October 16th, 1946.
Nuremberg, Germany.
1 in the morning.
Inside a prison gymnasium, a 64 year old man walks steadily toward a wooden gallows.
He has asked to die like a soldier by firing squad.
That request was denied.
Instead, he will hang.
And what happens next will last not seconds, but 24 agonizing minutes.
This is the story of Wilhelm Kitle, Hitler’s most obedient field marshal, the man who signed Germany’s unconditional surrender, and the man who paid for his obedience with one of the most painful executions in the history of the Nuremberg trials.
The 1st of October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany.
After more than 10 months of trial, 21 defendants, among the most powerful political, military, and economic figures of Nazi Germany, finally heard their sentences read aloud.
These were not ordinary criminals.
These were the architects of a regime that had plunged the entire world into war, enslaved entire nations, and industrialized mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history.
The International Military Tribunal formed by the Allied powers had gathered in Nuremberg specifically to hold these men accountable to make clear to the world that no rank, no title, and no claim of following orders could shield a man from responsibility for crimes against humanity.
12 of the 21 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging.
One of them was German Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle.
Wilhelm Kitle was born on the 22nd of September 1882 in the small village of Helm Sherroda, then part of the German Empire.
He was only 6 years old when his mother died of childbed fever in 1889 following the birth of his younger brother Bodawin who would later become an infantry general.
His father was a landowner and for a time Wilhelm expected to inherit and manage the family estates.
However, his father showed no intention of retiring, and with the land unavailable to him, Wilhelm made a decision that would change the course of his life entirely.
In 1901, he joined the Prussian army as an artillery officer.
In April 1909, Wilhelm Kitle married Lisa Fontaine, the daughter of a wealthy landowner.
Yeha family also owned the Willful Brewery, which was at that time temporarily the largest cooperative brewery in Europe.
It was more than a practical arrangement.
By all accounts, it was a genuine partnership.
Lisa wanted the life of an officer’s wife, and that desire would later play a quiet but significant role in keeping Wilhelm in uniform, even when other paths were available to him.
Together they had six children, though one died young.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914.
Kitle served on the Western Front, first as a battery commander and then as a staff officer.
In 1914, fighting in Flanders, he was seriously wounded by a shrapnel grenade.
During his recovery, his organizational abilities became impossible to overlook.
And from the spring of 1915, Yui was transferred to the army general staff, a role far better suited to his true talents.
He was not a battlefield commander by nature.
He was an administrator, a planner, a man who understood how large military machines were built and maintained.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when German leaders signed the armistice in the Compenya forest in France.
The war had claimed the lives of 10 million soldiers and left property and industry across Europe in ruins.
The victorious Allied powers responded by imposing a series of devastating treaties on the defeated nations.
The 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany solely responsible for starting the war and liable for massive reparations.
Germany lost 13% of its pre-war territory.
The Rhineland was demilitarized.
Yand Army, the Reichair, was restricted to just 100,000 men.
In the new VHimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1918 to 1933, Kitle was retained in the newly restructured military and played an active role in organizing the paramilitary frycore units.
These were largely World War I veterans, bitter, restless, and deeply hostile to the Republic they were ostensibly defending.
Many were involved in political assassinations.
The seeds of what was coming were already being planted.
In 1924, Kitle was transferred to the Ministry of the Reichair in Berlin where he served in the Tropon, an agency that existed specifically to conceal the banned German army general staff from international observation.
After the death of his father, the question of returning to farm life arose once again.
But Lisa had no desire to leave the world of an officer’s household.
And Kitle himself could see that promotion was within reach.
He stayed in uniform.
And in doing so, he became one of the central figures in Germany’s secret rearmament program, covertly planning, reorganizing, and expanding the German military in direct and deliberate violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Rearmament was hidden behind glider clubs training future pilots, sporting associations teaching combat techniques, and SA militia groups conducting infantry drills.
The deception was systematic and total.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in January 1933, this covert rearmament exploded openly and massively.
In Nazi Germany, all authority was centralized in Hitler’s person.
His word was the highest law and the men around him competed to serve that word most completely.
Wilhelm Kitle became Hitler’s most loyal and compliant military officer.
So thoroughly obedient that his peers began calling him behind his back a blindingly loyal Toadi.
In 1935, Kitle was appointed head of the armed forces office at the Reich Ministry of War, overseeing the Army, Navy, and Air Force simultaneously.
Then in 1938, when the Ministry of War itself was abolished and replaced by the German armed forces high command, Kitle was placed at its head with the rank of Reich Minister, making him on paper on the second most powerful figure in the entire German military hierarchy.
answerable only to Hitler himself.
This surprised everyone including Kitle.
His peers did not respect him.
