War & Peace Quote by Wilhelm Keitel

Power trying to launder atrocity into procedure is what makes Keitel's line so chilling. "Empowered" and "in duty bound" are the tells: this isn't a battlefield outburst, it's a bureaucrat's permission slip for cruelty, dressed up as obligation. The phrase does double work. It reassures anxious soldiers that what they are about to do is not only allowed but required, and it signals to superiors that the chain of command is aligned: the machinery will run without squeamish delays.

The pivot is "without mitigation". Keitel isn't merely authorizing violence; he's preemptively nullifying the moral reflex to restrain it. By specifying "even against women and children", he targets the most stubborn cultural limit on wartime conduct. It's a rhetorical crowbar meant to pry loose empathy where it might still operate, reframing protected civilians as acceptable inputs in the calculus of "success". That last word is the final act of euphemism. "Success" sounds like strategy, not slaughter; it abstracts the human cost into an outcome metric.

Context sharpens the intent. Keitel, a senior German field marshal and chief of the OKW, was central to orders that normalized scorched-earth tactics and collective punishment on the Eastern Front, where Nazi ideology treated entire populations as enemies to be managed, not humans to be spared. The subtext is simple and terrifying: war isn't just permission to break rules; it's the moment when breaking them becomes the rule.