Dönitz: The Last Führer (21 page)

Whether or not this was so, the reports on him by the flotilla chief,
Korvettenkapitän
Schniewind, could not have been more apt:

One of the springs of Dönitz’s success was his absolutely wholehearted commitment to his task and his love of his profession; concluding an account of a day with the flotilla at Lisbon at the end of May 1930—written in 1933—he described how in the evening he and his Commanders sat in a square under palms drinking red wine until the dawn light, ‘pleased with our life and our fine profession, the finest there is!’
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During the time he was bringing his boats up to a high level of efficiency the country entered another period of crisis. The causes were both economic and political. On the one hand the beginning of a general world trade recession exposed the artificial prosperity Germany had been enjoying from foreign loans, and once again inflation, bankruptcies and unemployment rose; on the other hand a swing to the Left in elections in 1928 had alarmed Conservatives and industrialists and induced in them much the same ‘backs to the wall’ mood as in the years before 1914 and immediately after the lost war. In their desperation they turned to Adolf Hitler.

Hitler had been using the years since his release from prison to rebuild his Party and secure his own position at its head. His tactics had been simple but brilliantly effective: the
Führer
or ‘leader’ principle, a pyramid of command modelled on the Army in which each man owed unquestioning obedience both to his own immediate superior and to the supreme leader, had made the Party an extension of his own ego, institutionalizing his own need to dominate and his incapacity to listen to or understand any view but his own. The intolerable annoyances of rational argument or rival leadership were cut off by Führer decree. In the short term this served the practical end of preventing factions splitting the party or diluting its message, thus giving it the tactical flexibility, speed of reaction and concentrated focus of a single will. In the long term, of course, it held the greatest dangers since the Führer must become corrupted by his power; the danger was evident in Hitler’s case since he was already accustomed to dominating his close colleagues, men from the same restricted background as himself who were held spellbound by the breathtaking flow of his ideas, silenced by his fits of passion when crossed, stirred in their shallow depths by his dark hatreds while they munched cream cakes in the simpler Munich cafés. Conviction and anger and vengeance are powerful weapons; Hitler used them consciously and unconsciously for the satisfaction of his own naked will.

To emotional verbal power he joined an animal-like nose for the secret feelings and failings of others and a peasant guile in his dealings with those socially, financially, intellectually above his own level; for their part these despised or humoured him. It was difficult for anyone with critical faculties to take him seriously. A trench coat thrown over his awkward figure, dandruff from his hair spotting the collar, his face redeemed only by blue eyes with a direct and fervent (short-sighted) gaze, he looked what he was, a street agitator. His unimpressive appearance and haphazard manner, described as typical Austrian
Schlamperei
, a Bohemian casualness at odds with his platform image of concentrated force, together with a genuine gaucheness when mixing in higher social circles, were some of his greatest assets. For he was dismissed by political rivals and powerful potential allies as a small-time demagogue who could be used, manipulated and dropped when necessary.

So probably he would have remained had trade recession and unemployment not hit Germany, increasing the numbers whose resentments and idle time could be harnessed to his will. At this he was supreme. As a propagandist and conduit for directing the frustrations and insecurities of the young and the dispossessed and merging them into the national humiliation of the lost war and the national preoccupation with power and the military spirit, he showed genius. The stage management and special effects of the party rallies at Nuremberg, the standards and banners, marching and counter-marching and shouting, music and mass emotion, the street battles against the internal Bolshevist enemy, the repetition in Nazi newspapers and speeches of the articles of hatred—against the treaty of Versailles, against the November criminals in the government who had signed it, against Bolshevism and the Jewish world conspiracy which had spawned it—never descending from generalities to particulars or remedies, never entering into discussion or argument, simply hammering the message home as he was wont to in his own close circle of the half-educated, shrilly and crudely, with these methods the party grew as one of the more noxious effects of the economic crisis. And it was at this point that an infusion of youth with its aggression and idealism transformed it into a potent movement.

So it was that the leader of the conservative, industrial and Pan-German forces, Alfred Hugenberg, threatened by the simultaneous advance of the Left, turned to the Nazis! Hitler had what he lacked, mass support; he had what Hitler lacked, the financial resources and political patronage of industry and the landed classes. Like so many others before
him, he underestimated the extent of the Bohemian corporal’s driving need to dominate or the elemental amorality of his nature. In religious terms it was a pact with the devil; the consequences should have been clear; fear of international Marxism, bitterness at the national humiliation represented by the hated terms of Versailles blinded him and the magnates he represented—that at least is the kindest interpretation. With free use of Hugenberg’s nationwide propaganda machine Hitler became a household name throughout Germany; in elections in September 1930, preceded by brutal street violence between Nazis and Reds and Republicans Hitler’s party increased its representation in the
Reichstag
from twelve to 107 deputies, becoming in one leap the second largest party in the House.

