Dönitz: The Last Führer (3 page)

Adalbert Schnee wrote an article about the funeral for the U-boat Association. He referred to this moment as ‘the moving leave-taking’ from the Grand Admiral:

Schnee went on to deny the charges frequently levelled against Dönitz, in particular that he had been little more than Hitler’s vassal; he knew of no case in the conduct of the war at sea in which his will had not prevailed with Hitler. Finally, he came to ‘the last and heaviest reproach’:

Schnee concluded his article:

These two views represent opposite poles of opinion; both command wide support in the camps into which Germany remains divided.

CHAPTER TWO

The Imperial Naval Officer

Karl Dönitz was born in Grünau-bei-Berlin on September 16th 1891, the second son of Herr Emil Dönitz, who came from the small provincial town of Zerbst in the Duchy of Anhalt some 80 miles south-west of Berlin. He was an engineer, specializing in optics who worked for the firm of Karl Zeiss of Jena, a world leader in the field; he was married to Anna, formerly Beyer, from the small town of Crossen on the upper Oder. Anna died on March 6th 1895, when Karl Dönitz was three and a half, his brother, Friedrich, five. Emil Dönitz did not remarry.

This much is certain from the record.
¹

From it one can make assumptions about the influences on Dönitz as a child—his father, his father’s station, the spirit of the age and of the city in whose suburbs they lived—Berlin, the imperial capital, where to a greater extent than elsewhere in Germany the strong sap of the new industrial-material age rose in the tough and ancient trunk of Prussian tradition. It was a powerful fusion. The industrial juices forced growth; the spread and shape and purpose was Prussian. Heroic race memories were inscribed in every convolution of the gnarled old bark, and Germans looked up at the magnificent structure and were inclined to dream and tell stories, imagining it would grow and grow for ever. Dönitz’s father was one of these, and he raised his two boys—in Karl Dönitz’s words—as ‘rather one-sided Prussian children’.
²

His was not an aristocratic or military family—thus not from the strata which set the tone in the
Reich
—nor was there a background of merchant wealth. His forebears, originally small farmers from the upper Saale region, included—according to his own account—pastors, officers, scholars. It can be said that he was of the aspiring middle class; this is probably a useful definition since in those days of earnest German aspiration the middle class, particularly, aspired—to be worthy of the ideals, to imitate the bearing and the outlook and the manners of the Prussian nobility of the sword who stood behind the Kaiser at the head of
the empire. They differed from the nobles, however, in their belief in education. And without family wealth Dönitz’s father would have aspired to the best education he could afford for his two boys.

As for the younger of these, Karl, it is evident that the absence of a mother from the age of only three and a half must have had a decided effect on his development. What this effect was or whether any woman such as a housekeeper had any counteracting influence as a surrogate loving mother is not clear. Karl Dönitz evidently thought not, for he wrote in his memoirs that his father attempted to take the place of the mother—whom he himself could not remember: ‘He is the man whom I have to thank most.’
³

This picture receives confirmation from the recollections of Dönitz’s youngest niece who was close to him in the last years of his life and had been very close to her father, his brother, Friedrich: ‘Neither from my father nor from my Uncle Karl did I hear of a woman who took their mother’s place. My father stressed to us that his father
never
married again. With much love he had refused to replace the mother.’
⁴

In the summer following his mother’s death, Karl Dönitz’s father took the two boys for the holidays to the small Ostfriesian island of Baltrum; years later he explained to them that he had chosen this lonely place because he had hoped its peace and sublimity would help him to recover from his grief and restore his balance.

There is no doubt that Karl revered his father. ‘There is nothing that sticks in a child’s memory,’ he wrote later in life, ‘more than walking with its father and asking him so many questions that he wonders what is coming next.’
⁵
He kept a drawing of his father on his desk throughout his life—one that he had probably made himself—and when this disappeared in the looting and destruction accompanying the collapse of the Third
Reich
he replaced it with a little photograph. His niece remembered: ‘In the last years [of his life] Uncle Karl still spoke to me of his father. Also I recall very well that my father spoke a lot about his father.’
⁶

An account of Emil Dönitz, probably based on an interview with Karl Dönitz in later life, states that he had an excellent all-round education including Greek and Latin—which would have been required at the
Gymnasium
he attended in Zerbst—that he was very well-read, possessed a voluminous library, and that his outlook on life was stamped in the Prussian mould; he brought up his boys with a strong sense of their obligations to the State: ‘The Monarchy and the German
Reich
, of which
Prussia was the core, was affirmed. Young Karl Dönitz grew up in the conviction, as he expressed it, that each citizen had the duty to serve this state.’
⁷

Some of the young boy’s first vivid memories were of Prussian soldiers. He was five years old, living then in Halensee in what is now a built-up part of West Berlin, but was then separated by sandy fields and pine trees, through which the Kurfürstendamm ran towards the Zoo and the city beyond. The Berlin infantry regiments used this secluded area for training and field exercises, and he often watched them forming line, firing, advancing, storming. One quiet Sunday afternoon here he saw a fairy-tale state coach with retainers in silver livery, and some distance from it the Kaiser and Kaiserin strolling by themselves. ‘The Kaiserin had on a lilac dress which I found surprisingly and wonderfully lovely.’
⁸

Is this line from his memoirs somehow revealing? Or perhaps he was also captivated, without mentioning it, by the Kaiser’s splendid uniform—for it can be assumed confidently that the Kaiser was in uniform. The irreverent said he slept in uniform.

