Dönitz: The Last Führer (82 page)

His account of the final April days in command of the northern area was concerned chiefly to distance himself from Himmler. His story of their midnight meeting on April 30th after he had been appointed Hitler’s successor is reminiscent of the fantasies he had indulged in in his 1934 account of his Hindenburg Award journey. He had passed Himmler the telegram from Berlin with the curt instruction to read it, and after the SS chief’s servile response, bowing and asking to be his second man, had simply told him he had no use for him!

Coming next to his radio message to the German people in the evening of May 1st, he completely omitted the first section giving the news that Hitler had died a hero’s death ‘fighting to the end against the Bolshevik storm flood…’ Similarly he omitted the opening section from his order of the day to the
Wehrmacht
, that with the death of Hitler they had lost ‘one of the greatest heroes of German history …’
¹⁵²

It would be tedious to list all the half-truths, evasions and downright lies with which the volume is replete—even about the actual course of the U-boat war; it was designed for two main purposes: to justify his own handling of the U-boat arm and, in the later stages, the Navy; and to present himself as an upright and honourable naval officer who had
known nothing of anything else taking place in any other areas. Speer, reading it in his cell in Spandau, felt it ‘the book of a man without insight. For him, the tragedy of the recent past is reduced to the miserable question of what mistakes led to the loss of the war. But should this surprise me?’
¹⁵³

Later Speer wrote that he was becoming more and more puzzled why Dönitz systematically obscured his personal relationship to Hitler, and the high esteem in which Hitler held him. Contrary to the story he himself had told him on the last day in Spandau, Dönitz asserted in the book that Speer had proposed him as the successor, presumably to strengthen his claim that he had no personal relationship with Hitler. ‘Dönitz maintains he had no inkling of Hitler’s esteem for him. Hadn’t it ever struck him that he was one of the very few men awarded the distinction of an armoured Mercedes weighing some five tons? Or that during the last months of the war Hitler forbade him to use an aeroplane? …’
¹⁵⁴

Of course Speer knew exactly what Dönitz was doing in his memoirs, and these published diary excerpts were presumably in retaliation for the hostility he had experienced since Nuremberg.

Dönitz was kinder to Raeder than his attitude in Spandau had suggested; he made much of his own call for a U-boat alternative to the ‘Z-Plan’ before the war, but did not make it a personal matter, no doubt to preserve a united naval front against the politicians; Raeder also brought out his memoirs at about this time and did not say what he had really thought of Dönitz! It is an open question which of the two Grand Admirals produced the more deliberately dishonest volume.

Whether Dönitz still hoped that a turn of the political wheel might reinstate him in his legitimate position as Head of State is difficult to say. He talked of it. When his former adjutant, Hansen-Nootbar, visited him in 1958, they went for long walks as of old and discussed the question, but Hansen-Nootbar could not make out whether he really wanted to involve himself in politics;
¹⁵⁵
Dönitz did say that he believed he meant more to the German
Volk
than they admitted, but this may well have been to impress his former subordinate. The
Wirtschaftswunder
had transformed West Germany by this time. Prosperity and old bourgeois values, which he and everyone else in 1945 had thought would never rise again, had blossomed; few wished to remember the immediate past. He was of that past; probably he realized it.

He attended dinners and numerous functions organized by the various
naval and U-boat associations, received old comrades at his flat, gave interviews and corresponded with historians and others interested in naval affairs from all over the world, but it is probable that he realized his active days were over.

