the killing of enemy special operations troops. The allied commandos were to be killed without trial, even when captured in uniform or if they attempted to surrender. This order was another blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions and the accepted rules of warfare.
During the planning of Case Blue, the offensive in Southern Russia in the summer of 1942, there were repeated disagreements between Jodl and Hitler. Jodl considered the German forces planned for the invasion to be too weak. He severely criticized Hitler’s intervention in operational planning and the associated splitting up of Army Group South in early July 1942 but was ultimately unsuccessful.
When the German attack stalled in the run-up to the Caucasus, Jodl countered the Führer’s accusation that the local commanders were to blame for the situation, pointing out that they had merely followed Hitler’s orders. In view of this open confrontation, Hitler planned Jodl’s replacement by General Friedrich Paulus as soon as he would conquer Stalingrad, which never happened. Even though his criticism led to a cooling of the relationship with the Führer, Jodl, the same as with his superior Wilhelm Keitel, remained loyal to Hitler, praising him for his strategic foresight and carrying out whatever the Führer ordered.
In February 1944, Alfred Jodl was promoted to the rank of Colonel General. On the eighteenth of April 1944, his wife Irma died. He remarried one year later, on the seventh of April 1945, when he married Luise von Benda, who had been a close friend of his first wife Irma.
This marriage also remained childless. On the twentieth of July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Hitler. Alfred Jodl was present in the Wolf’s Lair field headquarters, and he was slightly injured when the bomb exploded.
In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for conspirators which continued for months. Many of them appeared before the notorious People’s Courts for show trials, but this practice was ended as it gave conspirators a platform to condemn the regime. In the end, more than 7,000 people were arrested, and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest evidence.
On the twenty-eighth of October 1944, by teletype, Jodl ordered the evacuation of the Norwegian population and the destruction of all the houses east of the Lyngenfjord in the course of Operation Northern Lights so that they could not help the Russians. The forced evacuation of more than 40,000 people in Northern Norway took place shortly after, and thousands of houses were destroyed, leaving a civilian population displaced and destitute in the harsh Arctic winter.
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on the thirtieth of April 1945, in his bunker in Berlin, as the Soviet army closed in on the city. Following regional surrenders of German forces in Europe, Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state, sent Alfred Jodl to sign the surrender which was limited to only those forces still fighting the Western Allies. However, American General Dwight Eisenhower demanded complete surrender of all German forces, including those fighting in the East.
If this demand had not been met, Eisenhower was prepared to seal off the Western front, preventing Germans from fleeing to the West in order to surrender, thereby leaving them in the hands of the advancing Soviet forces. Dönitz ordered Jodl to sign, which he did on behalf of the German Armed Forces High Command on the seventh of May 1945 in Reims, France. A few hours later, a response was received from the Soviet High Command stating that the Act of Surrender in Reims was unacceptable.
They insisted that not Jodl, deputized by Dönitz, a civilian head of state, but the supreme commander of all German forces, Wilhelm Keitel, should personally sign the document. One of the reasons was a fear of a new stab-in-the-back myth, which maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front, especially Jews and Communists, who they claimed had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace. As a result, a second signing was arranged in Berlin.
On the night of the eighth of May 1945, Nazi Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel signed the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, which was the legal document that effected the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on all fronts and ended World War II in Europe.
In the end, justice finally caught up with Jodl when he was arrested by the British Troops on the twenty-third of May 1945 and tried at the Nuremberg Trials, which were held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution.
His wife Luise joined her husband’s defence team, working tirelessly to try to save his life. At the trial, Jodl claimed to have known nothing of the death camps at which nearly six million European Jews met their death and pleaded not guilty before God, before history, and his people. However, his lies and his claims of ignorance did not help him escape justice.
The evidence presented at the trial showed his deep involvement in the planning and execution of aggressive war and his complicity in war crimes.
On the first of October 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Alfred Jodl guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging. His request, as well as those of Wilhelm Keitel and Hermann Göring, for a military execution by firing squad was denied due to the criminal rather than military nature of his acts. He was executed by American Army sergeant John C.
Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman. It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job to make the ten Nazi war criminals that he executed on that day suffer, as they all died in long agonizing deaths. The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes.
With Alfred Jodl, it was even worse. After he had said his last words, “I salute you, my eternal Germany,” Jodl was hanged, but because he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his horrible convulsing lasted eighteen long minutes before he died. He was fifty-six years old.
After that, his corpse was cremated and scattered in the river Isar. There were no tears shed for Alfred Jodl, a man whose loyalty to a criminal regime had led him to the gallows, a man who had traded his honor and humanity for the approval of a tyrant, and who paid the ultimate price for his crimes against peace and humanity.
