Dönitz: The Last Führer (43 page)

The orders he sent out at 21.00 on 17th September were, as recorded in his war diary:

The actual wording of the order was not necessarily exactly as this war diary entry summary; bearing in mind the policy of deception permeating every level of the German services, exemplified in the
Athenia
case, in the clandestine abandonment of the Prize Rules and introduction of unrestricted warfare in the waters around England—‘not to be given in writing but need merely be based on the unspoken approval of the naval operations staff’—not all documents can be taken at face value. However, even in this record there are certain ambiguities which must have been deliberate. The evidence for this is contained in the mass of Dönitz’s other orders and memoranda; all are written with crystal clarity; his staff officers attest the fact: ‘… all he wanted was very precisely considered … he sought discussion … then he decided himself …’
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Moreover, as his communications staff officer, Hans Meckel, stated, ‘Dönitz regarded his staff as the servants of the front Commanders; if a Commander said he did not understand his orders, Dönitz always blamed the staff for not making it clear.’
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And there is ample evidence that the order was discussed at great length by the staff. When it became clear after the war that it was to be used in evidence against him at the war crimes trials, Dönitz said that both Godt and his first staff officer, Hessler, his son-in-law, had advised him not to send it. Both denied or claimed to have forgotten this.

The sentence which provoked the heat then and at Nuremberg was: ‘Rescue contradicts the most fundamental demands of war for the annihilation of ships and crews.’ It did not order the shooting of defenceless men, but any Commander so minded could read it as a licence to do so—any Commanders who believed—as all did—that they were fighting against powers determined to destroy the Fatherland, partition it, reduce its people to agricultural serfs, emasculate numbers of German men, powers who had already killed thousands of defenceless women and children and the old in saturation bombing raids, might take it as a green light for vengeance; any Commander with a brutal twist in his make-up, or immature men who doubted their National Socialist hardness and needed to prove it to themselves and others, and who questioned the strange wording and were given ‘the unspoken approval’ of the staff or the chief himself,
Der Löwe
, any of these might take it as a licence to massacre defenceless survivors.

The presumption must be that this was what Dönitz intended for, at about the same time, perhaps on the same day although this is not clear, another order, which was not noted in the war diary, pointed out the desirability of sinking the ‘rescue ships’ which were attached to most convoys for picking up survivors after U-boat attacks: ‘In view of the desired annihilation of ships’ crews their sinking is of great value.’
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In addition there is testimony from the chief of the 5th U-boat flotilla based at Kiel,
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who was worried about the ambiguities in the orders and sought guidance from one of Dönitz’s staff officers; for answer he was given two examples; the first was of a U-boat leaving on a mission from a Biscay port which sighted the shot-down crew of a British aircraft afloat in their rubber dinghy; unable to take them aboard because he was outward bound and every inch of space was utilized, the U-boat Commander left them. At the debriefing at the end of his mission he was reproached by the staff—or was he really perhaps reproached by the BdU?—for not attacking the crew if he could not bring them back for interrogation; for it was to be expected that in less than 24 hours the dinghy would be rescued by British reconnaissance aircraft and the crew would be returning to destroy U-boats.

The second example concerned the sinkings off the US coast, where because of the proximity to land a high proportion of the crews had been rescued; that was regrettable as the enemy merchant fleet consisted of crews as well as tonnage, and these crews were able to man the newly-built ships.

After this conversation the 5th U-flotilla chief took to explaining the orders in terms of these two examples if Commanders asked about the precise meaning when he briefed them before their missions. ‘However,’ he added, ‘U-boat command cannot give you such an order officially—everyone has to handle it according to his own conscience.’ He also told them that sinkings and other acts contrary to international law were not to be entered in the Log, but simply reported orally after returning to base.

It seems surprising that just at the very moment the naval staff was questioning the possibility of winning the ‘tonnage war’ with its demand for a constant 1·3 million tons of shipping to be sent to the bottom every month in the face of increasingly tough convoy defence which threatened, in Dönitz’s words ‘to crush and eliminate the U-boat’, the U-boat staff should be adding to the war against shipping a ruthless campaign against enemy crews—in effect throwing overboard every seamanlike and moral code in pursuit of what must have begun to seem a hopeless cause.

There are three possible explanations: one concerns the personality and reaction to imminent defeat of Dönitz himself—and on that there should be sufficient material to form judgement; another concerns his response to possible direct orders from the Führer—of that too there is ample material from the final two and a half years of the war; and the third possibility is that the events were indeed connected: with the prospect of having to sink 1·3 million tons every month perhaps the only hope was to make it impossible to man the new ships sliding down the ways by the day, by the hour. Yet even this was an irrational response, for if convoy battles were becoming hard, the chances of U-boats being able to stay around on the surface for sufficient time to massacre survivors was remote in the extreme; the only results to be expected were against independent ships and these could only be found away from the main theatre where the battle would be won or lost. There seems little doubt, therefore, that whatever explanations are chosen the true answer lies in the realms of the irrational and the National Socialist vision.

In any case there can be no doubt that propaganda that autumn was concentrated on the manning difficulties the Americans were said to be experiencing. Dönitz himself participated; sometime at the end of September or beginning of October he made his usual appearance at the conclusion of a U-training course and made a speech which started with a confession of the recent decline in sinking figures. This was due to the
strength of enemy air cover, he said, but he saw the answer in new weapons; Hitler, with whom, he remarked, he enjoyed a good relationship, had personally assured him that the U-boats would be equipped with a new type of anti-aircraft gun before other arms of the services, then the successes of earlier times would be resumed.

