Dönitz: The Last Führer (18 page)

This confirmed an excellent report on him by Schultze, who had also remarked on his deftness in handling subordinates.

Dönitz stayed in the torpedo boat flotilla altogether for nearly three years. During this time, on March 20th 1922, Ingeborg bore a third child, a boy who was christened Peter.

A year later the family moved back to Kiel as he was appointed
Referent
—literally, expert or adviser—to the Torpedo, Mine and Intelligence Inspectorate there. He was assigned to the U-boat department, his area of work primarily submarine hunting methods and the development of a new depth charge and its ejection device.

Although he recorded in his memoirs that he was not very happy about this posting, since he was occupied mostly with technical matters, his ability and dedication made the usual very favourable impression on his superiors. The Station chief of staff reported on him as ‘lively and energetic, an excellent soldier, decided in action, clear and confident in word and writing’. He went on: ‘To me he was and is a willing subordinate, an adviser of indefatigable working energy, who performed his written work with a clear head and deftness of expression.’
²⁰

He recommended him, because of his rounded service as Commander of both U- and torpedo-boats, and the great interest he had shown as
U-Referent
, for further employment in the torpedo arm; he also suggested that his ‘exemplary service outlook and superior qualities of character’ fitted him for posts where he might influence young officers and officer recruits. He concluded: ‘To serious consciousness of his duty he joins in a fortunate way a cheerful joy of life which makes him a very popular comrade. As father of three children he had a considerable economic struggle against the exigencies of the time.’

This referred to the period of hyper-inflation during the Ruhr crisis—the
political arm of the movement to circumvent Versailles. At the beginning of 1923 French and Belgian troops had marched into the Ruhr to enforce payment of arrears of war-reparations, as a result of which the German government had called a strike throughout the area. To finance this passive resistance they printed money and there resulted the notorious period when the value of the Mark fell by the day and hour until trunkfuls of paper were needed for the smallest purchases. It was a disastrous ploy, sweeping away the savings of the middle classes, bankrupting thousands, reintroducing hunger to the streets of the cities, further loosening the ties of society and unleashing a bitterness and restlessness that were harnessed by revolutionaries and nationalists for their own ends.

The Dönitzes were one of the families whose capital was destroyed, and as he was paid by the month he could not even protect current spending; even when the currency was stabilized in the autumn Dönitz’s monthly salary bought so little it lasted barely two weeks—so he recounts in his memoirs—after which Ingeborg had to shop on credit. His brother who had no family helped with occasional loans. He had returned to the merchant marine after the war, then set up on his own account in Riga probably with a shipping or export-import agency, but the day came when his business went bankrupt; to repay the loans, Karl Dönitz had to sell his priceless Turkish carpets.

His friend, von Lamezan, also suffered. Returning from four years as a prisoner in England he had not re-entered the Navy—perhaps he had been unable to since he had had no opportunity for distinguished service—but took a training in agriculture, hoping to buy a manor farm by the sea. The inflation eroded his capital and he was only able to buy a small-holding on sandy soil in Holstein.

While the middle classes were ruined and workers thrown on the streets, there were elements who emerged stronger than ever from the inflation; the Army High Command received one hundred million in gold at the height of the crisis for the purpose of rearmament outside Versailles limits; a portion of this was passed on to the Navy and incorporated in two secret rearmament funds, one under
Kapitän zur See
Lohmann of the Naval Transport department, the other under
Kapitan zur See
Hansen of the Weapons department of naval High Command. Dönitz mentions in his memoirs that his department at Kiel worked closely with Hansen. Meanwhile big industrialists who had geared their operations to inflation, which had been a feature of German currency
throughout the post-war period, expanded their real assets by discounting huge bills of exchange at the
Reichsbank
, paying them back in increasingly devalued
Reichsmarks
and using the profits to buy up medium and small concerns.

