Battleship Bismarck (60 page)

“Give these Dutch officers some tea!” said the duty officer at Horsham St. Faith to a sergeant, after he had heard and believed the Germans’ “history.” He also gave them quarters for the night. But he was the last British officer to be taken in. In the meanwhile, the Magister’s “departure” from the Kingstown airfield had become a subject of discussion and had buzzed through the circuits to southern England. And Wappler and Schnabel’s hot bath was ended prematurely when a group of officers armed with pistols entered their room and the airfield commander, Group Captain James N. D. Anderson, OBE, said in a friendly manner, “I am sorry, gentlemen, you deserved better luck. We shall have dinner together but after that I shall have to hand you over to the PoW authorities.” Indeed, there was no help for it now, Wappler and Schnabel had to own up to their identities. The military police brought them back to Shap Wells, where they were sentenced to twenty-eight days’ confinement, the standard penalty for attempted escapes.

“One really has to take off one’s hat to them,” Major Dury said privately. “I really regret having to lock them up.” And, like him, the British public was impressed by the pair’s audacity and cold-blooded nerve. Admiration for their imagination and courage appeared in the press. Wappler and Schnabel’s undertaking may be counted among the coolest and most imaginative attempted escapes by German prisoners of war in the Second World War.

At Shap Wells one German officer lived apart from the camp community, hermetically secluded. He had his own quarters, was served his meals separately, and went walking alone. All the officers were instructed by the German camp leadership not to speak to him and to avoid any contact with him. This officer had been ostracized and was to spend his entire captivity, in different camps and continents, in this sort of bleak isolation. He was Kapitänleutnant Hans Rahmlow, former captain of the
U-570
, the boat whose capture by the British in
August 1941 I have already mentioned. I was completely in the dark as to the exact circumstances of the loss of the U-boat and his being taken prisoner; what his side of the story might be, I had no idea. Inwardly, I felt the impulse to ask him to tell me about it. Personally, I felt no inhibitions at all about showing sympathy for him. But I abstained, in the interest of keeping peace in camp.

It was known that in another camp an “Honor Council” composed of U-boat officers had sat in judgment of Rahmlow’s first watch officer, Oberleutnant zur See Bernhard Berndt. This board, acting as an “Honor Court,” had found Berndt guilty of “cowardice in the face of the enemy,” as Rahmlow’s deputy sharing responsibility for the loss and British capture of the
U-570
and ostracized him in the camp. Among officers “cowardice in the face of the enemy,” if in fact it had occurred here, was viewed as a shameful offense. And since this was a question of such an offense, a conversation with Rahmlow—an arbitrary breaking of the ban—would have only inflamed the atmosphere in camp and created a tempest in a teapot which in the end would have accomplished nothing. So it was simply more sensible to give up the thought of talking with Rahmlow. And indeed it was conceivable that he himself would not have welcomed it, so
coram populo
.

Whenever, in those days, I pondered over Rahmlow, the shamefulness of the conduct held against him, and the guiding concept of “Officers’ Honor” formed by centuries of monarchical tradition—in terms of which the ostracism of Rahmlow appeared explicable if not obligatory—I could on the other hand think only with the greatest bitterness of the grave wounds that the “Führer,” very personally and in the absence of an appropriate rejoinder, had long since inflicted on the Wehrmacht’s honor code. Hitler’s murder of Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow
*
in July 1934 and his unprecedented insult to the Wehrmacht in the shamelessly conducted dismissal of the army’s commander in chief, Generaloberst Baron von Fritsch, in 1938 came to mind.
†
Blinded by the succession of Hitler’s sham successes, inwardly weakened and made unsure by the ceaseless cascade of Brown
propaganda, the Wehrmacht had been unable to mobilize its honor code as an effective defense. Insofar as the code was still intact and useful in the conduct of the war, Hitler would make use of it, to be sure. But basically he had long since taken leave of those whom with a view to the officers he once ridiculed as “antiquated knights with a dust-covered conception of honor.”

Increasingly Hitler’s hypocritical ideology had penetrated the erstwhile apolitical preserve called the Wehrmacht and had introduced there, among other things, a new “standard of honor.” It stipulated, for the first time, that a married officer also bore full responsibility for defamatory conduct on the part of his wife—an anticipation, initially little remarked, of the barbarity of
Sippenhaft
.
*
New formulas also appeared for the public aspect of the honor code. One motto read: “My honor is my loyalty.” Loyalty to whom? Well, to the “Führer” alone, who dictatorially and without responsibility to anything or anyone, had started to destroy civilization in Europe to the extent that the Wehrmacht’s territorial conquests enabled him to do so. And later he developed such a frenzy to retain the conquered territories that he not only ordered them to be held, under
all
circumstances,
whatever
the cost, without regard to the strategic situation, but on account of his inflexible demands even introduced a new “Honor Concept” for the “German officer.” He subsequently formulated it: “May it some day belong to the Honor Concept of German officers . . . that the surrender of a district or city is unthinkable and that above all the military leaders will have to set a shining example of the most faithful performance of duty unto death.” “Honor à la Hitler” instead of strategy and tactics, to hold territory in every case, without regard to
anything
, “performance of duty” for Hitler’s interests—which were not the German interests—total obedience! A thousand worlds removed from the intelligent obedience understood by a Tauroggen-Yorck,
†
a Hubertusburg-Marwitz, who “chose disgrace where obedience did not bring honor,” a Colonel Buchholz in the First World War: “I don’t command arsonists, this order will not be carried out.” Here now were slaves to command.

