Dönitz: The Last Führer (16 page)

At all events, came the dawn light on October 4th he dived in order to reach a position for a submerged torpedo attack. Immediately something went wrong. Here again there are three different versions, Dönitz’s in his memoirs, a slightly different one in his report, and a very different one pieced together from various survivors by British specialist submarine interrogating officers. There are several possible explanations for the discrepancies; he might have felt the disaster was his fault or he may have felt it was his responsibility to have trained his crew more rigorously before attempting operations in the face of the enemy, or he may have known it was the fault of the engineer, but decided to protect him; on the other hand, he may simply have shut his mind to the fearful details of the experience. First, here is his own version.

After ordering the dive he noticed suddenly that his engineer in the control room below was having difficulty with the depth steering, therefore he ordered more speed to give the hydroplane greater effect; it was already too late; the boat had lost longitudinal stability and was plunging with steadily increasing inclination until practically standing on its head.

Opening the hatch, he found himself in the middle of the convoy, destroyers racing towards him, firing. He closed the hatch rapidly and ordered another dive. The engineer called up that there was no compressed air left. He couldn’t grasp it at first, then realized that the amount of air required to blow the tanks from 90 metres must have exhausted the cylinders. He opened the hatch again. The situation was as before except the destroyers were nearer; shots were hitting the boat; he had no option but to give the order to abandon ship and to open the sea cocks and scuttle her.

His official report on the loss described the cause of the dive as an unexplained jamming of the depth steering, whereupon the boat sank to 80 metres stern-first, then changing to a forward inclination of 50 degrees went down to 102 metres where water came in through the stuffing of the stern tube before the compressed air took effect and she shot to the surface in the middle of the convoy.

The true story was more complicated. The tanks were flooded in the usual way after Dönitz’s order to dive, and she was being trimmed for periscope depth when she suddenly plunged to fifteen metres; to remedy this the hydroplanes were set to rise, but she came up so sharply that the conning tower broke surface. One explanation suggested that the ratings on the hydroplane controls gave them too much elevation; the ratings themselves blamed either excessive ballasting of the compensating tanks or too high a speed of the boat. To prevent the boat breaking surface completely the engineer flooded the tanks and sent all available hands to the forward compartments to weight the nose down; as a result she took an alarming forward inclination and dived at speed. At 60 metres the engineer attempted to check her by blowing No. VI tank and pumping out the regulator tanks, but either the pumps broke down or could not cope with the quantity of water at this depth. Reaching 80 metres all tanks were blown and the boat started rising rapidly with her stern pointing down at a considerable angle. As it seemed she must break the surface again, at 30 metres the tanks were flooded once more and again she started down, but even faster this time and with a forward inclination of 45 degrees. Something in the stern compartment gave way under pressure, water started coming in, and one of the tanks on deck
cracked as she plunged to 102 metres. For the second time all tanks were blown and she shot up, still at the forward inclination of 45 degrees, and rose from the sea stern first with her screws racing before she settled back in the water.

The navigating warrant officer claimed that he had then opened the conning-tower hatch and found they were in the midst of the convoy. He jumped in again, slammed the hatch shut and called down to the control room to dive, but the supply of compressed air had been exhausted by then and also the boat had taken a considerable list to port. The escorts meanwhile had opened fire and there were two hits, one on the conning tower, one on deck forward. Dönitz, seeing the impossibility of escape, ordered the crew to abandon ship and sent the engineer below to open the vents. All hands went on deck except for the engineer, and most jumped into the sea, leaving the dinghy which was lashed on deck for the non-swimmers. There was no time to lose as the boat sank within seconds of the cocks being opened. Dönitz himself took a header from the bridge. The engineer, however, was not seen again; it was suggested by one of the engineer petty officers that he stayed below on purpose. ‘In the latter case,’ the interrogating officers concluded, ‘it is hard to avoid the belief that rightly or wrongly he felt himself responsible for the loss of the boat.’
¹⁴¹

The survivors were rescued by the boats of one of the escorts, HMS
Snapdragon
—all but three who must have drowned, and the engineer. Dönitz, who had divested himself of his heavy leather gear and boots in the water, was picked up wearing a shirt, underclothes and one sock. The Commander of the
Snapdragon
thrust out his hand to him when he came aboard. ‘Now, Captain, we are quits. Tonight you have sunk one of my steamers, now I have sunk you!’ He sent a sailor to fetch a bathrobe from his cabin and placed it around Dönitz’s shoulders.

