Hitler's Commanders (46 page)

Meanwhile, U-boat strength continued to increase, ever so slowly. In the first six months of 1941, there had been an average of 18 boats at sea at any one time. In the second half of the year this average increased to 33. Twenty new U-boats were supposed to join the fleet each month in 1942, but actual production lagged well behind schedule.

When the “happy time” off the American coast ended in the summer of 1942, Doenitz’s men returned to the convoy battle of the North Atlantic. The fight was much more difficult than before, however, because the Allies were using better tactics and new technology. Radar-equipped aircraft, catapult-launched airplanes, new radar that could not be picked up by German detection devices, H/FD/F (the High Frequency Direction Finder, or “Huff Duff”), the Hedgehog depth-charge projector, and the new U.S. and RAF anti-submarine patrol and reconnaissance aircraft all combined to crush the U-boat offensive in May 1943.

Meanwhile, as we have seen, an angry Hitler ordered Grand Admiral Raeder to scrap all the big ships and mount their heavy guns ashore. Raeder resigned, effective January 30, 1943. At Hitler’s request he nominated two suitable successors: Generaladmiral Rolf Carls and Admiral Karl Doenitz. Predictably Hitler chose Doenitz, for several reasons. Primary, of course, was his success as FdU. Also, he found Doenitz’s optimism to his liking; his attitude was more sympathetic to National Socialism than the older Carls’; and Doenitz now had friends at court, most notably Albert Speer, the minister of munitions, and Admiral Puttkamer, Hitler’s naval adjutant. In any event, Karl Doenitz was promoted to grand admiral (Grossadmiral) and commander-in-chief of the German Navy on January 30, 1943. He also received a personal grant of 300,000 marks. One of his first acts was to sack Carls, who, as fleet commander in the 1930s, had been one of his biggest supporters but now was a potential rival. He also cleared the SKL staff of many former Raeder appointees. Clearly, Doenitz intended to have nothing but complete obedience and unquestioning loyalty from below.
39

Karl Doenitz had risen from the rank of captain to grand admiral in less than three and a half years and was now at the height of his power. Ironically, he was also on the verge of his decisive defeat. First, however, he dissuaded Hitler from disbanding the surface fleet, correctly and effectively arguing that a fleet “in being” would tie up a disproportionate number of Allied warships, which could otherwise be used to protect convoys or to fight Japan.

Doenitz moved his headquarters to Berlin but retained effective command of the U-boat branch himself (although his long-time chief of staff, Admiral Eberhard Godt, officially became FdU). From here, Doenitz energetically pursued the Battle of the North Atlantic. In March 1943, his U-boats, now operating in teams called wolf packs, sank 627,300 tons of shipping (120 ships), and a delighted Fuehrer decorated him with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Unfortunately for Doenitz, his losses were also high: 11 submarines did not come home. U-boats returning to their bases on the Bay of Biscay, formerly considered a safe haven, were now being attacked by Liberators, Fortresses, Boeings, and Beau-fighters, launched from the Allies’ new “escort carriers”—converted cargo ships or mini-carriers that could catapult-launch about 20 airplanes. For the first time, the previously exemplary morale of the German submariner began to fall. Doenitz responded by hurling more U-boats into the battle. In April, the Allies lost 64 ships (344,680 tons), but 15 submarines failed to return. U-boat losses now exceeded production, but Doenitz still escalated the battle. In May, however, Allied technology was finally brought fully to bear on the U-boats, and the German submarine arm suffered its decisive defeat. Fifty-eight Allied vessels (299,428 tons) were sunk, but a shocking total of 41 U-boats were destroyed.

Karl Doenitz had no choice but to admit defeat, and on May 24, 1943, he withdrew the depleted wolf packs from the North Atlantic. It is a measure of his influence with Hitler that the dictator accepted this decision without protest or reproach. Nevertheless, the U-boat weapon was finally blunted.

Doenitz’s strategy for the rest of the war was (1) to build more U-boats; (2) to continue the U-boat war, mainly in the “softer” sectors, such as the Caribbean or the area southwest of the Azores; and (3) to press for and await scientific developments that would again shift the balance in favor of Germany. He continued to send U-boats to the North Atlantic periodically but never with appreciable success. In the meantime, the U-boats continued to go out and sink Allied ships; however, almost as many U-boats failed to return. From June through August 1943, only 60 Allied freighters were lost—against 79 U-boats.