Naturally in the chaos the other elements to profit were the revolutionaries. It is possible now to select one as particularly important, Adolf Hitler, and it is interesting to find that he shared significant peculiarities with the exiled Kaiser. He was not so obviously deformed, but he was a poor specimen with hollow chest, wide hips, spindly legs and appalling posture. However, the most striking similarities with Wilhelm II were in early upbringing and mental characteristics: both were almost certainly over-indulged by doting mothers, in Hitler’s case probably because all the earlier children in the family had died in infancy; both were judged by tutors or teachers to have talent but to lack self-discipline or powers of concentration, both later proved to have prodigious memories for facts combined with complete inability in analysis; both therefore accepted the world as it was presented to them, exaggerated the picture in their own uncurbed, ego-centred minds, and when they attained power twisted the real world to their own fantasies.

Of course they came from entirely different backgrounds. Hitler was the son of a minor Austrian official and, after failing to obtain any qualifications at school because of laziness and wayward obstinacy against learning anything that did not interest him, he spent his young manhood drifting around cheap lodgings in Vienna painting copies of picture postcards and absorbing the pseudo-intellectual political ideas of the time from pamphlets, and reading in libraries. He accepted uncritically the two great themes of the age and his milieu—social Darwinism as put forward by Treitschke and his followers—struggle as the essence of life, victory to the strongest—and the racialism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner and their followers—the importance of racial purity, the mission of the Teutonic peoples, above all the poison in society represented by Jews. The rider to this was that Jews were at the centre of a subversive Socialist-Marxist world conspiracy.

The World War ended his drift and gave focus and imposed discipline on his life for the first time. He enthusiastically supported Germany’s world mission and volunteered for a German—not Austrian—regiment, serving as a despatch runner in the Bavarian 6th Division and winning the Iron Cross, second- then first-class; he did not rise above corporal though, which in view of his loyalty, evident bravery and long service,
suggests that he was not judged to command the confidence of his fellows.

He was shocked by the revolutions of November 1918 and the armistice, and the official line that the Army had been treacherously deserted by politicians at home fitted his crude ideas of a Jewish-Socialist-Communist world conspiracy. His loyalty came to the attention of the Bavarian Army Command press officer, who employed him to attend local political meetings and report on their tone and ideology; it was during this work that he found his vocation: he made the discovery that he could sway audiences.

In September 1919 he joined a small nationalist group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party, and by virtue of the fervour with which he pressed his few received ideas soon came to dominate the group. His success rested not on power in argument, but on dredging the deepest emotions of his colleagues and audiences. He gave them focus for their personal frustrations and bitterness by making ‘Reds’ and ‘November Criminals’—the government—scapegoats for Germany’s humiliation; he touched deep tribal chords by telling them they were members of the chosen race. His message was Messianic. He appealed to blood not reason, and although it is easy to criticize the narrowness and vulgarity of his vision, in such frenzied times and with such audiences who had experienced the terror of a civil war and a Communist regime in Bavaria it is understandable that many responded.

Over the next few years the Party grew and formed branches in other towns, largely as a result of Hitler’s impassioned oratory; he also won converts through street fighting against the ‘Reds’ who had hitherto been the masters of intimidatory public brawling; the spearhead of this movement was the SA, or
Sturm-Abteilung
, formed originally to protect meetings and demonstrations from the assaults of their opponents. The name of the Party was expanded to the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party—
Nazi
for short.

