Battleship Bismarck (4 page)

The author as a Leutnant zur See aboard the light cruiser
Königsberg
in 1934. He served as a range-finder officer in the
Königsberg
and in her sister, the
Karlsruhe
, thus beginning a career in gunnery. (Photograph from the author’s collection).

Before going to my new duty, however, I took a short leave. In the quiet of an Upper Bavarian health resort, where visitors were few in wartime, my thoughts continually wandered back, whether I wanted them to or not, to the moving months I had spent in London, only a year earlier. What changes had taken place in Anglo-German relations since then, so completely at variance with my hopes and wishes! Very early in life, actually during my school days, I acquired a special interest in Great Britain, her people, language, history, and political system. My own family history influenced me in this direction. In the eighteenth century, Sir George Browne, son of John, Count of Altamont, of the house of Neale O’Connor, an Anglo-Norman family that settled in Ireland and later spread to England, entered French service. Subsequently, he transferred to the Prussian Army, in which he fought in the Seven Years’ War. Made a privy councillor after the war, he became a chamberlain and treasurer in Lower Silesia. His daughter, Franziska, married one of my direct forebears. Visits to Britain over the years had deepened my interest in that country. In 1936 I accepted an invitation to the home of English friends in Colchester, and now I could not forget the long discussions we held over the burning necessity to preserve peace between our two peoples.

Unfortunately, the time I had spent as assistant naval attaché in London, personally very enjoyable, was tragically overshadowed from the outset by the continued deterioration of Anglo-German relations. A relentless succession of international events was responsible. I remembered it with a heavy heart.

By the time I arrived in London in November 1938, the British public had all but given up hope that the ceding of the German-populated Sudetenland to the Reich, which had been forced upon the Czech government with British and French consent at Munich the
previous September, would produce the hoped-for relaxation of international tensions. Aggressive speeches by Hitler in Saarbrücken, Weimar, and Munich within two months of the Munich Conference had contributed to Britain’s anxiety.

I had listened to the Saarbrücken speech over the radio. Hitler began by comparing the incorporation of the Sudetenland into the Reich with the return of the Saar in 1935.
*
Then he denounced the “Spirit of Versailles” that was still at large in the world and directed against Germany,
†
and emphasized the necessity of our rearmament, for which he had “fanatically exerted” himself for almost six years now. Germany had only one real, true friend in the outside world: Benito Mussolini. But in the western democracies, which might still want peace today, one could never be sure that tomorrow there wouldn’t be a change that would bring warmongers into the government. In order to guard against such dangers, he had now ordered the construction of our western fortifications to go forward with increased energy. The remainder of his speech he devoted to relations with England, which he indirectly threatened—nine days after signing his agreement with Chamberlain to hold mutual consultations on questions concerning both countries, nine days after an agreement that the world had held to be a great success.

I had hoped for a more conciliatory speech. But, as it was, it had angered and disturbed me. Can’t the fellow ever get enough? I thought. As yet I knew nothing of the agonized aversion with which Hitler had gone to the Munich Conference. And even that was only under last-minute pressure from Mussolini, who was not ready for war. For the “Führer” always wanted to decide everything himself, determine everything himself—what to do and when. And now to negotiate the cession of the Sudentenland to the Reich? “A. H. [Adolf Hitler] can scarcely contain himself when the word negotiation is mentioned,” on 27 September 1938 the British naval attaché in Berlin, Captain R. N. T. Troubridge, recorded in his diary, the impression of his diplomatic colleague Ivone Kirkpatrick, who as interpreter had taken part in Hitler’s conversations with Chamberlain at Bad
Godesberg and Munich. And on 23 October Troubridge noted his own impression of the events surrounding the Munich Conference: “It is indeed more and more apparent that the man wanted his war and is furious at having been done out of it. There is a story going around the chancelleries that he said to the King of Bulgaria that he wanted a war while he was young enough to enjoy it. Not at all unlikely.” Britain’s disillusionment was growing and it was becoming ever clearer that to pursue a policy of pure appeasement would be disastrous for Europe.

In this atmosphere, the horror and revulsion provoked by the attack launched—”at a stroke” in the Nazi manner—against Jewish life and property by Dr. Joseph Goebbels on 9 November 1938 disturbed me even more.
*
It was the evening before my departure from Berlin for London and I was eating in the famous Cantina Romana, when my waiter, suddenly gone white as a sheet, shocked me with the words, “Have you heard? The synagogue next door is burning!” Together with the other guests, I rushed out of the restaurant. In the Kurfürstendamm I saw that groups of hooligans armed with tire irons and crowbars, assigned to sectors like assault troops, were destroying and looting Jewish stores and had put the synagogue on the Fasanenstrasse to the torch. Confronted at such close range with the brutal face of naked force, I stared into the convulsive signs of the time, symptoms of the barbarity that had loomed over us for five years and was now a harbinger of still worse things to come. A subdued crowd, the living exemplars of a people kept politically disadvantaged for centuries, moved through this spectacle, silently or speaking in whispers admonished by the commands of an unseen speaker—”Keep moving! Don’t stand around! No picture taking!” It was an oppressive scene.