This was about 1897—the precise time that the German monarch was setting the course that shaped twentieth-century Europe and the world. The twentieth century would have taken some frightful turn, there can be little doubt, whatever the Kaiser had done or not done then, for powerful forces were already in motion. They had been set off on the one hand by Bismarck’s unification of diverse German-speaking kingdoms and duchies and electorates under the Hohenzollern crown of Brandenburg-Prussia—‘those terrible but splendid years’
⁹
—on the other hand by the ‘take-off’ of German industry, aided by huge war reparations demanded from France after the last of the Iron Chancellor’s three Machiavellian, brilliantly localized wars of unification. On the one hand the Prussian army and Court triumphant, on the other hand German traders and industrialists expansive.

As at all such points of high potential throughout history there was a philosophy at hand—in this case forged from the heroic ethic of the Prussian warrior caste—and sufficient intellectuals and popularizers who would bend to the new wind and create a national will mirroring the attitudes and necessities of the ruling élite. In the case of the German empire created by Bismarck, this national consensus took some time to develop fully for the simple, landlocked view of the Prussians had to be broadened to accommodate the world-wide trading outlook of the new
merchant industrialists. At least the attempt had to be made, although it is evident from twentieth-century German history that the soldiers never began to understand the consequences of their changed position. In any case this new Germany of 70 million people was a world power in competition with other world powers and her statesmen were forced to widen their horizons. The first looming object in view was Great Britain, not only the leading trading and colonial nation with a mighty Navy on the ‘two power’ standard and a world-encircling chain of naval bases, but actually positioned like a giant breakwater across all Germany’s routes to the overseas world.

Up until that time Britain had provided German scholars, statesmen and the growing middle classes with a model of individual freedom and constitutional and religious virtue; in the view of the great German historian, Ranke, England had been for centuries the champion of the Protestant-Germanic world, and it was generally agreed, from a study of the languages, that both peoples stemmed from a common ‘Aryan’ root in India; it was suggested that both had developed their admirable qualities of self-reliance and independence during their migrations.

One practising member of this Germanic cousinly school—in his early days—was the historian Heinrich von Treitschke. ‘Admiration is the first feeling which the study of English history calls forth in everyone,’
¹⁰
he wrote in the 1850s. In 1874 he succeeded Ranke to the chair of history at the University of Berlin. By that time his views had undergone a radical change exactly paralleling the changed position of Imperial Germany; now he saw that all the time England had been using the Germans shamelessly as continental foils for her own greedy ends and passing off this ‘sly and violent policy of commercial self-interest’ as a ‘heroic fight for the ultimate good of humanity’.
¹¹
The term ‘Germanic’ had disappeared from his vocabulary, replaced by rival ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Teutonic’ cultures. With the years he grew more extreme, adding anti-semitism to his anti-British stance, roaring out his message to packed audiences composed of military and naval men and civil servants as well as students at the University.

Treitschke was the shock trooper of what came to be dubbed ‘the Kaiser’s intellectual regiment of Guards’; he was the first to turn so thoroughly against England, the most violently emotional and, from his prestigious position in the Imperial capital, the most influential; above all he told the Prussian ruling caste what it wished to hear, translating their stern creed into historical and fashionable evolutionary terms, and
raising their recent conquests and the compulsions that stemmed from these successes into a mystical life-force.

And echoing the inevitable trend of philosophic thought in a nation such as Prussia, without natural barriers and surrounded by enemies, with only its own discipline and cohesion on which to rely:

Treitschke died in 1896. By that time the new consensus had formed. It was popularly described as ‘
Weltpolitik
’ or world policy, and while it could mean many different things to different enthusiasts, the idea in essentials was to build a great fleet to give Germany power in the larger world—in other words to rival the British fleet—so that she could win colonies, spread German
Kultur
and support her traders and manufacturers against the jealousy and active ill-will of Great Britain. While naturally appealing to the commercial community, this policy of overseas aggrandizement was also designed—perhaps primarily designed—to draw the people’s attention away from internal strains and by overseas success to create a national pride and spirit which would overcome the particularist tendencies in the various kingdoms and duchies so recently incorporated into the
Reich
, unite the middle classes, who were traditionally liberal and independent, under the Prussian-Hohenzollern yoke, and by increasing prosperity entice the growing urban proletariat from the ‘ensnarements’ of Marxism as represented by the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party.

In 1897 this new course was set. The two key figures appointed by the
Kaiser that year were both disciples of Treitschke; they were Bernhard von Bülow to be the new Foreign Minister, and Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz to be State Secretary of the Naval Office, responsible for naval building and manoeuvring the necessary budget through the
Reichstag
. He was to build the fleet, Bülow was to nurse Germany through the ‘danger zone’ that must ensue once the British divined his intention and before the fleet was strong enough to resist a pre-emptive strike. As Bülow put it, ‘in view of our naval inferiority, we must operate so carefully, like the caterpillar before it has grown into the butterfly’.
¹⁴

The policy had too many internal and external contradictions to succeed; the one which had the most immediate impact on the young Karl Dönitz was the need for a tremendous publicity campaign to explain to the German people, land-bound as most of them were, just why they needed a great Navy and colonies and all the apparatus of
Weltpolitik
. In a way this was the greatest contradiction of all, for it alerted the potential enemies inside and outside the country, and for the Treitschkian protagonists made the ‘danger zone’ frighteningly immediate. Nevertheless, the German people had to be aroused to their world destiny, and Bülow and Tirpitz set about the task with such skill and energy and achieved such success that it was not long before they were trying to restrain the effusions of Pan-Germans, Colonialists and others who had run too far ahead of them.

A modern scholar, Paul Kennedy, has examined this ideological nexus of
Weltpolitik
; he concludes that it bound virtually all who had an influence on German thought, economists, hyper-patriotic Pan-German professors ‘who foretold the coming mastery of the German race in the world’, colonial enthusiasts, promulgators of the racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Legarde, ‘who “scientifically” demonstrated the superiority of the Germanic spirit’, and was broadcast by all the institutions of the State: