Dönitz: The Last Führer (55 page)

Of Dönitz’s attitude to Hitler there can be no doubt; it is caught at this
time by an extraordinary hand-written note he appended to the war diary account of the August meeting:

This says much about Hitler’s skill in keeping his professional chiefs in their separated boxes; it says more, probably, for his consummate ability, remarked from the beginning of his career, to seek out men who would surrender every critical and moral faculty to him. And yet it is possible to suggest other interpretations: could this passionate overstatement be a measure of the doubt surfacing in Dönitz’s mind about the genius he had hitherto taken for granted? It may be significant that the naval staff officer responsible for keeping the naval staff war diary took a very different view about the divergent war aims of the allies, believing they would lead both sides to intensified efforts to destroy Germany and reap the rewards for themselves. In expressing himself so violently Dönitz was perhaps relieving his own doubts in characteristically tempestuous fashion.

Here we stray into forbidden territory, for such a reaction and the whole of his subsequent behaviour until Hitler’s suicide could be explained in psychological theory as ‘obsessional’—that is, single-mindedly following a path which the rational side of his nature was pulling
against
.

It would be possible to suggest any number of periods or incidents in his life which would fit textbook causes of ‘obsession’; his childhood was ruled by a strict father—perhaps overstrict? His initiation into the Imperial Navy had been brutally strict, indeed the whole ethos of the Prussian
Kaiserreich
had pressed him into a tight mould which perhaps did not suit his character. Then there were the traumatic experiences of his twenties, the horrifying events accompanying the loss of his U-boat, the captivity about which he was reminiscing so bitterly fifteen years later, the naval revolutions and the collapse of all he had been brought up to believe in, his own experiences in the second series of revolutions after the Kapp
Putsch
, and finally and most recently his decision to encourage
his Commanders to act against shipwrecked survivors, cutting across all accepted codes. Any of these experiences might have affected such a deeply self-conscious personality as Dönitz to produce pathological obsessions.

Of course, it is not necessary to accept this explanation. His attachment to Hitler may have resulted from an emotional need for love and approval by an all-powerful father—a role once performed by von Loewenfeld, perhaps.

Even on a plain man’s unanalytical level Dönitz’s proven record for extreme duty-consciousness and goal achievement taken together with Hitler’s development of a new war aim at this time provide sufficient explanation. The idea of continuing fighting until the enemy alliance split apart gave him justification and rationale for his fanatical commitment to the Führer and to a war which on any material assessment was already lost. His belief in Hitler’s grasp of historical and political realities outside his own ken fuelled this determination.

It is interesting that a deeply pessimistic naval staff review of the war situation on August 20th, whose gist was that Germany had changed ‘from the hammer into the anvil’,
⁸⁵
pointed to the necessity for showing the greatest consideration for the peoples of the occupied territories ‘in order to guarantee their use for the war effort and to counteract the enemy propaganda, which we have nothing to oppose in the enemy countries’. It was this moral dimension that Hitler omitted in his historical/political analysis, and he omitted to heed it in practice. As the occupied peoples sensed the war had turned decisively against Germany and resistance movements supported by the allies increased their campaigns of sabotage, the security forces reacted with trained barbarism; meanwhile the obsessive drive to eliminate ‘the Jewish bacillus’ from Europe gathered renewed strength.

The situation was desperate enough without this hideous diversion. By the date of the staff memorandum Kesselring had made a strategic withdrawal from Sicily to mainland Italy. It is significant that this decision was made without informing Dönitz, who never changed his position about resistance to the last. In the east it was evident that the line could not be held against the Russian summer offensive; it could only be a matter of days before the Army of the Ukraine under Manstein was forced to retreat.

At sea U-boats were still being sunk at a murderous rate—37 in July—without in most cases finding any targets for attack. Not unnaturally
morale had declined, particularly among the more experienced petty officers and men. They saw Commanders, in many cases younger than themselves, who had been combed from the surface fleet or from the Air Force, subjected to a crash U-boat course and minimum sea time as watch officer or trainee Commander before being given their own boat. Inexperience was rendered more dangerous in many cases by ardour to gain distinction; such men, known as
Draufgänger
(‘daredevils’) or
Halsschmerzen
(‘afflicted with throat trouble’—for the supreme mark of distinction, the Knight’s Cross, was worn at the throat) were anathema to old U-boat hands, who volunteered in droves to serve with experienced Commanders, recognized as
Lebensversicherung
(‘life-insurance’). Even these were not proof against the new scale of allied superiority. Three such Commanders who had been attached to the U-boat staff in Berlin to freshen the headquarters with the latest front experience were sent out in August to find out what was going on; only one returned.

Dönitz visited the bases to lend his personal authority to the fight for morale and, in ‘pep’ talks to the Commanders, he explained why they had to keep the seas even if they never sank a ship: by their very presence they were tying up some two million enemy personnel in the escort forces and shipyards.

One of these Commanders who survived wrote after the war:

Meanwhile troops and guns and aircraft poured virtually unhindered across the Atlantic to Great Britain in preparation for the invasion of the continent. While most German intelligence estimates doubted if sufficient strength had yet been built up to cross the Channel before winter, there was no question about the allied air superiority, now being exploited in sustained mass raids on German cities. The effects outdid anything previously seen. Begun on the night of July 24–25th against Hamburg this new scale of bombing created uncontrollable fire storms which sucked in winds of cyclone strength, devastating vast areas and leaving charred, mutilated victims among the rubble and thousands more asphyxiated or drowned by burst water mains in shelters and cellars
beneath the smoking shells that remained. Speer compared the scenes to the aftermath of a major earthquake.