Questioned by an officer about a newspaper report that the Americans were building a million tons of shipping a month, he expressed scepticism, saying that this was based simply on Roosevelt’s announcement. He added that in any case the allies were having great difficulty manning their ships. Many allied seamen had been torpedoed more than once, and these facts spread and deterred others from going to sea. Apparently warming to the theme, he went on to say—according to the recollection of one young officer there—that losses of men affected the allies severely because of their shortage of reserves, consequently the stage had been reached where total war had to be waged at sea as on land. The crews of ships, like the ships themselves, were a target for U-boats, and he spoke of the possibility of seamen’s strikes breaking out in the allied countries if the U-boat war were waged more vigorously. Those who thought these tactics harsh should remember that their families and their wives were being bombed.
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The combination of unfounded optimism backed up by a resort to the most ruthless, even desperate methods revealed here was a characteristic feature of Hitler’s leadership, and it may be that Dönitz was under his spell already. He had made his report to the Führer on September 28th, accounting for his boast about the excellent relationship he enjoyed with him, and there are so many similarities between what Hitler said then and Dönitz’s remarks to the U-training course as remembered by the young officer—who could not possibly have read the minutes of the Führer conference—as to suggest he was indeed closely following the Führer’s line.

The record of Hitler’s opening comments shows that, having expressed his great recognition of the achievement of the U-boats, he went on to express his conviction that the monthly sinking rate would remain so high that the enemy would be unable to keep pace by new building. He thought it impossible that the increases in production of the enemy yards would be as great as their propaganda represented.

‘If it were possible for the enemy to launch ships’ hulls at such a rate, they would still want for engines, auxiliary machinery, ancillary equipment and above all men to man these ships. With regard to the manning
problem,’ he went on, ‘it is very disadvantageous if a great part of the crews of sunk ships are always in a position to put to sea again in newly-built vessels.’
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He then passed on to the necessity of putting new technical developments into use as quickly as possible—after which Dönitz gave his report. He used it to press his previous requests for He 177s to dispute the allied air superiority, and managed to strike an optimistic note by suggesting that the Walter boat under development would revolutionize U-boat warfare. Raeder added that good progress had been made with the new
Abstand
firing pistol which would give the torpedoes such tremendous destructive power as considerably to increase the loss in human life.

It is interesting to speculate how far Raeder approved of Dönitz’s recent orders to the U-boat Commanders, how far he understood their purport. It may be that one of the reasons for an increasing hostility between the two men marked from about this time was caused by a disagreement over the spirit of the orders; Raeder had compromised most of his ideals of honour before the Nazis, but it is possible he had a sticking point. That is speculation; there can be no doubt, from the documentary evidence, that the naval staff in Berlin was calling for a propaganda campaign to exploit allied manning problems at this time. Here is part of a recommendation by the section dealing with the question of reprisals after the
Ulm
affair; it was dated October 3rd:

In view of the weight of evidence from such a variety of sources it seems that Dönitz and the U-boat staff had passed by this time over that blurred and indeterminate line separating the established western ethics of war from the barbarism of earlier ages. No sophistry about the inhumanity of war itself or the increasingly indiscriminate violence of mechanized war can obscure the fact that there was at that time a line and while it was not easy to distinguish it clearly, it was possible to tell on which side of it one stood. In view of the revolutionary character and hate- and destruction-inspired dogma of National Socialism, of Dönitz’s own character and of
the fact that the allies themselves had passed across the line with indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants from the air—a development pioneered by the
Luftwaffe
—the transition was probably inevitable at some stage; perhaps it is not surprising that it was crossed just as failure became a real possibility.

Dönitz’s fears during August and September that his campaign stood on the brink of defeat from the air were not realized that winter. The ‘Metox’ radar-warning devices installed in the boats reduced the numbers surprised on the surface, and the increasing number of operational boats he was able to deploy—200 during October, of which over 150 worked in the North Atlantic—made it difficult for the convoys to evade them, particularly as fuel shortages forced the allies to direct shipping along the shortest therefore predictable great circle route; moreover,
B-Dienst
had recovered its earlier facility while the allied cryptographers found themselves temporarily defeated by the added complication of an extra encoding wheel being used in the German Enigma machines. Perhaps the chief reasons for the U-boats’ continuing successes, however, were the exploitation of distant ‘soft spots’ off Cape Town and the Indian Ocean, and the diversion of allied resources from the Atlantic campaign into preparations for the invasion of French North Africa, code-named ‘Torch’.

The landings took place on November 7/8th, taking Hitler completely by surprise. The previous week the results of the ‘supply war’ in the eastern Mediterranean had come as an equal shock; after eight days’ fighting at El Alamein, his
Afrika Korps
general, Rommel, had been forced to retreat. The Führer had ordered him to stand firm: ‘… this will not be the first time in history that the stronger will must triumph over the big battalions’.
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He had won a temporary stay, but as the US Army entered the European war in strength from the armada assembled for ‘Torch’, Rommel was in full retreat. Hitler was trying to come to terms with these disasters in his mountain hideaway, the
Berghof
, when a third surprise blow fell: the Russian armies encircled his forces fighting for Stalingrad. The war had turned. He no longer held the initiative in any theatre; he could only steel his generals to hold what they had.