Read Dönitz: The Last Führer Online
Authors: Peter Padfield
Dönitz: The Last Führer (56 page)
The word ‘silence’ could simply have meant not complaining; in view of the stories of SS atrocities in the east which were circulating at all levels in
Germany,
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and news about the extermination of millions of Jews being put out by the BBC and other forbidden stations, it probably had a more sinister implication.
It was of this time that a former petty officer from U 333 reminisced long after the war. Referring to the preferential treatment and extra comforts provided for U-boat crews on their return from the ‘front’, he spoke of his own boat’s return from a war cruise in the summer of 1943. The men were presented with a wooden chest of watches from which to choose what they wished. The watches were all second-hand, all in working order; a few were watches for the blind. ‘Then we knew exactly. That was too macabre. Nobody should say that he knew nothing. We knew at that time where they came from.’
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It is inconceivable that such a crate could have been sent from the death camps in the east to the Biscay U-boat bases unless Dönitz had arranged it with Himmler.
Lest this story be dismissed as hearsay from long after the event there is documentary and recorded evidence to prove that Dönitz attended the
Tagung
—or Convention—that autumn at Posen, when Himmler first revealed to a select audience of Reichsleiters and Gauleiters his final solution to the Jewish question. The convention was designed to boost the morale of the assembled Party bosses and inform them in particular about armaments production. Bormann and Himmler, who called the convention, had assembled a top-level team for the purpose: besides Dönitz, Albert Speer, five of his Armaments Ministry chiefs and the State secretary of the Air Ministry,
Generalfeldmarschall
Milch, took part.
It was not a pleasant group; Milch, for instance, was one of those lost souls who had had to overcome the knowledge that a part of his own blood was Jewish; he had found it necessary to obtain from his father a sworn affidavit that he (Milch senior) had always been impotent, and could not therefore have sired him, and from his mother that his real father was not Milch senior but another of unquestioned Nordic stock. It is noticeable there was no representative from the Army among the team of guest speakers; it was a Party occasion; only those dedicated to the Party and the Führer had been invited.
Bormann opened proceedings, after which the morning session was taken up with the speeches of Speer and his Armaments Ministry colleagues. They then took lunch and left—that at least is Speer’s story, but as Himmler addressed him personally in the course of his own speech
in the afternoon it is not convincing.
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Bormann reconvened the meeting at 3 o’clock, introducing the next two guest speakers from outside the Party circle, Milch and Dönitz. Milch then spoke for 65 minutes and after him Dönitz for 41 minutes, concluding shortly before 5 o’clock.
SA Gruppenführer
Wilhelm Scheppmann followed him, then at 5.30 the
Reichsführer SS
, Heinrich Himmler, rose to make the big speech of the day.
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Why he chose this occasion to reveal the secret of the extermination programme is not clear. Possibly it was because it had become the subject of speculation and dark rumour among those large sections of the German people in contact with men returning wounded or on leave from the east, or who listened to the BBC. On the other hand it may have derived from a conscious or subconscious urge to share his awesome responsibility and implicate the Party as a whole in the task for which the Führer had chosen him. It could also be interpreted as a subtle warning for them and for the German people as a whole of the consequences if the war were to be lost—a prospect now clear to all—giving them additional reason to act ruthlessly against any defeatism and disloyalty. For the same propaganda which espoused the necessity of exterminating Jews within German-occupied Europe raised the spectre of vengeance from Jews outside—namely ‘International Jewry’ operating from London, Washington and Moscow to destroy the German race. It is significant that he addressed himself in a key passage to the subject of vengeance.
Whatever the motives behind the speech, it is scarcely conceivable that Dönitz who had finished his own speech only half an hour before had left the hall by the time Himmler rose; this would have been a gross discourtesy to the
Reichsführer
, who ranked rather above a
Grossadmiral
in the hierarchy. There can be no reasonable doubt, therefore, that he heard all that followed.
