Dönitz: The Last Führer (67 page)

This finally was what Dönitz’s fanaticism was reduced to. All other rationalizations had been stripped away by this date, March 26th: there was no prospect of fighter production erecting the ‘roof over Germany’ which according to his new adjutant, Walter Lüdde-Neurath, had sustained his hopes through the autumn. Instead Germany was being destroyed from the air. Central Berlin was under ceaseless 1,500-bomber saturation raids which had forced Berliners into a troglodyte existence. Hitler had taken up residence in a catacomb of bunkers 55 feet below the Chancellery, where he sought with the aid of a single switchboard and a radio telephone link to Army headquarters to hold up his disintegrating empire by will power. It was to this unhealthy concrete warren that Dönitz reported day after day.

There was no prospect either of the new U-boats becoming operational in time. Rumours of other ‘secret weapons’ with which Goebbels had boosted morale successfully for a while were plainly unfounded. Churchill and Roosevelt had not, it seemed, woken to the danger of Bolshevism overrunning Europe; the break-up of the alliance which Hitler and Goebbels had predicted had not happened; the allies
were calling for unconditional surrender in terms that left no doubt of their brutal intent. On the other hand, German forces were running out of arms and fuel. Systematic production had come to an end; Speer was concentrating on saving what he could from Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy for life after the war, miraculously escaping the fate that would have been meted out to any general expressing his openly ‘defeatist’ opinions. ‘His viewpoint is that it is no function of war policy to lead a people to a hero’s doom,’ Goebbels had entered in his diary two weeks before, ‘… and that this was stressed absolutely explicitly by the Führer himself in
Mein Kampf
.’
²⁰²

Everyone knew the war was lost; the roads from the east were clogged with refugees; pathetic columns trekked through Berlin on their way westwards, leaving frozen corpses among the rubble. In the west civilian morale had sunk, according to Goebbels, ‘very low, if it has not already reached zero’.
²⁰³
Soldiers had been deserting in droves for a long time. Confronted with the figures of those reported missing in February Hitler had declared he would abandon the Geneva Convention: ‘If I make it clear that I have no consideration for prisoners, but will deal with them ruthlessly without regard for reprisals, many [Germans] will think seriously before they desert.’
²⁰⁴
He had been urged to do this previously by Goebbels in retaliation for the bombing terror, and to make it known that captured allied aircrew would be shot out of hand. He had put it to Dönitz, asking his opinion. Dönitz had consulted his legal department, reporting back the next day that the disadvantages of such a step would outweigh the advantages, and ‘it would be better in any case to keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believed necessary without announcing them beforehand’.
²⁰⁵
This had been the common view in the Führer bunker; it remained so; even Bormann supported it.

Balked, Hitler instituted a system of itinerant Courts Martial to root out defeatism in the upper levels of the
Wehrmacht
. They had powers to investigate and execute Commanders found guilty of withholding full commitment. Other methods were in use to keep the troops up to the mark; SS General Schörner’s way with deserters was described to Hitler by Goebbels on March 13th: ‘They are hung from the nearest tree with a placard round their neck saying, “I am a deserter. I have refused to defend German women and children and have therefore been hung.” ’
²⁰⁶

In this bloody finale, as Hitler and Goebbels, cornered and with no hope of escape, turned savagely on anyone not prepared to hate and to
throw away his life for them and the continuation of the failed cause for a few more weeks, Dönitz gave fanatic support. His
Schnell
boats, U-boats and midget craft under Admiral Heye continued desperate sorties against allied supply convoys in the North Sea and around the British Isles, taking fearful punishment from the concentrated air-sea defence, and in the case of the midget craft from the weather, scoring only isolated successes, chiefly by minelaying, which could not affect the course of the allied advance by even a day. When fuel shortage forced the abandonment of operations by the few remaining
Schnell
boats in mid-April, the midget craft kept up the hopeless struggle. Whether or not they went out in the spirit of suicide mission as many did, that was usually the result. The units had been rushed through design and production too quickly and for the very different task of defending the coasts against allied landings; the young crews were trained in fanaticism; some performed feats of endurance, some navigating by their wrist watches simply lost themselves, others were picked up fast asleep in their craft, the great majority never returned.

U-boat crews, too, suffered heavy and increasing losses in these last weeks; Dönitz had predicted they would in early March, and on April 7th he explained to Hitler again that there was such a concentration of anti-U-boat forces in the operational area around the British Isles that once a boat disclosed its position by attacking it was often lost, for its low underwater speed did not permit escape.
²⁰⁷
Altogether 25 were lost around the British Isles or on passage during the month, a further eleven in areas as far distant as the US east coast and the Indian Ocean; this was over a third of the 100 or so boats operational at the beginning of the month, and for this just thirteen allied merchantmen were sunk. Meanwhile so many of the new Type XXI boats were destroyed or damaged by allied air raids on Hamburg and Kiel that eventually only one sailed for an operational cruise at the beginning of May.

