Dönitz: The Last Führer (81 page)

He preserved his own habits of daily exercises, and early to sleep. He read more than he had ever been able to—according to his letters mostly history, astronomy, biology and a few novels, and according to Jack Fishman he greatly enjoyed C. S. Forrester’s ‘Hornblower’ books, and Jack London’s adventures, particularly those concerning dogs. According to one of his former adjutants, von Knebel Doeberitz, who saw much of him after he was released, he read the ‘King’ plays of Shakespeare with great intensity—one imagines with practical insight into the power struggles, favouritism and corruption at Court. He was also preparing his own memoirs, the details of which were being worked on by former members of his staff outside; his son-in-law had particularly good opportunities since he had been commissioned by the British Admiralty to write a history of the U-boat war.

The prison routine—the early-morning processions to the washroom,
sweeping the corridor, always in the same order established in the first few days, Speer and Schirach at the sides, Dönitz with his favourite broom following in the centre leaving little piles for Funk with the dustpan and Hess with the brush to sweep them in—the gardening, the changing guards according to which of the four Powers was on duty—rolled on in unbroken succession; even the brief and tantalizing glimpses of his family became routine. The U-boat Association paid for Ingeborg’s trips to Berlin; often she was accompanied by Ursula and her children, but since only one adult and one child were allowed in together, they took two months’ visiting allowance on successive days. He loved seeing his grandchildren, but the conditions were not conducive to intimacy or even relaxation: the visitors were separated from him by a wire mesh, and a translator listened to every word in case current affairs or other forbidden topics were discussed. After one visit from his wife, Speer reported him returning with the words, ‘It was very pleasant, almost intimate. Only the Russian interpreter, the French
sous-chef
, a guard and one or other of the directors alternately were present.’
¹³⁹

However much each of the prisoners worked to preserve his sanity, the restraints and constant small humiliations imposed on such formerly active and extraordinarily ambitious men took their toll. Speer records one incident in the tenth year of their captivity which illustrates this perfectly. Funk, who had grown some sunflowers in his garden area, was ordered to remove them as they interfered with observation. The instruction caused an emotional outburst: Schirach hacked the heads off the flowers in his own area, Dönitz attacked his rows of beans; the guards watched incredulously.
¹⁴⁰

This ‘prison psychosis’ explains some of Dönitz’s extraordinary hostility to Speer—that at least was Speer’s charitable comment years afterwards: ‘Dönitz was of choleric disposition and this tendency was strengthened during his imprisonment, so that he was unable to control many sharp remarks.’
¹⁴¹
The experience certainly bit deep, for after he left Spandau he said nothing about it even to his family; as his daughter, Ursula, said, ‘The curtains came down.’

After a constant series of raised hopes that the changed political constellation or Kranzbühler’s efforts would gain him early release—followed always by bitter disappointment—finally on May 24th 1955, the tenth anniversary of his capture, he felt certain he would be going home; so did Kranzbühler, former U-boat officers and a posse of reporters and photographers who waited outside the gates. The British
director who had watched a film of the Nuremberg trial at the end of April—since when his attitude towards the prisoners had grown markedly cooler—merely informed him that time in prison before the trial was not counted; he would have to wait another year and a half. Dönitz protested indignantly, but to no avail.

Von Schirach remarked that since he repeatedly maintained the trial and sentence were unlawful, he was being inconsistent in arguing that his sentence had been completed!

Von Neurath had already been allowed home because of his advanced years and poor health; that autumn the other old man, Raeder, was allowed home on the same grounds. Finally, a year later, tension mounted among the prisoners as Dönitz’s time approached—again. He himself grew quieter and more inclined to fits of melancholy, although from time to time, according to Speer, he emerged to play the Grand Admiral and presumptive Head of State again, informing the others that the Powers were devising a procedure for dismissing him that would not attract attention, and that he and Kranzbühler would work for their release once he was out.
¹⁴²

On what was expected to be his last day, September 30th 1956, he said to Speer that he wanted to discuss something with him; it turned out to be the question of whether Speer had recommended him as Hitler’s successor during his last visit to the Führer bunker in Berlin. Speer told him—according to his account—that he had not; a direct recommendation to Hitler was usually counter-productive; he had simply answered questions about how he, Dönitz, was managing in the northern area. ‘Extremely well,’ he had told Hitler. When Göring was deposed a few hours later he had had the feeling that Dönitz would be appointed. ‘But it wasn’t I who proposed you.’

