Battleship Bismarck (58 page)

Günther Paschen was born in 1880, the son of a vice admiral and a mother of Danish origin. During the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 he was the chief gunnery officer in the battlecruiser
Lützow
, which sank early on the day after the action as a result of the damage she had sustained. He had shot rapidly and with great success at the British capital ships
Princess Royal, Black Prince, Indefatigable
, and
War-spite
. Later he wrote, “Jutland Day on the
Lützow
”—the flagship of the commander of the Scouting Forces, Vice Admiral Hipper—“represents the high point of my career as a naval and gunnery officer; memories of a great and fine work in the service of the cherished weapon bind me to the ship and her crew. Into the battleworthiness of this ship I put all the knowledge and ability that service and study had given me.”

Kapitän zur See a.D. Günther Paschen, the accomplished first gunnery officer in the battlecruiser
Lützow
at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 and gunnery instructor at the Mürwik Naval School 1929–36, rejected National Socialism at an early date and was murdered by “People’s Court” in 1943. (Photograph courtesy of Ruth Paschen.)

A recipient of the Iron Cross I. Class, Paschen had been discharged in 1919 and taught as an instructor at the Mürwik Naval School from 1926 to 1936. In my mind’s eye his tall figure now stood again before
me there, his face aglow with intelligence and determination—deeply absorbed during instruction in his favorite weapon or at ballistic demonstrations on the grounds of the naval school. Married to an Englishwoman, he had a complete mastery of the English language, shunning the American slang that was becoming increasingly current in Germany, and in his manner cultivating an English charm. He had seen through the mendacity of National Socialism from the beginning; his opposition to the regime was widely known, for on occasion he had spoken his mind—imprudent in a police state.

At the end of August 1943 Paschen opened his home to two unknown Danes who supposedly wished to rent a room, but were actually Nazi agents-provocateurs who had come to involve him in compromising conversations. They succeeded in short order. Paschen said that he did not believe in a German victory and that the Führer’s “secret weapons” were just a bluff. As his mother was a Dane, he spoke her language, went hunting in northern Schleswig, and spent a good deal of time in Denmark. He also believed that this country had been wronged in 1864 and that the Reich should give Schleswig back to Denmark.
*
One of the two Danes later repeated these remarks to a female naval auxiliary with whom he had relations. That was enough for the “People’s Court” to condemn Paschen: in private conversation in his own home with citizens of an occupied country the accused had made a public attack on the German military potential and that of an allied people. On 8 November 1943 Günther Paschen was murdered in Brandenburg Prison by Hitler’s henchmen. He had refused to appeal for mercy. Raeder, who on private occasions used to stress the strength of his Christian convictions, did not intercede with Hitler in favor of Paschen even after the latter’s daughter Ruth implored him by letter to do so. He did not even answer Ruth Paschen’s letter. Nor did any of the doomed officer’s crewmates step forward to offer a helping hand. Everyone seemed frozen in fear of the “Führer.”

In 1951 Professor Dr. Karl Römer, ship’s surgeon on the
Lützow
in Paschen’s day, wrote a friend of the family:

Your friendly card continues to move me greatly. Oh, that the noble Paschen was put to death! But it seems thoroughly fitting for that upright man. Already on SMS Lützow he was the strong character. You
know that of all the officers he was always the one for whom I really had respect. You had to know him, this tall man with a thinker’s forehead and a face full of character, who spoke little, and impressed us surgeons as kind and courtly . . . . Everyone spoke of him with respect. Everyone knew that he was really the one who got things done. When he came to the table—frequently late—you knew that he came from work. In humanity and character, he was, in fact, the best . . . . You probably know that he scored a hit with the first shot from the
Lützow
. Furthermore, he impressed me in a most exceptional way: it was probably in April 1916, in a disagreement with other officers, that he remarked that British reports were accurate, while ours were—well, I’ll say—colored. He was the only one who saw that at the time; and from then on, I was certain that we would lose the war. And from then on, I felt silently bound to him by the knowledge that the struggle was hopeless. Please give his wife my heartfelt and respectful regards, from one in whose memory her husband remains in death a shining example.

A shining example, a clear-sighted, perceptive patriot, Günther Paschen—honor to his memory!

Amid more reading and conversations with the medical personnel, the time in Hatfield House flew swiftly past. One day I discovered the attraction of the delicious food and decided to help myself well enough to make up for lost time. I also explained this to my physician. O woe! It was an injudicious remark. “If the food tastes so good to you,” said the doctor, “you’re completely well again and can go back to your camp at once.” And straightaway it was farewell to the meat dishes in Hatfield House and back again to my cell in Cockfosters.

*
Ausser Dienst (Retired)

*
The border province of Schleswig, whose population was predominantly Danish, had been incorporated into Germany following Denmark’s defeat in the War of 1864.