The real task of the Navy was in the Baltic, supplying the armies in Kurland and East Prussia and giving supporting fire in coastal operations. Meanwhile officers and men from administration and specialist branches, others from coastal batteries not immediately threatened were combed to form naval infantry divisions to stiffen the fronts or relieve regular garrison troops for front-line duty. Dönitz worked closely with Himmler and Hitler in these attempts to relieve the shortage of soldiers. On April 14th he offered Hitler 3,000 young men from the Navy to operate with light packs and bazookas behind enemy lines in the west.
²⁰⁸
The men had no training for the task; it was a desperate idea and appears even more extraordinary in retrospect when it is realized that at this time German forces in the west were being manoeuvred in careful defiance of Hitler’s orders, to open a corridor through which US armour might speed to reach Berlin before the Russians—an opportunity that was not realized. As for the eastern front, Guderian had broken openly with Hitler over his senseless strategy a fortnight before and had been sent on ‘extended leave’. Himmler, in eclipse because of the alleged failure of his SS regiments in the south-east and his own failure as a general in Pomerania, was trying to make up his mind about opening armistice negotiations through Sweden. Speer, of course, was working openly against Hitler’s destruction orders; as Goebbels recorded in his diary on March 27th, ‘Speer is continually saying that he does not intend to lift a finger to cut the German people’s lifeline … The Führer uses extraordinarily hard words about Speer …’
²⁰⁹
Dönitz, therefore, was practically alone in his continuing unswerving commitment to the struggle.

What that meant in human terms may be judged by his decrees during this final month of the war. The men of the Navy were as subject to demoralization as the rest of the population; those sent out in U-boats had more reason than most to wonder why they should sacrifice themselves for a plainly lost cause, especially those experienced petty officers and ratings ordered to boats with young, fanatically indoctrinated officers. For any who proved recalcitrant there were punishment battalions on the eastern front, where conditions were as unpleasant and death as certain as in U-boats. Courts Martial for cowardice and summary hanging for desertion by the notorious naval police, known as
Kettenhunde
—‘chain-dogs’—from the chains of office they wore around their necks, provided powerful inducement to loyalty. Dönitz personally encouraged the most savage measures; here is the final paragraph of a secret decree he issued on April 7th:

One wonders whether Hitler suggested this measure of Schörner’s, or whether it was by then a commonplace. Hitler issued a similar proclamation a fortnight later before the final battle for Berlin. Dönitz’s order was carried out ruthlessly as men from the naval infantry divisions, finding themselves armed with Dutch or even Russian rifles and with little ammunition, or expected to face armour with hand weapons, or simply infected with the current hopelessness, joined deserters and refugees trudging west to surrender to the British and Americans.

Generalizations about the state of morale are not possible, however; it varied widely. Those officers and men engaged in obviously worthwhile missions, supplying and supporting the Army in the Baltic and evacuating the wounded, performed selflessly to the end; the élite of the experienced U-boat men, training in the Baltic for the new type of boat, appear to have preserved morale; they were the fortunate ones; they had survived the worst of the Atlantic battle, had been held back from the more desperate missions in the last year when a boat was not expected to survive more than three war cruises, and they knew that when they were sent out they would be in boats whose high underwater speed would allow them to elude their pursuers. On the other hand there were naval garrisons waiting with nothing to do except think, where morale sagged; on Heligoland in the final weeks several officers and men of Marine-artillerie Division 122 and Marine Flak Division 242 actually arranged to give the island up to the British; their wireless messages were intercepted by the Security Services, however, and early in the morning of April 18th, the day they had arranged to raise a white flag on the Flak control tower as a signal to the British, an SS detachment came out from the mainland in three
Schnell
boats, and rounded up and executed the mutineers—an indication of the continuing close co-operation between Dönitz and Himmler. The corpses were interred in an unmarked mass grave outside Cuxhaven.
²¹¹

It is in any case evident from Dönitz’s drastic decrees that the Navy had its share of ‘defeatists’ and what he called ‘intellectual weaklings’. On April 11th, almost a fortnight after British and US air strikes against Hamburg and Kiel had destroyed 24 U-boats, including nine of the new Type XXI’s, damaged a further twelve and destroyed or seriously damaged three of the six remaining heavy surface units in use in the Baltic operations, he issued a long explanation of why they had to keep on fighting;
²¹²
this repeated the dire predictions about the results of capitulation he had made after the assassination attempt of July 1944,
and it is interesting that this time he included the areas ‘occupied by the Anglo-Saxons’ in his warning: Germans would be drafted as ‘work slaves’ to all enemy countries—above all of course to Russia. ‘Or does anyone think that the Anglo-Saxons will start a war with the Russians on behalf of these men?’

In the Russian-occupied area those elements in all classes liable to resist Bolshevism would be exterminated, but in the Anglo-Saxon areas, too, National Socialists would be violently removed; the intellectual weaklings who now thought about capitulation would be the first to be done away with or freighted off as work slaves; why, he did not explain.

Having next turned himself against dilettante strategists who said that the armies should have withdrawn to Germany in good time, he came to a point that really undermined his case for those with eyes to see; it implied that the war was irretrievably lost. The armies should not have retired, he said: ‘Quite the contrary. In this war with such far-ranging weapons as the Air Force, extent of space is decisive in order to hold the enemy as far as possible from the home area and home armaments industry.’

Since Germany’s last heavy industrial area, the Saar, had been overrun the previous month, it was a dangerous argument, but he went on in the same vein: ‘… The closer the ring becomes, the greater the enemy pressure on the defence and the greater the effect of the enemy on the remaining area … had the whole
Wehrmacht
fully grasped these problems it would have been better.’

Did he really believe this, or are the muddled arguments and unfinished explanations a sign of his determination somehow to find rationalizations for the course he had pursued? And after months of closest proximity to Hitler and the few ugly men from his past with whom he now surrounded himself, hearing the expressions of hate and frustration which extended to their own people, could he have believed his next words about the Führer? The answer may be yes. It is impossible to know the extent of his self-deception.