Dönitz: The Last Führer (83 page)

Ludovic Kennedy, who was making the programme, recalled his first impression as being, ‘how small he was, in repose like a wizened nut, in conversation like a virile old ferret’.
¹⁶⁵
He had written out some fifteen pages, partly in English partly in German, in reply to the two questions it had been agreed he would be asked in front of the camera; he read them out as if addressing ‘the furthest sailor on the longest parade ground in the Third Reich’. The essence of it was that if he had had the 300 U-boats he had asked for in the beginning, ‘I think we would have won the war by 1942’. Kennedy visited him on another occasion after the release of the ‘Ultra’ secrets revealing how the allies had cracked the U-boat code; when he told Dönitz of this, Kennedy had the impression he did not believe him.
¹⁶⁶

The British television team formed the impression of an austere old man accustomed to a frugal existence, dapperish but rather frail; the Cambridge historian, Jonathan Steinberg, another of the many visitors to the Aumühle flat, felt himself in the presence of someone from the lowest circle of Dante’s inferno, where all are frozen to ice. He came to life only twice during the interview, on the first occasion showing great anger that he had had to go to war on two occasions with the wrong weapons, and deploring the shortage of U-boats he had had to work with, the second time when he came to the subject of the
Scharnhorst
, again growing heated and justifying his decisions over her last sortie at great length.
¹⁶⁷

Photographs of him from the period convey an impression of a man peering out suspiciously from inside his skull as if haunted by the past and wondering whether it was going to blow up beneath him; perhaps the Judges at Nuremberg had sentenced him to a crueller fate than those who were hanged.

Undoubtedly he was retreating into himself. His daughter, Ursula, recalls how he seemed to recover physically from his ordeal in Spandau, but as time went on it had become evident he had not recovered in spirit. Even before Ingeborg’s death he had become intolerant of any differences of opinion; growing deafness did not make him any easier, and the Hessler family visits to Aumühle became more infrequent. She had the impression in the later years that he was quite glad to be left alone again when they had gone. They tried to get him to have a housekeeper but it
was impossible to discuss anything with him, and he continued to make do with a Prussian woman who came three times a week.
¹⁶⁸

His youngest niece, Brigitte, may have provided some of the brightest moments of his final years. She came to see him first after a break of over 25 years in about 1970, and he was visibly moved by the reunion.
¹⁶⁹
After that she made visits from time to time, and he would take her out to eat at one of the local restaurants where he was a well-known figure, greeted by young and old alike, and talk to her of his younger days and of her father, his brother … and of those uncomplicated times of striving in his profession, the finest there was:

By the 1970s it is probable he had convinced himself of his innocence of war guilt—it is possible, of course, that he had convinced himself even before the end of the Nuremberg trials—and his greatest disappointment—after the failure of his U-boat campaign—was the failure of the efforts made on his behalf with the Federal Government and with the former allied powers to clear his name. The campaign flickered for the last time in 1976 with the publication of
Dönitz at Nuremberg; a reappraisal
. It was not a reappraisal; no new evidence was produced. After the third of Michael Salewski’s volumes on the wartime naval High Command had come out in 1975 a reappraisal could only have been highly damaging—which is perhaps why the American editors finally brought out the book when they did some twenty years after they started the project. On the other hand, it is possible they were not aware of the evidence which had been surfacing since Nuremberg, which rendered their extraordinary mix of overstated and usually uninformed opinions more valueless than they would have been at the start of the campaign.

Undoubtedly it brought great pleasure to Dönitz and to the old comrades in the naval and U-boat associations who had been working to raise him to the highest pedestal as an officer of ‘unexcelled ability’ who had ‘offered his person and sacrificed his future to save the lives of many thousands of people’—to quote from the book’s extraordinary dedication to him.
¹⁷⁰

He signed a copy for Brigitte in an unsteady hand, and hoped that the government, when they saw it, would permit him a State Funeral. He
told the pastor in whose Church he prayed every Sunday that there was no doubt of his support for the Federal Republic. He would have on his coffin the black, red and golden flag.

By the autumn of 1980 he was obviously failing; almost deaf, practically blind and with the little strength left in his frail body visibly ebbing, he was taken unwillingly to hospital. No recognizable illness could be detected; he seemed merely to have run his course. After a few weeks, on November 20th, his wishes were granted and he was taken back to his flat in Aumühle, where he was cared for by nurses.