Hitler enjoyed great support in the armed forces, particularly amongst younger officers and men, particularly in the Navy. Senior Army officers viewed the Nazis with as much apprehension as they viewed the Communists, rightly seeing little to choose between them: both were revolutionary forces dedicated to the destruction of existing institutions and social structures, both implied dictatorship by the party. But many senior naval officers were sympathetic, for the Navy was still the
parvenu
and after the stigma of the 1918 and 1923 mutinies and the performance of the battlefleet in the First World War needed more than ever to prove that it was not an expensive, potentially disastrous luxury; and since naval officers had a far harder task than the Army to explain the benefits of a fleet to a still generally land-minded nation they naturally inclined to a party such as Hitler’s which promised to break the shackles of Versailles and rebuild German armed strength.

Above all perhaps, the nucleus of the officer corps that had been chosen to carry the seeds of the fleet for the future had been selected for their sound outlook and were particularly likely to respond to Hitler’s message; the generalities that he was purveying about the German mission in the world and the racial basis of that mission were the very beliefs in which they had been indoctrinated as Imperial officers. And when Hitler talked of restoring German honour, breaking the shackles of Versailles and regaining autonomy in defence they could identify almost personally with the lost honour of the fleet that had not sortied, and the shameful revolutions. It is significant that support for Hitler seems to have been particularly strong among the
ex-Freikorps
men who had fought the Communists.
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And as unemployment in the naval ports grew and with it the strength of the local Nazi Party branches, and the
message spread to the men of the fleet, officers felt that here was a popular ‘loyalist’ movement whose aims were their own and whose adoption on the lower deck fitted new ideas of ‘man-management’ through comradeship and shared purpose, which they had been consciously developing since the various mutinies had exposed the dangers of their old style.

Dönitz himself could not have been unaware of Hitler’s message; by 1929, his first full year as chief of the half flotilla, both Kiel and Wilhelmshaven naval stations had been successfully infiltrated by the Nazis, and by the spring of 1932 Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels, reported after a visit to one of these stations that ‘everyone, officers and crews are entirely for us’.
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It can scarcely be doubted that Dönitz welcomed the Party message for the same reasons as other patriotic and ambitious young officers; torpedo boats were for young men, and it is perhaps significant that the Commander of Dönitz’s leader boat,
Albatros
, von Puttkamer, became Hitler’s naval Adjutant after the Nazi seizure of power.

Another reason to believe that Dönitz supported the Nazi message was his close involvement with the concerns of his men. This was confirmed again in his final report from the flotilla chief, Otto Schniewind. After writing that everything in his first very favourable report remained valid, Schniewind went on:

This was the report countersigned by Rear Admiral Gladisch as BdU—Commander of U-boats.

Of Dönitz’s next posting, lasting from October 1930 to the summer of 1934, his memoirs are almost completely silent. It was the critical period for the nation when the Weimar Republic fell to Hitler’s assault; virtually his only mention of his activities comes in two brief references contained
in answers to questions about his career published in 1969. The first is a statement.

It is evident from his first year’s personal report by the Chief of Staff that some of this work—whatever it was—was of his own making.

This is the most interesting of all the reports on Dönitz, not least because its author was Wilhelm Canaris—a most unusual officer, perhaps the most unusual in the German service. More travelled and worldly wise than the run of career officers who had been sheltered from large areas of thought and experience in the service cocoon, he also possessed a Latin
subtlety that was contrary to the brutal directness of the Prussian tradition in which the corps had been moulded. This fitted him for the clandestine rearmament work on which he had been engaged almost continuously since the war, but not for the more straightforward duties of an executive officer—at least this was the feeling; his nickname ‘the Levantine’ reflected this. At Nuremberg Dönitz described him as ‘an officer in whom not much confidence was shown. He was a man quite different from us. We used to say he had seven souls in his breast.’
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That is rather a good description; Canaris was an enigma and will no doubt remain one, and Dönitz probably found him as curious a specimen as Canaris obviously found this fanatically diligent young staff officer. His remarks about Dönitz’s restlessness and imbalance and his uncertain health may, therefore, be a comment on the visible effects of this incompatibility. Whether or not this is so, they are extraordinarily interesting because, for the first time since the British interrogating officer’s report on the loss of Dönitz’s U-boat in 1918, with its similar suggestion of temperamental imbalance, we are receiving an impression as it were from outside the charmed circle of like-minded and dedicated career officers. To them Dönitz’s fervour was both natural and commendable; to Canaris it was exaggerated, and Dönitz, who had just passed his 39th birthday, had the outlook and emotional instability of a much younger man. This judgement appears to be borne out fully in his later career and was echoed afterwards by another close colleague, Albert Speer.