Battleship Bismarck (6 page)

That is where my reminiscences ended. Now, these “ships on paper” were about to take on tangible form, and my ship, the
Bismarck
, would certainly meet one or another of them at sea. But the veil of the future still lay over the when and the where.

My time in London lay barely twelve months back. How could it so quickly have come to this? At the end of June 1939 I was ordered to a fire control officers’ course for heavy caliber guns at Kiel. Later the scene of this course was shifted to the sea room around the Isle of Rügen. In our free hours during that hot summer we incubated on the beach at the seaside resort of Binz. What peace seemed to lie over the holiday makers assembled there, who had no idea of how their fate had already been decided—a last, deceptive idyll, during which in the state chancelleries of Europe the false peace was finally winding to a close.

Then signs of uncertainty over the continuation of the course came through official channels; not that we learned anything about the underlying, genuine reason therefor, the orders—subsequently revoked—to attack Poland on 26 August; no, we were kept quite in the dark insofar. At any rate, our class was discontinued, and on the evening of 23 August I was again underway in my auto, driving back to Kiel. Over the car radio I heard the unfathomable news of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and reached Kiel in a state of inward excitement over the question of what this could mean. The members of the course were released to their parent units and, as for me a return to London was out of the question in the midst of the crisis, I was appointed a company commander of the midshipmen at the Mürwik Naval School.

In the following days, the radio and press reports kept me in a state of growing unrest and drove me to the newspaper displays in the city of Flensburg, where on 28 August, I read in the
Flensburger Nachrichten
an exchange of letters, just released by the German News Agency, between Hitler and the French premier, Daladier. Daladier had appealed
to Hitler to exert his peaceful intentions in a last attempt for a settlement between Germany and Poland, without doing any harm to German honor. “If,” Daladier had written in declaring France’s solidarity with Poland, “German and French blood flows anew as it did 25 years ago, in an even longer and more deadly war, each of the two peoples will fight in the confidence of its own victory. Destruction and barbarism will most certainly triumph.”

In his reply, Hitler once more stressed the need for a revision of the Versailles treaty and wrote “that it is impossible for a nation of honor to renounce nearly two million human beings and see them mistreated on its own border. I have therefore made a clear demand: Danzig and the Corridor must return to Germany. The Macedonian condition on our eastern border must be resolved . . . settling . . . the question one way or the other . . . but I see . . . no possibility before us of being able to work with Poland in a reasonable sense to correct a situation which is intolerable to the German people and the German Reich.”

“To resolve the question one way or the other . . . intolerable,” enough of the familiar Hitler vocabulary, this time threatening and framing an ultimatum. Yes, of course, Versailles must be revised. What national-minded German has not demanded that; but to say Versailles and mean something quite different as you do, am I not right, Herr Hitler?—and thus I began my silent dialogue with him—Versailles as a convenient cover for one’s megalomania: and announcing, “but I see . . . no possibility . . . of being able to work with Poland in a reasonable sense,” because you really don’t want to see it. This speech of yours already
is
war. You want
it
, in every line, between every line. When Daladier appealed to your peaceful intentions, it was to a phantom.

And while I read and reread the
Flensburger Nachrichten
, it came back to me, Hitler’s saying: “Yes, gentlemen, I still must conduct a European war,” spoken to a group of high-ranking military officers in Berlin in 1935 and related to me by a friend, the son of the later Generalleutnant Paul-Willy Körner, one of the officers who was informed of it at the time. Yes, whoever wanted to know it, could have known that Hitler was bent on war.

From the same source I learned of the memorandum of July 1938, in which the chief of the General Staff, General der Artillerie Ludwig Beck, warned the high command and the government of Hitler’s aggressive policy, which was endangering world peace. Beck had resigned
in August of that year after Hitler’s announcement that in the coming weeks he would solve the Sudeten question with force. Of the admonition Beck then gave the commander-in-chief of the army, Generaloberst
*
Walter von Brauchitsch, I did not learn until after the war, but its sentiment is so exemplary and its language so noble that I cannot see it in print often enough:

The decisions made now will affect the fate of the nation. History will charge its leaders with a capital crime if they do not act according to their professional and political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit at the point where their knowledge, their conscience and their responsibility prohibit carrying out a command. If in such situations their council and their warnings do not receive a hearing, they have the right and the duty, before the people and before history, to resign from their offices. If they all act with one firm will, the execution of warlike actions is impossible. They have thereby saved their Fatherland from the worst, from ruin. It is lack of stature and recognition of the task when a soldier in a high position in such times sees his duties solely in the restricted framework of his military tasks, without becoming aware that his highest responsibility is to the whole people. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions.