What followed was a glimpse into the necessary and inevitable end-product of National Socialist ideology, that had focused from the first on the Jew as the single enemy; the shades and half-tones of the real world of infinite complexity had been seared away by Party propaganda, leaving only stark white and black—the honest German and the Jew. And since the Party had displaced God and for Christian morality substituted the law of survival there was in logic no constraint on action against this blood enemy. If Hitler and Goebbels were the supreme orators, Himmler was the supreme logician, and it was logic—in truth the logic of the asylum, for its premises were based on perceptions which bore no
relation to the real world outside—that he now expounded. All those who heard him became—if they were not already—fully certifiable inmates of the Party asylum.
… I refer, in this closest of circles, to a question which you all, my fellow Party-members, have obviously addressed, which, however, has become for me the most difficult question of my life—the Jewish question. You all take it as self-evident and gratifying that in your
Gaus
there are no more Jews. All Germans—apart from a few exceptions—are also clear that we would not have endured the bombing, nor the burdens of the fourth and perhaps the fifth and sixth years of the war if we had this festering plague in the body of our
Volk
. The proposition ‘The Jews must be exterminated’ with its few words,
meine Herren
, is easily spoken. For him who has to accomplish it, it is the hardest and most difficult of all tasks …
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He spoke matter-of-factly, without emotion, although allowing himself some irony when he digressed for a moment to the question of the ‘decent Jew’; from the number of people in Germany who had their ‘decent Jew’ it seemed there were more of these than the total Jewish population. He soon returned to the matter on hand, asking his audience never to speak of what he told them.
We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? In this matter also I have resolved on an absolutely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—so to speak killing or ordering the killing—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult resolution must be grasped—to cause this people to disappear from the earth. The organization for executing this mission was the most difficult task we have had. It was accomplished without—I believe I am able to say—our men or our Führer suffering injury to soul or spirit. This danger was very close. Between the two possibilities, either being too cruel and becoming heartless and not honouring human life, or becoming weak and by wavering losing nerve—the way between this Scylla and Charybdis is dreadfully narrow.
He passed on to the confiscation of the Jews’ possessions, in which matter too it had been necessary to be absolutely consistent; all had to go
to the
Reich
’s Economics Minister for the benefit of the German people as a whole. From the beginning he had decreed the death penalty for any SS men taking even a Mark for themselves, and in the last few days he had signed—‘I can say it calmly’—some dozen death sentences for his own men. He went on to promise that the Jewish question in occupied countries would be solved by the end of the year, after which there would only be a few solitary Jews left who had taken refuge; then only the question of the half Jews and those who had married Jews would remain to be ‘sensibly and reasonably investigated, decided, then solved’.
He had, he confessed, had enormous difficulties so far as the economy was concerned. In Warsaw, for instance, one ghetto which had taken four weeks to clear—‘Four weeks! We cleared out nearly 700 bunkers!’—had been a centre for the clothes trade.
‘If one had wanted to reach in there in earlier times it would have been “Stop! Armaments work!” Naturally that had absolutely nothing to do with Party Minister Speer—you—’ and one imagines him turning to the guest speakers—‘certainly could do nothing about it. It is the area of alleged armaments work which the Party Minister Speer and I wish to cleanse together in the next weeks and months …
‘With that may I conclude the Jewish question. Now you know your way about, and you will keep it to yourselves. Perhaps in some much later time one will be able to consider whether one should say something more to the German people. I believe it better that we—we as a whole—have done it for our people, have taken the responsibility upon ourselves—the responsibility for a deed, not simply for an idea—and that we take the secret with us to the grave.
‘I come now to the problem of defeatism …’
Dönitz’s and Speer’s reactions to the revelation of the
Reichsführef
’s awesome commitment to the
Volk
—if indeed it was a revelation to them—can never be known. Both carried the secret to the grave. According to one of those present, Baldur von Schirach, an oppressive silence reigned while Himmler spoke; afterwards Bormann closed the meeting with an invitation to snacks. ‘We sat speechless at the tables avoiding one another’s eyes.’
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According to Speer’s recollections in his memoirs—recollections which did not extend to the content of Himmler’s speech—the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters drank themselves
into a stupor that evening, a sight which so disgusted him that the next day he asked Hitler to exhort them to moderation.
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Whatever the truth, it seems possible that the convention served to boost Dönitz’s morale, for on the next day, October 7th, the order about rescue ships first promulgated the previous autumn was repeated over the signature of the FdU, Eberhard Godt, on behalf of the BdU, himself.