German science did produce a submarine (Type XXI) that might have been able to defeat the Allied convoy and escort system, but it was developed too late to make any difference. During the D-Day invasion, Doenitz ordered the last, massive commitment of submarines against the Allied navies. In all, 36 U-boats were committed. Fewer than half survived. Between June 6 and August 31, Doenitz continued to feed forces into the battle, in a desperate and fanatical attempt to influence the course of events no matter what his casualties were. His stubborn and unreasonable efforts were futile and were responsible for the needless deaths of hundreds of German sailors. Between June 6 and August 31, German submarines sank five escort vessels, 12 ships totaling 56,845 tons, and four landing craft totaling 8,400 tons. Eighty-two U-boats were lost during the same period.
40
Out of the 820 U-boats the German submarine branch committed to the Battle of the Atlantic from 1939 through 1945, 781 were destroyed in action. Out of 39,000 U-boat men who fought there, 32,000 lost their lives—most of them in the last two years of the war.

During his tenure as grand admiral, Doenitz was a loyal and sometimes enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler, backing his Fuehrer on every possible occasion, including such militarily senseless decisions as holding Tunisia in the spring of 1943; hanging onto the bridgehead in northeastern Sicily in August 1943; defending the Crimean peninsula between October 1943 and April 1944; and keeping Army Group North isolated in Courland in 1944 and 1945, when Germany needed every soldier it could muster to defend the Fatherland. Doenitz also issued propaganda statements echoing Goebbels, Goering, and so on; praised Hitler at every opportunity; called for fanatical offensives in highly inappropriate situations; and made sure that the navy was ideologically “pure” (i.e., pro-Nazi). Whether or not he knew of the mass murders of the Nazi regime is still the subject of debate, but he did use slave labor in his construction program and was at least outwardly friendly with Heinrich Himmler. On April 19, 1945, he evacuated his headquarters (on the outskirts of Berlin) only 24 hours before the Soviet tanks arrived. He then visited Hitler at the Fuehrer Bunker on April 20—the Fuehrer’s 56th and last birthday. Ten days later Hitler shot himself. To the surprise of many, his last will and testament named Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor and head of state.

Doenitz had initially transferred his headquarters to Ploen, but on May 2 he relocated it (and the capital of the Reich) to the Naval Cadet School at Muerwik, near Flensburg, at the far north of the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula. Here he pursued the twin policies of trying to end the war against the Western Allies as soon as possible while simultaneously saving as many Germans as possible from the Soviets. He sent every available naval and merchant vessel to the Baltic ports still in German hands, with orders to bring out every refugee they could. The troop units still fighting were ordered to cover the evacuation of the refugees and then escape to the west themselves. It has been estimated that 2 million civilians escaped Soviet captivity in the eight days that Doenitz prolonged hostilities. However, at 2:30 a.m. on the morning of May 7, Colonel General Jodl was forced to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender. It was to take effect at midnight on May 8–9. Doenitz continued the fiction of governing Germany until 9:45 a.m. on May 23, when he was summoned to the liner
Patria
and arrested by U.S. Major General Lowell W. Rooks of the Allied Control Commission. He was put on trial at Nuremberg as a major war criminal. Interestingly, he was forced to undergo an I.Q. test first. He scored 138 (borderline genius). Had he not been “the last Fuehrer,” Karl Doenitz probably would not have been indicted as a major war criminal. On the witness stand (May 8–10, 1946) he put up a strong defense in his own behalf, stating that as an officer it was not his place to decide if a war was “aggressive” or not but that he had to obey orders. After Doenitz finished testifying on May 9, Hermann Goering declared to those around him, “Ah, now I feel great for the first time in three weeks! Now we finally hear a decent German soldier speak for once!”
41