‘Terror can only be broken by terror …’ Hitler rasped in repetitive monologues after news of the raids. ‘We can only stop this business if we get at the people over there …’
⁸⁷
He authorized Speer to mass-produce the rockets under development at Peenemünde for use in bombarding London. Fighter aircraft to protect the
Reich
would have been a more profitable use of resources.

In early August Berlin came under air attack; Hitler ordered all women and children to be evacuated. Dönitz meanwhile made a tour of inspection of the shipyards at Hamburg after further raids, reporting to Hitler on the 19th; his impression was that industry would not be materially endangered by the bombing; he did foresee dangers to morale, though, and again he impressed the point on Hitler.

‘Despite all willingness to work, the people are depressed, they see only the many reverses … I consider it urgently necessary for the Führer to speak to the people very soon. I believe it absolutely necessary. The entire German nation longs for it.’
⁸⁸

Hitler said he intended to do so—but he had to wait until the Italian situation clarified.

Dönitz went on to tell him how the people he had spoken to in Hamburg had asked him when Germany was going to retaliate and when the fighter aircraft cover would be improved. He had not told them, he said, giving as his reason that this would play into the hands of the enemy.

He continued to hammer at this theme, saying that he kept telling his officers it was their solemn duty to inspire morale in the people—which brought him back again to the dangers of defeatism amongst ‘educated circles’, who were expressing opinions ‘in a wise and important manner. These people see only a part of what is going on and not the overall
picture’. This was a faithful echo of Hitler’s constant diatribes against educated men.

Hitler listened intently to all he had to say and thanked him, but the suggestions had no effect. Now that the real world was collapsing around him, he refused to step outside the world of his imagination, which he preserved in the familiar distractions of briefings, conferences and consciously
gemütlich
tea parties with his Nibelung intimates beneath the massive concrete roof of his command headquarters in the East Prussian forest and refused to view the destruction outside.

Tragedy, meanwhile, struck the family of Dönitz’s estranged brother, Friedrich. His home was in Berlin; his daughters had been evacuated to East Prussia, but he worked in the capital—at what is not clear—and was in his house in the suburb of Lichterfelde when it was set ablaze by incendiary bombs in a raid on the night of August 23/24th. He suffered third-degree burns and died on the 25th.

Finding that his name was Dönitz, the authorities contacted the Grand Admiral; whether they did so before Friedrich died, so giving the brothers a last chance to see one another, or whether he was in a coma or dead by the time Karl Dönitz was informed is not clear. It must be assumed that he went to the funeral on September 2nd; certainly Friedrich’s wife, Erna, came to live at their house in Dahlem and the three girls spent their school holidays with him and Ingeborg for the rest of the war, bringing a touch of spring into his ever-darkening world.

On September 8th 1943 news came that the Italians had committed the treachery Hitler had long been anticipating by signing an armistice with the allies; the plans prepared for just this eventuality were put into effect and in a series of lightning moves Rome was surrounded, the Italian forces disarmed, Mussolini seized from internment and reinstated, and before the end of the month central and northern Italy had become a German province under a puppet government. The arrangements for taking over the fleet were not so successful; most of the heavy units escaped to the allies, who had begun their landings on mainland Italy five days before the armistice was made public; the greater part of the light forces and submarines also escaped although several were taken over according to plan.

Well-prepared and brilliantly executed as most of these moves were, they did nothing to alter the defensive posture of the
Reich
. In the east Manstein was withdrawing. Dönitz was instructed to use his forces in the
Black Sea to evacuate troops and assist in establishing the Crimea as the next ‘fortress’ to be held at all costs.

By this time criticism of the conduct of the war must have spread to the Navy itself; facts are difficult to establish, but the documents suggest that Dönitz’s operations staff in Berlin did not see eye to eye with him, and disaffection may well have been spreading from those officers whose duties brought them in contact with wider affairs; among these in the juridical department of the Navy was Bertholdt, brother of Claus Count Stauffenberg who had recently joined the active resistance to Hitler. Whether the criticism chiefly concerned the hopeless strategic situation in which Hitler had placed the Fatherland, or the stains laid on the name of Germany by the crimes of National Socialism, or whether they also touched Dönitz’s own ‘fanatic’ commitment to the regime and its strategy is not clear. It is evident he took them seriously though, for on September 9th he issued a ‘Decree against Criticism and Complaints’.
⁸⁹

This started with a reminder of the ‘stupendous successes’ won in the early war years which had established the fundamentals for a successful conclusion to the war. Such times of attack were the high points of a soldier’s life; times of defence and waiting were harder to endure, and it was such times that demanded above all strong inner conviction. This was being eroded however by the ‘complainers’ who spoke ‘depreciatingly and without restraint about everything, and usually about things which were none of their business’. No one could see more than a small fraction of the totality of the war; it could, therefore, only be ‘foolish, conceited or malicious people’ who fancied themselves competent to criticize military and political measures they did not understand. He concluded: