Dönitz: The Last Führer (79 page)

Dönitz appeared glum and annoyed after reading all this, and relieved his anger when Gilbert visited his cell in the evening, accusing Raeder of being a disillusioned old man jealous about the increased U-boat construction that he and Speer had achieved.

Annoyed as he was, Dönitz had every reason to be overjoyed at another development that day; Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, formerly
C-in-C US naval forces in the Pacific, had delivered an answer to a questionnaire from Kranzbühler: in accordance with an order from the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington late on December 7th 1941, he wrote, he had ordered unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan from the first day of the war; moreover it had become general practice not to attempt rescue of survivors unless it could be done without prejudice to the execution of the mission.

‘Do you know what he said?’ Dönitz exulted at lunch the next day. ‘He conducted
unrestricted warfare
in the whole Pacific from the first day after Pearl Harbor! It’s a wonderful document!’
¹⁰⁰

Two days later von Schirach came to the stand and denounced Hitler in forthright terms as the greatest mass murderer of all time, perpetrator with Himmler of the darkest blot on German history. In the ‘elders’ ’ lunch room afterwards, the politicians agreed he had been absolutely right. Gilbert asked Dönitz if he did not agree too. ‘Of course,’ he replied abruptly and said nothing else.

The next evening Gilbert pressed him on the point; he agreed it was true, but thought von Schirach had been covering up too much. It was the Nazi leaders who had started the whole business and the soldiers who had done nothing but their duty were the sufferers. He went on to tell Gilbert how he had brought up his own children as Christians, and they had remained so despite joining the Hitler Youth, which he knew had been anti-Christian; ‘The two sons I lost in battle were good Christians and good soldiers. So was I. So are your Admirals. We are the same type.’

And he returned to his favourite theme: the politicians had caused these disgusting crimes, but now the soldiers had to sit in the dock and share the blame.
¹¹⁰

Towards the end of June Speer went to the stand and made his intended statement about the leadership’s common responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich, although he stopped short of admitting his own knowledge of the extermination policy. Afterwards he told Gilbert that his admission of a common responsibility was causing great consternation among the others.
¹¹¹

The final prosecution speeches began towards the end of July. Dönitz could have taken little comfort from the US Prosecutor’s description of him as promoting ‘the success of the Nazi aggressions by instructing his pack of submarine killers to conduct warfare at sea with the illegal
ferocity of the jungle’, nor with the sting in the tail, which charged all the professional men, politicians and military, with betrayal.

‘It is doubtful if the Nazi master plan could have succeeded without the specialized intelligence which they so willingly put at its command … Their superiority to the average run of Nazi mediocrities is not the excuse. It is their condemnation.’
¹¹²

After him the British Prosecutor asked if Dönitz was ignorant of the crimes of the regime when he addressed to a navy of some 600,000 men a speech on the ‘spreading poison of Jewry’, and circulated Hitler’s directive, ‘terror should be met by terror’ at the time of the shipyard strike in Copenhagen, asking for 12,000 concentration camp workers and recommending collective reprisals.
¹¹³

The French Prosecutor pointed to Dönitz’s ‘indisputable adherence to the criminal policy of the system.’ He said among other things, ‘The officer is the representative of the State. This talk about non-political officers is sheer nonsense.’
¹¹⁴
Finally the Soviet Prosecutor said that his British colleague had proved the guilt of Dönitz and Raeder so convincingly he would not dwell on the Grand Admirals; he did, however, call for ‘the last head of the Hitlerite government’ to be among ‘the first to pay the penalty for all those crimes which have led to the trial’.
¹¹⁵

This was a very reasonable call. However, Kranzbühler and Dönitz probably took comfort from the fact that, despite the hard language, none of the speeches had referred to the most dangerous charge to his personal account—ordering the shooting of shipwrecked survivors. Justice Jackson had come nearest to it, but his use of the term ‘illegal’ might well have referred to the unrestricted campaign, and that, as Fleet Admiral Nimitz had agreed, had been the US policy in the Pacific from the beginning; it had also been British policy in the Skagerrak area from May 1940.

