Dönitz: The Last Führer (62 page)

News that Klaus was not among the survivors reported by the British was phoned through to ‘Koralle’ in the morning of the 14th. Dönitz showed no emotion when he heard and continued work; Hansen-Nootbar noticed that he was not as collected as usual, however, and at the end of the morning U-boat conference he said, ‘Hansen-Nootbar, I’m going to my wife now to tell her.’

‘
Herr Grossadmiral,
’ Hansen-Nootbar replied, ‘may I remind you that the Japanese Ambassador, general Oshima and several staff officers are due for lunch at one o’clock …’

‘I will call you,’ Dönitz replied. ‘I will leave the decision to my wife.’

A quarter of an hour later the call came. There was to be no change in the arrangements.

The guests arrived, eight to ten all told; Ingeborg played the hostess
with all her usual poise and charm, and sitting between Oshima and a Japanese Admiral, kept the conversation going in French, which she spoke fluently. The mood was somewhat forced, but the visitors never learned of the loss of her second son. Afterwards Dönitz, Ingeborg and Hansen-Nootbar escorted them to the door and waved goodbye. A moment after they had driven off Ingeborg collapsed. Hansen-Nootbar was standing immediately behind and caught her as she fell. ‘Never in my life,’ he recalls today, ‘have I met a woman who showed such bearing.’
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Klaus’s body was washed ashore on the French coast later, his wrist-watch still ticking. He was buried in the German military cemetery near Amiens.

At the beginning of June, Dönitz and Ingeborg with his daughter and son-in-law and their family, Peter aged five, and a little girl, Ute, born the previous year, went on leave to Badenweiler again—a hillside resort in the Black Forest. Four days later he was woken by a telephone call in the early hours: the invasion had begun.

The allies achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. Even systematic preparatory raids on coastal battery sites, airfields, gun batteries and inland communications in France had been regarded as a mixture of bluff and preparation for a later invasion; a memorandum to this effect prepared by Admiral Krancke, chief of Navy Group West, was on its way to ‘Koralle’ even as the huge armada of transports, support ships and escort vessels headed across the Channel. Nevertheless the Navy was the first service on that morning, June 6th, to realize that this was a major landing; by 11.15 when Dönitz, back at ‘Koralle’, chaired a conference on the situation, the staff had no doubt that, in the words of the war diary, ‘the war has entered its decisive phase for Germany’.
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The long-planned counter-measures were ordered—the U-boats held in the Biscay ports to sortie, the boats in southern and central Norway to come to instant readiness in case of enemy landings in that area.

By then it was far too late; in any case Bletchley Park had deciphered earlier messages to the U-boat bases and to Navy Group West and the allies knew Dönitz’s plans and his orders for ‘Reckless Attack’ as precisely as the flotilla Commanders themselves. Massive sea and air counter-forces had been mobilized to prevent the boats getting into the Channel, let alone approaching the assault forces; they included escort carriers, no fewer than 286 destroyers, frigates and smaller anti-submarine vessels in trained escort groups, and in the west alone 21
squadrons of anti-submarine aircraft flying over Biscay and the Channel approaches in day and night patrols of such intensity that every square mile was covered at least once every half-hour. Against such a concentration the U-boats’ task was practically impossible, certainly it was impossible to reach the operations area in time to have any effect in the decisive early stages, and none did.

Harried unmercifully as soon as they left their bomb-proof shelters, it soon became apparent that only those boats fitted with the Schnorchel, which had recently entered service, had any prospect of working into the Channel; the others were recalled. Those that continued dared not surface by day but had to creep along continuously submerged, never able to make more than 30 to 40 miles a day, their crews enduring constant tension and danger in physically debilitating conditions. Whenever the boat dipped below the correct Schnorchel-depth the valves shut and air for the diesels was sucked from inside the hull itself, reducing the pressure dramatically; exhaust gasses, too, were unable to escape if the water pressure outside became too great, and they were forced back into the engine compartment, half suffocating the men. Meanwhile carbon dioxide built up and the power available from the batteries fell.