His former staff officers and old comrades, who had worked for his defence at Nuremberg, raised funds for Ingeborg to visit him at Spandau, petitioned the powers for his release, built a legend around his name and honoured and comforted him after his release, remained loyal to the end. His morning post was read for him as, neatly dressed and conscious as ever of his duty, he sat in a chair by his telephone with a glass of white Vermouth before him, and shouted replies, which were typed and sent. Towards Christmas, men from the
Deutscher Marinebund
came to his flat and sang him carols and the old sea-songs he loved,
Kameraden, wann sehen wir uns wieder?
—‘Comrades, when shall we meet again?’ He received them afterwards in his book-lined room and shook each by the hand. ‘You have made me very happy.’ Then he retired to the bedroom where pictures of his father and his wife and children were arranged on a chest of drawers beneath a carved wooden crucifix.
¹⁷¹

He seldom found the strength to leave his bed during these final days. As one of those closest to him put it, his life waned like a candle flame which becomes very small before finally it extinguishes.
¹⁷²

The flame flickered out quietly at about ten minutes past seven in the evening of Christmas Eve.

The old comrades, as bitterly disappointed as he had been at the refusal of the Bonn government to grant him a State Funeral, or even to permit uniforms to be worn at any private funeral, made their own arrangements to pay their last respects at the Bismarck Memorial Chapel in Aumühle on January 6th 1981.

Finally, after the crowds have departed the churchyard, one stands before the great carved Christ crucified, crowned with snow, thinking of his last pronouncements, ‘My position would have been completely different if I had not been Hitler’s successor. But no one asks me today,
“What would have happened had Himmler been appointed to my position in the last days of the
Reich
? … I did everything humanly possible in a chaotic time.’
¹⁷³

Or perhaps his final words were contained in a letter dictated in halting English in February 1971, only to be opened and published after his death:

To be buried under the flag of the Federal Republic and admit publicly that the central tenet of Nazi world philosophy had been wrong was a long way for Dönitz to have travelled. How far had he come in private? Was it personal loss and imagined injustice that had turned him to ice—as Speer thought, a man without insight? Or had he recognized his years of power for what they were, the blood-seal of his nation’s pact with the Anti-Christ? Did such a perception rush in perhaps during those last moments on Christmas Eve immediately before he stood before the judgement seat of Christ?

Postscript

Since first publication of this book I have received many letters from U-boat specialists and former officers of the U-boat arm who knew Karl Dönitz; the information conveyed scarcely changes the portrait in these pages, rather, it hardens it, as will appear.

I was charged by a few reviewers with showing ‘distaste’ for Dönitz, even ‘torturing’ the evidence against him; one accused me of a total want of charity. I am not sure this was fair. I made it plain at the beginning that this was a story of corruption—the corruption of a man by a system of power. Dönitz dedicated himself to that system, which in the end was wholly evil, dispensing evil, and he rose to its very heart and head. If, as his early reports surely indicate, he had once been a decent, able, sympathetic naval officer; if in the face of the Communist threat after the First War he, like most of his fellows, chose the national, anti-Communist path that led to Hitler; if, as suggested on
page 137
, the strength of his commitment had its root in the suppression of a naturally sensitive nature under the weight of the corrupted Prussian ethic the Nazis took over from the
Freikorps
; if, like hosts of decent Germans of the officer and professional middle classes who made the system possible, he was a product of historical forces, he was also, at the end, despite his navy blue uniform, a key part of the system. Charity is an appropriate response to the German tragedy and the millions of personal tragedies, of which his is but one; and in my account of his life I attempted to trace the springs of his pre-eminent tragedy. But I do feel that for the system and the man who came to embody it, charity has no place.

The U-boat historian Bodo Herzog wrote that several former German naval officers with whom he had spoken agreed unreservedly with the portrait of Dönitz presented here, although they would never commit their views to paper.
¹
In reviewing the book, however, he quoted others who had written similar things: thus Ernst-Günther Unterhorst, former Commander of U 394, U 395, U 396, wrote in 1981: ‘If we speak of
Dönitz … we speak of brutality, human destruction, barbarism as a result of “national sentiment” and National Socialism’.
²
And a decade earlier Herbert A. Werner, author of what is surely the classic human account of the U-boat war,
Die Eisernen Särge (Iron Coffins
), had written of the latter years: ‘…[Dönitz’s] tactics which had once led us to victory, now condemned to death thousands of loyal men in their outdated diving tubes …’ and ‘With the progressive decline of the
Reich
the influence of the Party grew even in the Navy—to the horror of the U-boat veterans …’
³

