Daily Inspiration Quote by Alfred Jodl

A bland benediction that lands like a coded last will. “My greetings to you, my Germany” is engineered to sound tender, even domestic: a soldier’s farewell to a homeland imagined as singular, intimate, possessed. The double “my” matters. It narrows a whole country into a personal object, a rhetorical move that turns loyalty into ownership and invites listeners to treat politics as family duty rather than judgment.

Spoken by Alfred Jodl, a senior Wehrmacht officer later convicted at Nuremberg, the line can’t be separated from the moment it’s trying to manage. It’s not a policy argument; it’s reputation control. Jodl’s intent is to reframe himself as a patriot rather than a functionary of a criminal regime. The subtext is an appeal over the heads of prosecutors and history: whatever I did, I did it for Germany. In one compact phrase, blame gets redirected from choices to fate, from agency to allegiance.

The context tightens the screw. Postwar Germany was shattered materially and morally, and Nuremberg was dismantling the convenient myth that “soldiers just obey.” A farewell addressed to “Germany” becomes an attempt to retrieve moral standing by merging the self with the nation. It’s also a subtle message to sympathetic audiences: treat the tribunal as an insult to Germany itself. The genius, and the danger, is how the sentence borrows the emotional warmth of homecoming language to launder the cold bureaucracy of war into something like devotion.