So while allied troops, tanks, personnel carriers, fuel and stores of every description flowed along the short route between the Isle of Wight and the assault beaches in Seine Bay, establishing a decisive bridgehead, those U-boats fortunate enough to survive were far away, working painfully, infinitely slowly towards the scene. The majority were destroyed or so damaged they had to turn back; three reached the German-occupied Channel Islands, a feat justly described in the British Admiralty tracking room report as ‘a heroic achievement’.
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After nine days one boat, U 621, reached the Cherbourg peninsula; it sank a US troop landing craft, fired at and missed two US battleships, then started an equally slow and hazardous return passage. By the end of the month three more had reached the operational area and on the 29th one of these, U 984, scored the only significant success of the campaign by sinking four ships from a coastal convoy.

These delayed results, scarcely even reaching the category of pinprick compared with the size of the allied operation, were achieved at horrendous cost in loss and damage. Dönitz’s orders to the commanders make it clear that he expected this during the attack on the invasion fleet, but it is apparent from the small number that succeeded in coming anywhere
near the target that he grossly underestimated the forces that the allies would deploy in defence.

His light forces were scarcely more successful. Four destroyers which tried to break into the Channel from Brest on the night of June 8th were located by a British flotilla of eight and two were sunk; the other two escaped back to Brest damaged. Other light torpedo craft based on Havre and other Channel ports made night attacks on the flanks of the assault area and the convoys approaching it but seldom pierced the escort screen and in the first week sank only one destroyer, three small ships, three landing craft and a few smaller vessels. Air raids on their bases subsequently destroyed so many of them as virtually to rule out effective operations. Meanwhile the naval coastal batteries had been subdued by the preliminary aerial bombing, followed by a tremendous fleet bombardment by all calibres from battleships’ main armament downwards, while the other hope, the midget craft which Heye was forcing through production, were not quite ready for action. The truth was that in the face of the enemy air mastery the
Kriegsmarine
was impotent to do much more than show it knew how to make heroic sacrifices.

By June 10th at the latest Dönitz had conceded that the invasion was successful: ‘the second front is at hand’.
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The logic of this recognition was not pursued. Up to the invasion Dönitz had regarded the battle for the beaches as ‘war-decisive’; all his hopes had been based on the assumption that the Anglo-American assault forces would be so mangled the allies would lose heart and recognize ‘Fortress Europe’ as impregnable. This would have released large German forces held in the west to reinforce the eastern front, guaranteeing the vital Baltic region and even permitting a counter-attack to repossess the Ukraine while his new U-boats came into operation and took such a toll of North Atlantic tonnage that the Führer could have negotiated terms from a position of strength. The converse of this rosy picture, however, was that once the second front was established, the
Reich
faced a drainage of manpower and materials west and east—and south to Italy—a steadily shrinking land base, dwindling economic resources and eventual certain defeat.

It was not in his nature to admit this, for one thing it would have meant admitting that his course had not been correct, his underestimation of enemy resources and overestimation of the power of commitment to National Socialism an error, for another it would have meant admitting
defeat while there were still numerous avenues for optimism! The secret rocket weapons for bombarding London were ready for launch, Heye’s small craft coming on to line, the ‘revolutionary’ U-boats due at the end of the year, the
Kriegsmarine
was still master of the Baltic, indeed the
Reich
was still master of the greater part of Western Europe. And there was always the prospect of the western allies waking up to what a Bolshevist-dominated Europe would mean, and a consequent splitting from the eastern partner. On the other hand was the certainty that in surrender or defeat they could look forward only to the partition of the German nation announced publicly by the allies, and for the German people unthinkable terrors in retaliation for the crimes committed in the east.

