Dönitz: The Last Führer (25 page)

There can be little doubt that Dönitz, like so many others, received an impression of assurance, purpose, volcanic sincerity and quick perceptions. Like them he would not have guessed that the stage front concealed only the street agitator of old with the same cosmic hatreds and naïve solutions, the same Austrian
Schlamperei
, the same incapacity to understand complexity or indeed anything that did not interest him, the same distrust of rational argument and inability to synthesize outside the framework of the survival of the fittest; that in consequence the organs of government were sliding into an even looser, more anarchic state than they had been under the Kaiser. Once again the mighty potential power of Germany was not under control, its people bathed in an even more systematic, hate-filled and destructive propaganda under a leader living in the same kind of Wagnerian fantasy as the Kaiser, but whose will and lust to dominate had been nourished by stronger feelings of inferiority and rejection and hardened in a crueller school; not the First Regiment of Guards at Potsdam, but the poor streets of Vienna and Munich set the new course for Germany.

Whether Dönitz ever realized much of this may be doubtful; it is scarcely conceivable that he glimpsed it in this first interview with the man who was to have such a baleful influence on his life. Long after the war he told the Cambridge historian, Jonathan Steinberg, of his impression of Hitler at this first meeting: ‘
brav und würdig
’—which might be translated as ‘honest and worthy’.
⁸⁵

Undoubtedly Raeder apprised him of the delicate situation anticipated the following spring, for the
Emden
would be on her own thousands of miles from the Fatherland. Dönitz must have wondered if he might be faced with a repeat of the situation of the
Breslau
in 1914.
⁸⁶

Before sailing Dönitz had the ship’s company mustered and gave them a talk on the cruiser’s mission as representative of Germany: ‘From the
appearance of the ship, the bearing and behaviour of the Commander and officers as well as the whole crew, foreigners would immediately draw their conclusions about the German
Reich
itself.’
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He instructed them on their behaviour and how to answer questions about Germany put to them by foreigners, and he warned them that anyone misbehaving ashore—‘i.e. drunk’—would be sent home. It can be assumed that the talk was pithy and terse, couched in language every man could understand and probably containing easily remembered short slogans epitomizing essential points. Afterwards he had the instructions and probable questions they would be asked about Germany, together with the correct answers, printed and distributed to all hands. At musters throughout the voyage he would shoot questions at anyone, sailor or fireman or cadet, to see if he understood, as a result of which, he wrote, most studied the paper ‘in order not to be made to look ridiculous in front of their friends’.
⁸⁸

This attempt at regimenting minds and behaviour was as much a reflection of the sensitivity of German naval officers as a group as of Dönitz’s personal methods. After the humiliations of the war and the mutinies, they were attempting to gain fresh bearings in the new revolution which would restore honour and dignity to Germany; naturally they set store by rules of behaviour. Raeder himself was a most earnest exponent of correct conduct. He had produced one handbook on the subject and another was to come out under his guidance,
The Naval Officer as Leader and Teacher
, which explained, amongst many other topics, the role of chivalry and religion, the officer’s task in the struggle against materialism, the necessity for optimism, the use of humour. It is reminiscent of English Victorian homilies on etiquette or self-help, designed for those rising or hoping to rise in the social scale; the reason of course was a similar feeling of insecurity induced by society in flux.

It would be interesting to know how Dönitz dealt with instructions on the burning topic of the time, the Jews. He would have had little difficulty with the other questions, since Nazi social doctrine, crude as it was, incorporated many splendid ideals from the treasure house of the youth and back-to-nature movements that had existed side by side with the yearning for power in the Bismarckian
Kaiserreich
.

The first port of call was Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands, from where they sailed to Luanda in Portuguese West Africa. By the time they reached this torrid port at the end of November it can be assumed the
crew had attained a high standard in all warlike drills under his untiring regime. The chief difficulty was that the other two functions of the vessel as training ship and ‘lightning clean and cared-for’ showcase for Nazi Germany interfered. Undoubtedly this simply meant harder work all round.

From Luanda they steamed for the Cape, on the way performing what must have been one of the first oiling at sea exercises in the German service. Dönitz himself had been involved in the preparatory work during his time as a staff officer at Wilhelmshaven—another indication of the ambitious oceanic war on communications that was at the heart of the Navy’s long-term strategy even as Hitler came to power.

From Cape Town, where the crew had a splendid time, voting it the best of their ports of call, they steamed up the East African coast, calling at Lourenço Marques where Dönitz visited German farmers in the interior with his Adjutant,
Kapitänleutnant
Eberhardt Godt, and became infected with malaria which hit him at the end of the cruiser’s stay in their next port, Mombasa.

Far worse than the malaria was a snub he received here from the British Governor of Kenya: Dönitz had been given the assignment of visiting German farmers in the former German East African colony, now British Tanganyika, by the Foreign Ministry in Berlin; permission for the visit had been sought before his arrival in Mombasa. Now, however, when he visited the Governor in Nairobi to clear the proposed trip he was told that the British Foreign Office had only agreed to his journey on conditions: he was not to wear uniform nor make speeches! This so incensed him that he decided not to go at all; he remembers his behaviour at breakfast in the Governor’s residence that day as cool ‘to the borders of courtesy’. Little reliance can be placed on his accounts of such incidents, yet this would have been in keeping with his strong sense of duty, temperamental reaction to setbacks and prickliness as a German; it might also have had something to do with the malaria which struck him just before they left the port and reduced his already slim figure to little more than skin and bone before he recovered as the ship neared the Seychelles.

