DR. EXNER: And one department of the Operations Staff, the main and most important one, was the operations department?
JODL: Yes, operations.
DR. EXNER: And most of your tasks were concerned with this department. The Prosecution say you were Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Keitel. Do you agree?
JODL: That is not correct as has already been shown by the organization which was explained here during Field Marshal Keitel’s case. There is a great difference. As Chief of Staff, I would have been Field Marshal Keitel’s assistant, concerned with all of his duties. I was, however, only the chief of one of the many departments subordinate to Field Marshal Keitel.
Beginning with the year 1941 it became the practice for me and my operational branch to report to the Führer direct on all matters concerned with strategics, while Field Marshal Keitel, using my quartermaster department as a sort of personal working staff, took over all other tasks.
DR. EXNER: Did you, as Chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, have authority to issue orders?
JODL: No—or rather only through my working staff. I was subordinate to Field Marshal Keitel, and even Keitel himself was not a commander but only the chief of a staff. But in the course of this war I naturally decided many operational details myself and signed them myself. There was no disagreement of any sort in these matters with the commanders-in-chief for I had their confidence, and I worked on the best possible terms with them.
DR. EXNER: For someone on the outside it is not quite easy to understand that even though you had no authority to issue orders, so many orders have been submitted here which were, in fact, signed by you, and signed in different ways—sometimes with your full name, sometimes with a “J,” the first letter of your name. Please explain these differences.
JODL: One must differentiate as follows: The decrees which the Führer himself signed, if they were of an operational nature, bear my initial at the end, on the lower right; and that means that I at least assisted in the formulation of that order. Then there were orders which also came from the Führer, though they were not signed by him personally, but were signed “by order, Jodl”; but they always had at the beginning the sentence, “The Führer has decreed,” or that sentence was found somewhere in the course of the order. There would be a preamble, usually giving reasons for the order, and then, it would read: “The Führer has therefore decreed.”
DR. EXNER: And what was the difference between these two groups of orders? Why was one group of orders signed by the Führer, and the other only by you?