Dönitz: The Last Führer (20 page)

Werth endorsed his former excellent report and added, ‘His confident, deft and sympathetic manner shows at every opportunity …’

He entered his physical appearance as ‘tall, slim figure. Very good military and social manner.’ In fact Dönitz was not much above average height; his extraordinary leanness and very upright bearing gave the impression he was taller than he was.

Werth’s chief, Pfeiffer, noted on this report: ‘an especially competent officer who deserves observation.’

Although signs of Germany’s increasing prosperity were evident in Berlin, Dönitz was still financially constrained. With three children to support and educate and provide with little extras like tennis and dancing for Ursula, his style to maintain in the usual large-roomed apartment with maid at 4 Bergmannstrasse, he could not afford theatres or concerts, nor any of the ‘decadent’ night life of the capital. Nor would he have wished for the latter; as his reports indicate, he had a serious outlook on life. If there was any spare money he seems to have been inclined to buy antiques, which both he and Ingeborg liked, or copper engravings of Frederick the Great’s generals and battles.

When they went on holiday as a family, usually to one of the North Sea islands, Borkum or Nordeney—never Baltrum where his father was buried—they travelled fourth class on the railway; this meant wooden seats with a wide space between for baggage on which the children stretched out and slept. At weekends his daughter, Ursula, then aged ten—her brother Klaus was seven and Peter five—remembers visits to museums and in the summer sailing on Lake Wannsee or going for family walks. A particularly sharp memory she retains is of her father reading to them in bed the traditional ballads he had learned as a boy,
Königskinder, Graf Douglas, Redboat
and others. He enjoyed declaiming them with feeling and pathos.

The children were brought up in the Protestant (
evangelisch
) religion and said their prayers at bed-time; probably this was the influence of their mother. Dönitz recalls in his memoirs how the youngest, Peter, looked up thoughtfully at his mother from his cot one evening and said, ‘
Mutti
, does God also have a telephone?’ However, as far as Dönitz and Ingeborg were concerned, the Christian stories and prayers were simply the traditional way to bring up children; neither were churchgoers except on special occasions; Ingeborg was described as a modern woman, and it is extremely doubtful if either was a believing Christian at this stage of their lives.

From time to time they spent days or short holidays on the small Lamezan holding in Holstein—although this occurred less frequently while they were living in Berlin because of the distance. Frau Lamezan is certain that Ursula was Karl Dönitz’s favourite child. Ursula herself remembers that on occasions when her father returned home in a bad mood her mother would push her out first to calm him. His first greeting, however, was always for their dog, a little Spitze whose name was Purzel. As a self-critical perfectionist and one who lived for his work and pushed himself to the limit and beyond, Dönitz was naturally subject to moods. Ingeborg was of an easy-going disposition, jolly and outward-going, and Ursula felt that she let Karl Dönitz dominate her; this finds support in Frau Lamezan’s recollections; she describes him as a ‘duty-man [
Pflicht-mensch
] who lived for his work without, unfortunately, caring for others’.
³²
However, she described Ingeborg as a strong personality. Of the marriage she believes that the two were considerate towards one another [
herzlich miteinander
], although at times he could not give her sufficient attention because of ‘his task’.

The impression is that the usual difficulties of a service marriage with
its separations and little money in the lower ranks were exacerbated in Dönitz’s case by his extreme duty-consciousness and temperamental nature, but that the family was in every other respect normal and very close. Ingeborg was a lively mother who enjoyed horse-play with her children; he was a fond father on holidays or when his duties allowed at the weekends. Ursula remembers, on one of their holidays at Nordeney, a sandcastle competition in which she took part with her father, he constructing a huge sphinx some six feet long, she making its tail. However, she made it so long—with a bow at the end—that he became exasperated and had her shorten it before the judge came round. They decorated the beast with shells and sprayed it with water to prevent it collapsing. It is a nice vignette, suggesting some imagination, some feeling for that ancient culture, or perhaps just for his own pleasant memories of the Mediterranean.