Here he spent most evenings, according to his memoirs, playing bridge with the Governor, ‘a typical English gentleman of unsurpassed correctness’, and his ladies who were ‘always in great toilette in the best social form’.
⁸⁹
Meanwhile the entire complement of the
Emden
was sent off in batches of 100 or so to spend four days each camping on one of the idyllic
islands fringed with blazing white sand beaches and coral lagoons—an imaginative gesture that acted like a tonic.

From this paradise they sailed to another, Trincomalee in Ceylon. This was the British naval base for the East Indies, and again his official duties and social life brought him into continuous contact with the British; he seems to have had a cordial relationship with the Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Rose, and his officers with their British counterparts who he records, fully understood the German aspirations to break the fetters of Versailles.

It can be seen that the four weeks he had spent in England had been in preparation for this tour of the empire, for the next port of call was Cochin on the Malabar coast of India, after which he headed west on the return voyage, passing Aden, and through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to Alexandria, another British base. By this time Hitler had produced two ‘Saturday surprises’—on March 9th the announcement by Göring that the German Air Force was in existence and, on Saturday the 16th, his own announcement that conscription was to be introduced and the
Wehrmacht
was to have a peacetime strength of twelve army corps and 36 divisions.

The fact of Germany’s secret rearmament had been known for a long time of course, but these contemptuous repudiations of Versailles had sent a shock wave through the European capitals, and in the resulting tension Dönitz was ordered not to complete the remainder of his scheduled calls in the Mediterranean, but to make for the Straits and the open Atlantic. This he did, then, apparently filling in the time before he was due home, visited the Canaries again, the Azores, Lisbon and finally Vigo. Here he received a letter from Raeder’s chief of staff to the effect that his next cruise with the
Emden
would be to Borneo, Japan, China and Australia—an alluring prospect, he thought.

In fact it had already been decided to place him in charge of the new U-boat arm. Hitler had ordered the construction of the first boats on February 1st; secrecy was to be preserved by assembling them inside huge, specially constructed sheds.

The following month an important conference was held at Naval High Command, Berlin, attended by nine departmental chiefs, including the U-department, at which organizational details of the now imminent U-boat 1st Flotilla were thrashed out; at this stage no flotilla chief was designated, but it was agreed that whoever he was he should be directly under the fleet chief at Kiel, Admiral Foerster.
⁹⁰
The arrangements were
accordingly sent to Foerster for his approval. On April 8th, Foerster notified the High Command that he was in full agreement and suggested that a
Führer der U-boote
(FdU) be appointed at the beginning of 1936. Foerster had been station chief at Wilhelmshaven in 1933 and had countersigned his chief of staff’s rhapsodic report on the 1st staff officer, Dönitz, with the words, ‘A particularly competent and sympathetic officer’. His successor as station chief in 1934, Dönitz’s last year there, was Vice Admiral Otto Schultze—the officer who had accepted Dönitz back into the service in 1919. He was one of the leading members of what might be termed the U-boat group in the Navy and would have been eminently qualified for the post of FdU on account of his war experience had he not been too senior. His comment on Dönitz in 1934 had been: ‘A staff officer with high leadership qualities who deserves special observation and advancement.’
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While there is nothing in the records to indicate that either of these men now put Dönitz’s name forward, both might easily have done so verbally to Raeder. Of course it may be—as suggested earlier—that Dönitz had staked his own claim while chief of the torpedo boat half flotilla. Whenever and however he was chosen, his name appeared as chief of the first U-flotilla in the list of autumn appointments issued on June 6th. It would be surprising if the list did not reach him at Vigo in June or by radio on his way home.
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Meanwhile the British government had swallowed Hitler’s poisoned bait, entering into bilateral talks with astounding disregard for friends or principles of collective security, and agreeing everything proposed by a German delegation headed by Ribbentrop. To understand this it is necessary to appreciate the state of mind of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, and the members of the Board of Admiralty in London. Simon was resigned to German rearmament, believed nothing could stop it, and thought ‘the practical choice is between a Germany which continues to rearm without any regulation or agreement, and a Germany which, through getting recognition of its rights, … enters into the comity of nations’.
⁹³
The Admiralty was concerned about the possibility of a German-Italian-Japanese coalition against the British Empire, and the imminence of a new naval arms race—triggered by Japanese ambitions in the Pacific—such as had preceded the first war. They leaped at Hitler’s offer to limit the German Navy to 35 per cent of the British as a means of containing the European end of the race.

These attitudes indicated an amazing misconception of German aims and methods; their naïvety and wishful thinking is brought out in the British naval staff memoranda on the talks:

This also reveals the aggressiveness of the German tactics. On the specific question of submarines, for which the German delegation claimed a 45 per cent ratio with the option of building up to 100 per cent, the British Admiralty memorandum stated:

A better description of the policy of appeasement could hardly have been penned—nor a crasser misjudgement of the Führer and the German Navy. With staggering lack of imagination, historical perception or up-to-date intelligence, the British naval staff applied its own standards—of the assured possessor of half the world, for whom peace and stability were essential—to the humiliated, vengeful inheritors of
Realpolitik
, whose leader claimed the right to world mastery.

Hitler was overjoyed at his masterstroke and told Raeder after the signing that it was the happiest day of his life. He too was living in a fool’s paradise, for as a later British Foreign Office memorandum put it, ‘this country is bound to react not only against danger from any purely naval
rival, but also against the dominance of Europe by any aggressive military power, particularly if in a postition to threaten the Low Countries and the Channel ports’.
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