Battleship Bismarck (12 page)

The second half of November was spent in more tests of the
Bismarck
and her engines. The only thing new was that gunnery drill was added to the routine. Not only were the brand-new guns tested for steadiness, the smooth working of their mechanisms, ballistic performance, and accuracy, but the resistance of the ship’s components to recoil was also tested. Practice firings served to train the gunlayers in the best way of keeping on target. These drills could be carried out satisfactorily at close range with 8.8-or 5-centimeter sub-caliber guns inserted into the barrels of the heavy and medium guns. Because the shells and powder charges used were relatively light, this kind of firing was economical. At the same time, it gave the gunnery officers practice in fire control.

Full-caliber firing! Unforgettable was the day the
Bismarck’s
heavy guns fired their first full salvo. How far, how violently would the recoil cause the ship to heel over, how quickly would she right herself? Below, in the engine rooms, where steam pressure was fifty-six times that of the atmosphere, the seconds passed slowly. A single crack in the main steam line caused by the shock of firing could result in the death of everyone in the engine room. Boom! The ship seemed to be abruptly jarred sideways, a few loose objects came adrift, a few light bulbs shattered, but that was all. Topside and in the control centers, it was quite different. Up there, the sideways movement was scarcely noticeable. Of course, the concussion had already been felt throughout the ship. Her steadiness in the water showed the
Bismarck
to be an ideal gun platform.

The
Bismarck
shows her rakish, modern lines in Kiel Bay in late 1940. A censor slightly altered her appearance by removing the radar antenna from her foretop range-finder cupola. (Photograph courtesy of Blohm & Voss.)

At the end of her trials, the ship was scheduled to return to Blohm &. Voss in Hamburg so that the yard could give her the “finishing touches” it had not been able to complete by September. On 5 December, therefore, the
Bismarck
departed Rügen under escort of
Sperrbrecher 6
and steamed for Kiel. Passage of the canal again took two days, and on 9 December we were back in Hamburg.

On 17 December, Reich Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels spoke in a shipyard workshop to the employees of Blohm & Voss, who had been assembled for a plant rally. His listeners also included some of Hamburg’s leading personalities, among them the chief of the Hamburg naval station, Vizeadmiral Ernst Wolf.

Goebbels began by thanking the workers for their stalwart conduct and disciplined labor in the face of the British night air raids. He called the shipbuilders and the yardworkers soldiers of labor in a Germany that was conducting a total war, a people’s war “in the best sense.” The Führer had not wanted this war, had for long years called upon Europe to be sensible and made peace proposals. Nothing had availed. But now, when England had forced the nation into war, Germany would stake everything on ending it victoriously. In this war, in which as in any conflict the victor creates legal title by force of arms, the German people had the opportunity to make good the mistakes of four hundred years of German history. While other peoples had divided the world among them, Germany had become Europe’s battleground. But today the politically and racially united German Reich was proclaiming its rights. The dictate of Versailles had circumscribed German living space to an intolerable extent after the German leadership had failed at the decisive hour. That sort of failure was impossible today, because it was the Führer’s unshakeable will to win the war for the whole Folk. Germany would finally have its just share of the world’s riches, and above all be able to solve its social problems in a generous and exemplary manner. For the attainment of this goal the Führer had personally made himself the guarantee, and in Germany only his word had weight.

The employees of the Blohm &. Voss yard enthusiastically joined in the
“Sieg heil!
” to Hitler with which the minister closed his address.

Well, now, Herr Goebbels, you’ve really let the cat largely—if not completely—out of the bag, I thought when I read excerpts of his
speech in the
Völkischer Beobachter
(Hamburg edition) the next day. Of course Goebbels had repeatedly offered the elimination of Versailles as an alibi for the war; but then he had said something very different and exceptionally honest: “In this war, in which as in any conflict the victor creates legal title by force of arms, the German people has the opportunity. …”

Donnerwetter
, that was clear: the formulated primacy of might over right, certainly over the “right to a homeland,” which in the eyes of the Brown despots did not belong to the “subhamans” of the East, and for which, after the German military disaster, the displaced German nationals who had conveniently forgotten Hitler’s and Goebbels’s principles of conquest would strive as a God-given right.

“To make good the mistakes of 400 years of German history . . . its just share of the world’s riches.” Certainly, that was it.

Four hundred years ago there had been a vast Kingdom of Poland, a Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretching almost to Smolensk, and later an even further-reaching Kingdom of Poland.

Owing to my family history I had carried a map of the east inside by head since childhood. My forebear Gebhard had come to the east in the seventeenth century as a result of the masterful hantsmanship that made him known far beyond the borders of his Alsatian homeland—where in the German Imperial Free City of Strassburg his ancestor Burcard had received and quartered in his mansion Kaiser Rudolf von Habsburg and his retinue in 1284 and the latter’s son King Albrecht in 1300.

