Dönitz: The Last Führer (76 page)

‘You will be told that the order, although perhaps unfortunately
phrased, was merely intended to stop a Commander jeopardizing his ship by attempting a rescue, which had become extremely dangerous as a result of the extended coverage of the ocean by allied aircraft …’
⁷⁷
However, if this had been the case, Phillimore asserted, the wording would have been very different.

He called
Oberleutnant zu See
Heisig, who had sworn an affidavit that he had heard Dönitz announce to his U-boat training course in October 1942 that the manning problem was the Achilles heel of the allied merchant service, and that the time had come to wage ‘total war’ at sea against crews as well as ships. After he had given similar testimony in the witness box, Kranzbühler rose to cross-examine, asking him first how he had come to make his original statement.

‘I made the statement in defence of my comrades [Eck’s officers] who were put before a military court in Hamburg and sentenced to death for the murder of shipwrecked sailors.’

Kranzbühler tried to find out whether he had been told, before he made the original statement, that the death sentence on Eck and his officers had been confirmed; Heisig could not remember.

‘Since you have knowledge of the circumstances,’ Kranzbühler went on, ‘do you maintain that the speech of Grand Admiral Dönitz mentioned in any way that fire should be opened on shipwrecked sailors?’

‘No, we gathered from his words and from his reference to the bombing war, that total war now had to be waged against ships and crews. That is what we understood and I talked about it to my comrades on the way back to the
Hansa
.’

‘Did you speak about the point with any of your superiors at the School?’

‘I left the School the same day. But I can remember that one of my superiors, whose name to my regret I do not recall, once spoke to us about this subject and advised us that if possible only officers should be on the bridge ready to annihilate shipwrecked sailors should the possibility arise or should it be necessary.’

Kranzbühler could hardly have been expecting such a damning answer. ‘One of your superiors told you that?’

‘Yes, but I cannot remember in which connection and where.’

Kranzbühler turned to the U-boat standing orders, asking whether these mentioned anywhere that shipwrecked sailors or their rescue apparatus were to be fired on.

‘The standing orders did not mention that. But I think one can assume this from an innuendo of Captain Rollmann, who was then officers’ Company Commander—a short time before that some teletype message had arrived containing an order prohibiting rescue measures and demanding that sea warfare should be fought with more radical, more drastic means.’

‘Do you think that the prohibition of rescue measures is identical with the shooting of shipwrecked sailors?’

‘We came to this—’

‘Please answer my question. Do you think these two things are identical?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you.’ Kranzbühler sat down.
⁷⁸

The following day Phillimore called
Korvettenkapitän
Karl Möhle, who had been chief of the fifth U-boat flotilla at Kiel from 1941 to the capitulation, and had briefed outgoing Commanders; he had found the
Laconia
orders ambiguous, and on his next visit to Dönitz’s headquarters had discussed them with one of the staff officers there,
Kapitänleutnant
Kuppisch. Kuppisch was unavailable to testify since he had been lost later in the war. According to Möhle, Kuppisch had given him two examples of action to be taken—against shot-down aircrew in a rubber dinghy, and against survivors from ships sunk in US waters.

Asked how he briefed Commanders on these orders, he replied that he read the message to them without comment.

‘In a very few instances some Commanders asked me about the meaning of the order. In such cases I gave them the two examples that headquarters had given me. However, I added, “U-boat Command cannot give you such an order officially. Everybody has to handle this according to his own conscience.” ’

‘Do you remember an order about entries in Logs?’

‘Yes, sir. At the time, the exact date I do not remember, it had been ordered that sinkings and other acts in contradiction to International Conventions should not be entered in the Log but should be reported orally after return to the home port.’
⁷⁹

Kranzbühler rose to cross-examine, and took him through each sentence in the orders, asking after each whether he saw an instruction there to kill survivors; Möhle found it in the one explaining rescue as contradicting the most elementary demands of war for the destruction of ships and crews.

‘Does that sentence contain anything as to the destruction of shipwrecked persons?’

‘No, of crews.’