They considered him a sycophant, frequently bypassed him and went directly to Hitler with their requests.
Hitler, for his part, did not choose Kitle for his intellect or strategic vision.
He openly acknowledged Kitle’s limitations.
What Hitler valued was simpler and more useful.
Kitle was, as Hitler once said, as loyal as a dog.
He was diligent, obedient, and he never pushed back.
In early 1938, Austrian Chancellor Curt Shushnig announced a referendum on whether Austria should remain independent or unite with Germany.
Hitler saw this as a threat to his plans and ordered Kitle to conduct military exercises near the Austrian border.
Not an invasion, but a demonstration of force, a visible threat designed to break Shushnik’s resolve.
It worked.
Shushnig resigned on the 11th of March.
The following day, German troops entered Austria without resistance.
One day later, Austria was formally incorporated into Germany in what became known as the Anlo, the Nazi regime’s first act of territorial aggression.
Thousands turned out to greet Hitler in the streets for his role in the operation.
Wilhelm Kitle was awarded the Anlus Medal, World War II began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Kitle was deeply involved in planning the invasion from the very beginning and he was fully aware of its criminal dimensions.
Imass arrests, population transfers, and mass murders had been planned long before the first German soldier crossed the Polish border.
On the 7th of September, Reinhard Hydrich declared that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be killed.
On the 12th of September, Kital personally added Poland’s intelligencia to that list.
Its scientists, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and military officers.
In the months that followed, approximately 60,000 such individuals were systematically executed across Poland in what became known as the Intelligencia Action.
When officers under his command began raising complaints about the atrocities they were witnessing, Kitle ignored them deliberately, consistently until those men became too morally numbed to protest any further.
For his loyalty during the Polish campaign, Hitler rewarded Kitle with a personal bonus of 100,000 Reichs marks.
The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands began on the 10th of May 1940.
Within six weeks, France had fallen.
Hitler determined to extract maximum symbolic humiliation from the moment ordered the armistice to be signed in the exact same railway car in which Germany had signed its own surrender at the end of World War I.
Removed from the museum where it had been preserved and transported back to the Compenya forest.
On the 22nd of June 1940, General Kitle signed the armistice for Germany.
General Huninger signed for France.
Kitle flushed with victory publicly called Hitler the greatest warlord of all time.
Shortly after he was promoted to the rank of field marshal when the promotion did nothing to improve how his colleagues regarded him.
Herman Guring, commander of the Luftwaffer, summarized the general view in a single sentence.
Kitle had a sergeant’s mind inside a field marshall’s body.
From April 1941 onward, Kitle issued and personally signed a series of orders that crossed every boundary of international law and basic human decency.
He authorized the execution of Jews, civilians, and non-combatants for any reason whatsoever.
He exempted the soldiers carrying out these murders from any risk of court marshall or future prosecution.
He issued directives demanding unusual severity on the Eastern Front, specifying that the death of a single German soldier justified the execution of 50 to 100 so-called communists.
He signed the commando order which authorized the killing of captured Allied special forces soldiers, even those who surrendered in full uniform.
And he drafted the night and fog decree which allowed German occupation authorities to abduct suspected resistance members in the middle of the night, making them disappear without a trace.
Friends and family were told nothing, not even whether their loved ones were alive.
Approximately 7,000 people were arrested under this decree.
Those who survived interrogation and torture were sent to concentration camps, including Gross Rosen and Natva Struto.
The decrees purpose was simple, to break the will of occupied populations by destroying hope itself.
The war had become deeply personal for Kitle as well.
In July 1941, his youngest son, Hans Gayorg, was killed during the German assault on the Soviet Union.
The same invasion Kitle had helped plan and launch.
Near the end of the war, his eldest son Carl Heints was taken prisoner by the Russians.
On the 20th of July 1944, Colonel Klaus von Stafenberg and a group of conspirators placed a bomb inside Hitler’s conference room.
It exploded.
Hitler survived.
Kitle personally helped lead the injured Furer out of the room.
In the brutal crackdown that followed, over 7,000 people were arrested and nearly 5,000 were executed.
Kitle sat on the Army Court of Honor that handed implicated officers over to the People’s Tribunal for show trials.
Among those implicated was Field Marshal Irwin RML, the legendary desert fox.
On Hitler’s orders, Kitle sent two generals to RML’s home with an ultimatum.
Stand trial or take your own life.
To protect his family from Nazi reprisals, RML swallowed a cyanide pill.
He was given a state funeral.
The official story was that he had died of wounds from his staff car being strafed in Normandy.
Kitle knew the truth.
He had delivered the message that ended RML’s life.
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April the 30th, 1945.
On May 7th, Alfred Yodel signed Germany’s unconditional surrender in Reigns.