But there was no other suitably high-ranking officer of Beck’s stature in the Wehrmacht.

I had admired Beck since 1938 as the model of a soldier and a man who had truly understood it all, even if he, too, had misjudged the regime in the beginning. But some others—to be sure, only a few—from politically sensitive circles had understood Hitler very early. Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein and the Karl Bonhoeffer family are examples. As early as 30 January 1933 they said, “Hitler means war, he will be a misfortune for Germany.”

Despite my own mistrust, sharpened by the serial murders on and after 30 June 1934,
†
I had still welcomed the reintroduction of the universal military obligation in March 1935 and the remilitarization
of the Rhineland a year later, although it grieved me to have to accept such gifts from Hitler, of all people. Finally, in 1937–38, after two more years in an atmosphere of increasing domestic violence, with the inevitability of the utter ruin of a Germany whose course was set by Hitler before my eyes, and in despairing certainty of being unable to change anything, anything at all, the only thing left for me was psychological flight into an inner emigration from my nation and a passive waiting until one day the regime’s inevitable fall would enable Germany to back out of its dead-end. Until then, I would hold out! Yet I was not one of those sharp-sighted intellectuals with high powers of discrimination; I had simply decided to use the common sense that nature had bestowed on me as far as it would go. And it had easily sufficed to see through the tricks that Hitler was playing.

On 1 September 1939 Hitler spoke to the Reichstag of his “love of peace” and “endless forbearance” and then said: “Last night for the first time Poland fired on our own territory with regular troops. Since 0545 hours we have been firing back! And from now on, bombs will be answered with bombs!”

So he finally had it,
finally
, his war—that was how I felt when I heard it over the radio. My God, how happy the man must be, released from the torment of the long wait for
his
war. And two pictures, published shortly thereafter in the German press, have haunted me ever since and will continue to haunt me throughout my life. The first: German troops forcibly opening a Polish border barricade, unsuspectingly throwing open the door to the destruction of the Reich. The other: Hitler observing through a stereotelescope the burning of Warsaw, the result of the destruction which he now served to the east, and whose later return from there to Germany, with interest and compound interest, was to push him into shabby suicide—his stealing away from responsibility—a desperado’s exit, worthy of his desperado deeds. What a world of difference between him and the statesman after whom he had dared to name a great warship so as to create a quasi-personal connection with him.

And now war was on the march, the war of an impatient Hitler, who had managed to have his people—a people certainly not without living space, but without patience—swear unconditional allegiance to him. Soon the name “Great German Freedom Fight” was given to this war. Freedom Fight! Freedom! My God, what business did the idea of freedom have anywhere near Hitler? As the goal of a regime, which since 1933 had publicly made itself manifest through murder, terror, and repression? What else could Hitler want than to continue
these horrors inside Germany and expand them outwards as far as the military conquests of the Wehrmacht would enable him to do so? No, Herr Hitler had no message of freedom, no real message at all, no progressive goal for mankind—he, who embodied a historical low in public morality. Everywhere I saw his cherished motto, “The strong devour the weak,” his lurking wish to wreck the religious life of our people and our civic state of law, his ever clearer manifestation as the destroyer of Western culture that he, of all people, pretended to have to safeguard against bolshevism.

What remained as a personal consequence? To fulfill the tasks assigned to me, but beyond that, insofar as I could influence them, to keep my rank and my duty assignments low and my sphere of responsibility small, and not to strive to get ahead. For the higher the position, the more important its support of Hitler, and the more significant the support of Hitler, the greater the harm to the German people. To speak to the men as little as possible about Hitler, so as not to have to lie too often. To such consequences six years of Hitler could drive one: from the retrospect of 1938, already one could only mourn for Germany—what an insane joke, what a bleak perspective and depressing hopelessness.

