Dönitz: The Last Führer (66 page)

During regular visits to his men at the front and in the training divisions, Dönitz left the same impression of confidence and determination which marked his performance at Führer headquarters. The late Admiral Wegener recalled accompanying him on an inspection of sailors and supply staff at Gdynia in the closing months of the war; the men were morose, but as Dönitz went along the lines looking each in the eye they straightened, visibly regaining their pride.
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One U-boat Commander training crews for the new boats recalled Dönitz coming round every three months or so, making rousing speeches, invariably ending with the resolve to ‘pursue this war until victory is achieved’. Afterwards he would spend the evening in the officers’ mess. ‘I often sat next to him, and he always left me with the
same impression of a reliable and energetic man perfectly confident that final victory
would
be achieved. He met all criticisms by short, clipped references to ultra-modern boats that could do fabulous things …’
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He argued that if he, with his close contacts with the Führer, could not judge the situation, nobody could, and echoing Hitler’s repeated—repeatedly falsified—promises he assured them that if they could just hold on they would see a complete turn of the tide in Germany’s favour. ‘Whenever he visited us, he left us feeling better.’
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He maintained his armour-plated confidence and inspring mien to the end, the very model of a Prussian soldier in adversity. Yet a model of leadership appropriate for a time of hope in victory or succour is inappropriate when there is no possibility of either. And while loyalty is the bedrock of soldierly virtue, to a leader who has proved himself unworthy it is the basis of evil. Hitler had proved himself unworthy, as decent judges of character had known from the beginning. Having blamed everyone but himself for his cosmic political and military misjudgements, at the end he blamed the German people, rationalizing his refusal to accept responsibility for the fate of those he claimed to lead with the dictum that they had proved the weaker in the struggle of races, hence could not expect and did not deserve to survive. Keeping faith with such a leader meant acquiescing in the ever-mounting slaughter of the German people in whose name he was exhorting his men to fight. Of all the multitude of deceptions which Dönitz perpetrated on his service—and no doubt on himself—this was the ultimate.

The causes lay deep in his personality, but it was the system he served and the history and tradition of the German Navy that shaped his responses. Scheer and Hipper and von Trotha had attempted a similar deception at the end of the First War when they planned the suicide sortie of the High Seas Fleet to preserve the honour of the service; that had precipitated the naval mutinies which Dönitz and every officer of his generation resolved should never recur. It was also possible to rationalize
Heldentod
—hero’s death—as in the First War, as necessary to gain the Navy honour for posterity and so ensure its future rebirth. This hardly accorded with political or economic reality, but neither had any place in naval education. The majority of naval officers at the time seem to have had much the same feelings as Dönitz.

Behind the naval tradition was the Prusso-German philosophy that condoned any deception for the good of the State; taken to its ultimate by the Nazis it became a system of lies in which Dönitz was inextricably
bound. The ultimate lie that the forces of the State must continue fighting for the people was inherent from the beginning in the totalitarian deception that the people were no more than collective units of the State without right to independent personality.

On a personal level there were equally powerful forces acting on Dönitz, one an individual trait, his refusal to admit that he was wrong, his compulsion to take every opportunity to assert that his course had been correct. He had espoused the Nazi doctrine, probably as early as any serviceman, had affirmed not only his soldier’s loyalty to the Führer in countless speeches and directives, but had made it clear that he had given him his ‘whole soul’; he had reacted to the assassination attempt with ‘holy wrath and extravagant fury’ against the ‘criminal traitors’; could he six to eight months later have altered course 180° and declared
himself a
traitor? Probably this never came in question; he was wholly emotionally committed.

Another force which can hardly be overestimated is the conviction and repetition with which he was assailed at Führer headquarters. There were no dissentient views there. He lent his own inner fires to the doctrines of hate and destruction repeated endlessly, his own confidence to the group certainties rising in the stale air of those Nibelung gatherings. Towards the end, as Speer recalled, it had become pure nihilism: ‘We leave the Americans, English and Russians only a desert.’
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There is ample proof from his speeches and other utterances that Dönitz was prepared to repeat the most extreme tenets of Hitler’s and Goebbels’ creed; there is no reason to suppose he was unresponsive to this ultimate ‘logic’.

There were significant moments during the final months when he was confronted with opportunities to break out and use individual judgement. One was in February 1945, when Speer, according to his memoirs, drew him aside during a situation conference revealing the disastrous military position on all fronts and said that something had to be done.

‘I am here to represent the Navy,’ Dönitz replied curtly, ‘All the rest is not my business. The Führer knows what he is doing.’
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On another occasion in March Guderian drew him aside to enlist his support for his own repeated pleas to Hitler to withdraw the northern army in Kurland, now encircled and only supplied by the Navy; he believed Hitler’s decision to hold on could be traced back to Dönitz’s concern for maintaining naval mastery in the Baltic. This time Dönitz
agreed to intervene; he had, it was true, repeatedly represented the necessity of holding Kurland, chiefly for reasons of U-boat training, but now the task of supplying the Army there and evacuating wounded and refugees had become the greatest strain on the service; he told Hitler this and supported Guderian’s evacuation plan. According to the naval staff war diary, Hitler agreed with him on the naval argument, but ‘described at length the reasons [for holding on], all based on land strategy’. According to Gerhardt Boldt, who witnessed the scene, Hitler rose slowly at Dönitz’s unexpected intervention, made a few dragging steps about the room, then spat out his reply in a harsh voice.

