Painful Execution of Alfred Jodl *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

On the morning of the 23rd of October 1942, seven men were walked into a yard at Sockenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. They were not spies. They were not partisans. They were not civilians caught with a weapon. They were British and Norwegian soldiers in uniform captured after a raid on a power station at Glomfjord in occupied Norway.

A raid that had worked. They had blown the turbines that fed aluminium production for the German war machine. And then they had been run down in the mountains and taken prisoner. Under the laws of war that Germany had signed and ratified, those seven men were prisoners of war. They had surrendered. Their names were known.

Their capture had been recorded. 5 days before they were killed, a document had been issued in Berlin that removed all of that. It did not name them. It did not know them. The men who wrote it had never seen their faces and never would. That document is why they died. And the man who put it into the hands of the German army was not a camp commandant, not an executioner, not a man who ever stood in that yard.

He was a career staff officer in a clean uniform sitting at a desk hundreds of kilometers away who would insist to the last day of his life that he had only ever been a soldier doing his job. His name was Alfred Jodel. If you want the stories the textbooks leave out, the ones told from the side of the people it was done to, subscribe to Bunker Files. That is all we do here.

The document was called the Commando Befale, the Commando Order. It was dated the 18th of October, 1942, and only 12 copies were made because the men who signed it understood exactly what it was. Its instruction was short. Allied commando troops captured in Europe or Africa were to be killed. All of them. It applied whether they were in uniform or not, whether they were armed or not.

And this is the line that mattered, whether they surrendered or not. Men who had already put down their weapons were to be destroyed to the last man. Any who somehow reached the custody of the military police were to be handed to the SD, the security service, and that was understood by everyone in the chain to mean the same outcome by a slower route.

Hitler signed it. The order went out through the armed forces high command, the OKW. The supplementary directive that carried it into the field explaining its application to the commanders who would have to act on it went out over the signature of the chief of the operation staff. That was Jodel. He would later say the order horrified him. He would say he tried to soften it.

What the record shows is that he passed it on and that men died because he did. At least 15 separate groups of Allied soldiers were killed under it before the war ended. Some of them were the men from Glom Fjord. Some of them had not even fired a shot. Alfred Jodel was born in Vertsburg in Bavaria in 1890 into a family that produced soldiers the way other families produce farmers or doctors.

He was commissioned into the artillery, fought through the First World War, was wounded in 1914, and came out of it with the conviction that would define the rest of his life. That a soldier’s worth is measured by how completely he does what he is told. He was quiet, precise, and clever. He was not one of the swaggering party men. He did not make speeches.

He kept diaries in a small, tight hand. Officers who worked near him described a man who was more comfortable with a map than with a room full of people. By 1939, he had reached the post he would hold until the end. Chief of the operation staff of the armed forces high command. In practical terms, this made him the man who turned Hitler’s spoken intentions into written military orders and pushed them down into the army.

He briefed Hitler almost daily for nearly 6 years. He was in the room for the planning of the invasion of Norway, of the Soviet Union, of the Arden’s offensive. He was by his own account a technician, a soldier, a man who moved arrows on a map. The paper trail says something else. The commando order was not the beginning.

It was the third or fourth step down a staircase that had started more than a year earlier. In the spring of 1941, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was being prepared, a set of directives was drafted that were unlike anything issued for the campaigns in France or Poland. They were not tactical. They were about what German soldiers would be permitted to do to people who were not soldiers at all.

One of them, the Barbar Roa jurisdiction decree, effectively removed the requirement to prosecute German troops for crimes committed against Soviet civilians. It told an army of millions that ordinary law had been switched off in the territory they were about to enter. Another was the commasar order. It instructed that Soviet political officers captured with the Red Army were not to be treated as prisoners.

They were to be separated out and shot. Jodel’s fingerprints are on both. On the draft of the commasar order, he added a marginal note suggesting the killings be presented as though the men had died in combat. A cosmetic instruction whose only purpose was to disguise what was being done. It is one of the few surviving pieces of paper in which a very careful man briefly stopped being careful.

The Soviet officers shot under that order were killed in ditches and roadsides across a thousand kilometers of front, mostly without names being recorded. The number is not known. It runs into the thousands. In September 1941, with German forces closing around Lennengrad, a directive went out through the OKW stating that the city’s surrender would not be accepted if it were offered.

The reasoning given was practical and cold. Accepting a surrender would create an obligation to feed almost three million people. The alternative was to seal the city and let hunger do the work. Lennenrad was cut off for almost 900 days. The people inside it burned furniture, then floorboards, then books. They ate leather, wallpaper paste, sawdust bread.

Children died in apartments beside parents who no longer had the strength to move them. A girl named Tanya Seeichiva kept a notebook of six pages recording the deaths of her family one after another, ending with a line noting that she was the only one left. She died in 1944, evacuated too late.

Somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 civilians died in that siege. None of them were combatants. The policy that trapped them was not an accident of battle. It was written down first. In November 1942, a month after the commando order was issued, two British gliders carrying engineers crashed in southern Norway. They had been on their way to attack the heavy water plant at Vmort.

The men who survived the crashes were captured. Some were injured. All were in uniform. Under the order that had just been circulated, they were killed. Some shot, some killed in custody, some after interrogation. A few were murdered in a manner that German officers later tried to conceal even from their own command. They had been in Norway for a matter of hours.