In 1962, in May, his tragic month when he had lost both sons and the U-boat war, and indeed the war itself, Ingeborg died, and the final lonely phase of his life began. He had become a Christian, and he had a large carved wooden crucifix placed over the grave: Christ, as he told his pastor, was the only one to whom, finally, he could adhere.
¹⁵⁶

As he grew older, he dwelled more and more in his grand early years, and began work on another volume of memoirs to cover this period. The volume came out in 1968 as
Mein wechselvolles Leben (My Changeful Life)
. Whereas at the end of his first volume of memoirs he had been concerned to separate himself and the Navy from the criminal side of the regime, in this later volume, no doubt encouraged by many expressions of disgust with the Nuremberg trials from former enemies, he turned his concluding chapter into an attack on the Nuremberg process in general, his own sentence in particular. Relying on the vagueness of the wording in the judgement, he defended himself on three points which, he suggested, had been used to convict him of war crimes: these were the ‘Commando’ order, which had not concerned him when it first appeared, and of which, he wrote, he had heard no further word during his time as C-in-C; his suggestion that concentration camp inmates be used in the shipyards, which he explained in the same terms as he had used at Nuremberg; and finally the charge concerning his attitude to the Geneva Convention, which again he defended in the terms he had used at his trial. He made no mention of the ‘severe censure’ that had been passed on the ambiguity in his
Laconia
orders, and came to the conclusion that the judgement against him had been unjust on every point: ‘It was evidently on political grounds that I had to go behind bars.’
¹⁵⁷

Making all allowance for his personal difficulty in admitting he had been wrong on any point at any time, and the huge difficulty anyone in his position would have had in acknowledging the barbarities he had been a party to, it is still hard to square this aggressively unrepentant attitude with the huge Christ crucified he had erected over his wife’s grave.

He repeated exactly the same line in another volume he wrote at this time under the title
Deutsche Strategie zur See im zweiten Weltkrieg
, changed in later editions to
40 Fragen an Karl Dönitz
(
40 Questions to
Karl Dönitz
). Here he quoted from the many letters he had received from former enemy countries; typical was one he cited from the British military historian, J. F. C. Fuller, who apparently considered the judgement against him ‘a flagrant travesty of justice resulting from hypocrisy’.
¹⁵⁸
Whatever may be said of the more political aspects of the charges, particularly the difficult question of ‘aggressive war’—which it seems from the rest of the letter probably concerned Fuller most—it cannot be said too often that the victors had every right to try individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The law and the machinery were well established and to suggest—if Fuller and the others whose letters Dönitz quoted had indeed suggested—that genocide, the murder of captured prisoners on land and the massacre of shipwrecked survivors at sea, to all of which Dönitz was party, were not illegal at the time the acts were committed is plainly nonsense.

Dönitz was equally happy to cite the opinion of his former enemies about his strategic and tactical conduct of the war at sea; he quoted the British First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Cunningham, writing in the
Sunday Times
, that ‘Karl Dönitz was probably the most dangerous enemy Britain has had to face since de Ruyter’, and that ‘it was extremely fortunate for us that his advice was so little heeded by his political leaders’,
¹⁵⁹
and Stephen Roskill in his official history: ‘The small total [number of U-boats] available early in the year [1942], combined with diversions to unprofitable purposes, now seems to have been a decisive factor in the Atlantic battle.’
¹⁶⁰

Here we are at the nub of the real question about Dönitz’s career and historical importance: could his U-boats have brought Great Britain to her knees if his strategy, of concentrating all naval resources on the U-boat arm and the Atlantic theatre, had been adopted? Like all historical ‘ifs’ this is not a question that can ever be answered. It is no good trying to deduce the tonnage that would have been sunk during 1941 by calculating how many U-boats could have been produced in the time available, how many crews could have been trained, then multiplying the total available for operations by the actual U-boat ‘potential’—or tonnage sunk per U-boat per day at sea. Likely British reactions to mounting losses have to be put into the equation. For had the U-boat campaign looked as if it were about to strangle the British Isles, it must be doubted if it would have taken so long for the Royal Navy to have trained support groups, doubted if the Royal Air Force would have been allowed to misuse its bombers over Germany instead of protecting
merchant shipping. Surely, too, the supply routes would have been concentrated as foreshadowed by
Kapitänleutnant
Fresdorf’s paper in 1939, into a single highway across the North Atlantic from New York, which would have been made the focus of all other routes, and the vast agglomeration of shipping would have been protected by the whole strength of the Royal Navy, including aircraft carriers, for the passage across the ‘air gap’. In short, if the British Admiralty had realized that all German naval resources were being concentrated on the U-boat Battle of the Atlantic, it must have responded with a similar concentration on defence in this area. Common sense and naval history alike suggest that had it done so it would have contained the threat. And if it had begun to look as though it might not, would the United States have stood by passively and watched the penultimate stronghold of the free world go under? There was plenty of uninformed isolationist sentiment around, but Roosevelt, at least, was under no illusions about Hitler’s long-term designs and the danger to America from a Nazi Germany triumphant.