Within hours, the Soviet high command rejected it, partly out of fear that a future generation would use it to revive the stab in the back myth, the dangerous lie from World War I that Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated.
The Soviets demanded the supreme commander of all German forces sign the document himself in Berlin.
That man was Wilhelm Kitle.
On the night of May 8th, 1945, he signed the definitive German instrument of surrender, the legal end of World War II in Europe.
The man who had helped build Hitler’s war machine had now officially and personally dismantled it.
He was arrested shortly after.
At Nuremberg, Kitle was charged on four counts.
Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, planning, and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Throughout the trial, he admitted knowing that many of Hitler’s orders were illegal, but insisted he had followed them because he had no choice.
He described the atrocities as having developed step by step without fornowledge of the consequences.
The tribunal was not moved.
Prison psychiatrist GM Gilbert, who interviewed all the major defendants extensively, delivered his assessment of Kitle with clinical precision.
He had no more backbone than a jellyfish.
On October 1st, 1946, you the International Military Tribunal found Wilhelm Kitle guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging.
His formal request for a firing squad, a soldier’s death, was denied.
The tribunal was explicit.
His crimes were not military.
They were criminal.
Here is a fact that most history books bury quietly.
The man assigned to execute Wilhelm Kitle and nine other Nazi war criminals that night had never legally hanged anyone in his life.
American Army Master Sergeant John C.
Woods volunteered for the role in 1944, claiming he had hanged men in Texas and Oklahoma.
The US Army never verified this claim.
If they had, they would have discovered immediately that both Texas and Oklahoma had switched to electrocution years before Woods claimed to have worked there.
The last hanging in Texas took place in 1923 when Woods was 12 years old.
Between 1944 and 1946, Woods participated in at least 11 documented bungled hangings of American soldiers.
11 before he was handed the Nuremberg assignment.
So the question that hangs over that gymnasium on October 16th, 1946 is simple and deeply uncomfortable.
Was what happened to Kitle and the others that night an accident of incompetence? Or was it something else? According to left tenant Stanley Tills, who coordinated the Nuremberg hangings, Woods had deliberately placed the noose coils off center on Julius Striker to ensure he
would not die quickly.
Reporter Howard K.
Smith, present that night, wrote that after Striker’s initial drop failed to kill him, Woods came down from the platform.
He disappeared behind the curtain, concealing the dying man, and the groaning abruptly stopped.
Smith and every other witness in that room believed Woods had grabbed Striker and strangled him manually with the rope.
Photographs of the bodies taken that night showed battered and bloody faces on multiple executed men, including Kitle, consistent with the trap doors being too small and striking the men’s heads as they fell.
The US Army officially denied any wrongdoing.
After the executions, Woods gave newspaper interviews.
He said he never saw a hanging go off any better.
He said it was an assignment he really wanted to do.
He described the men as arrogant criminals who really deserved hanging.
A small smile, witnesses noted, crossed his lips as he pulled the handle.
Was this justice or did it cross a line? A journalist cannot ignore that question.
The men who died in that gymnasium had committed some of the worst crimes in human history.
but a civilization that prosecuted those crimes on the principle that no man is above the law.
That civilization must also ask whether its own executions were lawful and humane.
The army’s denial in the face of photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony suggests they already knew the answer.
October 16th, 1946.
The night before, Kitle spoke to prison chaplain Henry F.
Gerka.
You have helped me more than you know.
He said, “May Christ, my savior, stand by me all the way.
I shall need him so much.
” He received communion.
At 1:11 in the morning, he walked into the gymnasium.
He climbed the steps.
He stood beneath the noose and spoke his final words.
I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people.
More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me.
I follow now my sons all for Germany.
The trap door opened.
He fell.
The drop was insufficient to snap his neck.
The trapdo struck his head as he fell through, cutting his face.
He did not die.
He hung there, strangling, convulsing for 24 minutes before death finally arrived.
He was 64 years old.
His body was cremated.
His ashes were scattered into the river Ear.
There were no tears shed for Wilhelm Kitle.
Wilhelm Kitle was not a man who lacked intelligence.
He was not a man who didn’t understand what he was signing.
He was a man who made a choice repeatedly across more than a decade to place loyalty, career and comfort above every moral instinct he possessed.
He called it duty.
The tribunal called it what it was.
And yet, a journalist who covers this story honestly must also sit with a final uncomfortable question.
The civilization that punished Kitle for crimes committed outside the law.
Did it in that gymnasium also step outside the law? The army said no.
The photograph said otherwise.
History is rarely clean.
Justice, even when deserved, is rarely simple.
Wilhelm Kitle signed the orders.
He signed the surrender and in the end he paid for both in one of the most agonizing executions in the history of the Nuremberg trials.
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