Read Dönitz: The Last Führer Online
Authors: Peter Padfield
Gilbert and Kelley also administered the Wechsler-Bellevue adult intelligence test, compensating for differences in German culture and vocabulary, and allowing in their results for average mental deterioration with age. It is interesting that apart from Streicher, all were found above average intelligence, but none came into the highest mental categories; Schacht came top by virtue of heavy age-weighting with 143 points, Seyss-Inquart next with 141, and Göring and Dönitz were equal third with a very respectable 138, confirming the impression both had already given the psychiatrists by their attitude and speaking ability.
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When eventually the Court, described as the International Military Tribunal, was ready to sit, and the charges had been formalized, Gilbert took his copy of the indictment to each of the prisoners and asked them to sign it with their comments. The result was a succinct record of the attitudes and poses adopted
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—thus Göring: ‘The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused’; Speer: ‘The trial is necessary. There is a common responsibility for such horrible crimes, even in an authoritarian system’; Keitel: ‘For a soldier, orders are orders’; Frank: ‘I regard this trial as a God-willed World Court, destined to examine and put an end to the terrible era of suffering under Adolf Hitler’; Streicher: ‘This trial is a triumph of world Jewry’; Raeder refused to comment; Ley, despite the security precautions, managed to commit suicide.
Dönitz had previously told Kelley that he had been picked by Hitler as his successor because all other candidates were either dead or in disgrace, and he was the only one left to whom the
Luftwaffe
, Army and Navy would pay attention; also it was felt he was the one who could most
easily bring about peace, which he had done as fast as possible, yet now as Hitler’s successor the Americans wanted to hang him. ‘This seems to be an example of American humour.’ He condensed this on Gilbert’s charge-sheet: ‘None of these indictments concerns me in the least—typical American humour’
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—remarks which Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe characterized as ‘perhaps the most extraordinary of all’.
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The trial opened on November 20th. The prisoners were taken from their cells one by one under close guard to a lift up to the courtroom where they were seated in two rows along benches opposite the Judges’ dais. Behind them armed US military police with white belts and helmets stood alert to ensure that no poison or other aids to suicide passed from the defence lawyers.
When William Shirer, anticipating the moment he had been awaiting ‘all these black, despairing years’ entered the courtroom the prisoners were in their places. He found his first sight of them in their changed condition indescribable. Shorn of their former glittering symbols of power, ‘how little and mean and mediocre’ they looked. At the left of the lower row, Göring was scarcely recognizable in a faded
Luftwaffe
uniform shorn of insignia; he had lost weight and reminded Shirer of ‘a genial radio operator on a ship’.
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Above him at the left of the second row Dönitz sat wearing a civilian suit and looking ‘for all the world like a grocery clerk. Hard to imagine him as the successor of Hitler’; next to him Raeder looked ‘a bewildered old man’.
The Court bailiff barked and the prisoners, assembled lawyers, Press men and spectators rose for the entrance of the judges in black robes, Lord Justice Lawrence, who was to preside, and Sir Norman Birkett; the US Attorney General, Francis Biddle, and Judge John H. Parker of North Carolina; the French Judge Donnedieu de Valres, his fellow countryman, M.le Conseiller Robert Falco, and the two Russian Judges, appropriately in uniform with decorations. When they had ascended to their places, Justice Lawrence rapped for silence.
‘The trial which is about to begin is unique in the history of jurisprudence in the world …’
The morning session was occupied with details of the first two counts of the indictment, conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and humanity, and the planning and initiation of wars of aggression in violation of international treaties. During the recess the defendants took lunch in the courtroom and so were able to greet and talk to one another for the first time since their imprisonment. In the afternoon the other two
counts were read out, war crimes, including ‘murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations of or in occupied territories and on the high seas …’, and crimes against humanity including ‘deliberate and systematic genocide, viz. the extermination of racial and national groups …’
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The charges against Dönitz were participating in the conspiracy and preparations for aggressive war set out in the first two counts, and that ‘he authorized, directed and participated in the war crimes set forth in Count Three of the Indictment, particularly the crimes against persons and property on the high seas’.
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The British prosecution, bringing these charges, believed they had a virtually impregnable case, particularly on the third count; no formal orders to murder shipwrecked survivors had been traced, but they were hardly to be expected from experienced staff officers; on the other hand they had a witness from the U-boat arm prepared to testify that Dönitz had publicly encouraged action against survivors, and a senior officer who would testify to his interpretation of the dangerously ambiguous orders of September 1942 as licence to attack survivors. They also had the entry in the BdU war diary detailing these orders, and Dönitz’s rambling and unsatisfactory explanations under interrogation. The Admiralty transcript runs:
D
ÖNITZ:
‘We have in all the years leading up to this particular event acted exactly in the opposite sense to the one laid down in this statement [the September 1942
Laconia
orders]. That is what matters. This particular incident of the
Laconia
distressed us so very very deeply because it showed that in the very rare cases where we could possibly do rescue work, then we were even being murdered from the air.’
I
NTERROGATOR:
‘That may be, but I still say that the language in this extract is contrary to the reason which you state, which is, as I understand it, that the safety of the submarine required that no efforts be made, but still you provide here that the orders concerning the bringing in of Captains and Chief Engineers of these vessels, still stands.’
D
ÖNITZ:
‘That is an addition that is meant rather in a theoretical sense, because actually in no case, in no instance was it carried out, for the
Laconia
incident, which happened a very few days before the entry in the diary, shows how we acted. We were in a situation where in an infinitely greater number of cases we could do nothing, and in a very,
very slight number of cases we could do something, and in these cases then we would subject ourselves to the bombings from the air.