After ascertaining that Möhle had not spoken to Godt or Dönitz himself about the orders, Kranzbühler asked him whether he knew that the story of the aircrew in the rubber dinghy was just the opposite of that he had given. ‘The Commander was reprimanded because he did not bring home these fliers even if it meant breaking off the operation.’

To appreciate the absurdity of this suggestion it is only necessary to consider the difficulty of the ten-day passage across Biscay with the ever-present danger of aircraft, and to imagine Dönitz’s face if a commander had then come back with four airmen! However, the reason for Kranzbühler’s desperate essay became apparent as he reminded Möhle of U-boat standing order 513, stating that every effort was to be made to take prisoners from aircraft and destroyers for interrogation purposes.

‘Did you notice,’ he went on, ‘and try to clarify a contradiction between these orders concerning the rescue of aircrew in every case and the story you passed on about the destruction of aircrew?’

‘No. Because in the order of September 1942 it also said that orders about the bringing in of ships’ Captains and Chief Engineers remained in force.’

‘Did you hear of any instances where a U-boat brought in Captains and Chief Engineers but shot the rest of the crew?’

‘No.’

‘Do you consider it at all possible that such an order can be given—that is that part of the crew should be rescued and the rest of the crew should be killed?’

‘No, sir. One cannot make such an order.’

Re-examined by Phillimore, Möhle said he took the orders to mean that something further than abstaining from rescue was implied, ‘only it was not actually ordered, but was considered desirable’.

‘What were the actual words you used when you passed that order on to the Commanders?’

‘I told the Commanders in so many words, “We are now approaching a very delicate and difficult chapter, it is the question of the treatment of lifeboats. The BdU issued the following radio message in September 1942”—I then read the radio message in full. For most of those present the chapter was closed … In some few instances the Commanders asked, “How should this order be interpreted?” Then as a means of
interpretation I gave the two examples which had been related to me at U-boat command. “Officially such a thing cannot be ordered, everybody has to reconcile this with his own conscience.” ’

‘Do you remember any comment being made by commanding officers after you had read the order?’

‘Yes, sir. Several Commanders, following the reading of this radio message, said, “That is very clear, but damned hard.” ’
⁸⁰

From the moment the surviving Nazi leadership had been reunited in the Palace Hotel at Bad Mondorf, Dönitz as the Führer’s nominated successor, and Göring as former heir apparent, had been circling one another warily in matters of precedence. This had been interrupted during the period of solitary confinement; since they had been joined again in the dock Göring had shown by force of personality and uninhibited defiance towards the prosecution that he was the natural group leader, and by mid-February, Dönitz, according to Gilbert’s diary, had fallen into his pattern of undignified courtroom behaviour.
⁸¹

Since it was evident the ‘fat one’ was trying to terrorize the rest into supporting Hitler and the Nazi myth, even to the extent of threatening to incriminate them in his own evidence unless they took the Party line, the prison authorities moved against him, banning communication within the prison and segregating the prisoners into five dining rooms for lunch. The arrangements were carefully devised: Dönitz was put in with the three elder conservatives, von Papen, von Neurath and Schacht, to allow their obvious disillusion with Hitler and the Party to work off on him and, it was hoped, wean him from his exclusive concern with his soldier’s honour. The others were similarly grouped in patterns of influence. Göring had to take his lunch on his own.

Discussing the new arrangements with Speer a few days later Gilbert remarked that he had thought of putting Dönitz in with him. Speer replied that it was better as it was because even he felt somewhat inhibited when Dönitz was around.
⁸²

A Russian-made atrocity film was shown on February 19th, even more terrible than the US one, and over the following days survivors from death camps gave their dreadful evidence. ‘Didn’t
anybody
know
anything
about
any
of these things?’ Kranzbühler asked Dönitz in Gilbert’s hearing at the end of one harrowing session. Dönitz shook his head and shrugged sadly.
⁸³

At lunch in the ‘elders’ ’ dining room at the end of the month Gilbert
was encouraged to hear Dönitz accepting the idea that the German people had been betrayed, and felt that the new arrangements were working well. What Dönitz was probably doing was continuing the campaign he had begun with Rooks and the address to the officer corps left in his desk at Flensburg to establish himself as a staunch ‘Westerner’: the Germans, he said, must have the feeling that they were being treated fairly if they were to be won over to co-operation with the west.