But what distressed me above all else that evening, what tore me to pieces inside, was not the horror in the Kurfürstendamm, the atrocious individual acts, as much as the recognition, clearly gained here
in Berlin, of the true nature of the so-called “Third Reich,” the Reich which I had to serve. Germany, since 1933 had been transformed into nothing more than the stage for a dictator, a political actor, who through successive assaults, beginning with the Emergency Decree for the Protection of the People and State of 28 February 1933,
*
had long ago changed the technical legality of his accession to power into an illegality, striking the instruments of a state of law out of the hands of the Germans, one after the other, like superfluous toys. Germany had become a theater directed by a dictator. It was outwardly dazzling—but on account of the parallel internal systems of coercion and repression, the grotesque racial nonsense, the fundamental immorality of the Brown rulers, which no oratorical demogoguery could conceal—internally rotten, self-destructive, and thus, in the last resort, worthless, heightening the political fall for the Germans when the Hitler-bewitchment ended. Germany was now the arena for an intoxicating Hitler-rhetoric that paid lip service to national interests while the actual policy, serving only the maintenance of the “Führer’s” power, irresponsibly placed these very interests at risk and rejected the values of Western civilization, Bolshevik fashion. Here and now I had for the first time seen the regime unmasked; henceforth I could never again misunderstand it.

Individually to oppose the bans of ruffians in the streets, especially in view of the passivity of the police—obviously on orders—what a hopeless thought. That would lead only to one’s own obliteration without doing any good for anyone and thus would be senseless. Besides, I did not have enough blind heroism for that. To be sure, I felt my toleration of these visible wrongs to be a humiliating civic failure, a growth of complicity to have unresistingly accepted another act by Hitler injurious to the interests of our nation and the German reputation in the world—but in this advanced phase of the consolidation of state terror an individual could not accomplish anything. Since 1933 the German people, with a very few exceptions, had with rejoicing capitulated to Hitler by surrendering the stations of a civilized state, never even recognizing the capitulation as such. The adherents
of a liberal state of law could accomplish nothing more here and would have to wait until the system of terror collapsed of itself.

But this would lie in the unforeseeable future, and it would be a long way, and for those with eyes to see, a lonely one, until that time came. How very lonely—and that, too, brings one particular memory to mind. It goes back to a day in December 1938, on which the naval attaché and I journeyed from London to The Hague so that I could present my credentials to the Dutch government, to which we were also accredited. After the official part of the day was over, I spent about an hour strolling through the city by myself, past inviting shops, pausing outside the bookshops to leaf through some of the volumes set out for inspection.

In so doing, I stumbled on authors from whom nothing had been heard for a long time in Germany and whom I could barely remember—exiled authors, in whom the publisher Fritz Helmut Landshoff of the Querido Press in Amsterdam had taken an interest. One of Ernst Toller’s works came to hand,
Eine Jugend in Deutschland
*
with a chapter titled “Blick 1933,”
†
whose text included the words, “Whoever wishes to understand the collapse of 1933. . . .” Ernst Toller—the Communist, whose “Maschinenstürmer”
‡
I recalled from my school days—did it have to be he to confirm that, through the years of doubt in which I had tormented myself about my countrymen’s political sense, I had been entirely correct in my estimate of the Nazi system? We could scarcely think the same way, he and I—an active-duty naval officer and dyed-in-the-wood anticommunist; but I was not thinking in terms of party politics. The “collapse” that I had in mind was Hitler’s so openly attempted disassociation of the German people from the last two thousand years of human culture, and insofar as I interpreted Toller in this manner I was in complete agreement with him.

How extraordinary, this glance at Toller’s text; at this time, in this place, to which nature had contributed a dense fog, as if keeping “Big Brother” from peering over my shoulder and threatening me: “Listen, you, you’re committing intellectual high treason, come along!” I wandered the streets still further, deep in thought, considering how ironic it was that of all people, I—descended from an unpolitical
family of officers and civil servants with a conservative outlook going back for generations, brought up in a strict boarding school after the death of my father, shielded by the military profession from the daily cares of civil life, politically naive and inexperienced—had been endowed with instinct enough to recognize early that Hitler’s path was the wrong path, a dead-end. And thereby like a fallen leaf blown astray, I became estranged from my countrymen, who in their overwhelming majority were Hitler’s followers.

But, my thoughts returning to the Kurfürstendamm, I felt then that if there was a ray of hope it was that the next day I would leave the arena of such barbarities and journey to England. I would be spared the sight of the swastika flag for a time that I wished would never end.

Under the impression of the pogrom of 9 November, of Hitler’s last three speeches, and of his talks with foreign correspondents during these weeks, Troubridge noted in his dairy on 15 November 1938 that according to the opinion of American circles in Berlin, the Jewish pogrom of 9 November would have a negative effect twice that of the sinking of the
Lusitania
in 1915. He continued:

This has really been rather a significant day in the relations between England and Germany, for on this day I finally and irretrievably decided that whilst National Socialism in its present form remains in power there is not the slightest chance of an accord. For over two years I have thought it possible, but now I regret to say I must side with the majority. I am very sorry for Chamberlain, who has done more than anyone in his position could be expected to do but he has received no response whatever from here. The Führer has not made one conciliatory gesture since Munich. He has made three speeches in a row attacking Churchill and Co. and “democrats with umbrellas” (very good taste!) but has uttered not one word of hope. So far as I am concerned, the die is cast.

It is this foresight that leads the reader of Troubridge’s diary back to the ominous words of one of the first entries in it, when in July 1936 he wrote of the launching of the Berlin Olympics:

Prophets who aver that Germany is rushing into an abyss of bankruptcy, self-immolation and dragging the rest of Europe with her in one glorious (?) downward plunge appear on the surface (?) to have some justification for their gloomy predictions. Where comes the money for this lavish entertainment, the new buildings one sees everywhere, new uniforms, new soldiers—ships—aeroplanes, all on a Babylonian scale of splendor and beneficence? First impressions [Troubridge had just entered his post as naval attaché] are lasting. Clean children. . . . Do they want a war, if so, with whom and what about? How is it all done economically? . . . this re-accession of strength that the Olympics symbolize?