There is generally in every convoy a so-called rescue ship, a special ship up to 3,000 tons appointed to pick up the shipwrecked after U-boat attack. Most of these ships are equipped with aircraft and large motor boats and are strongly armed and very manoeuvrable, so that they have been described frequently by Commanders as U-boat traps. Their sinking is of great value in regard to the desired destruction of the steamers’ crews.
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The care which had gone into the wording of this order in case it was discovered by the enemy is evident: the ‘so-called’ rescue ship was in reality a strongly-armed ‘U-boat trap’; this justified the meaningful phrase at the end. But was it remotely likely in the desperate conditions of convoy warfare that Commanders would or could recognize or aim for specific ships?
The new U-boat campaign to wrest back the initiative in the North Atlantic had begun nearly three weeks before. The boats were armed with
Zaunkönig
acoustic torpedoes for use against the escorts, and increased flak armament for defence against aircraft. They also had a new receiving set called Hagenuk for detecting the allied radar beams. This had been developed because the old Metox warning set was believed to emit radiations which gave the U-boat’s position away—a story planted by a captured English pilot. He had told his interrogating officers that the British hardly ever used radar in anti-submarine work since the (Metox) receiver radiation could be detected up to 90 miles away; aircraft simply homed in on this, using their radar in brief bursts to check the range!
While it was realized that the story might be a deliberate deception, it was felt necessary to act on it at once, and Commanders at sea had been instructed not to use their Metox; at the same time Dönitz had leaped to the conclusion, as he told Hitler, that the radiations could explain ‘all the
uncanny and unsolved mysteries, for instance avoidance of U-boat dispositions, losses in the open seas’; future experience would prove whether the ‘conclusion that Metox is responsible for a great part of our losses’ was justified.
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The episode shows how far behind the allies German radar scientists were and suggests that U-boat Command scarcely even comprehended the principles involved. Nor did Hitler; he was happy to agree with Dönitz that Metox ‘radiations’ probably accounted for the former losses.
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As boats carrying all the hopes for the renewed battle in the decisive theatre headed out towards the northern shipping lanes in mid-September,
B-Dienst
reported two westbound convoys, ONS 18 and ON 202, and the boats were ordered into a patrol line across their track. The signals were deciphered at Bletchley Park, however; a support group and shore-based Liberators were sent to augment the convoy escort, and on the 19th one of the Liberators sank U 341; the leading convoy was sighted on the same day and touch was held. Two boats made unsuccessful attacks that night, but battle was not really joined until the next night, by which time the second, faster convoy had come up into the same area. The boats had orders to use their acoustic torpedoes on the escorts first and they succeeded in damaging one frigate so badly that she had to be towed home; they also sank two merchantmen. Liberators from Iceland joined at dawn and one of these employing an acoustic torpedo under development at the same time as the German weapon sank a second U-boat; two other boats were damaged. That evening the pack evened the score by sinking two surface escorts with
Zaunkönigs
, but the fiercest battle took place on the fourth night when yet another escort was sunk, together with four merchantmen, for the loss of only one boat. By the next morning there was full air cover as the convoys reached Newfoundland, and the action was broken off.
The results of this four-days’ battle were one destroyer and two smaller escorts sunk, one frigate severely damaged and six merchantmen, totalling 36,000 tons sunk, but the success reports reaching U-boat Command amounted to three destroyers and twelve merchantmen totalling 46,000 tons.
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Dönitz was delight and, encouraged in his belief that the anti-destroyer torpedo was the ‘decisive’ weapon and that the quadruple AA guns could counter the menace from the air, reported to Hitler on the ‘successful’ beginning to the new campaign. Hitler was equally delighted, spoke with ‘unprecedented emphasis on the importance of the U-boat tonnage war, the only light in an otherwise dark
situation’, and stressed that U-boat warfare ‘must be stepped up with all available means’.