While still a youth Gebhard was called by Kaiser Ferdinand II to be chief hunting master at the Vienna Hofburg and, upon the emperor’s recommendation, to the court of Warsaw in order to introduce German-style hunting in Poland. With letters patent dating from 1625 he had served Prince Wladislas Sigismund (subsequently King Wladislas IV) and his successor Johann II Casimir as a master of the hunt and of falcons in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and as a royal Polish chamberlain, attaining Polish indigenous rights in 1635. In his new homeland Gebhard was granted extensive landed properties. He became Starost
*
of Bersteningken, Striowken, and Masselingken. He acquired estates in Prussia as well, becoming hereditary lord of Puschkeiten, with Schleidanen, Meisterfelde, Stockheim, Dommelkeim in Samland, Frisching and Palpasch in what later became the District
Prussian Eylau, Podollen in District Wehlau, and Moritzkehmen and Plauschwarren in District Tilsit. Gebhard also served Wladislas in his campaigns against Moscow and the Turks. The Cossack rebellion, the invasion of Poland by 200,000 Tartars who plundered and burned almost to Warsaw, and growing social and political unrest in Poland, cumulatively led him to lay down his Polish offices in 1668 and go back to Prussia, where he died in 1674 and was buried in the Sackheim Church in Königsberg.

To burst into the east already scarred by the bloody migration of peoples, to conquer, plunder, and practice “racial hygiene,” to put forward the revision of Versailles as a curtain raiser for territorial conquests—a military hors d’oeuvre—one could have gradually grasped that to be Hitler’s goal whether or not one had read
Mein Kampf
, and I had not.

Hitler’s supreme goal was “total war”—the military expression that since the publication of Ludendorff’s
Der totale Krieg
in 1935 had been embraced by the totalitarian regime as the mark of a “heroic” new era and had become a sponsored slogan. It was a war in which the entire personal, material and spiritual strength of a people would be used against the entire enemy people, not just its armed forces. After years of preparation this now to be considered “total” war was underway. It had exploded with growing force and would predictably become increasingly ruthless, ruled more and more by feelings of hate and revenge; thus, it must appear ever more inappropriate for bringing about any kind of acceptable settlement.

But moderation was not Hitler’s concern. To the contrary, as legal title to the conquests he expected in enemy territories, Goebbels had only paraded the same cherished thesis, according to which in total war the role of policy was merely to serve military realities: that the place one’s infantry reached in the enemy homeland would dictate the content of policy. That was it, the absolute immoderation of Hitler’s policy, once more displayed by Goebbels—to those who saw, anyway.

Among those who had recognized Hitler’s immoderation early was Eric Arthur Blair, later to become famous as George Orwell. In March 1940, he had written in
The New English Weekly:
“Suppose that Hitler’s programme [in
Mein Kampf]
could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (i.e., stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible, brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for
war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.” Exaggerated, certainly, but scarcely moreso than Hitler’s sick visions.

I had to think of the man for whom my ship, the
Bismarck
, was named. One of my relatives had worked as chief nurse in the colonial hospitals at Tanga and Dar-es-salaam in German East Africa from 1911 to 1913 and subsequently animated me to study our colonial history. I had come to understand with what extreme, endless caution, what intense watchfulness, what understanding of the whole European scene, and with what a fine sense of international risks Bismarck had dared to take even the smallest step of colonial expansion. “The papers are full of the launch of the
Bismarck
, so named because of the Führer’s love of him,” Troubridge wrote in his diary for 15 February 1939: “Let us hope that they follow Bismarck’s policy, which was one of friendship for England or at any rate avoidance of a clash.” What a striking contrast between the insatiable conqueror Hitler and the statesman Bismarck, whose name the Brown despot had so shamefully misused through his christening of my ship.

It seemed to me a confirmation of my thoughts, my conception of Hitler as a conscienceless gambler, when, a day after Goebbels’s speech, he spoke to officer aspirants at the Berlin Sports Palace of “the necessity of struggle in general,” the need “to beat, or you will be beaten—kill, or you will be killed” and characterized the world as a “traveling cup” that was continually awarded anew to the bravest people. There was at present no world power that possessed so great a core of racially homogenous people as the German Folk, which he had made ready for this war, resolved to do nothing halfway and stake everything on the turn of the card. Should the 85 million Germans in national solidarity succeed in making good their claim to life, Europe’s future would belong to them—if not, then this people would fade away, it would sink back, and it would not be worthwhile to live among this people.

Living in an environment in which there was no room for a critic of Hitler, I could again react only with impotence, choke back my cold rage at the tyrant, and withdraw still more deeply into myself. This is your war, Herr Hitler, I thought, not the German people’s. You’ve got it all backwards—only when you and your system have one day disappeared, only then, when hopefully we will again be ruled by a statesman rather than a gambler, only then will it again he worthwhile to live.

Over Christmas, we were given leave. For most of us, this was our last chance to be with our families. Those who could not get away were able to spend a few more hours in hospitable Hamburg. I enjoyed two weeks of marvelous skiing in the Bavarian mountains.

Schloss Puschkeiten near Königsberg, seat of the Prussian branch of the von Müllenheim-Rechberg family, 1647–1742. (Engraving from the author’s collection.)