It is perhaps significant that he never, so far as Ursula remembers, spoke of his own childhood to his children; this may suggest it was not so happy as he implies in his memoirs. Asked about this, Ursula agreed that she found it strange he had never said anything to them about his early years; she thought he had described them as he remembered them in his memoirs, but had perhaps suppressed certain feelings.
³³

He was in general a silent man. In company he could exert himself to charm as most of the reports of his senior officers imply; on duty he spoke clearly and to the point, off duty he was a congenial messmate, but he was not noted as a raconteur, nor as a witty or amusing talker. Both Frau Lamezan and his daughter remember him as a reserved man whose strong inner discipline precluded rash, unconsidered remarks. Perhaps childhood reminiscences came into that category. Nevertheless, the suspicion remains that the masculine home in which he grew up and the pressures from his father and his own inner drive did perhaps shadow his youth and cause him to shut many memories up.

His relationship with his brother appears to have been good. Friedrich’s loans to help him support his family during the inflation have been mentioned. Although living abroad, he was a visitor from time to time, particularly at Christmas; Ursula remembers him with great affection as a large, jolly man, temperamentally very different to her father. But Friedrich’s own youngest daughter, Brigitte, remembers extraordinary similarities of manner and expression in the two men.

When Friedrich married, Ursula was one of the bridesmaids, but at some time afterwards the brothers quarrelled and became estranged;
why and when this happened seems unclear; the survivors of the two families were all children at the time and Karl Dönitz did not mention it in his memoirs—indeed he scarcely mentions his brother. It may have been on account of the loans and repayments, it may, as Ursula believes, have been over money left by an uncle. Whatever the cause, it struck deep for the families ceased to see or correspond with one another and Dönitz probably never saw his brother again.

In early August 1927 the Navy’s secret rearmament was exposed in what became known as the ‘Lohmann scandal’. It had been known for a long time that rearmament outside the treaty was in progress, but when the financial editor of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, investigating the affairs of the propaganda film company, Phoebus, stumbled on and published details of an extraordinary clandestine network of companies funded through Lohmann’s
Seetransport
office at the Navy High Command, it rekindled all the anti-militarist ardour of the Communists and the pacifist wing of the Social Democrats, and once again the Navy became the target for bitter sustained attack. Dönitz was involved in preparing the Navy’s case for the
Reichstag
. By this time he was working in collaboration with a department of the Army which had been set up in the image of his own department after it had become evident that the Navy was far more professional in political matters. Its chief was Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt von Schleicher, an officer in the Prussian mould who detested the Republic for its materialism and corruption and longed for a return to the austere ethic and authoritarian certainties of former days. Dönitz made no mention of the Lohmann affair or rearmament in any of his published writings, merely stating that Schleicher was the department chief with whom he worked at this period. However, there can be no doubt that he joined wholeheartedly in the military defence against the attack from the Left, no doubt that his attitude towards Communists and Democrats of any colour gained further reinforcement.

The government tried to suppress the facts of its own involvement in Lohmann’s dealing. Meanwhile Lohmann himself was sacrificed, together with the Defence Minister and several senior naval officers implicated in the affair who were discharged, moved to less sensitive posts or retired before time; among these were Pfeiffer, Werth, von Loewenfeld and the naval chief, Zenker, who was succeeded in 1928 by the survivor of a former scandal, Admiral Erich Raeder. Canaris received a sea-going appointment, as did Dönitz, although whether this
was as a result of his involvement is not clear. What is clear is that these were cosmetic changes and both the Navy and the government continued their efforts to circumvent the Versailles treaty without a pause. Thus at the height of the uproar in August Pfeiffer held a conference attended by Canaris, Spindler, representatives from the naval construction department and Lohmann’s go-between firm, on the funding necessary for Canaris’ Spanish U-boat project, then nearing fruition, and in November when the contract was at last signed, Zenker approved the allocation of four million Reichsmarks from the Navy’s own construction budget.
³⁴
The following spring Fürbringer and his men, having carried out trials on a second German-designed submarine built for Turkey by Krupp’s Rotterdam yard, delivered the boats to Constantinople, and both Fürbringer and his chief engineer stayed on to guide the Turkish U-school.