My leave flew past, and at the beginning of June I arrived in Hamburg in typical “Hamburg weather”—rain. I registered at a hotel and awaited the morrow, when I was to report for duty to the commanding officer of the
Bismarck
, Kapitän zur See
*
Ernst Lindemann. Lindemann’s reputation as a naval officer was distinguished; he was known as an outstanding gunnery expert, but also as a strict superior, and so it was with some nervousness that I anticipated my first encounter with him.

Ernst Lindemann was born in Alenkirchen/Westerwald in 1894 and entered the Imperial German Navy on 1 April 1913. Because he was not very strong physically, he was accepted only “on probation.” With the tenacity and energy that already characterized him, however, he weathered the hardships of a year of cadet training under a particularly strict officer in the heavy cruiser
Hertha
as well as did any of his comrades. Later, one of his classmates who served side by side with him as a naval cadet, wrote me: “His zeal and his concept of duty were exemplary; I cannot recall that he ever fell into disfavor or aroused the anger of our cadet officer.” When one thinks what trifling misdemeanors could expose the cadets of that period to censure, it becomes obvious that Lindemann had unusual concentration and strength of will. “Yet he was definitely not a careerist in the negative sense; he was an unselfish, helpful, and popular human being,” wrote the same classmate, who also praised his strict and uncompromising concept of the personal and professional obligations of a naval officer. Nevertheless, he was not lacking in ambition. When in later years, Lindemann, who had in the meanwhile become an acknowledged gunnery expert, was told by his classmate that he, Lindemann, would certainly become Inspector of Naval Gunnery some day, he replied: “I still hope at least to become commander of the first battleship squadron in the Kriegsmarine.” But there was not such a squadron again in his lifetime.

Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann, commander of the battleship
Bismarck.
During the training and trial periods he demanded a great deal of his crewmen, but won their admiration and respect. (Photograph courtesy of Hans H. Hildebrand, Hamburg.)

Lindemann went to the Mürwik Naval School in April 1914. Owing to the outbreak of the world war, this assignment had to be broken off and the examination usually given at the end of training was not held. Like his classmates, he was given sea duty and in 1915 was promoted to Leutnant zur See. In the rank list for 1918 he stood fifth among his approximately 210 classmates, and later in the Reichsmarine and Kriegsmarine he ranked second in his class.

Most of Lindemann’s service was in large combatants, on staffs, and at the Naval Gunnery School in Kiel. Early in his career, he made gunnery his specialty and he studied every aspect of it. In 1920, as an Oberleutnant zur See, he was posted to the fleet section of the Naval Staff in Berlin, and thereafter to the predreadnought
Hannover
By 1925, he had been promoted to Kapitänleutnant and was on the admiral’s staff at the Baltic Sea Naval Station in Kiel. When that tour ended, he went as second gunnery officer in the predreadnoughts
Elsass
and, later,
Schleswig-Holstein.
“Lindemann always performed his duties with the same industry and the same conscientiousness,” said the classmate quoted above. “For example, as second gunnery officer of the
Elsass
he took paperwork home with him, even though that billet in a predreadnought was generally considered a relatively soft job.” After a tour as an instructor at the Naval Gunnery School in Kiel and after being promoted to Korvettenkapitän
*
in 1932, Lindemann became first gunnery officer in the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer.
It was at about this time, when more than twenty years of very successful service lay behind him, that he once told some friends that, actually, he was still “on probation,” because he had never been advised of his final acceptance into the navy! In 1936, he was assigned as a Fregattenkapitän
†
to the operations section of the Naval Staff, and, in 1938, as Kapitän zur See, he became Chief of the Naval Training Section in the Naval High Command. This post was followed by one that was a high point in his long and successful career as a gunner, command of the Naval Gunnery School. Without doubt, given his specialization in ordnance and his other professional and personal qualities, he was destined to have command of the newest, biggest, and most heavily armed German battleship: the
Bismarck.
The appointment reached him in the spring of 1940.