This raises the question of the effect knowledge of such crimes had on Dönitz’s commitment to fight on to the bitter end. Himmler’s reasons for revealing the extermination policy to the Gauleiters the previous October had probably included binding all members of his audience into the unholy compact, making it clear that all moral bridges had been burned and showing them that the only alternatives before them now were victory—or the rope. And it is significant that as tension about the allied invasion had mounted in May, Himmler gave similar addresses to audiences of generals—attended on one occasion by one of Dönitz’s liaison staff at Führer headquarters, Vice Admiral Voss. Hitler also explained the extermination policy to them, answering his own rhetorical question whether he could have solved the problem more humanely, with the assertion that they were fighting a battle for existence;
¹⁵¹
should the enemy win, the German people would be exterminated, the upper classes, intellectuals and their children butchered in a programme organized by international Jewry.

In June after the invasion, Himmler addressed another group of Corps Commanders from the northernmost front in Finland, again spelling out the extermination programme; both he and Hitler used the argument Dönitz had employed on Heroes’ Day: Germany could not have withstood the bombing terror if the Jewish virus had remained in the body of the people.

These disclosures to even wider groups occurred at a time when not only the external but also the internal dangers to the regime were growing fast. The military wing of the resistance, the only arm that could stage an effective
coup
, had grown in numbers and resolve since it had become plain that Germany was going down to defeat, and had gained
a new leading spirit in Claus Schenk, Count Stauffenberg. Severely wounded in Tunisia, he had been appointed in October 1943 to the Reserve Army in Berlin as Chief of Staff to one of the principal conspirators, General Olbricht; here he helped complete plans for the assassination of Hitler and a military take-over of government. Himmler’s security services, meanwhile, penetrated the civilian arms of the resistance, arresting leaders from time to time—including von Moltke in January 1944—but more concerned to watch and lay traps to trace the wider circles; by early summer Himmler had a good picture of the extent and aims of the movement. The conspirators knew this; they had further cause for haste in the imminence of the expected invasion, for it was felt that unless the Nazis could be displaced before an allied landing in Europe all political meaning would be lost. When the invasion caught them, too, by surprise, Stauffenberg wondered whether they should proceed. He was assured by General Beck, a founding member and leader of the military resistance, and by one of the younger leaders, General Tresckow, that it remained a moral imperative; they must prove to the world and to future generations of Germans that they were prepared to stake their lives for their convictions.
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It became clear, moreover, that the Gestapo net was closing. Himmler told Canaris, the
Abwehr
chief he had displaced, that he knew a military
coup
was being prepared, and dropped names of the military and civilian leaders, Beck and Goerdeler—no doubt expecting Canaris to pass the information on, as he did. In early July wholesale arrests of Communists, among them a close friend of Stauffenberg’s, added to the pressure, for no one could resist Gestapo interrogation for long, and Stauffenberg felt personally threatened. He had been appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Reserve Army, General Fromm, in June, a post that gave him personal access to Hitler, and on July 11th he attended a Führer Conference with a bomb concealed in his briefcase; finding Himmler not present he did not set it off. He carried the bomb to another conference a few days later, but again Himmler was absent and again he postponed the attempt—that at least is the usual explanation, although Speer records attending a Führer conference at the
Berghof
at this time with Himmler and Göring present.
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Just how much Himmler knew by then will never be known, nor how much he revealed to Dönitz, who was with Hitler for some of this time; he was at the
Wolfschanze
on July 9th, and after the daily situation
conference had taken lunch with Hitler, Himmler and several Commanders from the eastern front; he then followed Hitler to the
Berghof
and after the conference there on the 11th when Stauffenberg made his first aborted attempt, he had lunched with Hitler alone; on the next day he was Himmler’s guest. Nothing is known of the conversations that took place. It is clear, however, that the situation for the
Reich
was critical; in the east the Russians had broken through on the central, Polish, front and threatened to push up to the Baltic, cutting off the Northern Army Group in Lithuania-Estonia; in the west the allies were establishing a material superiority via supply lines which neither Dönitz’s few remaining forces nor the overstretched
Luftwaffe
could begin to threaten; at home ‘defeatists’ advocated either a pact with the west against the Bolsheviks or a pact with Stalin against the Anglo-Saxons; the General Staff advocated withdrawal; military revolt was imminent.