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The gleam of light was short-lived. The boats, regrouped to catch reported eastbound convoys, missed them and three were destroyed by aircraft from Iceland. Regrouped again, they only succeeded in finding the escort for the next convoy, and although one destroyer was sunk with a
Zaunkönig
three more boats were lost to air attack. Dönitz, recently returned from the Gauleiters’
Tagung
, formed another patrol line with boats fresh from home and ordered them to stay on the surface when aircraft were sighted, fighting it out with their guns. The results were disastrous: in a five-day battle against two convoys whose own escorts were strengthened by a support group and shore-based Liberators, six U-boats were destroyed for the loss of only one merchantman. This time the lesson was heeded; U-boat Command war diary noted: ‘A U-boat armed with 2-cm flak guns cannot stand up to a heavily-armoured large bomber or flying boat.’
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Yet the illusion of the first success with
Zaunkönig
s lingered on, and a new group named
Siegfried
was formed to find eastbound convoys; it is usually possible to deduce whether Dönitz was personally directing operations from the names given to the groups—
Siegfried
was undoubtedly one of his! The boats were ordered to proceed submerged by day to avoid detection and only to surface at night; still the convoys evaded them and three more boats were sunk. In an attempt to conceal the whereabouts of the patrol lines at the end of October the groups were split into three sub-groups, then on November 5th into five with one boat from each group stationed in advance in the expected direction of the convoy; still they found nothing. Finally new dispositions were formed south-east of Greenland with a number of groups of only three boats each, ordered to remain submerged by day and to surface and keep moving by night to confuse the enemy as to their whereabouts. Still they found nothing, still too many were themselves found and destroyed—in October 26 in all theatres, in November seventeen.
Meanwhile escort vessels had begun towing a noise-making ‘foxer’, under development previously as an antidote to just such a weapon as the
Zaunkönig
; these attracted the acoustic torpedoes away from the ship itself. In addition specialized escort groups had perfected a new tactic for use against deep-diving boats; it involved one ‘directing’ vessel fixing the position of the submerged boat by Asdic, while one or more of the other vessels of the group manoeuvred slowly and silently over it; when
informed by the directing ship that they were in position these fired patterns of deep-set charges to sink in the track of the unsuspecting boat, which had no time to take evasive action before they were exploding around it. This ‘creeping’ attack proved so murderously effective no crews survived to report on it to U-boat Command.
For the second time that year the scale of losses in the North Atlantic reached crisis proportions without compensating successes, and in mid-November, barely two months after the start of the renewed offensive, Dönitz was forced to withdraw; again he moved the groups southwards towards the Gibraltar convoys, leaving the vital northern routes devoid of boats.
It was shortly before this, on November 10th, that naval operations staff laid a draft
Lagebetrachtung
, or general view of the war, before him.
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It was even more pessimistic than the August
Lagebetrachtung
; German forces were everywhere so strained, reserves so short and the allied resources of personnel and material so superior that there was now no possibility of seeking a decision of the war by offensive action. Nor could any comfort be drawn from the situation in the east: the Japanese were in the same position as themselves, on the defensive and strained everywhere. In these circumstances the staff believed that the only way to regain freedom of action and avoid the series of continuing crises was to reduce the frontiers of occupied Europe by strategic withdrawals, and four areas were mentioned—the Crimea, the Baltic, the Aegean and northern Norway. Dönitz had objections to each, as he always had objections to any withdrawal anywhere; each objection was sound in itself; taken together they amounted to a policy of holding on everywhere until forced into involuntary retreat or surrender with huge and unnecessary losses of men and war materials. It was a negation of strategy.
Hitler was frozen in the same attitude. With no hope of an offensive thrust that could lead to victory, surrender not in his vocabulary, his aim had dwindled to holding the frontiers of ‘Fortress Europe’ with iron determination until the providence which had shielded Frederick the Great rescued him. It is possible therefore that Dönitz’s conviction was that of a courtier echoing his master’s views; certainly he was taking great pains to be present at the top councils at this period; he made frequent flights to the
Wolfschanze
, while there staying in a timber building Hitler had made available for him inside the defended perimeter; it was known as the
Haus der Marine
or
Haus Atlantik
. Besides providing
accommodation for him and his staff it was a useful venue for entertaining members of the clique around Hitler or other influential visitors to headquarters.
