Alfred Jodl

Alfred Jodl signed the German surrender at Reims and was hanged at Nuremberg eighteen months later. He was a Bavarian artillery officer of the old army who spent the war as chief of the operations staff of the armed forces high command - the post that turned Hitler's decisions into orders for the fronts Hitler controlled directly. It was a staff job with no troops, and it made him one of the two or three men who saw the whole war. He was injured in the bomb plot of 20 July 1944, standing near the table in the same room as Stauffenberg's briefcase, and remained loyal. The signature is what he is known for. At 2.41 on the morning of 7 May 1945 he signed an unconditional surrender to Eisenhower's headquarters at Reims, to take effect the following night; Stalin objected that the capitulation had been signed in the west, and it was repeated in Berlin with Keitel signing to Zhukov. At Nuremberg he was charged on all four counts. His defence was that a soldier obeys orders and that the general staff is not a criminal organisation. The tribunal convicted him on the documents he had signed himself, including the Commando Order directing that captured commandos be killed and the orders for reprisals in the occupied east, and he was hanged on 16 October 1946. A German denazification court posthumously cleared him in 1953, on the argument that he had been a soldier rather than a policymaker, and the Bavarian government revoked that ruling two years later.

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