39    Shap Wells

My new stay at Cockfosters following my return from Hatfield House would be of only brief duration. My time there had run out. And soon I was on another journey, this time to the north, to my first regular prisoner-of-war camp. This was Camp Number 15, Shap Wells Hotel, near Penrith, Cumberland, a camp allocated solely to the reception of captured German officers.

The hotel, a rectangular building of weathered, local stone, lay as though hidden in a swale about three kilometers from the London-Carlisle road. Its situation in the landscape gave promise of an agreeable coolness during the hot summers, and in winter protection from the sharp winds and often penetrating fogs of these northern latitudes. Its isolated location made it appear an ideal place for quartering prisoners of war.

The hotel was before the war—and is again today—a famous starting point for tours of the in parts majestic, in parts monotonous landscape of the Lake District and the Yorkshire valleys. Its history is remarkable. The present building was always operated as a hotel and was already opened as such in 1833. It had throughout belonged to the earls of Lonsdale. One of them—the one who on account of the color he preferred on his conveyances, the color of his servants’ livery, and the yellow carnation that was always in his buttonhole was called “The Yellow Earl”—had the German emperor as a hunting guest at his ancestral seat, Lowther Castle, not far from Shap, in 1910 and 1911. Today, the memory of these visits by Wilhelm II still lives on in the names “Emperor’s Lodge” for a row of guest residences
there and “Emperor’s Drive” for one of the approaches to the castle. Into the twenties, members of the British royal house had as hunting guests of the Earl of Lonsdale repeatedly visited Shap Wells, which until the Second World War was known as a hotel for the rich and famous.

The former Prisoner-of-War Camp No.15 near Penrith in Cumberland. Taday it is again, as it was before the war, the Shap Wells Hotel. (Photograph courtesy of Shap Wells Hotel, Ltd.)

Shaps Wells Hotel was transformed into a prisoner-of-war camp in February 1941 and Major G. A. I. Dury, M.C., Grenadier Guards, was appointed its first commandant.

There was a great hello upon my arrival there, where among the camp’s seventy inmates I encountered many personal acquaintances. In the first place stood the German camp leader, a Korvettenkapitän with whom I was acquainted from prior service. Officers of all three branches of the Wehrmacht were present: among the naval officers, mostly submariners who had lost their boats; Luftwaffe officers who had been downed during the preceding years’ air battle over England; and—only a few—army officers who had fallen into British hands after the invasion of the west in May 1940. Whoever had been captured in September–October 1939, like a few of the submariners, already considered themselves expert “old prisoners”; for the newcomers
towards the end of 1941 there was, in view of what almost everyone still expected to be a short war, no more “room” for a long stay in British custody. “What! You’ve come now—it isn’t worthwhile anymore!” No wonder—the quick victories from 1939 to the summer of 1941 were still fresh memories; things would certainly continue to move just as fast!

I cannot complain of the accommodations in the camp. Of course, it was less roomy than in my spacious cell at Cockfosters, but I shared my room with nice comrades on one of the upper floors reserved for prisoners. There was a great deal to tell and to ask and a little less space soon lost its significance. The hotel furnishings, including bed linens, were completely at our disposal. At night searchlights, which had been set up around the camp, slid over the iron bars mounted outside the windows. They were supposed to frustrate attempts to escape under cover of darkness. Of the rooms on the ground floor, the big dining room served us prisoners; the rest were claimed by the British camp authorities. The garden adjoining the building we found very pleasant. We could go walking in it and sometimes also plant flowers or vegetables. Two rings of barbed wire ran around the building and garden, an obstacle against escape to be taken seriously by prisoners of war.

It was customary for every newcomer to give a talk to the camp inmates on the circumstances of his capture as soon as possible. Naturally, mine concerned the action and end of the battleship
Bismarck
. After fulfilling this duty one was, so to say completely, accepted into the camp community.

The prisoners’ daily life was determined by an unvarying uniformity. The external discipline followed a fixed schedule: wake up, to the roll call that ascertained we were all present; meal times; in the evenings “lights out.” Variations in our existence came about mainly through the occasional arrival of “new ones,” the coming and going of the seasons, and the impressions of political and military changes in the world. Soon it became a crucial question of keeping ourselves physically and mentally fit for an indefinite period. At Shap Wells, praise God, we had the freedom to do both in sufficient measure.

Of our food, always a sensitive point, I personally had no complaints. If in quantity it often seemed scanty, it was still adequate and of good quality. Time and again, however, comrades suffered from serious indigestion, apparently a result of the fact that the cooks, formerly assistant cooks from U-boat crews, were not completely the masters of their craft. These cooks had to process, altogether on their
own, the raw materials the British provided, which corresponded to the rations of second-line British troops. But the kitchen’s performance never became optimal and the shortcomings in food preparation did not cease.