Dönitz said he had to know for his memoirs. Then, suddenly hostile, he accused him of being to blame for his imprisonment and the loss of eleven years of his life.

‘What did I have to do with politics? But for you, Hitler would never have had the idea of making me Head of State. All my men have commands again. But look at me! Like a criminal. My career is wrecked.’
¹⁴³

Speer, stung, retorted that Dönitz had ‘slandered, disparaged and ostracized’ him for ten years. Now he wanted him to hear something: ‘You and the others here have endlessly talked about honour. Every other word you or Schirach utters is dignity, bearing. This war killed
millions of people. More millions were murdered in the camps by those criminals. All of us here were part of the regime. But your ten years here perturb you more than the 50 million dead. And your last words here in Spandau are—your career!’
¹⁴⁴

Dönitz did not leave a record of his time in prison, nor did the others; moreover he told his niece after the publication of Speer’s recollections that he had not and would not read them; it is not possible, therefore, to check Speer’s account. Probably it was coloured by the hostility he had endured from Dönitz and the others, possibly it was distorted by his own ‘prison psychosis’, and his guilt feelings; the story might even be a fantasy like those Dönitz dreamed up to put down his enemies and present himself in a favourable light. Yet the attitudes depicted are surely correct: there are too many other indications of Dönitz’s concern to present himself as an honourable sailor to doubt the attitude ascribed to him here—indeed it appears to have been one of the chief aims of the memoirs he busied himself with directly he left prison.

It was not quite his final word. After supper that evening he shook each of his fellow prisoners by the hand and bade them farewell; he was visibly moved when he came to Speer. Later Speer heard him weeping in his cell. It was not until towards the end of his own sentence that he realized the pressures that caused ‘strong-nerved Dönitz’ to weep quietly during the last hours of his imprisonment.
¹⁴⁵

Dönitz was kept until the stroke of midnight; when he was taken up to collect his possessions, the Russian director said, ‘Sign here, number two,’ and when he had done so, ‘so that ends that, Admiral Dönitz.’

Ingeborg had been working as a nursing sister in a Hamburg hospital while Dönitz was in Spandau, and struggling to remake a home in rented rooms on the ground floor of a villa in Aumühle; it was a large house, not unlike the one they had possessed in Dahlem, set amongst trees and shrub-bordered lawns in this quiet residential town outside Hamburg, but the flat itself, consisting of two main rooms, was somewhat gloomy and scarcely fitting the status of a Grand Admiral. It was a pleasant spot though, convenient both for the U-boat reunions in Hamburg and Kiel and for walks in the surrounding countryside and forest, and this was where he settled after a brief holiday in Badenweiler, surrounding himself with books and pictures of ships and U-boats and old comrades, buying engravings from time to time to replace those looted by the
British. His pension had been raised to that of an admiral, two grades below his former rank, so, while not wealthy, he was never short of money.

His first task was to produce his memoirs, and he was soon hard at work on the detailed material supplied mainly by his son-in-law, who had access to the archives captured by the British. The book appeared two years later under the title
10 Jahre und 20 Tage (Ten Years and Twenty Days)
; it was, as was to be expected, concerned exclusively with his activities as a naval officer. The first 328 pages detailed his development of the
Rudel
(pack) tactic before the war and the various phases of the Battle of the Atlantic up to the spring of 1943, ending with a conveniently abbreviated quotation from Captain Stephen Roskill’s official
History of the War at Sea
; instead of completing Roskill’s sentence, ‘After 45 months of unceasing battle of a more exacting and arduous nature than posterity may easily realize, our [allied] convoy escorts and aircraft had won the triumph they so richly deserved’, he cut it after ‘may easily realize’ and finished in his own words, ‘the tremendous sea- and air-defences of both the greatest seapowers, above all on the basis of the new detection methods, had crushed the U-boat war.’
¹⁴⁶
A small enough change perhaps—it might even be said substituting one side’s propaganda for the other’s—nevertheless fundamental in its revelation of the spirit of self-justification pervading the whole book; there are countless similar instances.