By the time of the Ruhr crisis in 1923 the SA had become an armed unit organized on military lines with brown shirts, leather belts, swastika armbands and standards, one of the many unofficial
Freikorps
which supported the nationalist cause; its new leader was Hermann Göring, a World War fighter-pilot ace and considerable prize for Hitler, most of whose associates were from the same restricted background as himself. Hitler also had the support of two formidable leaders of the old guard in retirement in Bavaria, Hindenburg and Ludendorff; they were not
members of the Party and regarded the fanatical and socially gauche ‘corporal’ with proper condescension; they recognized his immaculate political viewpoint, though, and admired the military order prevailing at his rallies—in sharp contrast to the anarchy and chaos spreading throughout Germany in the wake of inflation. It was in these circumstances that Hitler forced on a startled Ludendorff the famous
Putsch
which began on November 8th during a nationalist mass meeting in the
Bürgerbraukeller
in the outskirts of Munich. It was to have resulted in a march on Berlin by the combined
Freikorps
to arrest the ‘November Criminals’, overturn the Republic and set up a nationalist dictatorship on the lines of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, which Hitler admired greatly. But the military had learned their lesson during the Kapp
Putsch
and were besides more monarchical than fascist; thanks to elementary errors on Hitler’s part the local
Reichswehr
command and Bavarian police were able to disperse the marchers with comparatively little bloodshed and arrest the leaders.

Their trial began in Munich in February 1924, and for the first time Hitler’s name became known outside Bavaria. The most significant aspect of the trial, however, is the light it throws on the failure of the Republic. The government had brought the Ruhr crisis on itself for the sake of protesting against the Versailles treaty and was thus largely responsible for the hysterical nationalism and chaos that ensued. To restore order it was then forced to call on its implacable enemy, the Army, whose handling of the situation showed clear sympathy for the nationalists and against the ‘Red’ revolutionaries. The results of the trial in Munich demonstrated that the judiciary was equally partial; Ludendorff was acquitted, Hitler sentenced for high treason in attempting to overthrow the government to the absurd term of five years with a recommendation for remission. He served only two of them in very agreeable conditions, enjoying pleasant rooms and better and more regular meals than he had probably ever experienced, and he used the leisure to expose his cosmic fantasies in a manuscript, the first part of which was published in 1925 as
Mein Kampf
.

The trial of Hitler and his colleagues was not exceptional. Three years previously there had been a series of trials at the German Supreme Court in Leipzig which showed similar, even more flagrant violations of justice. These were the proceedings taken against a few of those designated as ‘war criminals’ by the allies. Only twelve actually came to trial, but one particularly nauseous case must be touched on since it is relevant to
Dönitz’s later career. It concerned the hospital ship,
Llandovery Castle
, which was torpedoed and sunk by U 86, commanded by
Oberleutnant z. See
Helmut Patzig—who had beaten Dönitz to first place in the exams aboard the
Hertha
. Patzig himself did not stand trial since he had gone to ground—he emerged later in the Counter Intelligence Organization, the
Abwehr
. In his stead his two watch officers were brought before the Court.

From the evidence of these two it appeared that Patzig torpedoed the hospital ship because he was convinced she was carrying ammunition and combatants, in particular US airmen; why he thought so was not discovered. At least five lifeboats got away from the ship before she went down and Patzig, surfacing, interrogated the survivors of several, apparently intent on proving his assumptions about munitions and US airmen. When he found he was wrong he apparently decided to remove all the enemy witnesses to his mistake—since sinking hospital ships was contrary to the Geneva Convention—and after making two vain passes to ram one of the boats ordered fire to be opened with the after gun, then cruised about on the surface firing at the other boats until he judged that all had been destroyed.

After the incident the crew of the U-boat, who had been kept below during the shooting, were naturally depressed. Patzig swore his officers to secrecy and the log was faked to show a track a long way from the sinking, which was not entered. From all this the Court could hardly avoid the conclusion that there had been a deliberate slaughter of defenceless survivors or, as it was put in the Judgement: ‘The universally known efficiency of our U-boat crews renders it very improbable that the firing on the boats, which by their very proximity would form an excellent target, was without effect.’
²¹

The Court managed to find that Patzig had been in a state of excitement when he gave his order to fire: ‘he had to act quickly: under this pressure of circumstances he proceeded in a manner which the naval expert rightly described as imprudent’!
²²
This naval expert was to become an Admiral responsible for naval education in the 1930s. ‘In view of this state of excitement,’ the Judgement continued, ‘the execution of the deed cannot be called deliberate.’