Naturally Dönitz was deeply depressed; he recorded in his memoirs how he kept on turning the accident over in his mind, wondering how it had occurred and whether his engineer, Jeschen, had escaped from the boat or had been trapped below while scuttling her; she had taken only eight seconds to go down, according to the interrogated survivors.

He and the rest of the crew were put ashore at Malta and marched to the old Verdalla fortress which was being used to hold prisoners of war. His mood at this time is described by the British officer who tried vainly to question him.

This initial deduction was probably not shared by the later specialist interrogators, and while they came to no definite conclusions, it is probable they held it more likely to have been the engineer or the hydroplane ratings who started the chain of disaster. As for Dönitz’s extreme moodiness, this was not by any means a normal reaction for U-boat Commanders before British interrogators.

The days in the fortress passed dully, Dönitz still obsessed by the loss of his boat and the death of Jeschen, and no doubt by the fact that he could take no more part in the war which had been his life for the past four years. His despair was deepened by the news the prisoners were permitted to glean from allied papers; the outlook had been gloomy before he had left Pola with Turkey, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary visibly crumbling before the allied armies; now one after another they agreed armistice terms, while in the north the German armies reeled back from Flanders; there were rumours of open disaffection among the starving German population and, worse, mutiny in some of the ships of the High Seas Fleet, while the humiliating terms the allies were seeking to impose were deeply wounding, particularly President Wilson’s ‘fourteen-point’ proposal with its call for the abolition of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the military and the imposition of a democratic system in Germany. Dönitz found Wilson’s attitude quite unintelligible.

On November 4th he was taken down to the harbour and went aboard a British cruiser for transport to England, finding his first lieutenant, Müssen, also on board. On the 7th they dropped anchor off Gibraltar; for the next few days he and Müssen watched the activity in the roads from the cruiser’s quarterdeck, seeing:

The cruiser was still at anchor there on the 9th, when one of their comrades from Pola, Heinrich Kukat, struck the last dramatic blow for the U-boat arm, sinking the old pre-Dreadnought battleship,
Britannia
, while she was under escort by two destroyers within three miles of the concourse of nets and U-boat hunters across the Straits of Gibraltar. Seeing the allied ensigns at half-mast and the destroyers steaming in with survivors, Dönitz gloried in this perfect expression of his own mood of bitter defiance:

Two days later the scene in the roads was very different. As news came through of the flight of the Kaiser and the German government’s acceptance of the humiliating terms of the armistice, fog horns, sirens, steam whistles split the air in a deafening cacophony from the armada in the bay, cheers and calls rolled across the water, hats were tossed high, flags run up, and on a nearby ship a captured German war ensign was hoisted upside down with the white ensign above it. He and Müssen stood together on the quarterdeck, ‘a small, defiant band with infinitely bitter hearts’.

The Captain came on the quarterdeck with a group of the cruiser’s officers with whom he had been celebrating the victory in champagne, and stepped across to Dönitz; looking at the up-ended German ensign and the yelling sailors on the neighbouring vessel, he said, ‘I don’t like it.’

Dönitz waved his arm in a gesture to encompass all the ships in the roads, British, American, French, Japanese, and asked if he could take any joy from a victory which could only be attained with the whole world for allies.

‘Yes,’ the Captain replied after a pause, ‘it’s very curious.’

Dönitz thought, ‘An honourable “front man”.’ In his memoirs he wrote, ‘I will hold the memory of this fair and noble English sea officer in high regard all my life.’
¹⁴⁵

So ended Germany’s first bid for world power, and Karl Dönitz’s career as an Imperial naval officer. But for both the attitudes were too ingrained to be altered even by the bitter shock of defeat.