Dönitz, meanwhile, was serving as navigator of the cruiser,
Nymphe
, flagship of the Commander in Chief, Baltic—none other than Rear Admiral von Loewenfeld! Probably this appointment was far more to his taste than the desk job in Berlin; certainly he records in his memoirs that the crew of the cruiser were ‘united in a joyous spirit’ forming a community in which ‘a young sailor was as happy as the Commander at the success of his ship in an exercise’.
³⁵

One of the reasons for this happier state of affairs was a rigorous selection policy for the Navy, screening out all applicants whose family had any connection with Republican or socialist politics, and which was especially vigilant against deliberate Communist infiltration and cell-building.
³⁶
The naval ports were still hotbeds of Communism and naval ratings a prime target for subversion, but constant vigilance by the officers and major propaganda drives to make the men aware and motivate them to combat the dangers themselves had had effect. The small size of the service helped. For as Dönitz wrote, the candidates could be selected for high quality.
³⁷
The quality most sought, as Dönitz knew well from his three years’ involvement in disciplinary and political matters in Berlin, was patriotism.

The time in the
Nymphe
flew by in individual working-up drills, exercises in company—reconnaissance by day, attack by night—a foreign voyage, and finally the autumn naval manoeuvres. Once again he received an exemplary report from his commanding officer, the cruiser’s Captain, Conrad, himself an outstanding navigator;
³⁸
in his memoirs Dönitz gives generous tribute to the lessons he learnt from him.

The report was agreed and countersigned by von Loewenfeld, his last official service for the exceptionally promising junior he had picked out eighteen years earlier as a cadet in the
Hertha
.

Dönitz was now 37 years old. On November 1st he obtained his step-up to
Korvettenkapitän
(Lieutenant Commander); this coincided with his first independent command of a force, news of which had been conveyed to him in July personally by a beaming von Loewenfeld: he was to be chief of the 4th torpedo boat half flotilla—as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘a magnificent command … I was independent. Some 20 officers and 600 men were under me, a large number for a young officer such as I was.’
³⁹

Immediately he plunged into preparations for the task, utilizing every free hour permitted by his duties in the flagship to work out a systematic training programme; dividing the first year into sections he assigned a goal to each, working up from individual weapon training to sea training by single boats, two boats in company, finally all four boats and exercises with the fleet. When the date came for him to take over the half flotilla he knew exactly what he had to do, and lost no time in imposing his ideas and indefatigable habits of work on his Commanders, nor in showing them who was chief.

It is evident from Dönitz’s memoirs that the basic tactics of forming reconnaissance lines to seek the enemy by day and keeping touch at the limits of visibility until the attack by night were unchanged from his former torpedo boat time. And he mentions that in the autumn manoeuvres of 1929 the object was an enemy convoy which his half flotilla had the good fortune to find and ‘destroy’ that night. Whether any of the exercises were consciously devised to probe U-boat surface attack is not apparent although it is interesting that the report on him for the year 1930 was countersigned by Rear Admiral Walter Gladisch, one of the leading lights in the clandestine U-boat preparations, who signed himself BdU or Commander of U-boats, a title that was naturally not in any official naval list. It is interesting, too, that the same year, 1930, marked the first practical U-boat training of active service as distinct from retired officers like Fürbringer. This was carried out on a 500-ton Finnish submarine designed by IvS and built in Finland with the help of German technicians. The German officers were disguised as civilian tourists, and carried out trials with the boat from July to September.

Answering questions about his career in 1969, Dönitz said that he
‘could have had no better military command for later leadership posts than this task as chief of the 4th torpedo boat half flotilla’.
⁴⁰
Probably he meant this in general terms; however, a biographical sketch of him in the Navy
Taschenbuch
for 1944 states that in the autumn of 1929 his new position with the torpedo boats ‘for the first time gave him the opportunity to put down his experiences and suggestions [for the reconstruction of the German U-boat fleet] in the form of memoranda written for his superiors and other influential personalities’.
⁴¹
This may be a propaganda fabrication; none of these memoranda appear in Walter Gladisch’s papers and have not so far come to light anywhere else. Yet the citing of a specific date, autumn 1929, rather than a generalized statement about his involvement in U-boat preparations is suggestive, and it is interesting that in 1932 detailed consideration of U-boat types led to a decision to reduce conning-tower sizes to give a smaller silhouette. As a highly ambitious, thrusting officer who undoubtedly knew all about the secret U-boat work, it would have been entirely in character for him to have made suggestions and written memoranda on the subject; considering the close involvement of Loewenfeld and Gladisch in U-boat affairs it is even possible that he was being groomed deliberately for the anticipated U-boat arm.