It would be wrong, however, to interpret his support for Hitler’s policy as mere sycophancy. His skill in angling reports to present an optimistic picture under the guise of objectivity would have enabled him safely to oppose Hitler had he wished to do so; he proved this often enough in naval affairs; had he thought that a withdrawal anywhere was in the best interests of the Navy he could have found suitable arguments. He never did, and the records of his conferences with the Führer suggest that he was usually the first to express the view that one position or another must be held at all cost. The reason is probably quite simple: he still believed he could influence the outcome of the war decisively once the new types of U-boat with high underwater speed were available, but he needed time to put sufficient into commission and to work them up. This certainly coloured his attitude towards the Baltic region, vital for training. Probably, therefore, his vehement support for Hitler was in aid of the U-boat arm.
This is supported by his reaction to the November
Lagebetrachtung
. There was no necessity for him to echo the Führer’s views in his own headquarters, but he expressed himself very bluntly when the draft was laid before him, as a result of which the staff, against their own judgement, trimmed the more negative aspects. This marked the final stage in the intellectual rift between Dönitz and his thinking departments.
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No more overall
Lagebetrachtungen
were produced; the staff was reduced to a mere transmitting organ for his policy; since this was formed, as throughout his career, from a narrow concentration on his own goal with scant attention to the enemy’s strengths or likely moves, and since his natural over-optimism was constantly reinforced during his visits to Führer headquarters, the Navy now finally departed from reality.
This coincided with a physical removal of Command headquarters to a new post in the open countryside some 30 kilometres north of Berlin, known as ‘Koralle’. It was a complex of timber barracks inside a perimeter fence in a pine clearing rather similar to the various Führer headquarters; it had been started in July, but the move had been forced by the heaviest air attack to date on West Berlin on the night of November 22nd; the naval headquarters building on the Tirpitz Ufer was gutted by incendiary bombs, and overall naval command had to be
transferred temporarily to Group North in Kiel. By the end of the month the transfer to ‘Koralle’ had been effected, however, and Dönitz, who made his home with Ingeborg in one of the only two stone buildings in the compound—the other was the Command
Zentral
—remained there until the closing stages of the war. His house was situated on rising ground, the windows commanding a splendid view of wooded and hilly country over which he liked to stride on long afternoon walks with his dog, Wolf, close members of his staff and in the school holidays his three young nieces.
He loved Wolf dearly; his first question of his adjutant after his return from Führer headquarters or one of the front command posts was always ‘How is my dog?’ Since he also loved children there is no doubt that these walks provided his chief, if not his only, relaxation from the increasingly severe strains of his position. Perhaps one of his remarks which his adjutant, Hansen-Noorbar, recalls from this time reveals something of those strains, ‘Hänschen, there is nothing in the world more faithful than a dog. He believes in his master unconditionally. What he does is right.’
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Hitler’s closest and most constant companion was his wolfhound, Blondi, and he was wont to make similar remarks about the wholehearted devotion of a dog to its master. Is this saying of Dönitz’s yet another sign that he had fallen completely under the spell of the Führer, even to copying his remarks, or simply an indication that he, like Hitler, had doubts about the complete loyalty of his staff—or even about the correctness of the path he was following?
He never allowed such doubts to show—unless perhaps to Ingeborg and that can never be known. According to Hansen-Nootbar, she had a ‘very balancing influence’ on him. ‘In my time he was often very agitated by the unfortunately negative events of the war; she understood how to calm him down—which was certainly not always easy.’ Hansen-Nootbar was in a good position to judge since he lived with them virtually as a son of the house, taking his meals with them and in the evenings joining them for bridge—until after a short time Dönitz flung his cards down, ‘It’s not worth playing with you drips [
Flaschen
],’ and announced he was off to bed.
Hansen-Nootbar found Ingeborg a delightful person—indeed he regarded it as his greatest good fortune to have known her; she had a wonderful head, although less fortunate perhaps in figure, tremendous charm, a good sense of humour and was immense fun—‘quintessentially a lady’, he recalls, and ‘a personality I shall never, ever forget’. His view
of Dönitz was more reserved, and he thought he had little humour. This was not surprising perhaps at that cruel stage of the war: the first weeks at ‘Koralle’ coincided with shattering naval setbacks, one of which was final acceptance of defeat in wolf-pack tactics.