Dönitz: The Last Führer (4 page)

Such was the atmosphere in which young Karl Dönitz grew; it was as natural to him and he absorbed it as naturally as the oxygen from the air he breathed. It formed a part of the matrix of his brain as fundamental in sparking the paths of his conscious thought as language itself, at the same time providing a focus for his emotional needs, which were great.

In April at the age of six and a half, he went to a preparatory school outside Halensee in a highly fashionable suburb on the edge of the forest known as ‘Kolonie Grunewald’. It was known as the millionaires’ suburb. Its ostentation belied an official ethic of Spartan selflessness and duty to the State; it was representative of the other half of the German drive—thoroughly despised by the true Prussian officer—which had already turned the formerly austere capital of the Hohenzollerns into ‘the most American of European cities’. The dichotomy would not have been apparent to the young Karl Dönitz.

He was only at the school for six months, after which his father was posted to the headquarters of his firm at Jena on the upper reaches of the Saale in the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar. Here was a different Germany, moving at a more leisurely pace. No motors or electric tramcars in the winding streets within the medieval walls of the town nor even gaslight or electricity. Students from the university sauntered from picturesque, timbered houses bedecked with the banners of the different collegiate societies. And outside the gates was a beautiful prospect of wooded hills crowned with towers, testimony to the comparatively recent border warfare between Germans and Slavs. The Dönitzs’ house looked out on this splendid view from halfway up a hill aptly named Sonnenberg. ‘From morning to evening the south-facing rooms of our house had sun. The view stretched over Jena up the Saale valley to distant Leuchtenburg. Never again in my life was I to live with such a beautiful prospect.’
¹⁶

He and his brother attended the
Realschule
, known as the Stoy’scher after its formidable director, Professor Stoy, who ruled both the public
Realschule
and an attached boarding department as an absolute monarch. On their first day the Director himself conducted the two boys round, showing them sketches of the old town which adorned the walls and, when they came to engravings of the famous Battle of Jena in 1806 and incidents from the subsequent war of liberation, explaining the scenes to the boys. Karl was thinking what a very genial director he was when they arrived at a cast relief of Bismarck. Immediately the Professor asked his brother who that was. Friedrich had heard a great deal from their father about the great man but failed to recognize the features in the bronze relief. Suddenly angry, Professor Stoy shouted, ‘
What!
You do not know the greatest German!’ and dismissed them coolly.

It is an instructive vignette.

Despite this unscholarly worship of a man whose only morality was power and, like the majority in his influential station, pressing his contributions towards the corruption of Germany, and tragedy in the twentieth century, Professor Stoy ran a splendid school, as it appears from the recollections of Karl Dönitz, one of those who suffered and had to learn a very elementary lesson about the corrupting effects of power very late in life amongst blood, bereavement and ruin.

The school rooms were lofty and bright with many pictures on the walls; each class of the younger pupils had a garden and each boy his own flower bed to dig and sow and delight in the miracle of spring and beauty. Twice a week they had singing instruction, learning children’s and folk songs which Karl Dönitz enjoyed enormously; if in later life he heard one of these songs it brought back his childhood pleasure. They learnt about Jena and its history in a practical way, measuring old walls or foundations and working their results up into plans; every year on the anniversary of the Battle of Jena they made a visit to the battlefield after being taken enthusiastically through every tactical detail on maps in the classroom during the previous week. Twice a year they made trips to places of interest, the younger boys spending eight days in the Thuringian hills, visiting Roman ruins and other sites of cultural and scenic value.

All in all the Stoy’scher school sounds a model institution, broadening its pupils’ minds by engaging their interest and enthusiasm. Certainly in the school and outside in the small community of Jena which revolved around the university and the firm for which his father worked, Dönitz enjoyed a variety of activities: he played the flute in a youthful orchestra—his brother the violin—attended an art class each Wednesday afternoon in an artist’s studio, visited art exhibitions and lectures with
lantern slides—several on African, Asian and Polar travel and exploration, no doubt funded by one or other of the societies promoting Germany’s place in the wider world—and took part in the fairs and other traditional functions of Jena society.

For their summer holidays every year Emil Dönitz took the two boys to the lonely North Sea island of Baltrum, which they had first visited after the death of their mother. The only inhabitants were a few families of fishermen and sailors who lived in cottages with hayloft and sheep pens under the same roof. They were simple holidays spent strolling in the dunes, investigating wrack washed up on the shore, swimming, boating, lying listening to the rustle of the wind in the spiky grass and the murmur of the sands under the tow of the ever-present sea—or, when the weather changed, thrilling to the roar of the breakers and the spray flying under lowering clouds. On Sundays they attended the small, unadorned, whitewashed chapel with the local men in their best suits and their wives in Friesian costume. The services always ended with a traditional ‘God bless our shore!’

At the western end of the island was a small cemetery planted with simple wooden crosses; Dönitz recorded in his memoirs how he loved to lie ‘in the peace and sublimity of this place with the bell of the heavens over the flat land’ and the view to the dunes and the ‘majestic plane of the sea stretching to the distant horizon’.
¹⁷

In September 1908 the Dönitzes moved to the city of Weimar some 20 miles from Jena. Karl Dönitz provides no reason for the move, but since there was a railway connecting the two places, since his father had by now risen in the Zeiss firm to ‘scientific colleague’, and his elder brother had left school to join the merchant marine,
¹⁸
since the twenty-mile displacement from a town in which they were well known and had lived for ten years meant a change of school for Karl at the age of seventeen, it seems reasonable to conclude that the move was
in order
to change his school; it may be that his father or the masters at the Stoy’scher academy considered his intelligence such that he would benefit from the greater scope of the
Gymnasium
at Weimar. That is speculation. The facts as related by Dönitz in his memoirs are that the Stoy’scher taught neither Latin nor Greek but the
Realgymnasium
at Weimar demanded classics and his father informed him that he would have to learn sufficient Latin in private study after school to satisfy the requirements. ‘I was literally speechless at first when I received this paternal instruction, seeing a
mountain of work before me which seemed to me to be impossible to surmount.’
¹⁹

