A second document, EC-405, was submitted concerning a meeting of the same body on 7 March 1934; and a third document, 2261-PS, dealing with the Reich Defense Law of 1935 and the simultaneous appointment of Dr. Schacht as Plenipotentiary General for War Economy.
Beyond doubt, you have been active in questions of national defense. These documents are also submitted as evidence against you. I ask you, therefore, to state whether these meetings in which you participated and which you conducted, were concerned with preparations for war and rearmament.
KEITEL: From the very beginning, as long as we were working on these things and by means of a committee of experts from which everything else evolved, I personally participated in these matters, and I may call myself the founder of that committee of ministerial experts which was set up to co-operate with the War Ministry. As Chief of the Organizational Department of the Army, in the winter of 1929 and 1930, that is, 3 years before Hitler came to power, I formed and personally assembled that committee after the Chancellor—I believe it was Brüning—and the Prussian and Reich Minister of the Interior Severing had consented to it. I would like to add that a representative of Minister Severing was always present to make sure that nothing took place which would have been in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. This work was very difficult, because no Reich minister and no department head was officially obliged to carry out the wishes of the National Ministry of Defense, this was purely voluntary. Consequently, the work went along haltingly and slowly. In this committee of experts which met perhaps two or three times a year, we dealt with, if I may put it briefly, what assistance the Civilian Department could render, in order to set free the small army of 100,000 soldiers for purely military tasks, naturally limiting ourselves to the defense of our frontiers, as stated in the Treaty of Versailles: “The Defense of the Frontiers”; I could perhaps still repeat our discussion from memory, since, with the exception of the period from 1933 to 1935, I conducted every one of these meetings myself, that is as leader of the discussion, not as chairman. I can, however, refer you now to the Mobilization Handbook for Civil Authorities, which was the outcome of this work and about which I shall speak later. It may be possible to submit it here. We were concerned only with questions of defense, such as the protection of our frontiers, and, in order to make myself clear, I should like to mention some of them. The Wehrmacht was to be free to protect railway property, post office property, repeater stations, radio stations, and to man the frontiers with security units for which the Customs Services were to be responsible. Cable and sea communications with East Prussia were also to be improved.
I will not bore you with all this. They were all defensive measures with a view to freeing the few soldiers for purely military functions, because for purposes of actual military operations I need not tell you what we could have done with an army of only 100,000 men. Any questions which went beyond this were never dealt with in that committee. The manner in which we worked was this: I asked the experts to submit their wishes to the heads of departments or state secretaries and then to try to persuade the heads of departments to take over the tasks from us, so that we could say that was being done by others and we need not bother about it. I can guarantee that operational questions, strategic questions, armament questions, questions of supply of war equipment, were never discussed in this committee. They were only organizational questions of the taking over of functions which generally should be performed by a soldier, but which we wanted to transfer to the civil authorities.
Now, as to the meeting of 22 May 1933, which has been discussed several times, it was already stated in the heading of the minutes which we have before us: “Competency—heretofore the Reichswehrminister, now the Reich Defense Council”—I have just explained that. Hitherto Reichswehrminister, over the committee, voluntary participation of the ministers of other departments, now obligatory activity of the heads of departments, that is, the group of ministers who received the title of “Defense Council.” I will express that even more clearly, so that it cannot be misunderstood. Every member of the committee represented a ministry. The minister to whom the committee member was responsible, along with his colleagues, formed the Reich Defense Council, as envisaged by us then. They were the Council and we were the Committee. Therefore, “heretofore the Reichswehrminister”—now, one could say, as I have just expressed it, the other ministers were obliged to do that.
In Paragraph 3 the working plans were particularly mentioned. These working plans, in a word, are the forerunner of the Mobilization Book, which is the final stage; whereas the working plans of about 1933 were the intermediary stage. Then as regards the concluding words at the meeting of 22 May 1933, which have been given special prominence here by the Prosecution, and which deal with the need for secrecy—the passage where I said, according to the minutes, that nothing which could lead to objections at the Disarmament Conference should be left lying in the desks of the ministries—that is correct. I did say that, and I have said it because the experts told me that, with the exception of a small wooden box or a drawer in a desk which could not be locked, they had no place in which to keep anything, and because Von Blomberg, Reich War Minister at that time, who had been in Geneva at the Disarmament Conference for almost two years, gave me the definite order before this meeting, to point out these things, because in Geneva one was surrounded by an extremely large number of agents who were only waiting to be able to present proof that, in spite of the disarmament negotiations, there were things going on which could be interpreted as violations of the Versailles Treaty. That is what I had to say about the document.
DR. NELTE: I have given to you now the Mobilization Book for the Civil Administration. It is Document 1639-PS. It has been submitted in order to prove that aggressive wars were being planned. Would you explain to us the purpose of this book?
KEITEL: I have already stated that at an earlier stage, that is, during the years 1932-33, the individual ministries had so-called working plans, indicating what they were to do if something happened which necessitated their participation in defending the country. In the course of years, naturally, a number of new tasks were added and that finally led to this Mobilization Book for the civil authorities and civil administration, the study of which would certainly show nothing which might have anything to do with strategic, operational, or other preparations for war. On the other hand, I am not in a position to prove that everything contained in this book could never have been useful in military operations which could develop from an aggressive war plan. Many measures, one could almost say most measures, in the event of mobilization would not indicate on the surface whether it is a measure for defense or a measure which is necessary or indispensable for aggressive action. That cannot be determined. But I believe I can say, because I, myself, have been engaged so deeply in this work, perhaps more than in any other, that there was no reason at all to burden the civilian experts—they were high government counsellors—with strategic or operational planning. I do not believe that it is necessary to prove that such work is not within their scope. I have looked through and studied this mobilization book here. I do not wish to bore you by citing points which are of a purely defensive nature. I could name them: barriers, reinforcement of the frontier defenses, demolitions, cutting of railroads and similar things, all this is in the book. One of the most important chapters, which, if I remember correctly, we discussed during four or five of these sessions, was the question of evacuation, that is, evacuating territories close to the border of valuable war material and personnel, so that, in case of war with the neighbor, they should not fall into the hands of the enemy. This problem of evacuation was one of the most difficult, because the extent to which one can evacuate, that is, what things can be evacuated, is perhaps one of the most difficult decisions to make.
I would like to say one more thing about the Reich Defense Committee, supplementing the ideas which I expressed before. Until the year 1938, no meeting or session of the Reich Defense Council was ever held, that is, the ministers who were the superiors of the committee members never met, not even once. I would have known about it, although at the cabinet meeting, I believe as early as March 1933, we passed a resolution to make these ministers responsible for a Reich Defense Council which should deal with these tasks, and to oblige them to take over these tasks as their necessary contribution to the defense of the Reich, and, of course, to finance them. That was the main purpose, otherwise the Reich Defense Council never met.
DR. NELTE: Actually, the minutes which have been presented, for the period of ’33 to ’38, are of the meetings of the working committee. But you know that about eight days ago two documents were submitted which appeared to be the minutes of the meetings of the Reich Defense Council. One session or assembly is supposed to have taken place in November 1938, and the second one in March 1939. Unfortunately these documents have not been submitted to me, but I have looked at them and you have also seen them. Can you explain to us how these minutes, that is, these meetings came about and what they mean?