‘… I lost in one month 42 U-boats only by the airplanes … I was obliged to give such an order to prevent the U-boats from being killed by the old orders of rescuing … This message was ordered only by me. I remember that Captain Godt and Captain Hessler were against this telegram. They told me that expressly, because they said that that can be misunderstood, but I said I must tell that now to these boats to prevent the losses in this one per cent. I must give them a reason so they don’t feel obliged to do that.
‘… I am completely and personally responsible for it because Captains Godt and Hessler both expressly stated that they considered the telegram as ambiguous, or liable to be misinterpreted …’
I
NTERROGATOR:
‘I would like to ask you, why was it necessary to use the language that I read to you before, that the most primitive demands for the conduct of warfare by annihilating ships and crews are contradicted by efforts to rescue members of the crews?’
D
ÖNITZ:
‘These words do not correspond to the telegram [i.e. only to the war diary summary]. They do not in any way correspond to our actions in the years of 1939, ’40, ’41 and ’42 as I have plainly shown you by the
Laconia
incident. I would like to emphasize once more that the Captains Godt and Hessler both were violently opposed to the sending of the telegram.’
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Pressed again on the wording in another interrogation a few weeks later, just before the trial, he replied:
D
ÖNITZ:
‘I had never given this order if I hadn’t had the
Laconia
incident, see. Then I saw the time coming when I had to give the order, “You are not allowed to go to the surface at daytime at all.” … Godt and Hessler told me, “Don’t make this wireless, you see; one day there can be a wrong appearance about it. There can be a misinterpretation of that.” And then I told him I must, I think, in the reality take measures. I wished to prevent my U-boats being bombed when they saved. That was the whole thing of it, you see …’
I
NTERROGATOR:
‘Why did Godt and Hessler say this telegram might be subject to misinterpretation?’
D
ÖNITZ:
‘That’s a very right question from your side. The misinterpretation is the political side of the thing, you see. The Nationals. They
were quite sure nobody thought of a thing like that. But these points why I am sitting now here and have to speak with you—I couldn’t think in 1942 that I would have to talk it over with you, you see. I only wish to tell the U-boats the other side … I was under great pressure …’
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His admirable determination to shield his former chief of operations and his son-in-law was reciprocated by them and the entire officer corps of the
Kriegsmarine
, which closed ranks solidly. An elaborate clandestine network for assisting his and Raeder’s defence by finding documents and providing testimony and technical advice was organized under cover of the minesweeping service which the allies had set up with German naval personnel, and a weekly courier service was run between the Hamburg headquarters and Nuremberg by a young U-boat officer under cover of an automatic washing machine service!
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On the second day of the trial, the chief US Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, made the opening speech; he built up a devastating picture ‘of the racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence and of the arrogance and cruelty of power’ symbolized by the ‘twenty lost men’ in the dock. Probably the twenty considered it propaganda; for most, the first real jolt came in the afternoon of November 29th, when a film was shown of the concentration camps entered by US troops. In his opening address Jackson had warned that the proofs to come would be disgusting and cost those in the courtroom their sleep. Now they were told that no one was allowed to leave ‘unless they become sick’. Special fluorescent lights had been built into the ledges of the dock and, as the courtroom lights went out, these illumined the faces of the prisoners with an eerie glow. The psychologists had stationed themselves one at each end of the rows to note the reactions.
The film started with scenes of prisoners burned alive in a barn. Gilbert noted:
… Frank swallows hard, eyes blink trying to stifle tears … Fritsche watches intently with knitted brow, cramped at the end of the seat, evidently in agony … Göring keeps leaning on the balustrade, not watching most of the time, looking droopy … Funk now in tears, blows nose, wipes eyes, looks down … Speer looks very sad, swallows hard … Funk crying now … Dönitz has head bowed, no longer watching …
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Shots of the piled dead in a slave labour camp were followed by scenes of crematorium ovens, a lampshade made from human skin, a woman doctor describing experiments on female prisoners at Belsen …
By this time Dönitz’s head was buried in his hands.
As the film ended and the lights went on there was a stunned silence; Justice Lawrence forgot to adjourn the session; the Judges simply rose and left without a word.
After the prisoners had been returned to their cells, the psychiatrists visited them one by one. Reactions differed wildly: Fritsche burst into tears as soon as the door closed, so did Funk. Speer said he was more than ever resolved to acknowledge a collective responsibility and absolve the German people from guilt. Göring pretended indifference. Frank cried with rage, ‘To think that we lived like kings and believed in that beast! Don’t let anyone tell you they had no idea… They didn’t
want
to know.’ Raeder said he had hardly heard of the concentration camps before. Keitel said he was ashamed of being a German, ‘It was those dirty SS swine …’
Dönitz trembled with emotion, his words tumbling out in mixed English and German, ‘How can they accuse me of knowing such things? They ask why I didn’t go to Himmler to find out about the concentration camps, why that’s preposterous! He would have kicked me out just as I would have kicked him out if he’d come to investigate the Navy! What in God’s name did I have to do with these things? It was only by chance that I rose to a high position, and I never had a thing to do with the Party.’
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In December he and the other military men on trial were defended from an unexpected quarter: the U.S.
Army and Navy Journal
apparently ignoring the war crimes and crimes against humanity in the indictments, accused Justice Jackson of attempting to discredit the profession of arms. The
Chicago Tribune
had made more intemperate attacks on the whole idea of the trials earlier. Dönitz naturally learnt of this support from his defence lawyer, and it is probably significant that his efforts to present himself as a simple sailor pledged to the Christian West were directed from now on at Americans.
The Prosecution documents against Dönitz were put in by Colonel H. J. Phillimore on January 14th; of the
Laconia
orders he submitted, ‘… The wording is of course extremely careful but to any officer of experience its intention was obvious and he would know that deliberate action to annihilate survivors would be approved under that order.