When he came to make his final statement to the court at the end of August, Dönitz said he considered his conduct of the U-boat war was justified, and he ‘would have to do the same again’. His subordinates had carried out his orders in complete confidence in him and in their legality and no subsequent judgement could deprive them of their belief in the honourable character of the struggle for which they had made such sacrifices. Of the Führer principle, he admitted that ‘if in spite of all the idealism, all the decency and all the devotion of the German people’ it had led to such results, it must be wrong ‘because apparently human
nature is not in a position to use the power of this principle for good without falling victim to the temptations of power’.

Finally, ‘…my life was devoted to my profession and thereby to the service of the German people. As the last C-in-C of the German Navy and the last head of State, I bear responsibility towards the German people for everything which I have done and left undone.’
¹¹⁶

It was a neat move towards Speer’s position without committing himself to knowledge of or responsibility for crimes.

Raeder was equally concerned to stress the ‘cleanness and decency in battle of the
Kriegsmarine
’ which stood ‘before this Court and before the world with a clean shield and an unstained flag’; he could only explain the repeated attacks on the Navy and himself as the result of the Prosecution being ‘unqualified to judge soldierly honour’.
¹¹⁷

The period of about a month between these final statements and the judgements was one of tense depression amongst the prisoners; several just lay on their cots staring at the ceiling, and as the days passed even Göring grew nervous and uncharacteristically quiet. Dönitz probably clung to the hope he had gained from Nimitz’s statement and a feeling perhaps that his efforts to place himself firmly in the western camp and explain the dangers if the Russians obtained the secrets of the Walter U-boat might pay off. That is speculation.

The judgements were delivered on October 1st. For Dönitz, ‘The evidence does not show that he was privy to the conspiracy to wage aggressive war.’ Nevertheless ‘from January 1943 Dönitz was consulted almost continually by Hitler’ and the evidence showed he was ‘active in waging aggressive war’. Of the unrestricted U-boat campaign, ‘In the actual circumstances of this case the Tribunal is not prepared to hold Dönitz guilty’; of the
Laconia
orders, ‘The Tribunal is of the opinion that the evidence does not establish with the certainty required that Dönitz deliberately ordered the killing of shipwrecked survivors.’ The orders were, however, ‘undoubtedly ambiguous, and deserve the strongest censure’.

He had permitted the ‘Commando’ order to remain in force, but claimed he knew nothing of the MTB crew being turned over to the SD and shot; his call for 12,000 concentration camp inmates for the shipyards had been a suggestion; he had no jurisdiction over the shipyards, and did not know whether they had been procured. His attitude to breaking away from the Geneva Convention had been: ‘It would be better to carry out the measures considered necessary without warning and at all costs to save face with the outside world.’

He was found ‘Not Guilty’ on the first count of the indictment, ‘Conspiracy to wage aggressive war’, but ‘Guilty’ on the second and third counts, ‘Waging aggressive war’ and ‘War crimes’.
¹¹⁸

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discover from the language on what grounds these guilty verdicts were brought. In the circumstances in which he found himself in 1943, waging ‘aggressive war’ could hardly be considered a crime. As for ‘War crimes’, if the evidence was insufficient to convict him of ordering the killing of survivors—and it is most unlikely that he ever gave a direct order to this effect—and he was not held responsible for the murder of the MTB crew under the ‘Commando’ order, nor for what happened in the Danish shipyards, and his encouragement to anti-semitism in a speech to the nation was not even mentioned in the judgement, what was left? Only the ‘ambiguous’ orders about survivors for which he received the ‘strongest censure’. If Heisig’s and Möhle’s evidence meant anything—and it is difficult to see why they, against the grain of the entire officer corps working for Dönitz’s acquittal, should have invented it all—he had incited his men to kill survivors, the ‘ambiguities’ in his orders had been criminal, and he bore prime responsibility for the murder of the crew of the
Peleus
—to take one proven instance. For this there could have been only one sentence.

Sentences were pronounced that afternoon. The prisoners were taken up one by one in the lift to the courtroom to hear their fate. Gilbert remained below to note their reactions as they came down. First was Göring; he was evidently fighting an emotional breakdown as he answered Gilbert: ‘Death’.

