Black May (48 page)

P
HILLIPPS:
Are the U-boat men also supposed to live outside now, no longer inside the shelters?

G
EIMEIER:
They all live outside.

P
HILLIPPS:
… One flotilla [already] lives up in the woods, doesn’t it?

G
EIMEIER:
Yes, that’s the Second Flotilla. When we were there, their camp was already finished.

They were about forty kilometers away from us. We belonged to Tenth and as Tenth wasn’t ready, we were still in the shelter; if we’d gotten back we shouldn’t have returned to it.

P
HILLIPPS:
… Are the boats [of the Second and Tenth Flotillas] together?

G
EIMEIER:
The boats themselves are berthed together, but the men are billeted separately, in separate camps; … The longest time that any of our boats was at sea was sixteen weeks. Otherwise, the average patrol was five or five and a half weeks if we were not supplied at sea, and eight weeks if we were, or, at most, nine. To which brothel did you go? The one at La Rochelle?

P
HILLIPPS:
Yes.

G
EIMEIER:
Do you know the one at La Pallice, too … at the top end towards the … the petrol store is there.

P
HILLIPPS:
Yes, I know that [one], too.

G
EIMEIER:
… The layout at Lorient is a sight worth seeing, because the thing has been designed like a wasp’s nest. It’s like a labyrinth; you can’t find your way about in it. All the workshops are inside the shelter, [for example,] the torpedo workshops.… Lorient has been smashed up, but that doesn’t matter at all. Only the population has suffered, the French population, and no one else. You must imagine the Kiel shipyard … [or] the Deutsche Werke, with a large concrete shelter on top, only even more clearly arranged. On one side you have … engines, then here are the … cleansing workshops where all the pistons are washed down and all that; then here are the … workshops, and here are the torpedo workshops; here is the compressor room, where the air compressors are taken off; here is another pen; it is all arranged in pens, and all beside the boat.

P
HILLIPPS:
Did you actually have a Junkers compressor?

G
EIMEIER:
Yes.

K
UFFNER:
You pass through there, the U-boats are in single pens and between the
U
-boats there are the workshops. It goes right up to the roof. Then there are other things which are separate—Junkers is separate—and that is separate, and all the experimental places are separate.

G
EIMEIER:
You can’t form any picture of it if you haven’t seen it yourself.

K
UFFNER:
Well, the Junkers compressor is damnable!

P
HILLIPPS:
Is there only one staircase leading to the one thousandman shelter, is there only one way you can go?

G
EIMEIER:
There are two proper entrances. But one of them is always closed during the day, it is only opened at coffee and mealtimes … otherwise, there’s just one way up.

K
UFFNER:
Inside there you could buy everything in the canteen—cloth, wine, everything you needed. What amount of stuff we took with us on leave! You can buy stockings, cloth, everything.

G
EIMEIER:
I always bought my wife expensive stockings.

K
UFFNER:
I used to send my wife a parcel before I put to sea. I bought her five meters of cloth. It was marvelous blue coat material and cost twenty-four Riechsmarks a meter.

Recorded 11 May 1943
⁵¹

R
OSENKRANZ:
The English will never find out where the hutments of the Tenth Flotilla are [outside Lorient]. They are inside the woods, right in the middle of them, and they are camouflaged into the bargain! Everything has been camouflaged, even the pond. It is all covered with scrim. You can’t see anything at all. They haven’t got any landmark there. The huts are covered over with scrim. You can’t see them at all. All round them there are meadows. It’s all surrounded by woods. They certainly won’t find it. They won’t see the lake, it isn’t really a lake, only a pond. They have no idea where the camp is.

G
RATZ:
Did the hutments belong to the Second Flotilla or the Tenth? Or are both flotillas stationed together?

R
OSENKRANZ:
No, the camps are perhaps a quarter of an hour apart.

Recorded 15 May 1943
⁵²

K
ALISCH
[Re: Lorient]: The roof on the shelters is four meters thick.