Most were in their early 20s. Several of the bodies were not recovered and identified until after the war, and some of the families waited years to learn what had happened. The order that killed them had traveled from a desk in Berlin to a hillside in Norway in less than 30 days. By the autumn of 1944, the war was being lost, and the German withdrawal from northern Norway produced one of the least discussed civilian catastrophes of the entire European war.

The instruction was scorched earth. Everything in Finnmark and Northern Trums that could shelter or feed a pursuing Soviet army was to be destroyed. houses, boats, peers, churches, livestock, fishing gear, the entire physical basis of life in an Arctic region where winter arrives in October. Around 50,000 Norwegian civilians were forcibly evacuated.

Many refused and hid in caves, turf huts, and mountain shelters through an arctic winter rather than leave. Children were born in those caves. Old people died in them. The towns of Hammerfest and Vardo were reduced to almost nothing. When people came back in 1945, in many villages, there was no landmark left to identify where a house had stood.

Yodel’s staff drafted and transmitted the operational orders for that destruction. He signed off on the withdrawal planning. In his own diary, he had written approvingly of the principle of terrorizing a population into submission in Norway years earlier. On the 7th of May 1945, in a red schoolhouse in Rance that the Allies were using as a headquarters, Alfred Jodel sat down at a table and signed the instrument of Germany’s unconditional surrender on behalf of the armed forces.

He asked to make a short statement. He spoke about the German people and the German armed forces having suffered more than perhaps any other and asked for generosity from the victors. He said nothing about Leningrad. He said nothing about Finnmark. He said nothing about seven men in a yard at Soxenhausen. Within weeks, he was under arrest.

At the International Military Tribunal, he faced four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. His defense was the one that would echo through every war crimes courtroom for the next 80 years. He was a soldier. He held no political office. He never joined the party leadership.

He gave military advice and transmitted lawful orders through a chain of command. And a soldier who refuses to transmit orders is not a soldier at all. The prosecution did not need witnesses to answer it. They had his own paper. They had the commando order and the covering directive. They had the commasar order with the marginal note about disguising the killings.

They had the Lenenrad directive. They had his diaries in his own handwriting, recording conversations and intentions he later denied having. The tribunal’s judgment addressed his defense directly and rejected it. Participation in crimes of that scale it held could not be excused by the fact that a superior had ordered them, and [clears throat] a senior staff officer who understood exactly what he was signing was not a machine.

There was also a problem with the claim that refusal was impossible and the court knew it. Other German officers had refused. Some quietly failed to pass the commando order down to their units. Some field commanders in Norway and France declined to hand captured raiders to the security service and put them into ordinary prisoner of war camps instead where they survived the war.

General Hans Spidel and others obstructed orders they judged criminal and were not shot for it. Refusal carried risk and in some cases it cost careers. It did not in the great majority of documented cases cost lives. The staff officer’s defense rested on the idea that there was one road and he was pushed down it. The record showed a road with exits and men who took them.

He was convicted on all four counts. He was sentenced to death by hanging on the 1st of October 1946. He petitioned to be shot instead. A soldier’s death rather than a criminals. The petition was refused. The executions were carried out in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison in the early hours of the 16th of October 1946 with a small group of official witnesses and press pool reporters present.

Yodel went to the gallows shortly after 2:00 in the morning. The reporters present recorded that he spoke a few words to Germany before the end. He was 56 years old. The bodies were photographed for the record, then taken by truck to a crematorium at the Ostfred Hoff in Munich, listed under false names so that no grave could ever be made.

The ashes were scattered into a small tributary of the Esar. There is no headstone. That was deliberate. The story did not end there, and this part is rarely told. In February 1953, a Munich denazification court reviewed a petition brought by Jodel’s widow Louisa and postumously cleared him. For a few months, the official position of a German court was that the man convicted at Nuremberg had been exonerated.

The Bavarian authorities revoked that ruling later the same year. The Nuremberg conviction stood and stands. But Louisa Yodel spent decades afterwards writing and speaking in defense of her husband’s memory and the argument she made. The soldier, the chain of command, the man who only passed things along did not die with him.

It has been used since by officers in a dozen countries on a dozen continents in courtrooms that had nothing to do with the Second World War. That is why the Jodel case matters more than the man himself ever did. The seven men taken from that yard at Soxenhausen in October 1942 had names. Captain Graham Black, Captain Joseph H. Hot. Hotton, [clears throat] Sergeant Miller Smith, Corporal Spur Granland, the young Norwegian who had guided them through his own country’s mountains.

Four others alongside them. They had trained together in Scotland. They had crossed the North Sea by submarine, walked into the mountains above Glumjord, and done exactly what they had been sent to do. The plant they attacked did not return to full production for the rest of the war. By any measure that soldiers use, they had won.

They were killed because of a piece of paper written by men who had never met them in a building they had never seen on the reasoning that soldiers who fight in small numbers behind the line are not really soldiers at all. The man who put that paper into the army’s hands never lifted a weapon against any of them. He never had to. That was the entire point of the position he held and it was the entire point of the judgment against him.

The people at the desks are not standing behind the people with the guns. They are standing in front of them. If this is the kind of history you want, the untold ones told from the ground up, subscribe to Bunker Files and stay with us. There is a great deal more still buried.