Dönitz: The Last Führer (65 page)

It is possible that he was simply out of his depth. He had been brought up to unconditional loyalty as a soldier; his language expressed it on this occasion:

This was the essence of the Prussian code; it cannot be challenged on general grounds. The questions are, surely, had his perceptions been so narrowed by early indoctrination, was his capacity so limited that he could not reinterpret general propositions in the light of specific circumstances, or was he using the argument of unconditional loyalty to escape awesome responsibilities? Did he feel himself too deeply involved in the crimes of the regime to turn back? Was he simply unbalanced? Or was the need for a war-father his master emotion?

This sentiment brought him back again to the need for those listening to stand unequivocally behind the Nazi State, and to indoctrinate their men in this spirit, ‘not with fine speeches, but by showing fanatical ability to die. Whoever neither wants to nor can do this cannot be a senior officer or troop Commander and must disappear’.

He passed on to an optimistic assessment of the overall war situation; the
Putsch
had cleared the air extraordinarily—indeed it would have been a blessing if it had occurred six months earlier. The leadership and spirit of the armies in the east was now wholly different; Guderian—who had been brought back as the new Chief of the General Staff—was giving clear, strong, optimistic leadership, the
Panzer
divisions were being deployed offensively to smash the enemy thrusts instead of in passive defence. Additional divisions were being raised at home—Himmler’s
Volksgrenadiere
or Peoples’ Army; production was rising; the fighter aircraft programme was on schedule despite enemy harassment; by September—echoing Hitler’s remarks—they had the possibility of the mastery of German air space. The U-boat programme was proceeding unchecked, Heye’s Small Craft Division was of great significance. He ended by calling for the maintenance of the Navy’s striking power and a high standard of training.

He was not the only leader to adopt blinkers: Speer, whose armaments production figures were indeed rising astonishingly, exaggerated his future output and the effect this could have on the situation, especially in the air; re-reading his words at this time after the war he found himself horrified by the recklessness he had shown, and felt ‘something grotesque’ about his efforts to persuade serious men that supreme exertions might still bring success.
¹⁷³
Himmler overestimated the effect of National Socialist ardour in his new Peoples’ divisions for the eastern front, and of his own committed leadership in place of the ‘defeatist and obstructionist generals’ of the old guard. Goebbels encouraged Hitler’s hopes of miraculous intervention while stepping up propaganda for total war, self-sacrifice in daily life as in battle, and the rooting out of all traitors and defeatists—Dönitz’s address might almost have been composed by him, even to the remarks on the cleaning up of public art, one of the Propaganda Minister’s important accomplishments.

The final months of the war from autumn 1944 until Hitler’s suicide in April 1945 below the ruins of the Chancellery raise all the questions about Dönitz’s character in starkest form. His performance was fanatical in the
strictest sense. The
Wehrmacht
was forced to withdraw from one ‘vital’ position after another, German cities were reduced to spectral ruins standing in wastes of rubble, allies and friendly neutrals deserted the
Reich
, raw material sources were blocked, coal and oil supplies cut to a fraction of the amounts necessary to maintain even a one-front war, the homeland invaded, morale in the west collapsed and in the east civilians with reason fled the Red terror; Ribbentrop, Goebbels, Himmler each in their different ways came to terms with the inevitable and extended peace feelers to the enemy, Speer set himself the task of sabotaging Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy so that when the end came the German people would not be denied all means of subsistence—but Dönitz, practically alone among the top leadership, cleaved straight, scorning any ‘deviation’ from the course set by the Führer, seemingly intent only to prove that when the waters finally closed over the tortured ruins of the Third Reich the ensign of the
Kriegsmarine
would still be flying, he himself beyond reproach by his Führer or posterity.

The really remarkable thing about his performance is that it never changed. Had he been a rational leader subject to rational considerations, there must have come a point during this steady erosion of Germany’s position when attitudes appropriate in January 1943, when he had taken over from Raeder, became totally inappropriate. Dönitz never perceived this in Hitler’s lifetime, or if he did never acted on it. In 1943 it was still possible to believe in the Führer’s political and strategic genius, still possible to hope that more U-boats or new types of U-boats might yet snatch victory from the sea powers, hence still everything to fight for. Two years later none of these assumptions was valid. It was plain to all officers—and of course the generals had seen it long since—that Hitler’s ‘strategy’ was a disaster, and it was clear that even if the new U-boats did all that was expected of them they would never have the
Luftwaffe
support vital to their success; moreover by the end of 1944 it was clear that there would not be enough of them to affect the situation before industry was brought to a standstill, the country occupied.