When it was Dönitz’s turn to put on the headphones in the court, he heard himself sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He removed the
headphones, banged them down, and walked quickly to the door, apparently very angry.
¹¹⁹
But to Gilbert he seemed not to know quite how to take it.

‘Ten years—well, anyway I cleared U-boat warfare—your own Admiral Nimitz said—you heard it—’
¹²⁰

If he was a little confused it was not surprising. The judgement and sentence do not fit; they read like the result of an inept committee compromise. There can be no doubt that the Russians wanted Dönitz’s head, so did the British, therefore the questions concern the attitude of the American and French Judges. Did politics as well as justice inform their judgement? If not, on what basis was the sentence pronounced? It is known that the US Judge, Francis Biddle, said that he thought Dönitz should have been acquitted; perhaps ten years was the best compromise they could reach. Apart from three acquitted, von Papen, Schacht and Fritsche, it was the lightest sentence of all.

Of one thing there can surely be no doubt; tried with the evidence and insights available today, he would have joined Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl and the rest of the twelve condemned to death by hanging.

Seven ‘major’ war criminals remained in the cells at Nuremberg after the executions had been carried out; besides Dönitz there were Hess, Funk and Raeder, all sentenced to life imprisonment, Speer and von Schirach, twenty years, and von Neurath—found guilty on all four counts—to fifteen years. Speer, agonizing over questions of guilt and responsibility, found himself the odd man out, positively disliked by Raeder, Dönitz and von Schirach for his attitude at the trial. On December 6th—according to the illegal diary he kept on scraps of paper—this came out into the open. As they were cleaning the corridor Schirach, breaking the non-communication rule, jeered at him for his assumption of total responsibility, which even the Court had rejected. Speer saw the other five nodding in agreement.
¹²¹

Was it only the question of shared responsibility that irked the others? It is more likely they felt him to be a hypocrite. They knew he had been as aware as they themselves of the extermination policy, of which he had denied all knowledge; they considered his attitude in the witness stand an opportunist posture to save his neck. Dönitz certainly believed this. He and Speer had been friends; Speer was the only one in the dock, according to Kranzbühler, with whom his client was on the familiar ‘
du
’
terms. Kranzbühler could never understand this, believing Speer to be a pure opportunist; after a long time Dönitz had come to share his opinion.
¹²²
It is difficult to explain Speer’s moral turmoil—after he had unburdened himself of his feeling of shared responsibility—without assuming a deeper layer of guilt than anything he admitted to.

In March the following year the rules banning communication were relaxed during the periods for exercise in twos in the prison yard. Speer and Dönitz seem to have repaired their relationship to an extent as they sometimes walked together. One morning Dönitz said to him with aggressive suddenness that the trials had made a mockery of justice—if only because the judging nations would not have acted any differently. Speer felt it was futile to try and persuade him of the moral legitimacy of the verdicts since Dönitz was ‘unable to see the magnitude of the horror’. But assuming, as it must be assumed on the evidence, that Dönitz recognized his good fortune in escaping with his neck, his words sound rather as if they sprang from a compulsion to justify himself.
¹²³

On July 18th the prisoners were woken at four in the morning and told to prepare for a move; this was the long-expected transfer to Spandau prison in West Berlin, a maximum security jail which had been a collecting point for political prisoners
en route
to the concentration camps from the start of the Nazi regime. Arriving at the castellated red-brick building inside a high wall and outer security fence the same morning, the seven were made to strip and were led, naked, to the surgery to be examined by doctors from each of the four, formerly allied nations, then searched for secreted poisons. Afterwards in the Chief Warder’s room they were told they would henceforth be known as numbers, and were shown seven piles of numbered clothing which, the Warder made a point of telling them, had been worn by concentration camp inmates. They consisted of underwear, a coarse grey shirt, tattered brown convict’s trousers and jacket, a convict’s skull cap and sandals. The prisoners went to collect them in the order they had entered the room; Dönitz was ‘number two’, Raeder ‘number four’, Speer ‘number five’—and so they remained to the prison authorities to the end of their time. Hess, who was destined to stay longest, was ‘number seven’.