CHAPTER THREE

Towards the Second World War

After the armistice the cruiser continued its voyage to Southampton, where Dönitz and Müssen experienced the curiosity and horror with which ordinary Britons regarded U-boat men. Thence they were sent to a prisoner of war camp for officers at Redmires, near Sheffield. Again almost the only sources of news were British papers, whose columnists had no doubts about the war guilt of the Kaiser, the German military and the U-boat Commanders, and called for their trial and execution. Dönitz regarded this as enemy propaganda, but it made an impression on several of the younger men in the camp who began to deny the Kaiser; they had, they said, always been Republicans at heart. Dönitz, disgusted, founded a loyal barrack which he called ‘Hohenzollern’. He was joined by several U-boat colleagues and many other ‘genuine warriors almost all repeatedly wounded’ to form a congenial community of unrepentant monarchists.
¹

Weeks in captivity drew into months as the allies thrashed out peace terms to be dictated to the defeated enemy. In Germany a Republic headed by Socialists had been born in revolutionary violence. Dönitz fretted, wondering if he would ever see his homeland again, and if so what kind of a Germany it would be, then in an effort to get himself repatriated, he feigned madness.

Contemporary medical reports are missing, but one version of his assumed ‘madness’ came from Wolfgang Frank after the Second World War, during which Frank served as a Propaganda Officer concerned particularly with U-boat affairs. According to this Dönitz played childish games with biscuit tins and little china dogs that could be bought in the canteen ‘until even his first lieutenant thought he was crazy’.
²
It is scarcely necessary to trust the story of a man schooled by Dr Goebbels; nevertheless the Second World War British Intelligence file on Dönitz states that he was sent to Manchester Lunatic Asylum! This suggests that he either feigned madness rather convincingly or
was
a shade unbalanced.
In view of the depth of his feelings, particularly about the loss of UB 68 and his engineer, Jeschen—as will appear—it could have been a combination of both. He himself made no mention of it in any of his books although he did tell a US psychiatrist at the Nuremberg war crimes trials a fantastic story—swallowed whole—about pretending to be a U-boat!
³
In his memoirs he wrote simply that he deliberately exploited his poor health in order to get home.

Whatever the truth, he was repatriated with some of the earliest batches of prisoners in July 1919.

Kiel was scarcely recognizable as a naval port when he returned. The great harbour was empty of warships; the only sounds of work came from the destruction under the eyes of a temporary allied control commission of those U-boats which had not been handed over to the allies. The naval station itself presented a dismal spectacle, the sentries offhand if not actively insolent, careless in dress and manner, smoking on duty, allowing their rifles to rust. These were some of the visible effects of mutiny and defeat; the inner scars left on the officers were probably not so apparent, but certainly more permanent.

Mutiny had been brewing in the High Seas Fleet since at least 1917; this was the natural result of inaction and the incarceration of the large crews in uncomfortable steel boxes repeating drills that had come to seem increasingly purposeless; it had been heightened by the loss of many of the best officers to the U-boat arm and by existing tensions between the exclusive executive officer corps and the engineer and deck officers below them, by the impersonal, iron discipline with which the big ships especially were run, above all by new tensions arising from the good food and wine and high life enjoyed by the executive officers while the men’s rations were cut and the civilian population reduced by the allied blockade to near starvation, in some cases to scavenging scraps from the fleet’s garbage. In November 1918 a new naval High Command under Admiral Scheer, disregarding the warning signs pointed out by more intelligent officers, lit the spark that worked along these powder trains to blow the fleet apart; it was nothing less than a suicide run against the British Grand Fleet; the purpose was rationalized in various ways but undoubtedly the real concern was the honour of the Navy, above all the honour of the officer corps.

To the men of the German battlecruiser squadron which had already experienced a suicide run to extricate Scheer’s battleships at Jutland, the idea of sacrificing themselves for their officers’ code of honour did not
appeal. They refused to turn to; others refused even to return to their ships from shore leave, instead running riot in Wilhelmshaven demonstrating for peace and cheering the name of the United States President, Woodrow Wilson. The mutiny spread to the battle fleet and to the cruisers until only the torpedo boats and U-boats remained loyal.

