What is the ‘Hostage Edict’ and which primary documents record Keitel’s orders on reprisals in occupied Europe?
Executive summary
The “Hostage Edict” refers broadly to the system of orders and regulations issued by Nazi military leadership in 1941–42 that institutionalized the taking and summary execution of civilian hostages and collective reprisals in occupied territories; these measures were formalized in directives signed or distributed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and implemented alongside the Night and Fog (Nacht und Nebel) decree [1] [2]. The primary documentary record of Keitel’s orders appears most clearly in a series of dated directives and implementation letters—most notably the 16 September 1941 reprisal ratios and orders to hold hostages, the 1 October 1941 “hostages” order (Document 1590‑PS), and the December 1941 Night and Fog regulations and Keitel implementation letter—each preserved in the Nuremberg and allied documentary collections [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. What historians mean by the “Hostage Edict”
Scholars use “Hostage Edict” not for a single statute but for the Wehrmacht and OKW framework that mandated preventive detention and execution of civilians as group punishments and deterrence against resistance; this policy replaced earlier practices of imprisonment or taking individual hostages with systematic, often secret reprisals aimed at “efficient intimidation” of occupied populations [6] [1]. The practice encompassed standing orders that military commanders should “always have at their disposal a number of hostages” drawn from the same social or political circles as suspected saboteurs, and that they be shot in the event of attacks—language preserved in Wehrmacht memoranda and trial exhibits [1] [4].
2. Keitel’s September–October 1941 orders: the hardest evidence
Keitel’s fingerprints on the hostage policy are manifest in dated directives from autumn 1941: a 16 September 1941 directive ordering draconian reprisal ratios in the East (for example, executions of dozens for each German casualty) and a 1 October 1941 order instructing commanders to keep hostages ready for execution; these orders were produced as prosecution documents at Nuremberg and are quoted in the trial record and Avalon Project collections [3] [7]. The 1 October instruction is catalogued as Document 1590‑PS in Nuremberg sources and explicitly states that hostages “belonging to the same group as the culprit are to be shot in case of attacks,” a passage Keitel acknowledged he had signed even while later claiming he was acting under orders [4] [7].
3. Night and Fog (Nacht und Nebel) and Keitel’s implementation letter
The Night and Fog decree, issued 7 December 1941 under Hitler’s authority and carried out through SS and security organs, sought to make resistants “disappear” into German custody so families and communities would not know their fate; Keitel’s implementation letter attached to the decree insisted that “efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know [the prisoner’s] fate,” linking the clandestine deportation/processing policy to the broader hostage-and-reprisal regime [2] [6] [5]. Harvard’s Nuremberg document viewer and the USHMM summarize how Keitel’s letters and the distribution of Night and Fog regulations by Himmler’s office created overlapping legal and operational authority for secret deportations and executions [5] [6].
4. Documentary provenance, trial use, and Keitel’s responses
The principal primary documents cited by prosecutors are the OKW/OKH orders signed or transmitted by Keitel (e.g., 16 Sept., 1 Oct., and December implementation papers) preserved in allied seizure collections and introduced at both the International Military Tribunal and subsequent Nuremberg proceedings [3] [4] [7]. Keitel testified at Nuremberg that he signed such orders because he had been ordered to do so and sometimes disclaimed origination, a defense recorded in the trial transcripts even as the prosecution relied on the documentary record to show his responsibility for criminal reprisals [4]. Alternative interpretations—advanced by defenders after the war—argued Keitel lacked autonomous command or that some instructions reflected wider state policy rather than his personal initiative; the documentary trail, however, shows him as a formal signatory and conduit for reprisals policy [8] [9].
5. Limits of the record and where to look next
The surviving documentation in the Nuremberg archives, Avalon Project reproductions, and institutional summaries such as the USHMM and Britannica provide the core primary-source evidence tying Keitel to hostage and reprisal orders, but the archives also contain broader OKW exchanges, SS distribution memos, and trial transcripts that nuance timing and authorship—materials that require direct archival consultation for exhaustive attribution beyond the major cited directives [5] [4] [6].