At the beginning of April Keitel was called to the witness stand; Jodl fumbled uneasily with his papers; Dönitz tapped nervously on the dock. When the former chief of Hitler’s staff started taking the line that he was a soldier and had simply been carrying out his duties, Göring turned round to Dönitz and said contemptuously, ‘The little weakling!’ and later, ‘The little white lamb! If he hadn’t been in sympathy with National Socialism he wouldn’t have lasted a minute.’
⁸⁴

Midway through the month Höss, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, was called to give evidence. He had been captured almost a year after he first dived for cover into the
Kriegsmarine
and just two days after inadvertently breaking his poison phial. He described the production-line arrangements for separating out able-bodied Jews and exterminating the rest at the rate of 2,000 to 10,000 a day, afterwards extracting valuable items like gold teeth and rings from the corpses and sending them melted down to the
Reich
’s Economics Ministry. Approximately two and a half million had been disposed of during his time.

Afterwards both Göring and Dönitz told Gilbert that Höss was a South German, not a Prussian.

Later in the month, after Rosenberg had given evidence about his ‘master race’ theories, Dönitz confided to Gilbert that Rosenberg had his head in the clouds. ‘I have no doubt that he would not hurt a fly, but there is also no doubt that these propagandists were really responsible for paving the way for these terrible anti-semitic acts. It’s too bad Hitler isn’t here. He did so much of all that’s discussed here.’
⁸⁵

They passed on to the question of whether Kaltenbrunner had known as little as he had claimed in the witness stand a few days before, after which Dönitz returned to the theme he had broached earlier, the Russian danger to Germany; it was not in America’s interest to allow Russia to control Europe; he would like to talk with some sensible American official after the trial.

Towards the end of the month Streicher took the stand; Gilbert noted signs of obvious embarrassment in the dock as the obscene old man,
describing himself as the scourge of Jewry, denied any knowledge of the extermination policy.

That evening in his cell Dönitz told Gilbert he didn’t want to know or say anything about these dirty politics and propaganda. His officers would not have touched Streicher with a pair of tongs, and he was glad his case was coming up soon and he was being represented by an upright example of a clean-cut young German naval officer who would present his case simply and honestly.
⁸⁶

His turn came in the afternoon of May 8th. Taking the stand, he repeated after the President, ‘I swear by God—the Almighty and Omniscient—that I will speak the pure truth—and will withhold and add nothing.’

It was a somewhat meaningless oath to administer to a Nazi; he repeated it in German, then in answer to Kranzbühler’s first question about his career began to establish his credentials as a simple professional sailor.

‘
Ich bin seit 1910 Berufssoldat, Berufsoffizier seit 1913
.’
⁸⁷

Kranzbühler led him through his conduct of the U-boat war and the prosecution allegation that Hitler had ordered him to act against survivors. He replied that he had never had either a written or a verbal order from Hitler on these lines, but during a conference on May 14th 1942 Hitler had asked him whether some action could not be taken against the rescue ships which were succeeding in picking up a large percentage of allied crews.

‘What do you mean by action taken?’

‘At this discussion, in which Grand Admiral Raeder participated, I rejected this unequivocally and told him that the only possibility of causing losses among the crews would lie in the attack itself, in striving for a faster sinking of the ship through the intensified effect of weapons …’

Kranzbühler passed to the orders of September 1942; Dönitz maintained these were simply non-rescue orders; there was no intention to attack survivors.

‘Firing on these men is a matter concerned with the ethics of war, and should be rejected under any and all circumstances. In the German Navy and the German U-boat arm this principle, according to my firm conviction, has never been violated, with the one exception of the Eck affair. No order on this subject has ever been issued in any form whatsoever.’
⁸⁸