In an effort to split the mutineers individual battle-squadrons were ordered to separate ports; far from allowing the officers to control the divisions, this merely spread the contagion along the coast. In Kiel the Commander of the Naval Station, Admiral Souchon, was caught unprepared by the arrival of the 3rd Battle Squadron flying the red flag and surrendered his command with scarcely a struggle to a ‘Sailors’ Council’. The next day Lübeck and Travemünde had fallen to other Sailors’ Councils and, the day after that, Hamburg, Bremen, Cuxhaven, Wilhelmshaven; from these bases groups of sailors travelled to other industrial cities and garrison towns throughout Germany, raising the red banner of revolution among workers long prepared by Bolshevik propaganda and inadequate rations. Aboard the ships, meanwhile, deck officers and petty officers combined to control the violence of the men’s sudden release from constraint,
⁴
and it was largely due to their efforts that the fleet was not crippled and was able to sail out on its last voyage on November 21st, under the terms of the Armistice to internment in Scapa Flow, the Grand Fleet’s base in the islands north of Scotland. Five battlecruisers leading the way, nine dreadnought battleships, guns trained fore and aft, seven cruisers, 50 torpedo boats, ‘the endless funeral procession’ as one officer wrote, filed out across the grey North Sea to surrender. It was an unprecedented moment in naval history, and a potent symbol not only of the humiliation of the naval officer corps, but of Germany itself. The former fleet Commander, von Hipper, watched with breaking heart; the sailors themselves wondered what would become now of the Fatherland.
⁵

Revolution and hunger stalked the streets together. So far as the Navy was concerned, a sailors’ ‘Council of 53’ had taken over the High Command in Berlin and was not only directing the Sailors’ Councils running the naval bases and interfering in the negotiations with the allies, but was planning in concert with Soldiers’ Councils thoroughly socialist armed forces in which there would be no insignia of rank and officers would be elected to their positions by the men. In December delegates from Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Workers’ Councils throughout the
Reich
had assembled in Berlin for the first Soviet Congress, and on the 23rd, the
‘People’s Marine Division’, incited by Communist groups, forced its way into the
Reich
Chancellery itself. In these circumstances the Socialist Chancellor called in the military to restore order. So the provisional government of the new Republic with its democratic, socialist aims and the old officer corps with its monarchist authoritarian convictions—which the Soviet Congress and the Councils intended to eradicate entirely from the life of the nation—became partners against anarchy and Bolshevism.

The instruments of internal order were not regular service units, but brigades of loyalist volunteers known as
Freikorps
. Dönitz’s former mentor, von Loewenfeld, raised one such at Kiel, and in July as Dönitz came home this brigade was winning itself an awesome reputation for swift and ruthless action against Communists, strikers, looters and rioters. Other officers, shocked by events and the collapse of all discipline in the regular service, resigned their commissions; many more debated whether they could serve a Socialist Republic. But at the highest levels the decision had already been taken that the officer corps was to remain at its post, serving the new State, biding its time. Tirpitz, for instance, gave the new regime about one or two years before a strong reaction set in.
⁶
Others expected to guide this reaction, topple the government and reinstate the monarchy.

This corps exercise in self-preservation was rationalized as a sacred duty to the German people, who after they had recovered from their present temporary setback would need a powerful Navy to realize their world mission. Nothing had changed. The new head of the Navy, Admiral von Trotha, an ardent disciple of Tirpitz had been one of the leading spirits behind the plan to send the fleet on its death ride for honour, and on June 21st 1919, the day the peace terms were supposed to be signed at Versailles, he had the ships scuttled where they rode at anchor in Scapa Flow to salve that honour. Now he intended nurturing the seeds of a new fleet ‘so that when the time comes a useful tree will grow from it’.
⁷
The material allowed him by the peace terms was minimal—six old battleships, six cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats, with an absolute ban on U-boats and naval aircraft; consequently his immediate aim was in the personnel field; discipline and pride had to be restored, a nucleus of dedicated officers formed who would be able to guide the later expansion. Under the peace terms he was allowed only 1,500 officers; only the best and most loyal need be selected.