But of course every German retreat, however slight or however
substantial in individual cases, signified a Soviet advance to the west, a thrust forward by the “ultimate avengers,” which they would indeed be, towards Herr Hitler’s own precious skin, more precious than the Reich. And the nearer the avengers thrust, the deeper he buried himself in personal security, against war and assassination until the end in Berlin, where he let half-grown boys be slaughtered for him. If only the destroyer of the Reich lived on! One must never lose sight of it: he was such an egomaniac and nihilist, despiser of the officer corps and its “dust-covered conception of honor,” for whom in the final analysis Rahmlow had to suffer long years of isolation in the camps and bear the brunt of a life thus ruined.

Newspapers and magazines were not available to individual prisoners at Shap Wells, but the German camp leadership received a selection. The latter also had access to British radio broadcasts. The camp leader could periodically give a comprehensive report on the progress of the war at our common mealtimes. The terminology of such newscasts was, understandably, in keeping with the Brown spirit of the time, which included the obligatory anti-Christian accent. Whenever it was necessary to speak about Winston Churchill, and in England that could not be avoided every now and again, his name changed itself, unforgettably, into “Church-evil.”

In any event, we could follow the situation on the many fronts. The stagnation of the German offensive on Moscow at the beginning of winter in 1941, the serious defeat there in December, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S.A. on 11 December—we learned of all this almost immediately. Declaration of war
on
, not
by
America, that was a long way from the Hitler who on board the
Bismarck
on 5 May had said, “I consider American intervention in this war to be out of the question!” But I cannot claim, even in retrospect, that at the time the significance of the failure of our Moscow offensive to the entire course of the Russian campaign fully dawned on us.

Also in December, the British radio reported the loss of the capital ships
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
to Japanese aerial torpedoes in the Far East. At our table the news was greeted with long-lasting rejoicing. The
Prince of Wales
had stood opposite the
Bismarck
in the battle southwest of Iceland half a year earlier; my memory of it was still so fresh. But so, too, were the gruesome scenes on the decks of the
Bismarck
a few days later. Similar scenes might now have played themselves out in the
Prince of Wales
. The mere thought of them choked any feeling of rejoicing in me.

*
Born on 1 May 1909, Griffith was elected general procurator of the worldwide community of the Oratorium of St. Philip Neri in Rome in 1948 and elected its first visitator in 1958. He died in Livorno on 14 June 1959.

*
General Kurt von Schleicher, who had served briefly as chancellor in late 1932 and early 1933, his wife, and his closest collaborator, General Ferdinand von Bredow, were among the victims of the Blood Purge (please see note, p. 22).

†
Early in 1938 Hitler dismissed Werner Baron von Fritsch as commander in chief of the army on account of what were later proven to be fabricated accusations of homosexuality. Although subsequently Fritsch was officially “rehabilitated,” he was not restored to his post. He found a soldier’s death while accompanying the regiment of which he was honorary colonel during the Polish campaign of 1939.

*
A law promulated in 1944 which made an entire family liable for an act committed by any of its members.

†
General Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg commanded the Prussian corps assigned to support Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Acting without orders, on 30 December he concluded the Convention of Tauroggen, an agreement with Russia whereby his forces assumed a neutral status. This bold initiative encouraged his country’s ensuing switch from reluctant ally to ardent enemy of France.

40    Transport to Canada

In March 1942, a delegation of British officers from London visited Shap Wells and spoke with Major Dury. At once rumors, which soon congealed into certainty, arose that we prisoners were to be moved—but where? To Canada.

In imminent expectation of a German invasion, Great Britain had shipped most German prisoners of war, numbering around three thousand, to Canada in 1940. What awaited us was a seaborne transfer of approximately one thousand men, including two hundred officers, after whose departure only about two hundred German prisoners would remain in England. No other power participating in the Second World War dispersed its prisoners so far around the world as Great Britain: besides the British Isles themselves, in Australia, Canada, the U.S.A., Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Norway, Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar and, at times, still other places. By the end of 1942 more than ten thousand German prisoners were to be brought to Canada from camps in the Near East. The remote expanses of this enormous land afforded the necessary space.

At the end of March we left Shap Wells to travel to the port of Greenock. Here a veritable armada of ships, defended against air attack by countless barrage balloons, was being organized into a convoy. Our quarters for the coming days and nights was the transport
Rangitiki
(16,755 BRT, 15 knots, employed as a troop transport since February 1941). On boarding the ship we stepped onto decks strung with barbed wire that left room for a daily walk for exercise on the upper deck. Following the convoy’s zigzag course as a precaution against U-boats, the
Rangitiki
brought us to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The voyage passed without special incident, even if occasionally we were in somewhat “precarious” spirits. For as much as one wished his U-boats success, one nevertheless hoped that they would not torpedo the very ship in which a person himself was traveling.

After a railway trip of several days, repeatedly interrupted by halts, the train stopped in an open field that for all we knew might have been anywhere in Canada. However, we were still well within the eastern part of the country. “This is it,” the word came, “everybody out.” So, carrying our baggage, we tramped cross-country to the entrance gate of our new “hostel,” whose name we now learned: Bowmanville, established as a prisoner-of-war camp in 1941 and in the meantime occupied by hundreds of German officers. More than one hundred German enlisted men looked after the cleanliness of the quarters and worked as barbers, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, and cooks. After the mild weather in England and during the ocean voyage, the snow that was falling upon our arrival made such an impression that I noted the date. It was 9 April 1942.