page_title: Alfred Jodl
section_title: Trial and conviction
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Jodl / Trial and conviction
caption_attribution_description: The body of Alfred Jodl after being hanged, Oct. 16, 1946.
context_page_description: Alfred Josef Ferdinand Jodl was a German Generaloberst who served as the Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces High Command, throughout World War II.
  After the war, Jodl was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Allied-organised Nuremberg trials. The principal charges against him related to his signature of the criminal Commando and Commissar Orders. Found guilty on all charges, he was sentenced to death and executed in Nuremberg in 1946.
context_section_description: Jodl was arrested by British troops on 23 May 1945 and transferred to Flensburg POW camp and later put before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials. Jodl was accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The principal charges against him related to his signature of the Commando Order and the Commissar Order, both of which ordered that certain classes of prisoners of war were to be summarily executed upon capture. When confronted with the 1941 mass shootings of Soviet POWs, Jodl claimed the only prisoners shot were "not those that could not, but those that did not want to walk."
  Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution. Presented as evidence was his signature on an order that transferred Danish citizens, including Jews, to Nazi concentration camps. Although he denied his role in this activity of the regime, the court sustained his complicity based on the evidence it had examined, with the French judge, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, dissenting.
  His wife Luise attached herself to her husband's defence team. Subsequently, interviewed by Gitta Sereny, researching her biography of Albert Speer, Luise alleged that in many instances the Allied prosecution made charges against Jodl based on documents that they refused to share with the defence. Jodl nevertheless proved that some of the charges made against him were untrue, such as the charge that he had helped Hitler gain control of Germany in 1933.
  Jodl pleaded not guilty "before God, before history and my people". Found guilty on all four charges, he was hanged at Nuremberg Prison on 16 October 1946. Jodl's last words were reportedly "Ich grüße Dich, mein ewiges Deutschland"—"I salute you, my eternal Germany."
  His remains, like those of the other nine executed men and Hermann Göring (who had taken his own life prior to his scheduled execution), were cremated at Ostfriedhof and the ashes were scattered in the Wentzbach, a small tributary of the River Isar to prevent the establishment of a permanent burial site which might be enshrined by nationalist groups. A cross commemorating Alfred Jodl was later added to the family grave on the Frauenchiemsee in Bavaria. Although in 2018 the local council ordered the cross to be removed, in March 2019 a Munich Court upheld Jodl's relatives right to maintain the family grave, while noting the family's willingness to remove Alfred Jodl's name.
  On 28 February 1953, a West German denazification court declared the now-deceased Jodl not guilty of breaking international law. This not guilty declaration was revoked by the Minister of Political Liberation for Bavaria on 3 September 1953, following objections from the United States.
caption: The body of Jodl, 16 October 1946
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