I suggested in this book that Dönitz, by virtue of his personal insecurities and need for total commitment, was probably an early convert to Nazism;
⁴
Bodo Herzog confirms that this was so: thus, during his call at Capetown in command of the cruiser
Emden
in 1934, Dönitz reported on the ‘Jewish Mayor’ there, the ‘strong Jewish influence in the [Cape] Press’ and their ‘agitation against Germany’.
⁵
It was his own capacity for whipping up National Socialist fervour amongst the expatriate Germans in Africa that persuaded the British Foreign Office to prohibit the official tour he was to have made in the former German colony, now Tanzania (see
page 146
). When in January 1935 the citizens of the Saarland voted themselves German, Dönitz wired Berlin:

Bodo Herzog has also drawn attention to the close connections between the
Kriegsmarine
and the Nazis from the early 1920s when naval
Freikorps
officers helped raise the paramilitary
Sturm-Abteilung
(SA) in Bavaria, and the Navy Office in Kiel founded and funded the extreme right Organization Consul, whose assassination squads murdered the Weimar Republic’s Jewish Foreign Minister, Rathenau, and the Finance Minister, Erzberger. Researches for my biography of Himmler also led me to the connections between the Navy and the SS. Besides Reinhard Heydrich, many other one-time naval officers held the highest positions in Himmler’s organizations. Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeberg, who but for the outbreak of war would have succeeded Dönitz in command of the U-boat arm in October 1939, was particularly close to Himmler. On February 24th 1943, less than a month after Dönitz succeeded Raeder as Navy Commander-in-Chief, Himmler convened a meeting aboard the
U-boat arm flagship
Erwin Wassner
to explore means of increasing the underwater speed of U-boats, as a result of which von Friedeberg ordered the development of oxygen turbines.
⁷
Thereafter, the naval construction departments worked closely with SS industrial enterprises exploiting slave labour both in the yards and for special developments. Thus in October 1943 Albert Speer,
Generalfeldmarschall
Milch and Dönitz (who it will be recalled were the three main speakers at the infamous Convention that same month when Himmler revealed the secret of the extermination of the Jews, men, women and children, to the assembled Reichsleiters and Gauleiters—see
pages 322
–
5
) jointly set up a High-Frequency research unit in the concentration camp, Gross Rosen.
⁸
And in the final stages of the war Himmler collaborated in the development of a fast speedboat and flying boat with Vice Admiral Heye’s Small Craft division (see
page 357
).
⁹

Turning to Dönitz’s personality, I have been fortunate in meeting and engaging in lengthy correspondence with Peter Hansen, a former U-boat officer of perceptive and individual mind. His main criticism of my portrait was the reference on pages
269
–
70
to Dönitz’s possessions and collections, and the implication of corruption. The imposing villa in Dahlem, the Mercedes and other trappings of Nazi power came with Dönitz’s promotion to Commander-in-Chief, Hansen wrote; ‘Dönitz did not hanker for these things… [all] he wanted [was] the platform and the power to move things’. As for his collections:

Hansen recalled times when Dönitz handed cash to junior officers who had blown all their money on girls and champagne, or instructed his
adjutant to give them enough to visit their family or parents in Germany ‘and buy them some presents too, even if they would have preferred to stay in France instead’. This money came from his own pocket. Some officers even signed IOUs at nightclubs such as the Sheherezade in Paris, asking for the bill to be sent to Dönitz at U-boat headquarters:

A minor correction: U-boat headquarters at Kerneval was not called ‘
Sardinenschlösschen
’—or ‘Sardine Chateau’—on account of its small size (see
page 227
) but because it had been owned before the war by a tycoon who made his fortune from tinning sardines. As for the amateurishness of the staff-work there, Hansen is clear that while ‘discussions were lengthy, constant and never-ending in many respects, the facts were
never
ferreted out’.
¹²
Part of the reason was that Dönitz had to live within the financial budgets and staff allocations set at Navy High Command in Berlin, where many senior Admirals disliked and distrusted ‘the war of the
Kapitänleutnants
’ and ‘used every possible bureaucratic device to keep the U-boat arm and Dönitz from gaining more influence, funds and staff’.
¹³
As a result Dönitz never managed to add to the authorized staff positions. As mentioned, all his staff officers were overworked, or as Hansen puts it ‘vastly overburdened with the usual and often excessive daily grind of paper-shuffling and filing’. This was aggravated by a shortage of support staff, chiefly for the same budgetary reasons, and Hansen points out, ‘there was
never
a single female auxiliary staff member authorized for the BdU or assigned to U-boat Command, even after Dönitz commanded the entire Navy establishment… even as late as 1945!’
¹⁴
This, of course, was a result of Nazi ideology.