Such was the position when Dönitz reported back to the Navy Station at Kiel in July. He was greeted by the Adjutant,
Korvettenkapitän
Otto Schultze, his former U-boat flotilla chief in the Mediterranean.

‘Are you going to stay with us, Dönitz?’ Schultze asked.

‘Do you think we shall have U-boats again?’

‘Certainly I think so. The [Versailles] ban will not remain for ever. In about two years it is to be hoped we will have U-boats again.’
⁸

This reply, according to Dönitz’s memoirs, finally answered the question he had been debating with himself, his fellow officers and his family since returning home—whether or not he should re-enlist in the new Republican
Reichsmarine
. He decided to do so because, he wrote in his memoirs, he had become ‘an enthusiastic U-boat man’ and was ‘under the spell of this unique U-boat camaraderie’.
⁹

Nevertheless, the conversation with Schultze seems extraordinary only a month after the signing of the treaty denying Germany U-boats, at a time when the fleet had virtually ceased to exist. One wonders whether, if Schultze did use the words Dönitz recalled 40 years later, it was off his own bat to entice a fanatically loyal and able young officer back to the colours, or if he was simply repeating official policy at a higher level.

All that can be said is that clandestine preparations for rebuilding a U-boat arm were indeed under way within two years, and that the Naval officer corps was imbued from top to bottom with a thoroughly vengeful spirit against the allies, against the Versailles treaty, particularly perhaps against Great Britain, whose ‘poisonous hatred … inconsiderate inhumanity, incitement (to revolution) and hunger (blockade)’
¹⁰
von Trotha saw as chiefly responsible for their present humiliations, but also against the Republican politicians who, by signing the armistice, had robbed the armed forces of victory—this was the legend which the High Command of both Army and Navy were preparing to preserve the honour and ensure the future of the officer corps.

So Dönitz was carried along in the elemental life-stream of the Bismarckian-Prussian system. His father-in-law, whom he had consulted earnestly about his future, had intimate connections at the very top of the system and had already thrown in his lot with the new
Reichswehr
; he counselled Dönitz in strong terms to do the same: ‘You are not permitted to abandon the State.’
¹¹

No doubt Schultze reinforced the message; at all events he took Dönitz on as his assistant to help him with the task of picking the select
band who were to be the nucleus of von Trotha’s future Navy; he started on August 14th.

Through the autumn of 1919 internal unrest grew, not so much from the Communist groups, which were routed by the government-backed
Freikorps
whenever they showed their heads, but from the monarchists. In November, during a Public Inquiry designed to prove that the government could deal with the military and there was therefore no necessity for the allies to press the peace treaty requirement for war crimes trials of Germany’s former leaders, the generals and Conservative politicians turned the tables, putting the revolutionaries and the government in the dock as the authors of Germany’s humiliation. On November 18th Hindenburg in his evidence made the historic pronouncement that the immaculate Army had been given a dagger thrust in the back by the revolutionaries. Talk of an imminent military coup to restore the monarchy became widespread.

In February the allies heightened the tension by publishing a list of nearly 900 ‘War Criminals’ and demanding their surrender to stand trial; the names ranged from the Kaiser and his entourage, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Falkenhayn, successive Chancellors, and among naval officers, Tirpitz, Scheer, von Trotha down to individual U-boat Commanders. Anger erupted, and not only amongst the monarchists; this ultimate humiliation united the greater part of the nation in defiance. The government, knowing it could not survive if it agreed to the demand, sought to gain time; nationalist hotheads, led by a Prussian official named Wolfgang Kapp and supported by a naval
Freikorps
, felt the time ripe to act. An hour before midnight on March 12th, with the tacit approval of the naval High Command they marched on Berlin. The Army High Command refused to support the Republic and the government fled.