Painful Execution of Wilhelm Keitel *Warning Real Footage

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]October 16, 1946, 1:11 in the morning, Nuremberg, Germany. The gymnasium inside the Palace of Justice is cold. Three wooden gallows stand under harsh floodlights. 12 journalists, Allied officials, and two chaplains watch in silence. No cameras are permitted inside. 10 of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany will hang tonight. When Wilhelm Keitel, Field Marshal, head of the entire German Armed Forces, steps to the platform, something goes wrong. The trapdoor is too narrow. The drop is too short. The rope doesn't snap his neck.

[00:00:30]He strangles. He convulses. 28 minutes pass before he dies. The most senior military officer ever executed in modern Western history, a man who signed orders condemning hundreds of thousands of innocent people, takes nearly half an hour to die in front of silent witnesses. This is documented history, and it starts 44 years earlier with a boy who just wanted to farm. Welcome to Nazi History Profiles, where we tell history exactly as it happened. No sugarcoating. If you're new here, subscribe right now and hit the bell.

[00:01:00]Every week we go deep into the real people behind the Third Reich, verified, documented, unflinching. Now, let's get into Wilhelm Keitel, September 22, 1882.

[00:01:10]A boy is born in Helmscherod, a tiny farming village in the Duchy of Brunswick, now part of Lower Saxony. His father Karl runs a modest estate. His mother Apollonia is warm and present.

[00:01:20]She dies when Wilhelm is 6 years old, taken by childbed fever after delivering his younger brother, a Baldwin, who would later become a German infantry general. Wilhelm is home tutored, then sent to the gymnasium in Göttingen. His grades are completely unremarkable. His teachers remember nothing extraordinary about him. He is average in every measurable way. What he genuinely wants is to be a farmer, take over the family estate, work the land, simple life. But his father has no intention of handing over the property while he's still breathing. So, in 1901, Wilhelm does what ambitious but directionless sons of German estate owners did. He joins the Prussian Army. He picks the mounted field artillery, not the prestigious cavalry, too expensive, too status-heavy. Artillery was practical, unglamorous, it suited him. Here is a detail most history books skip. Keitel's primary military function from 1908 onward was as an adjutant, scheduling, coordination, paperwork. This was never a battlefield warrior. He was built for an office, and an office is precisely where he stayed. In April 1909, he married Lisa Fontaine, a wealthy landowner's daughter from a family with considerably more standing than his own.

[00:02:28]People who knew the couple noted that Lisa was the sharper of the two, more driven, more ambitious for her husband than he was for himself. She wanted to be an officer's wife, he still wanted to farm. She won. They had six children, one died in infancy. When World War I opened in July 1914, Keitel deployed to the Western Front. In Flanders, a shrapnel grenade nearly killed him. He recovered, and rather than returning to the trenches, his organizational skills pulled him into the Army General Staff by spring 1915. He spent the rest of the war managing logistics behind a desk. He received 12 military decorations. Not one was for battlefield valor. Every single one was for administration. When the armistice came in November 1918, Germany was dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, 13% of its territory stripped, crushing reparations. The German army reduced to 100,000 men. The empire Keitel had built his life around was gone. Keitel was kept on in the new Reichswehr. He helped organize the Freikorps, brutal paramilitary units deployed to crush communist uprisings across post-war Germany. His role was administrative, but the work was not clean. By 1924, he was in Berlin working inside the Truppenamt, the troop office.

[00:03:40]That deliberately bland name concealed what it actually was, a covert general staff secretly operating in direct violation of Versailles. Germany was rebuilding its military brain while the world looked elsewhere. From 1929, Keitel headed the organization department, quietly enlarging and modernizing the German army, illegal under international law. He was meticulous and relentless. He worked so hard that in autumn 1932, he suffered a simultaneous heart attack and double pneumonia. He was still recovering in a Czechoslovak sanatorium in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor. He recovered remarkably fast after that.

[00:04:17]Keitel met Hitler for the first time in July 1933. Every account from that meeting describes the same reaction.

[00:04:23]Keitel was completely captivated. Here was a man with total conviction, total authority, a vision for restoring everything Germany had lost. For a mid-career officer desperate for direction, Hitler was magnetic beyond reason. His career accelerated sharply.

[00:04:37]By 1934, he commanded the 22nd Infantry Division at Bremen. By 1935, he was chief of staff to War Minister Werner von Blomberg. Then came the moment that rewarded his instinct for self-serving loyalty. In January 1938, Keitel obtained a police dossier proving that Blomberg's new wife had a criminal past.

[00:04:56]Rather than managing the situation discreetly, Keitel passed the file directly to Hermann Göring, knowing exactly what Göring would do with it.

[00:05:04]Blomberg was destroyed. He resigned January 27, 1938. When Hitler asked Blomberg who should replace him, Blomberg gestured toward Keitel and shrugged.

[00:05:13]"He just runs my office." Hitler snapped his fingers. "That's exactly the man I'm looking for."

[00:05:19]On February 4, 1938, Keitel was appointed head of the OKW, the Supreme Command of all German armed forces.

[00:05:25]Every senior general in the Wehrmacht was stunned. Keitel was stunned.

[00:05:29]Everyone knew he wasn't qualified. That was the point. Hitler absorbed supreme command immediately. The OKW became his personal military staff. Keitel's job wasn't to think or strategize. His job was to convert Hitler's will into signed official orders and stamp them with his name. The German officer corps gave him a nickname, Lackey Keitel, a brutal pun combining his surname with Lackey, the German word for lackey. Behind closed doors, they called him a sycophant, spineless, a stupid follower. Even Göring sneered that Keitel had a sergeant's mind inside a field marshal's body. Hitler described Keitel as being loyal as a dog. He said it as a compliment. What Keitel did with that loyalty is the reason this story ends on a gallows. Austria, March 1938. Keitel ordered military maneuvers near the Austrian border to intimidate Chancellor Schuschnigg into backing down from a planned independence referendum. It worked without a single shot. Austria was absorbed into Germany. Keitel received the Anschluss Medal for his role in it. Poland, September 1939.

