Battleship Bismarck (56 page)

“No,” I said finally, “how could I?”

“Yes,” Izzard continued, “today Goebbels had to get up very early
again and tell the German people that the Russians are still utter swine.”

If at best the war in the east reaches a stalemate, thought I, but the war in the west continues, there are a good ten to fifteen years behind barbed wire ahead of me—the self-absorbed vision of the future of a prisoner of war in solitary confinement immediately entered my mind.

Over the next days the British press brought the details. In a special broadcast over the “Great German Radio” at 0530 hours on 22 June Goebbels had read the “Führer’s” proclamation to the German people, in which he “unveiled” Moscow’s “treacherous machinations” since signing the nonaggression pact on 23 August 1939 and reported the advance of German, Finnish, and Romanian armies on a front from the North Cape to the Black Sea. The whole blame, according to Hitler, belonged to the “Jewish-Bolshevistic rulers.” By the threatening deployment of Russian strength on our eastern frontier and incessant violations of our border they had impeded the radical ending of the war in the west. They had blackmailed him and threatened “European culture and civilization.” Now, however, the hour had come to stand up to this plot of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevist Moscow control center. The defense against this “Russo-English plot” against the Reich, indeed, against all Europe, was the—unbelievable—kernel of Hitler’s otherwise painfully long-winded proclamation on 22 June 1941. And he had then without any declaration of war attacked in the east.

The reason for this attack had indeed been clarified by Goebbels in his speech to the Blohm & Voss personnel in Hamburg on 17 December 1940, “to make good the mistakes of 400 years of German history to obtain a just share of the world’s riches.” And from whom did Goebbels get the political score other than his master Hitler? There is no need for us to go back once more to the latter’s words to high-ranking officers in Berlin in 1935: “Yes, gentlemen, I still need to wage a European war.” We clearly hear Hitler say the same thing to the commanders in chief of the three branches of the Wehrmacht who had been summoned to the Reich Chancellery on 23 May 1939.1 had learned of it during a brief visit to Berlin in June 1939, but only peripherally and without details. Hitler to the commanders in chief:

The mass of 80 millions [the Germans] has solved the ideological problem. The economic problem must also be solved. . . . The solution to the problem will require courage. It must not be approached with the
idea of avoiding a solution by adapting to circumstances. Rather, it must be a matter of adapting circumstances to needs. This is not possible without the invasion of foreign states and the seizure of foreign territories. . . . Danzig is not the object around which it revolves. For us it is a question of the expansion of living space to the East and the guarantee of the food supply. . . . The question of whether to spare Poland is therefore eliminated and the decision remains to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. A repetition of Czechoslovakia is not to be expected. It will come to a fight. The mission is to isolate Poland. The success of the isolation is decisive. . . . It must not come to a simultaneous confrontation with the West. . . . Principle: confrontation with Poland is a success only if the West stays out of the game. If that is not possible, then it is better to attack the West and thereby dispose of Poland at the same time. The war with France and Britain will be a war of life and death. . . . We will not be dragged into a war, but we cannot get around it.
*

How did Grossadmiral Raeder, my commander in chief, choose to describe this address of Hitler’s, at which he was present? On pages 163-64 of Volume II of
Mein Leben
,
†
we read:

On 23 May Hitler gave an address to a small gathering in which he expressed remarkably contradictory ideas about the Polish problem [The address] had according to my impression only one definite purpose, namely, the establishment of a small study group outside the General Staff. The final conclusion, which, moreover, Hitler himself drew, was that the ship-building program should be continued in its existing format and that the other armament programs. . . . would be put off until the year 1943–44. No change in Hitler’s intentions in regard to England [the previous intention had been “avoid war”] was evident on this occasion. After the end of his address, Hitler had [further] explained to me personally that politically he had a good grip on things. He was convinced that war with England was not to be expected on account of his latest demand for the revision of the Polish Corridor. . . . After these assurances, I had no hesitation in sending the battleship
Gneisenau
into the Atlantic in June 1939. . . . Despite the events that had taken place in the spring [the German entry into Prague, Hitler’s renunciation of the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement] and despite the proclamation of the Franco-British
guarantee of Poland, the international political situation did not appear to me to be threatening in the summer [of 1939].

It is hard for me to comprehend that Raeder so simply accepted Hitler’s assurances about the international situation. To “have a good grip” on the unfolding of international politics? War with England “is” not to be expected? So simple, so easily ascertained as all that? Now, to be sure, Raeder’s memoirs show him in general to have been a political innocent of the first water. But his interpretation of Hitler’s address of 23 May reveals a bloodcurdling lack of political perceptivity in a commander in chief that should have distinguished him from a mere departmental administrator. Moreover, had not the navy always prided itself on its superior knowledge of the outside world and its inhabitants? Was not the navy often envied by members of the other armed services for the greater possibilities it possessed of gathering information abroad? And must not that apply in especial measure to Great Britain, which lay so near and was traditionally associated with us in seafaring? Should not Raeder as a result of his long professional experience have been capable of forming a realistic estimate of British reaction to Hitler’s recent violence in Europe, which was now repeating itself against Poland? Did he allow this estimate simply to be prescribed to him by Hitler, who, as was well known, had never understood the British mentality? With him, Raeder, Hitler truly had an easy game. How far ahead of him in the political view of the world was the army officer Ludwig Beck.