However, he performed so well in the entrance exam without Latin that the
Gymnasium
admitted him on the condition that he took the Latin paper in six months’ time. Practically every day throughout that first autumn and winter in Weimar he crammed the subject in the private rooms of one or another of the
Gymnasium
teachers after school while keeping up with his normal homework in the evenings. He took the paper at Easter 1909 and passed, but recorded in his memoirs that any mention of Latin in later life brought back ‘the pressure of those six months of forced learning’.
²⁰

Weimar had been the home and workplace of Goethe and Schiller, and naturally the
Gymnasium
placed special emphasis on these giants of German literature. The adolescent Dönitz responded with ardour, founding a literary society among half a dozen classmates in his new form. Meanwhile his interest in art, aroused at Jena, was fed by an optional class which he took in the history of art, and he also continued an interest in the fashionable subjects of geology and palaeontology, making excursions to collect rock samples and fossils. One has the impression of a reserved, even withdrawn, youth responding earnestly to the influence of his elders, father, teachers, artists, and committing himself wholly to each enthusiasm. Perhaps this is a back-projection from what is known of his adult life—but perhaps it is not too wide of the mark.

Two things can be said with fair certainty: he was intelligent—not in the highest class of creative intelligence, but with an agile, retentive mind and first-rate ability in expression; and he worked unsparingly at his studies. When it came to taking his
Abitur
, which might loosely be compared to English ‘A’ level exams, he submitted the best composition on a section of Goethe’s verse in the whole school; a harbinger of his later terse reports and memoranda, it was—so he claims, having been told by the Director—‘certainly the shortest but also the best, that is to say the clearest and most logical’.
²¹

So at eighteen and a half, he came to the end of his schooldays. Half a century later he looked back nostalgically to the ‘abundance of experience and stimulation’ he had enjoyed in this ‘lovely heartland of Germany with its beauty, history and high cultural tradition’.
²²

When he decided he would like to join the Navy is not clear; his stated reasons included a longing to emulate the feats of explorers like Nansen,
von Wissmann and Sven Hedin—whose books he read ‘with glowing spirits’—and pride in the Bismarckian
Kaiserreich
and a veneration for soldiership ‘that lay apparently in my blood’;
²³
the Navy seemed to offer an ideal combination of travel and the military life. These ‘reasons’, however, are no more than a reflection of the spirit of Imperial Germany at that date and of Tirpitz’s naval propaganda.

The Army was the senior service—until Tirpitz’s appointment virtually the only service in Germany. It was the natural destination for sons of the nobility and the higher civil service grades, and consequently the Navy, expanding at a great pace, had to mount extraordinary campaigns to attract suitable officer candidates and had to seek them amongst the middle classes, the new rich merchants and industrialists, and the academics especially. These, for their part, eagerly grasped at the opportunity to wear the Emperor’s uniform and cultivate the attitudes and distinguishing signs of the nobility of the sword, for these, not wealth, were the marks of social class and masculinity. Thus were the
nouveaux
and the upper-middle classes, formerly liberal in outlook and looking to England for their attitudes, feudalized and Prussianized—a most satisfactory outcome for the Kaiser whose loyal knights they became, for the Navy which achieved a homogeneous officer corps, and for the new officers and their families anxious for their sons to climb the caste ladder.

This is particularly relevant in Dönitz’s case, for in social terms he probably only just made the grade. It is significant that his elder brother had joined the merchant marine which entirely lacked the
cachet
of the arms-bearing services, very significant that he nowhere mentions this fact, even when discussing his own reasons for joining the Navy.

His education qualified him for entry; the decision to admit him or not rested with the Sea Cadet Entrance Commission, which deliberated in private without minutes or necessity to reveal its reasons, basing its judgements on social and financial grounds from information provided by local magistrates, police agencies, district military Commanders and the schools themselves.
²⁴
Kleine Leute
—the lower-middle and artisan classes—were rejected in nearly all cases, although a few were allowed through the net as a deliberate policy to answer criticism in the
Reichstag
. Any hint of socialist contacts or leanings in the family background, however, operated an automatic bar. Jews were also barred although one or two were taken provided they were both baptized and wealthy—usually members of the so-called ‘millionaires’ club’. Income was an
important factor for everyone; when Karl Dönitz was a candidate in 1910 the parental contribution was calculated at 1,505 Marks in the first year—some 200 Marks above the average industrial wage—and rather over 1,000 Marks for each of the succeeding three years of training, followed by 600 Marks’ annual allowance for the next four years as a junior lieutenant in order to keep up the style of an officer—altogether over 7,000 Marks.
²⁵

Dönitz’s father evidently passed the social and financial examination, and on April 1st 1910 Karl reported to Kiel to enter the
Kaiserliche Marine
as a Sea Cadet. There were 206 other lads in this intake or ‘crew’; almost half were sons of senior academics—an astonishing proportion and an illustration of how the professorial class had swung their weight behind
Weltpolitik
. A further 26 of the lads were from noble families, nearly all from the lower, usually impoverished and sometimes questionable nobility; a few were the sons of non-noble officers and landowners; 37 had a merchant or industrial background; and 32 came, like Dönitz himself, from other middle-class backgrounds.
²⁶
There was one baptized Jew in this crew and no doubt one or two statutory
Kleine Leute
.