Alfred Jodl

In September 1913, he married Irma Gr�fin von Bullion, a lady five years his senior, from an aristocratic Swabian family. She died after contracting pneumonia in 1944, in Konigsberg.

He married Luise Von Benda, a family friend, in November 1944.

He was found guilty of war crimes and was hanged on October 16, 1946. His remains were cremated at Munich and his ashes were scattered into the Isar River.

He was born on May 10, 1890 in Wurzburg, Germany to Alfred Jodl, an Officer, and Therese Baumgartler before their marriage. His parents married after 9 years of his birth, in 1899.

He had a younger brother, Ferdinand Jodl, also born out of wedlock, in 1896. His uncle, Friedrich Jodl, was a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Vienna.

He received his education from the Cadet School in Munich and graduated in 1910. After school graduation, he joined the field military regiment in the German army as an artillery officer.

He served as a battery officer during the World War I from 1914–1916 on the Western Front. He suffered a severe thigh wound and also fought on the Eastern Front, in 1917, for a short time. Later, he returned to Western Front as a staff officer.

Germany faced defeat and the ‘Treaty of Versailles’ was imposed upon it. The treaty dictated that German’s armed forces would be limited to 100,000 men and prohibited their use of any heavy artillery, tanks, submarines and air missiles. He remained in the services of the military and joined a newly formed military organization, Reichswehr.

He served in the newly created Weimar Republic in Germany’s Ministry of War and the intelligence service during the 1920s and was appointed as the major in the operations branch of the Truppenamt in the Army High Command during the last days of Weimar Republic. He was advanced to the rank of colonel and to the post of the head of the National Defense Section in the High Command of the Armed Forces in 1936.

Meanwhile, Germany’s degrading economy gave rise to a new fascist political movement, National Socialism, led by another World War I veteran, Adolf Hitler. Hitler became the German chancellor and took some extreme measures that restricted the civil rights of German Jews. He also violated the Treaty of Versailles by acquiring arms and ammunitions.

From 1938 to 1939, Jodl served as the Artillery Commander of the 44th Division and was posted in Austria and Czechoslovakia. He met Hitler in September 1939 and was appointed as the ‘Chief of Operation Staff’ of the newly formed OKW, a part of the command structure of the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

In 1934, he received a First World War Service Medal titled ‘Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918’.

He was also the recipient of ‘Anschluss Medal’ and the ‘Sudetenland Medal’, both of them being a decoration of Nazi Germany awarded in the interwar period.

On March 25, 1942, he was honored with the ‘Order of the Cross of Liberty 1st Class with Swords’, one of the three official orders of Finland.

He was also honored with Romania’s highest military decoration, ‘Order of Michael the Brave’, both 2nd Class and 3rd Class, on December 23, 1943.