Dönitz: The Last Führer (80 page)

The prison rules, which were read out to them, forbade communication either between themselves or with their guards without permission; Dönitz was probably one of the first to break this when he asked a guard how many other prisoners were in the jail. After some hesitation the reply came: ‘None.’ Escorted through a steel door that clanged shut
behind them, they came into the wide corridor of the inner cell block, and were locked into alternate cells, an empty cell between each. These were similar to the ones they had left at Nuremberg with a single, high barred window and a grille in the door and rudimentary furniture. Soon after Dönitz heard the key turn in the lock, he sat down at the small table and began a letter to his wife:

‘
Meine Ingeliebste
, we are in Spandau. I may write two letters in six months and may receive the same number …’
¹²⁴

He asked her to send him a hairbrush and soap, and told her he could receive a visit lasting a quarter of an hour every two months. ‘I must say I will never acknowledge my sentence as just or internationally sound…’ Nevertheless, he continued, the ups and downs of life could not change their own values. He ended ‘
Dein Junge
’ (‘Your boy’).

There began for each of the prisoners a renewed struggle to preserve minds and bodies from the isolation and lack of incident, or even news of the outside world—for they were forbidden papers or magazines and during their visits their relations were not allowed to tell them anything apart from personal matters. Dönitz may have found it easier than the others; he had less time to go, he had always been dedicated to a more or less spartan regime of disciplined work, above all he still had much to live for. For he believed that the German people might turn to him as the legitimate Head of State.

The naval officers’ organization which had contributed to his defence at Nuremberg was actively co-ordinating a propaganda drive to clear the stigma of war crimes from his name and elevate him into a national hero who had saved millions in the east from the Russians. What connections they may have had with extreme right-wing organizations planning a neo-Nazi State with Dönitz as the Führer’s legitimate successor—as alleged by the journalist Jack Fishman in
Seven Men of Spandau
—is not clear. But whether or not there was any serious planning, Dönitz certainly considered himself the legitimate Head of State!

Ingeborg evidently believed this too. She told Jack Fishman that her husband had the right to the highest position in the land and would be ‘ready to take the wheel’ if certain influential people were to ask him.
¹²⁵
Some of her answers to his questions suggest intimate knowledge of Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg; asked for instance whether her husband had not asked Himmler about the concentration camps, her reply was almost identical to his own: certainly not; he always maintained that one department was not justified in questioning another on the basis of
rumour; he would have thrown anybody out who had questioned him about the affairs of the Navy.

From her answers at this and other interviews, it does not seem she felt any more shame or guilt for the stains brought on Germany by the regime her husband had served than Dönitz himself. She seemed more concerned at her loss of status and the disappearance of all the possessions they had collected: the priceless Gobelin tapestry, the sea paintings, the Persian carpets, 60 copper engravings, silver and plate which had been crated and stored with relations of Admiral Heye’s on an estate near Zulfeld in Holstein had been looted by a British Colonel of the Parachute Regiment.

‘I don’t want anything to do with the British,’ she told one intelligence officer, ‘they are thieves,’ and she produced photographs of the interior of the Dahlem house showing the carpets which the Colonel had stolen.
¹²⁶
Another complaint was that the British had frozen her bank account and she was receiving only the pension of a
Kapitän z. See
for her husband.

This was something which angered Dönitz. The reason given by the authorities was that he owed his promotion above that rank to Hitler; he regarded this as an insult and quite untrue since he would have become an Admiral in any event; ‘I became the Supreme Commander of the Navy at the most critical time of the war,’ he told von Neurath, the elder statesman in whom most of the prisoners confided. ‘I had the thankless task of bringing the war to a finish and now all the government can do is give me a Captain’s pension for my wife …’
¹²⁷

Relationships between the prisoners naturally fluctuated, but von Neurath and von Schirach were the two with whom Dönitz consorted most on their exercise walks and at other times when the ‘western’ guards relaxed the no-communication rules; with the Russian guards it was always difficult to snatch a few words together. The hostility Dönitz felt for Raeder since reading his Moscow statement came to the surface from time to time, as did the dislike which he had conceived for his former friend, Albert Speer. Speer records one of these occasions that December. The two of them were talking while sweeping the corridor, when he made an inadvertent remark, presumably about Hitler, and was immediately taken to task by Dönitz.