However, faulty staff-work and failure to adapt until too late to the constantly changing conditions of U-boat warfare was in part grounded in Dönitz’s own personality. Peter Hansen confirms Hansen-Nootbar’s comment (see
page 271
) that Dönitz lacked an understanding of other people; ‘he was very slow in judging people upon their ability …yes-men
and ass-kissers could often fool him, at least for a period of time’ and he ‘instinctively disliked the outspoken man who did not mince words’. A former naval officer who prefers to remain anonymous had very personal experience of this when assigned to the staff while recovering from wounds after a front patrol. His position, newly created, was ‘Opponents’ Representative’; his task, to examine the Intelligence the Allies might have and from this deduce their next moves. Taking his work seriously, he was not ‘super-respectful’:

He made three presentations to Dönitz and Godt, which apparently so disturbed them that his position was immediately abolished, never to be resurrected, and he was posted back to sea. Only Dönitz’s son-in-law, Günther Hessler, 1a on the staff, seemed to realize that he had performed what he had been called upon to do, and had not been entirely wrong or pig-headed. But of course Dönitz had never listened to conclusions if they crossed his own blood reasoning. Moreover, since in totalitarian systems facts become polished as they go up the chain of command, and since Dönitz was taken in by ‘yes-men’, the versions he received were generally rosier than the actual position warranted; as already noted, he then polished them up further for Hitler, whom he regaled often with pure fantasy. The officer received the impression from his experience that despite the stories put about that Dönitz encouraged different opinions and contrary viewpoints, he actually disliked them intensely, and discussing them was only a matter of form; for he had already made up his mind and reached his decision.
¹⁶
All this helps to explain his continued obsession with numbers of boats long after the Type VIIs had been outclassed by Allied counter-measures, and his disinclination to think in new directions until the disasters of May 1943 forced the realization that his boats and tactics were obsolete.

Peter Hansen characterized him as rigid in thought and slow in comprehension, certainly by comparison with such multi-faceted characters as Admirals Canaris and von Friedeberg, both of whom he also knew personally; even Dönitz’s sense of humour he described as ‘very
limited indeed, as he was slow to catch on to any double meanings in conversations, jokes or stories’. In contrast to von Friedeberg, who was ‘a very fast judge of people and their character’, Dönitz ‘needed a comparatively long time to get used to new faces and people, and took very long to judge halfways properly the real worth of a person’.
¹⁷
This comment is particularly interesting in the light of Dönitz’s veneration for Hitler as he led the
Reich
to destruction.

One symptom of Dönitz’s lack of mental agility, Hansen noted, was a dislike of the telephone, which might bring surprises and face him with unexpected decisions. ‘He needed to take his time to mull things over … [he] was never
Schlagfertig
—or quick-witted. He liked to deliberate on things himself, or sometimes in talking to others …’ Consequently he preferred to conduct business by correspondence, or on teletype;
¹⁸
if a personal word with Berlin were necessary it was usually handled between Godt and Raeder’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Erich Schulte-Mönting.

While the conflict between Raeder and Dönitz in the latter part of 1942 was due to Dönitz’s extreme frustration at the limitations imposed by the Naval Staff, particularly Raeder’s written instruction confining U-boat Command to operations (see
page 261
), Hansen points to the part also played by personality: ‘Erich Raeder was a rather sensitive man and Karl Dönitz anything but, who could be extremely obtuse and had virtually no antennae out to sense the reactions he caused in other people.’ Although Dönitz informed Schulte-Mönting he could not accept Raeder’s order, and if the High Command insisted they would have to relieve him as BdU, Raeder dreaded the adverse publicity this must produce for his beloved service; consequently the order remained in force but was practically disregarded. Dönitz, eventually grasping the strength of his own position, began to take advantage, and Schulte-Mönting had to exert all his considerable emollient powers to prevent the affair blowing up out of control. Raeder himself refused to talk to Dönitz. As Hansen learned from Dönitz’s adjutant, it was only after Raeder had offered his resignation to Hitler in early January 1943 that he again spoke to his BdU, calling him up to ask whether he felt fit enough to succeed him as Commander-in-Chief. After the long rupture, Dönitz was totally unprepared.
¹⁹