On the German side, quite apart from the effects on the
Luftwaffe
and
Panzer
divisions of such a concentration of resources on the U-boat arm, there was the essential weakness of contemporary U-boats—their low underwater speed. It was not necessary for the British to destroy them, only to force them under so that they lost contact or lost the ability to gain position for attack. To assume that the Royal Navy and Air Force would not or could not have combined to accomplish this is to fall into the very trap that Dönitz constantly fell into, of ignoring or underestimating the reactions of the opponent. Nor should it be forgotten that the decisive step in radar research, the discovery of the magnetron permitting ‘centimetric’ radar, had been made at Birmingham University by February 1940, and therefore all German efforts to step up the U-boat campaign would have been racing British efforts to develop and equip escorts and escorting aircraft with centimetric radar—against whose magic eye the U-boats had no counter.

It may be, therefore, that Dönitz’s assertion that he would have beaten Great Britain if only he had been given 300 U-boats at the beginning—a formula which he continued to repeat against all historical arguments that war against trade alone had
never
succeeded in the long history of naval warfare—was as large, although unconscious, a deception as his insistence that he had been an unpolitical naval officer.

As for the new Electro boats, these were potentially dangerous, but
without
Luftwaffe
support they would have found it as difficult to find targets as the conventional boats, and they had other disadvantages which would have prevented them having more than nuisance value against the allied concentration of sea and air power.

In the early 1970s the past began to catch up with Dönitz. German naval historians had formerly been in the van of academic nationalism, prepared, like Raeder and Dönitz, to bend facts and distort, fake and suppress evidence for what they conceived as the good of the State. Now a new wave of German historians sought truth. Amongst them Volker Berghahn exposed the grandiose ambitions behind the Tirpitz plan, Jost Dülffer exposed Raeder’s role in the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich, Gerhard Schreiber exposed the red thread linking Tirpitz and Raeder, the drive to world mastery, Michael Salewski exposed Dönitz’s total identification with the Nazi State.
¹⁶¹

Meanwhile in America, Professor Erich Goldhagen published evidence that Himmler, during his speech at the Gauleiters’
Tagung
in Posen in October 1943, had addressed an aside to Speer, who must, he asserted, have been present and thus have learned about the extermination programme.
¹⁶²
Speer published a reply saying that he had left Posen after lunch that day, and while Himmler may have thought he was present during his speech in the afternoon, there had been so many in the hall he could not have identified who was and was not there! During this disclaimer, no doubt on purpose, Speer listed all the speakers at the
Tagung
and the times they had spoken—in the fateful afternoon session, Dönitz. For good measure he gave the opening words of Dönitz’s speech.
¹⁶³

Dönitz must now have felt himself under threat from all sides, particularly as denouncements of the U-boat strategy that had caused such heavy losses in the latter stages of the war were appearing in popular works in Germany. It is not surprising, therefore, that when a BBC television team visited him in 1973 in the course of making a series of programmes on the U-boat war, he would not make any spontaneous statements, took out books from the huge collection that lined his walls to verify anything he said, and refused to be drawn on Hitler, in the words of the producer, ‘as if terrified he would be whipped back into Spandau’.
¹⁶⁴
His extraordinarily suspicious attitude struck the producer as bordering on persecution mania. One thing he was happy to talk about, however, was his strategy and tactics; he was proud of having
evolved an ‘unbeatable strategy’ for the defeat of England, and could have done it, he said, had it not been for political animals like Göring and Bormann.