Speer concluded that ‘for all his personal integrity and dependability on the human plane’, Dönitz had not revised his view of Hitler in any way, and he wrote in his diary that evening, ‘To this day Hitler is his
Commander in Chief.’ It was probable, he considered, that a large proportion of the generals and the German people thought in the same way, and would never realize what had actually happened.
¹²⁸

Here Speer hits on the predominant characteristic of the attitude Dönitz displayed in all his writings and everything he said to the end of his life. Speer’s explanation was that Dönitz retained a ‘naïve loyalty such as I had only at the very beginning’. He, of course, had greater opportunity to observe him than anyone, but it has to be asked whether he was right. Dönitz was certainly obsessive, but he was not unintelligent and the strongest influence on him during his time in Spandau, as during the talks in the ‘elders’ ’ dining room during the Nuremberg trials, was von Neurath, a representative of the old Germany in which Dönitz had been brought up and in whose service he had been conditioned. Von Neurath’s disillusion with the Nazis was genuine and arrogant in its detachment; ‘For all of you,’ he told Speer one day, ‘it’s just Hitler and the Third Reich that have perished.’
¹²⁹
It is difficult to believe that this sense of the disaster the Führer’s criminal amateurishness had brought upon Germany and its good name did not rub off on at least the rational layers of Dönitz’s mind.

This being so, his protestations of loyalty, like his assertions that the victor nations would have done just the same if the positions had been reversed, and his repeated statements that he would do it all over again and no differently, sound like desperate self-justifications for the course he had followed and the crimes he had condoned and perpetrated. Even without that compulsion to self-justification which was a part of his character, it is difficult to see how he could have faced the charges on his conscience other than by denying to himself the possibility of acting differently—that is ‘disloyally’. What other recourse had he if he thought of Eck and his officers than to insist to himself that he had been following his soldier’s duty when he indoctrinated them in fanaticism?

Speer, still tortured with doubts, came to a similar conclusion about himself; it suddenly seemed to him that he had heard no word more frequently than ‘loyalty’ in the Third Reich, and he asked himself whether it had been ‘no more than the rag we used to cover our moral nakedness’.
¹³⁰

The seasons passed. The prisoners had been given the opportunity of taming the wilderness that had grown up behind the cell blocks during their first summer, and had welcomed the chance. The space had been
turned into the ‘Garden of Eden’—after the British Foreign Secretary!—in which each had his area for growing vegetables for the kitchens; Speer, as a special dispensation, grew flowers and constructed a rock garden. Dönitz, probably for the first time since his early schooldays, had an opportunity to devote himself to the simple satisfying tasks of growing things; he specialized in tomatoes and became characteristically obsessive, sometimes achieving 40 or 50 fruits on a single plant—transparently delighted when anyone counted them in his presence.

He found a renewed interest in nature, the night sky, the birds and insects he saw and the mice which swarmed in the garden. He put lupin seeds outside their holes and watched them come out to take them. ‘It is remarkable,’ he wrote to Ingeborg, ‘how in the absence of normal distractions, one remembers all that has gone before. Things that really meant something to one become clearer, among them the many songs learned as a child.’
¹³¹

As spring came round again he thought of his sons; he had pictures of them both in the centre of a collection of family photographs on the small table in his cell.

Even here, though, his thoughts could not stray far from the inevitability of his course; it would have been better, he went on, if his views (about building U-boats instead of a surface fleet) had been accepted in time. ‘That is where the tragedy in my affairs lies.’ Is it possible that Speer was right? Did Dönitz never realize what had happened—apart from defeat—and what he had shared in? Or is this cry in his most intimate correspondence another sign of the deep cover he had imposed on his thoughts?