R
adioman from THE
GERMANIA
: And now they are adding an extra four meters. The shelters can only be destroyed by an attempted invasion.

K
ALISCH:
Yes.

S
PITZ:
But you could destroy the boats lying inside if an aircraft were to fly in front of the opening to the shelters and drop a torpedo?

K
ALISCH:
No, it couldn’t do that. It would never get near them.

S
PITZ:
Why not?

K
ALISCH:
One shelter is here, here is the mole, and up here there are balloons everywhere—shelter balloon barrage; each balloon has three cables. There are about eighteen balloons in front, one next to the other. They form a close wall, so to speak. No aircraft could get through there, and then there are the hills(?)
[die Berge (?)]
everywhere as well, with any amount of flak on them.

S
PITZ:
There are flak positions on the shelters themselves.

K
ALISCH:
If an aircraft wanted to approach from in front and drop torpedoes there, it would have to come down low, when it would be shot down. They can’t do anything there.

Recorded 16 May 1943
⁵³

R
OSENKRANZ:
He [Interrogation Officer] asked me about losses.…

G
RATZ
: A whole lot of boats are missing from the Tenth Flotilla. There were fifty boats in the flotilla, weren’t there?

R
OSENKRANZ:
I don’t know how many the Tenth had, about sixty, I think.

G
RATZ:
Now?

R
OSENKRANZ:
I believe so. Wait a moment—a fellow who did the officers’ pay had sixty-two boats [on his roll].

GRÄTZ
: Perhaps he had another flotilla as well.

R
OSENKRANZ:
No, only the Tenth. The Second Flotilla had its own administration as well. The name of the Commander is supposed to be a secret, but they [Interrogation Officers] know it as well as we do. They are better informed about it all than many U-boat men.…

Recorded 9 May 1943
⁵⁴

W. RAHN: The Commander hit the First Officer of the Watch over the head with a bottle. They were very drunk, and the First Officer of the Watch retaliated by taking a broom and beating up the Commander.

R
adioman from the
GERMANIA:
H
ow are things with the Italians?

W. RAHN: They hate us like poison. When seamen get drunk they open the portholes and throw bottles at the Italians walking by on the street.

Recorded 3 May 1943
⁵⁵

G
RÄTZ:
I believe that all the old Commanders will sail again if the present rate of [Allied ship] sinkings decreases again.

E
LEBE
: Yes, but the trouble is this: the majority of them haven’t been to sea for two years, so that they don’t know anything about the very latest methods of defense, and they aren’t in a position to voice an opinion.

Recorded 1 June 1943
⁵⁶

O
POLKA:
We simply must win the war. If things go wrong, presumably the Russians will overrun our country; and even if the Russians don’t come right in but confine themselves within certain limits, for the simple reason that they, too, have lost a lot, then all these head-hunters will come in, the Poles and the Czechs. I come from the frontier district, from that actual part; I hate the Poles, they’re a vile race. I’m anxious about my parents.
Recorded 10 June 1943
⁵⁷

The Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division issued a report on 2 April in which it evaluated morale among U-boat POWs as of mid-March. It had an “on the one hand … yet on the other” quality. It reported “no marked deterioration in fighting spirit” among those POWs recently captured. Given the leadership of confident, able, and imaginative Commanders, “even young and raw recruits are resolute in face of the enemy.” In captivity, however, the crews recently captured, including officers, had shown a previously unseen tendency to divulge information that they must have known was contrary to their country’s interests. The Intelligence people theorized that that talkativeness resulted mainly from Germany’s recent reverses on the Eastern Front—the German Sixth Army had fallen at Stalingrad on 2 February—and from the Afrika-Korps’ impending collapse in Tunisia, which would occur on 7 May. Other reasons advanced were distaste of Roman Catholic POWs for Nazi treatment of their church, general war weariness, and a mounting feeling that Germany would lose the war. Withal, Intelligence noted, recent POWs continued to believe that they were loyal Germans, and it cautioned that nothing heard from the POWs suggested a decline in the fighting efficiency of U-boat crews still at sea, or that their combative ability would fall “in the near future.”
⁵⁸