The next 54 pages opened simply: ‘After my appointment as C-in-C,’ with no discussion of how this came about, and dealt with the various theatres of the sea war in seven sub-sections—the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Baltic and so on. His treatment of the loss of the
Scharnhorst
in the ‘northern area’ is particularly revealing. He omitted the crucial question of radar altogether; Burnett’s cruiser squadron appears to have found the
Scharnhorst
in the wastes of the Arctic night by eye, and to have shadowed her by eye, and the same for the
Duke of York
and the final gun action. Admiral Bey’s message when breaking away from the cruisers that he was under ‘radar-directed fire from a heavy unit’ was the sole reference to this absolutely vital aspect of the battle. In the run-up to the decision to send the battlecruiser out in the first place, he omitted the suspicious message from 200 miles astern of the convoy which turned out to have been from the
Duke of York
, and the weather forecasts of gales and snowstorms, depicting what was really a gamble of extreme hazard as a simple operation on which all were agreed: ‘In my opinion and in
that of the Fleet Command and the naval High Command this was a great chance for the
Scharnhorst
.’
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Most disgraceful of all was a subtle attempt, like the one he had made in the aftermath of the action, to shift blame to the shoulders of Admiral Bey; since Bey had been unable to make a report and explain his decisions, he wrote, it was not known whether the battle could have been handled in ‘other or better ways’, and therefore one could not criticize, ‘only raise questions’, which he proceeded to do.
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After his glance at the naval aspects of the various theatres of war came five pages on the July 20th plot. This, he wrote, had to be seen free from present political prejudices. The mass of German people at the time stood behind Hitler; ‘one had no inkling of the facts known to the resistance, which induced them to act’.
¹⁴⁹
Even without the knowledge since gained from the archives this was a truly breathtaking statement; the plotters’ legal adviser came from within his own service! It would have been better for his reputation if he had omitted the sentence and dealt with the affair on the practical basis of the internal chaos which must have resulted if the plot had succeeded—as he proceeded to do.

As for his feelings towards the plotters now, if they knew of the outrages ‘which today we all know’, he could not dispute their motives. At the time, however, the Navy had not had the same contacts with Hitler as the generals, since Hitler personally conducted the land battles, whereas the sea war was something foreign and uncanny to him. Moreover, the Navy had not seen what many generals and army staff officers had seen of Himmler’s activities behind the lines in the east. Any tolerably informed person might have asked him what naval officers in the Baltic bases had been doing when the Jews were rounded up and deported from there, what indeed he and his officers in Paris were doing when that city had become the centre for deportation of French Jews. But a more fundamental question from the point of view of the rational prosecution of the war was, did Army and Navy officers have no contact even at the highest level? The whole section is an insult to the intelligence of his readers—although not, it seems, to many reviewers of the English-language edition in Great Britain and America.

There followed 26 pages on the U-boat war from May 1943 to the end. The staggering sacrifices of men and materials during this period he justified chiefly on the grounds of the huge allied resources that would otherwise have been released for the offensive against German coasts, sea traffic and civil population, also because morale would have collapsed
if they had broken off the campaign and it would have been difficult to re-start afterwards with the new boats. He ended this section with Churchill’s tribute in his
History of the Second World War
to the stubbornness and implacable courage with which the U-boats had fought to the very end.
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The remaining 42 pages of text were taken up with the final months of the war; it was the allies’ demand for unconditional surrender, and their plans for the partition and destruction of the German nation, that had been responsible for the German continuation of the war to the bitter end; as for himself, he had considered the rescue of Germans from the east as his first priority, and here he followed his former adjutant, Lüdde-Neurath, whose
Regierung Dönitz
, published in 1950, had already pointed to the disastrous consequences that would have overtaken the armies in the east had they laid down their arms in midwinter.
¹⁵¹
Dönitz did not mention his own support for Hitler’s determination to hold the Baltic areas to the last—the real reason why so many troops were in the east and why the evacuation had to be carried out under such gruelling conditions. The legend of the rescue of millions of easterners had been prepared by his adherents; he only had to confirm it, and of course he did.