To outward appearance Speer was right. He heard him one day in February 1949 lecturing von Neurath excitedly in the garden about the shortage of U-boats at the beginning of the war, insisting that if he had had the number he had demanded England would have been forced to her knees by 1941. Speer watched the old aristocrat as he listened with polite interest to Dönitz’s agitated voice.
¹³³
Almost five years later Dönitz received via an ‘illegal’ channel an extract from the British official
history of the war at sea, which suggested that Germany’s failure to build up a large U-boat fleet at the beginning had been a vital error. Enormously pleased, Dönitz repeated again and again, according to Speer’s diary, that he intended to bring this up ‘in the full light of publicity’ once he and Raeder were free.
¹³⁴

The reference to Raeder being free was caused by the hope, shared by all the prisoners, that they would soon be released. News of the Cold War, the blockade of Berlin, and the re-arming of West Germany by the western allies, had reached them through the clandestine channels of communication each now had, and seemed finally to make nonsense of the Nuremberg judgements and their own incarceration. Dönitz appears to have convinced himself that he and Raeder at any rate would be let out since it would be impossible to re-establish the
Wehrmacht
if their new allies were holding high-ranking officers in Spandau. Also he knew that his friends outside were doing their utmost for him in representations to the West. Whatever the Americans may have wished, the Russians were adamant that all seven were going to serve their appointed terms to the last day, and on December 6th 1952, Dönitz received a letter from Kranzbühler, still his legal adviser, that he should count on serving his full sentence. His hopes were not permanently stilled; they continued to burst out afresh at any apparently hopeful news.

Early the following year rumours of an attempt by a neo-Fascist group to lift him from Spandau and place him at the head of a new West German government brought brief excitement. Speer took the opportunity to cast a fly. Dönitz rose beautifully; he had nothing to do with the attempt, he said; he would disassociate himself from it publicly if only they would let him out. Moreover he condemned Hitler’s system. ‘But I am and will remain the legal Head of State. Until I die.’

Speer, who knew his convictions on this score, pretended surprise. ‘But there has been a new head of State—’

‘He was installed under pressure from the occupying powers,’ Dönitz contradicted, and insisted that until all political parties, including the neo-Nazis, were allowed to operate, whether he liked it or not, his own legitimacy remained.

‘It has become an obsession with him,’ von Neurath said.
¹³⁵

He received an unexpected boost for the idea in April 1953 when a research organization, the
Allensbacher Institut
, published the results of a survey of opinion on formerly prominent people. Dönitz received a note from his son-in-law, Günther Hessler, to say that he had topped the
pole; 46 per cent of Germans had a good opinion of him, only seven per cent a bad opinion; Schacht ran him close with 42 per cent of good opinions. Göring had 37 per cent and Hitler was still well thought of by 24 per cent—indeed only 47 per cent had a bad opinion of him!

At the time he was apparently thinking of himself as a future Head of State, the other side of Dönitz’s nature manifested itself in dreams of caring for orphans or animals in need. ‘I think I shall start a kindergarten when I get out,’ he is reported to have said, ‘a mixed one for puppies as well as children.’
¹³⁶
It seems he was serious about this, for after his remark had appeared in print in the series Jack Fishman had written about Spandau, Dönitz commented, ‘My wife is trying to dissuade me from it because I’m too old. She may be right.’
¹³⁷

That his personality was not fully integrated is suggested by his relationship with the guards; for periods he would act the Grand Admiral, ostentatiously preserving his distance, at others he sought companionship and engaged them in long talks. He was constant in his hostility to Speer, though—to such an extent that Speer began to suspect that he planned his quips at night ‘since he is not very witty’. He also preserved his coolness towards Raeder, which was fully reciprocated; both Grand Admirals, however, joined forces against Hess, whose self-pity, constant, unseemly cries for attention, refusal to co-operate in the work they all had to do and generally muddled manner cut across their military ideas of behaviour. ‘He has to be trained and treated harshly,’ Dönitz remarked in the presence of the guards after one incident in 1955.
¹³⁸