Given the 2 April assessment of talkativeness, it is striking that the secretly recorded POW conversations after March and throughout May and June reveal a studied intention on the part of many recently captured men to stonewall or mislead their Interrogation Officers. Furthermore, among the mass of recorded conversations during that same period, there are relatively few expressions of despondency or of what the British obsessed on, “collapse of morale.” There were, of course, a few such fears of inevitable defeat, strongly put, as seen in the epigraphs heading this chapter (which are repeated below together with their serial numbers). As indicated earlier in this narrative, there is little ground for assuming that the U-boat crews ever lost their fighting spirit up to and including the last months of the war. One may argue that morale is a different attribute from courage, and that it, at least, diminishes in the face of inevitable defeat. Perhaps. If ever a distinction could be drawn between morale and courage, perhaps this was the moment. But the morale collapse so long and devoutly sought by the British, and cited so frequently in their documents as a goal, if it ever was achieved in fact, seems not to have had any appreciable effect on the resolute willingness of the German crewman to come back swinging, like one man fighting three. One thinks of Napoleon’s army on its way to Waterloo, of whom it was said, they marched without fear and without hope.

M
ARCH:
I don’t want to sail in any more U-boats, I’ve had enough of them.

R
adioman from the
SLLVAPLANA:
I can well believe that! march: The anti-U-boat devices are getting too good. They had instruments with which they DFed us exactly. Three destroyers came along, and got us right in the middle. We should never have gotten away again however deep we’d gone. It was hopeless. I believe they sank three U-boats that day. radioman: Three U-boats in one day—that’s the limit!
Recorded 25 April 1943
⁵⁹

O
POLKA:
I was with the BdU a whole year at Lorient as Adjutant to the Commander in Chief. [Pause] … My father is a
Kapitänleutnant
on a
Sperrbrecher
[auxiliary minesweeper]. But he’d rather sell vacuum cleaners. My brother is a soldier, my brother-in-law is a soldier.… I didn’t want the war. I’m not a pacifist and I was sorry that I had to remain on the Staff for so long. I kept applying for a transfer. But to say that I enjoy the war—the decisive factor for me is that my parents have to go through the whole damn business a second time. They lost everything and with great labor have struggled to their feet again.

Recorded 9 June 1943
⁶⁰

O
POLKA:
So you are convinced that we shall win the war?

S
CHAUFFEL:
Yes, we’ve both said: “We shall not lose.”

O
POLKA:
I’ll tell you something, no one wins in war.

S
CHAUFFEL:
When I’m on board, I’m the type of person who likes to start an argument, because the others always said:
“We
shall win the war.” It’s nonsense; one must allow logic to play a part. My one fear is that my father’s vessel
[Pott]
will go down under him.

Recorded 9 June 1943
⁶¹

L
INK:
Don’t you believe that we will use gas if worst comes to worst?

M
ARCH:
I don’t think so. But I think we shall lose the war. Time is no longer our ally. These attacks on Germany now—our losses in the field!

L
INK:
Two million were killed in the last war; only two hundred thousand have been killed so far in this war!

M
ARCH:
But the English and Americans will hold out longer, and the use of gas would only hasten our downfall.

Recorded 23 May 1943
⁶²

K
OHLER:
I have the impression that the English will also keep us on as prisoners, even more than we have the French. If Germany loses the war they will treat us as slaves; if it suits them they will send us to the colonies as slave labor. As outcasts! Who is to stop them? They have certainly no conscience. If there is any justice in the world, we ought to win, especially against England. I hate the English. One is easily inclined here to allow oneself to be influenced by their propaganda. Superficially, the Englishman appears sporting and kind, but really he is as hard as stone; he has no feelings. If a German gives anything, he gives it from his heart. [Pause] … Are you also Catholic, or religious
[gottgläubig]?