And it was, characteristically, another striking error of judgment that led Hitler to sound the trumpet of the “long-desired crusade” and “holy war” against Bolshevism to Great Britain, The German press and the German radio emphasized these themes. I now saw the outcome in the London daily papers. Hitler desired in this way to bring the Anglo-Saxon powers to ally with Germany as the saviour from Bolshevism. Winston Churchill answered him over the British radio on the evening of 22 June 1941 in a speech that has become famous.

At four o’clock this morning Hitler attacked and invaded Russia. All his usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique. A nonaggression treaty had been solemnly signed. . . . No complaint had been made by Germany of its non-fulfillment. . . . Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. . . . The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized
world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. . . . The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. . . . We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until with God’s help we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.

But herewith Churchill had not only answered Hitler’s idea of a “common crusade against Bolshevism.” He had also rejected in advance the idea of those Germans in the Reich who in April 1945 clung to the hope of a last-minute reversal in the alliances: the Western powers henceforth on the side of Germany against the Soviet Union! Germany, which through the unreliability and international aggression of the Nazi regime had long since come to be regarded as a pariah by all sides? A soap bubble, identifiable as such since 22 June 1941 at the latest.

From now on, the war in Russia hung like a shadow over my cell in Cockfosters. It defied any estimate of its length or its outcome. It posed new puzzles to a patriot concerned for Germany.

*
“Tycho Brahe’s Way to God.”

†
“18–Carat Virgin.”

*
Confinement in a military installation was considered more honorable than in a civilian jail. Trench did not actually serve time, however; the Kaiser commuted his sentence and he was merely expelled from Germany.

*
Admiral Karl Dönitz

*
“Come! Come!”

*
The
U-570
was so renamed in February 1942 when she went to the Clyde for trials. She became fully operational at the end of September 1942, leaving Holy Loch for patrols in the Bay of Biscay early in October 1942. At the end of that year she was reallocated to patrols in northern waters, still attached to the Third Submarine Flotilla, to cover the passage of Russian convoys. On 1 January 1943 she sighted two destroyers and fired a salvo of four torpedoes, but without success. She went into refit in June at Chatham, which lasted until January 1944. On 16 March she left Aberdeen in tow. Early on the 18th the tow parted, and on the 19th the vessel was reported still adrift with no crew on board at 55° 55’ north and 06° 33’ west. On the morning of 20 March she was sighted aground on a rocky coast at 55° 48.8’ north and 06° 27’ west, on the west coast of Islay.

†
“Observations of the Hunt,” p. 59.

*
In February 1942 these vessels succeeded in returning to Germany from Brest by an audacious dash through the English Channel. The London
Times
complained that “Nothing more mortifying . . . has happened in Home waters since the 17th century.”

*
Joachim Fest,
Hitler
, p. 802f., on the basis of the International Military Tribunal, XXXVII, 546ff.

†
A slightly abridged English translation, entitled
My Life
, was published by the Naval Institute in 1960.

38    An Outing in London

“If you’d like,” I heard Izzard’s now-familiar voice, “this afternoon we can go out together, have a look at London, and visit some pubs. Of course, you must give your word of honor not to make any attempt to escape. You’ll be provided with suitable civilian clothing. To keep you from feeling ’nationally’ alone, a second German officer can join the party.”

At first I thought that I hadn’t heard correctly. Then I did some quick calculating: the welcome change of scene against the risk that I would make a slip of the tongue in the course of such a tour. How expertly, how intensively, would I be pumped? A wrong word, a wrong gesture, could be critical. Would I get through it? What to do? Better not, then? But my curiosity about London and the wish to see it again won out. And I felt sure of myself. “Agreed,” I said.

And that same afternoon Izzard, Dick Weatherby, another German naval officer, and I—the two of us in borrowed civilian clothing—rode in a chauffeur-driven government car to the center of the city. Through familiar streets, past spots and scenes with minimal bomb damage—everything seemed so unchanged. Berkeley Hotel, the bar there, was our first destination. The British public surrounded us, many in uniforms—which I had scarcely ever seen there in peacetime—also de Gaulle’s “Free French,” proud of their status, naturally all the more in uniform. One, two drinks, chats about times past, harmless, not military. The same scene an hour later in the bar at the Ritz in Piccadilly. In this street I still knew the contours of the great houses which in 1938–391 had passed daily on the way from my
apartment in Belgrave Square to the embassy in Carlton House Terrace. An indescribable feeling, to be here in the scenes of faded, happy peacetime days and—if only the damned war didn’t lie like a lump in the way—to be able to walk through them again freely. If ever again? That could only be a vague hope.