No one was in a better position to assess the situation than Dönitz himself; he had seen the débâcle at close quarters and witnessed one after another of the Führer’s promises come to nothing—even Goebbels at the end was entering in his diary ‘we have heard it all so often before that we can no longer bring ourselves to place much hope in such statements’
¹⁷⁴
of Hitler’s; he had heard Hitler vilifying one scapegoat after another for failures for which he was responsible, had seen the
alarming deterioration in Hitler’s already ruined physical and mental condition; during the final months when he was spending two or three days every week, sometimes longer, at Führer headquarters, he was reporting to a bowed and shaking figure whom shocked newcomers described as prematurely senile. Yet neither the form nor the manner of his commitment altered in any way. He seized on any scrap of hopeful news to weave an optimistic forecast; if there were no good news he invented something; in December, during one of his private conversations with Hitler he said he had decided to send ten to fifteen German naval officers to Japan so that they could study fleet operations on a large scale, experience which could be used later when it came to rebuilding the German fleet;
¹⁷⁵
on New Year’s Day 1945 he produced an article from
Picture Post
alleging weak construction in American Liberty ships!
¹⁷⁶
Two days later he assessed the prospects for the latest weapon from Admiral Heye’s Small Battle Units, the
Seehund
midget U-boat carrying two underslung torpedoes: ‘Assuming that from the 80
Seehund
U-boats planned per month, only 50 come into operation, then 100 torpedoes will be carried to the enemy; with 20 per cent hits that gives a sinking figure of some 100,000 tons …’
¹⁷⁷

After a
Seehund
sortie towards the end of the month when all boats were forced back to base by the weather or technical defects without reaching the target area, he reported that despite the lack of success the operations were of the highest value as ‘all the teething troubles which might never have shown up under test in the Baltic have shown up in the severe conditions in the Hoofden and can thus be corrected …’
¹⁷⁸

Of course, the chief hope which he held out before the Führer’s exhausted gaze to the last rested in the new Type XXI U-boats. By mid-February, by extraordinary exertions, Speer’s teams had succeeded in launching over 100 of these and 49 of the smaller Type XXIII boats. It is interesting that Dönitz preceded his report on their future use with a summary of conventional U-boat operations, virtually returning full circle to his first thoughts on U-boats in September 1935 when he became FdU; then he had written that their low speed virtually excluded use against fast forces, they would therefore be used in stationary mode before enemy harbours; now he said that ‘old-type’ U-boats had little chance of success in mobile warfare, hence it was best to station them outside ports.
¹⁷⁹

Afterwards Hitler stressed the great importance for the overall war situation he attached to the revival of the war at sea with the new boats.
Dönitz reacted enthusiastically: the new Type XXI could travel all the way from Germany to Japan without surfacing; all the apparatus presently employed by the sea powers to maintain their mastery could now be circumvented—the new boats could be expected to be very effective. But he pointed out that the nub of the matter was the construction problem; the yards needed priority rating for personnel, coal and steel.

By this date the coalfields and industries of Silesia had been overrun by the Russians who had reached the Oder river; the western allies were attacking the Ruhr, whose output had already been reduced to a fraction of the previous year’s peak by concentrated bombing, and armaments production was only being maintained at all by expedients and the consumption of existing stocks of components. Dönitz’s remarks on priority bore no relation whatever to possibility or reality.

At the end of the month he was reporting to Hitler again on the revolutionary qualities of the new U-boats ‘against which the mighty sea power of the Anglo-Saxons is essentially powerless’.
¹⁸⁰

Goebbels noted in his diary, ‘… what a fine, imposing impression is made by Dönitz. As the Führer told me he is the best man in his arm of the service. Look at the invariably gratifying results he has achieved with the Navy …’
¹⁸¹
On March 13th after another discussion with Hitler, Goebbels wrote:

A week later Goebbels was recording that although reproaching Göring, Hitler would not appoint a new C-in-C for the
Luftwaffe
. ‘From many quarters Dönitz is being proposed for the post and I think this proposal is not too wide off the mark.’
¹⁸³

There is no doubt that Dönitz’s bearing in the crisis was everything he was demanding from his subordinates, unquestioning loyalty, unquenchable optimism, selfless, indefatigable zeal and eagerness to take, on any responsibility. He was performing exactly as all his service reports indicate he had throughout his career. Already he had taken over the
transport and supply of coal throughout the
Reich
, a task he had proposed himself for in January after the allied devastation of the Ruhr and inland communications had brought chaos. Since then he had extemporized a system of canal barges assisted by narrow-gauge field railways around danger spots or locks which had been destroyed. No difficulties were too great for him to find solutions. If Himmler needed additional troops, Dönitz combed men from his naval garrisons; if the Army wanted river bridges destroyed, he sent detachments of naval frogmen and mining experts from the Small Battle Units; when the RAF destroyed dams with bombs set to explode against the walls at depth it was to Dönitz that Hitler turned for a defensive solution.

To the very end he maintained an air of imperturbable confidence and reliability. One young officer, Gerhardt Boldt, whose task it was to lay out maps for Hitler’s daily situation conferences, recalls a day in January 1945 when he placed them in the wrong order. Guderian, starting his report on the eastern front with the southern sector as was customary, realized that the map he was pointing to was of the northern area and stopped in mid-sentence, glaring at Boldt; Hitler, too, looked him over with an ‘indescribable glance’ before sinking back wearily, and the rest of the assembled company stared at the unfortunate young officer, now stammering in confusion as if he had committed treason.