Unlike most trials, at Nuremberg the defense had to present its case first. Also, defense objections had to be submitted in writing and the court answered them at its leisure—making them practically useless. Doenitz nevertheless held his own. When asked if he was interested in the fact that naval arms had been produced by slave labor, he denied any knowledge of it but added that he was only interested in the production itself, not where the weapons came from. (The debate over whether or not Doenitz lied about not knowing that slave labor produced naval armaments continues to this day, but it seems extremely likely that he did.) He denied having anything to do with the concentration camps but admitted ordering the sinking of neutral ships in war zones, declaring this perfectly proper. They had been warned to stay out, he said, and if they risked entering a war zone for the sake of profit, they should be prepared to suffer the consequences. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt had recognized this fact, the admiral said, when he stated that merchant ships had no right to risk the lives of their crews by entering a war zone just to make a profit. The prosecution countered by bringing out that Doenitz had advocated occupying Spain (to get her ports and Gibraltar) and asserted that he had supported Hitler in various efforts to prosecute the war aggressively. Doenitz could not deny that he advocated seizing Spain, but he justified his “fanatical” Nazi speeches as necessary to keep up morale, since the collapse of the Eastern Front would have meant death for countless German women and children. He attacked the conduct of the Soviets and denied that he had any idea millions of Jews were being murdered. Unlike some of the other defendants, however, he refrained from denouncing Adolf Hitler.
42

Much of the prosecution’s case hinged on the issue of the legality of unrestricted submarine warfare and was deflated by U.S. Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, who supported Doenitz’s views on the subject. He submitted written testimony, stating that this type of warfare had been the policy of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from December 8, 1941. Several British prisoners also submitted depositions stating that they had been treated in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention while prisoners of the German Navy. Now, almost 50 years later, it appears that much of the case against Doenitz was rather thin. At the time, however, passions were running high, and the Soviets in particular wanted Doenitz’s scalp for rescuing the refugees from the East, for the remarks he made about them from the witness stand, and for his anti-Communist activities, which dated back to the 1920s. The British judge also wanted his head, apparently because his submarines had been too successful. U.S. Judge Francis Biddle thought Doenitz should be acquitted on all counts. The result was a compromise. Doenitz was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment—the lightest sentence of any of those convicted at Nuremberg. Even this relatively light sentence did not satisfy Major General J. F. C. Fuller, the distinguished British armored theorist and military historian, who a decade later was still describing Doenitz’s sentence as a “flagrant travesty of justice resulting from hypocrisy!”
43

Doenitz was imprisoned at Spandau. He had an easier time of it than the others because of his Spartan self-discipline and work ethic. He was soon devoting himself to growing things and sometimes produced up to 50 tomatoes on a single plant—he was always the classic overachiever! While in prison, he and Admiral Raeder remained distinctly cool toward each other, and his previous friendship with Albert Speer deteriorated into thinly veiled animosity because of the munitions minister’s testimony at Nuremberg. Contrary to his hopes, Doenitz served every day of his sentence and was released on October 1, 1956.

Frau Ingeborg Doenitz had been working as a nurse in a Hamburg hospital while her husband was in Spandau. He rejoined her in the nearby residential town of Aumuehle, a quiet, pleasant community where she rented the ground floor of a villa. She had had to struggle to make ends meet, but Karl soon managed to get his pension restored (as an admiral, not as a grand admiral), so they were able to live comfortably. Doenitz spent most of the time immediately after his release hard at work, writing his memoirs, which were published in 1958 under the title
10 Jahre und 20 Tage
(
Ten Years and Twenty Days
), which was later printed in English. Later he wrote
Mein wechselvoltes Leben
(
My Eventful Life
, published in 1968) and
Deutsche Strategie zur See in zweiten Weltkrieg
(
German Naval Strategy in World War II
, published in 1969), which was retitled
40 Fragen an Karl Doenitz
(
Forty Questions to Admiral Doenitz
) in later editions.

His wife died on May 2, 1962, and the rest of his life was lonely. Now a Christian, he had a huge cross erected over her grave. He went to church every Sunday and still attended dinners and enjoyed visiting and receiving old comrades, but he became more introverted and more easily angered. Perhaps this can be partially explained by his Spandau years, his advanced age, and his growing frailness and deafness. He was particularly disappointed with the German people, who, he felt, had unjustly turned against him. He was also annoyed by the Bonn government’s continued refusal to clear his name, despite the efforts of various U-boat associations on his behalf. He was also bitterly disappointed when the government refused to grant him a state funeral or to allow uniforms to be worn at a private one.