[00:06:28]Within days of the invasion, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the murder of Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews. On September 12th, Keitel personally added Poland's intelligentsia to the kill list, scientists, lawyers, doctors, professors, teachers. Over the following 3 months, roughly 60,000 people were systematically executed across Poland in what historians call the intelligentsia action, >> [snorts] >> including over 1,000 prisoners of war.

[00:06:53]Keitel had been fully briefed before the invasion. The mass murders were planned in advance. He knew. He signed. When German officers filed complaints about the atrocities they were witnessing in Poland, Keitel ignored everyone, deliberately, until commanders and soldiers became morally desensitized. He engineered the collapse of conscience within the ranks. Hitler personally rewarded him with a cash bonus of 100,000 Reichsmarks. France, June 1940.

[00:07:20]After France collapsed in just 6 weeks, Keitel signed the armistice in the very railway carriage where Germany had been humiliated in 1918, the same car pulled from a museum, placed at the same forest clearing at Compiègne. He publicly called Hitler the greatest warlord of all time. He was promoted to field marshal. Göring immediately mocked him for it. Soviet Union, June 1941. Before Operation Barbarossa launched, Keitel issued directives that dismantled the laws of war entirely. He co-issued the Commissar Order.

[00:07:50]German soldiers were to execute captured Soviet political officers on site. No process, immediate execution.

[00:07:57]Soldiers who carried out these killings were explicitly exempted from any future prosecution. In September 1941, he ordered that for every German soldier killed, 50 to 100 communists were to be executed as reprisal. He wrote in the official document that human life in the East was worth less than nothing.

[00:08:14]He signed the Commando Order in October 1942.

[00:08:18]Captured Allied special forces were to be killed without trial, even in uniform, even attempting to surrender.

[00:08:24]He authored the Night and Fog Decree.

[00:08:26]Resistance suspects across occupied Western Europe were seized in darkness and transported to Germany with no notification to families. Approximately 7,000 people vanished under this decree.

[00:08:37]Most were interrogated, tortured, and sent to camps like Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler-Struthof. Their families received nothing, no location, no status, no proof of life. The psychological cruelty on the families was deliberate. Keitel designed it that way. In December 1942, writing about Yugoslav partisans, he stated that German troops were authorized and obliged to use every means in this fight without restriction, even against women and children. He wrote those words himself, under his authority, with his signature. Hitler rewarded him again in 1942 with 250,000 Reichsmarks, roughly $2.4 million in today's money. In October 1944, an additional forest estate worth over $7 million today.

[00:09:19]Meanwhile, his youngest son Hans Georg was killed on the Eastern Front in July 1941. His eldest [clears throat] son Karl-Heinz was captured by Soviet forces. History sent the accounting back through his own family. On July 20, 1944, a bomb exploded inside Hitler's Wolf's Lair. Keitel personally pulled the wounded Hitler from the wreckage. In the purge that followed, over 7,000 people were arrested and nearly 5,000 executed. Keitel sat on the military Court of Honor that handed officers to the fanatical People's Court Judge Roland Freisler, where show trials almost always ended in death. It was Keitel who dispatched two generals to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's home carrying Hitler's ultimatum, public trial or suicide. Rommel swallowed a cyanide pill to protect his family.

[00:10:03]Keitel delivered that choice to him. By [clears throat] April 1945, Berlin was burning. Keitel was still issuing orders for counterattacks using forces that no longer existed. Hitler killed himself April 30th. On the night of May 8, 1945 in Berlin-Karlshorst, Keitel raised his field marshal's baton in a final formal salute and signed Germany's unconditional surrender. The Soviet High Command had specifically demanded Keitel sign. They wanted the man at the top of the chain of command to face what he had built. He was arrested May 13th. At the Nuremberg trials, Keitel was charged on all four counts. He admitted under oath that he had known many of Hitler's orders were illegal. His entire defense collapsed into three words, I was following orders. Prison psychiatrist G.M. Gilbert assessed him with clinical precision that has never been improved upon. Keitel, he wrote, had no more backbone than a jellyfish. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal found Wilhelm Keitel guilty on all four counts, death by hanging. His written request to die by firing squad, the military's method, was denied. His crimes were not military in character, they were criminal. He would hang like a murderer. In his final hours, he told the prison chaplain, "You have helped me more than you know. May Christ my savior stand by me all the way. I shall need him so much." He received communion. He was calm. Then he walked to the gallows at 1:11 a.m. on October 16, 1946. The executioner was U.S. Army Sergeant John C. Woods with no documented pre-war experience as a hangman. The trapdoor was too narrow. As Keitel fell, its edge struck his head, causing immediate injury. The rope did not break his neck. He strangled. He convulsed 28 minutes. His final words from the platform, "I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than 2 million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons, all for Germany." He was 64 years old. His body was cremated. His ashes scattered into the Wenzbach, a small tributary of the Isar River. No grave, no marker, nothing. Sergeant Woods later said he was proud of every execution.

[00:12:03]Joseph Malta, the military policeman who held the noose that night, reflected on it 50 years later. "It was a pleasure doing it. I'd do it all over again.

[00:12:12]Nobody in that gymnasium grieved for Wilhelm Keitel. A man who could have said no hundreds of times chose compliance every single time. He called it duty. The tribunal called it murder.

[00:12:22]And a Nuremberg gymnasium in the middle of the night is where that choice ended.

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