‘I have already said that repatriation of the Kurland troops is out of the question. I cannot abandon the heavy equipment. Moreover, I must take Sweden into account.’
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Ever present in the background to these and no doubt other moments when Dönitz may have been asked or even felt tempted to question policy were Hitler’s repeated denunciations and threats against ‘defeatists’; there was also Führer order number one which laid down that no one had the right to reveal information from his own service sphere to other departments; all information and views had to pass upwards to the Führer who alone might be in possession of the complete picture. And as Hitler reminded Guderian, failure to comply with this fundamental law constituted treason; there were fearful proofs of the punishments meted out for treason in the wake of the July assassination attempt. And the coarse, scarred features of Himmler’s principal lieutenant, the giant Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Central Office, were seldom absent from Führer headquarters during these final months of the war. Terror had always been the buttress of the system; it was needed now more than ever and must be added to the powerful forces distorting the environment in which Dönitz was moving. Whether his attitude at the end came as much from the push of fear of getting out of line, or knowledge of complicity in crimes for which the allies had promised to exact atonement, as from the pull of his need for an all-powerful father and all-embracing creed to which he could commit himself—reinforced by the convictions of the brutal group with whom he consorted day after day in the final months—there is no doubt that the manner in which he carried on performing his duty with fanatical commitment while the
Reich
and all rational hope crashed around him represented a growing separation from reality. Nor can it be doubted that he was aware of it at some level, which he managed to exclude from judgement, for directly
he learned of Hitler’s death he dropped from his fantasy plane with an abruptness which astonished those closest to him.

The documentary record from autumn 1944 suggests that his way of excluding reality was by increasing his already over-loaded working day and exaggerating his normal goal-oriented methods. He had always tended to discount factors interfering with his aims; now he banished outside events completely, concentrating on solving problems within his own sphere
in vacuo
; his solutions were practical and worked out in immaculate detail, but they did not key into what was happening outside. They represented so much lost motion.

The construction programme was an example. On September 29th he wrote a memorandum calling attention to the fact that losses of naval units had outstripped new building since the summer by 60 craft; if this continued the Navy would be unable to fulfil its tasks, and he concluded therefore that the programme in its entirety should be accelerated.
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Since the original grand plan had already been set back by severe material and personnel shortages, aggravated by his own
additions
such as the Small Battle Units and extra minesweepers, and disrupted by allied bombing and sabotage in the occupied territories, since it competed for ever scarcer resources with the other armed services, this was pure fantasy. He continued to press for the complete augmented and accelerated programme, however, refusing to consider any reduction—‘We yield not a finger’s breadth’—
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and in November had the satisfaction of gaining Hitler’s approval. This was worth as little as the detailed and practical proposals with which he backed his arguments. The resources were not available. Before the end of January all surface shipbuilding had stopped for lack of coal.

One of the practical measures he had proposed was to boost the shipyard labour force with 12,000 concentration camp inmates. He also suggested steps to deal with poor performance and sabotage in Danish and Norwegian yards. It was absolutely senseless, he wrote, to expend costly raw materials and scarce foreign exchange in these yards ‘if, for example, out of eight newly-built ships in Denmark, seven will be destroyed by sabotage’.
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If new measures to be taken by the Security services proved ineffective, he suggested:

Two months later, on January 23rd, after even the pretence of continuing the building programme had been abandoned, he raised the proposal again in a small group consisting of Hitler, Ribbentrop, Göring, Keitel, Jodl, Lammers and Bormann after the daily situation conference at Führer headquarters, recording the result: ‘The Führer decides to resort to energetic measures as advocated by C-in-C Navy.’
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Extension of the slave-labour system to the northern shipyards was a brutal measure to propose to fulfil a programme that was plainly impossible; to repeat the proposal after surface shipbuilding had come to a halt was pure fanaticism; the springs of fanaticism lay within, but the record of these conferences in the final months of the war leaves no doubt that he was playing up to and for the Führer—Professor Salewski even suggests that the whole charade of memoranda and proposals about the construction programme was no more than image-building to prove his capacity for endurance.
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‘Military qualities don’t show themselves on a sand model,’ Hitler repeated often, ‘in the last analysis they show themselves in the capacity to hold on, in perseverance and determination … fanatical determination.’
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Dönitz had no need to prove he possessed these qualities; he had shown them throughout his career and especially perhaps during his time as C-in-C Navy, yet it is evident he felt the need to reaffirm them continually to Hitler. Again and again, with childish eagerness to please, he brought little episodes which might reflect credit on his Navy or himself to the Führer’s attention. After the collapse of a vital bridge over the Rhine at Remagen—too late to prevent the passage of US troops—he described to Hitler ‘the repeated attempts by Navy detachments to destroy the bridge under the most dangerous conditions’.
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He not only made hugely over-optimistic and groundless predictions for future U-boat warfare at the end, but when reporting actual results explained how much better they would have been if only
they still had the Biscay ports, a futile observation, which he repeated in early April with the Russians practically at the gates of Berlin. The war diary recorded: ‘C-in-C Navy points out how great our chances for successful U-boat warfare would be now if we still had the Biscay ports.’
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Similarly he brought to Hitler’s notice the fanatical spirit of Admiral Hüffmeier, recently appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Channel Islands. When Hüffmeier suggested in November 1944 that a programme of drastic confiscation and severely reduced consumption would enable the islands to be held until the end of 1945, he commented on the soundness of the appointment of ‘this energetic personality’.
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In March 1945 he commended the Admiral to Hitler again for his inspiring leadership, later reporting the reply to his own congratulatory telegram: ‘Vice Admiral Hüffmeier hopes he will be able to hold the Channel Islands for another year.’
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A few days later, after differences of opinion in the channel Islands Command about whether or not the forces should hold out to the last man, the garrison Commander was relieved, and Hüffmeier appointed to the post; Hitler then ordered that all fortress Commanders in the west should be naval officers. ‘Many fortresses have been given up,’ he said, ‘but no ships were ever lost without fighting to the last man.’
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