Dönitz: The Last Führer (19 page)

However, the passage which was to be significant for the future concerned the responsibility of the two officers brought before the Court; they had been on the bridge with Patzig and had assisted in the massacre, although it had not been proved that either had actually fired
the gun. The question was whether they could plead their Commander’s orders as a defence:

In view of this and the ‘dark shadow’ the action threw ‘on the German fleet and especially on the U-boat arm which did so much in the fight for the Fatherland’ both accused officers were sentenced for having ‘knowingly assisted Patzig’ in ‘homicide’ to four years’ imprisonment. The feeling against even this mild punishment was fierce and general, and neither man served the full term: one was allowed to ‘escape’ after serving four months, the other after six months. There could not have been a better example of the mood in leading circles, nor of how the ground was already prepared for Hitler: patriotism, expressed as defiance of the former enemy powers, was a higher value than justice; mass murderers of medical staff including nurses served terms which would have been lenient for petty larceny, while the officer who gave them their orders went free.

All that was needed in Germany was a leader and a Party to focus the hate and enshrine these values in the constitution.

By this time Dönitz, who no doubt knew and cared little about Hitler—although he undoubtedly knew about the
Llandovery Castle
trial and despised the Court and hated the guilty verdicts as much as every other nationalist member of the armed forces—had been posted to the
Marineleitung
or naval High Command in Berlin. Before taking up his appointment in the autumn of 1924 he attended a short staff-training course run by Rear Admiral Raeder, formerly one of Tirpitz’s staff officers who had been close to von Trotha and had been shunted to a backroom for cosmetic purposes after the Kapp affair. He was an able, very correct officer devoted to the service in the manner of Tirpitz, and with the same wide-ranging conception of its future and the future of the German people on the oceans. His comments on Dönitz at the end of the course are interesting:

He too recommended him as ‘very suitable for the upbringing of officer recruits’, from which it can be inferred that Dönitz shared Raeder’s views about the future of the Navy, hence of Germany in the greater world, and the naval officers’ part in ‘the future liberation struggle of the German nation’, as it was expressed in a naval memorandum of the time.
²⁵

Dönitz’s appointment in the
Marineleitung
in Berlin was as section head for organizational, internal-political and various general military affairs in the
Wehrabteilung
. In his memoirs he leaves the impression that he was concerned chiefly with service regulations and a new military penal code which had to be thrashed out in
Reichstag
committees, co-ordinated with the Army staff and adjusted to suit actual conditions at the naval stations. This was a particularly sensitive task for the service was still in the throes of the internal rift between the
ex-Freikorps
men and those who had not taken an active part against the internal enemies, was threatened by determined Communist infiltration and subversion in the naval ports, and under constant attack from the Left in the
Reichstag
. None of this is mentioned in any of his published writings.

However, the task of combating Communist propaganda and subversion formed a major part of the work of the
Wehrabteilung
, and there can be no doubt, both from his own later attitudes and copious evidence of the state of mind of his seniors in the
Marineleitung
that this time in Berlin reinforced a hatred of Communism that had resulted quite naturally from the various indignities he and his fellows had been put to in recent years. One of the propaganda exercises his department had to deal with in 1926, for instance, was a crass piece of ‘proletarian theatre’ staged by the
Rote Marine
(Red Navy) commemorating the naval mutinies and depicting the alleged cruelty of the naval officers and finally the execution of the sailors’ leaders.
²⁶
Meanwhile his close involvement with the
Reichstag
reinforced his prejudice against party politics—also quite natural, given his upbringing and indoctrination in the officer corps.

Although his liaison duties within the service and with the Army and his representation of the Navy’s case in
Reichstag
committees called for
very different qualities to those he had needed hitherto, his department chief,
Kapitän zur See
Werth, reported that as a result of his ‘ability’, quick perception of essentials and excellent service outlook’ he adapted surprisingly quickly. Werth went on: ‘In dealings with other ministries and authorities he is deft and, thanks to his objective and sympathetic manner of negotiating, achieves the best possible for his department.’
²⁷

His character and disposition, Werth continued, made him ‘a specially valuable naval officer’, and off duty he was ‘a popular and respected comrade who, despite economic necessities, never loses gaiety and humour’.

The
Marineleitung
at this time was a powerhouse of clandestine rearmament; the leading characters in the U-boat field were gathered here, Arno Spindler, Wilhelm Canaris, the redoubtable von Loewenfeld, all of whom worked closely with Werth and came under the same chief, Rear Admiral Adolph Pfeiffer. Canaris, later head of the intelligence and counter espionage organization, the
Abwehr
, was the liaison between the
Marineleitung
and Spain, whose co-operation was anticipated, especially in U-boat building; he called for a U-boat department in the High Command, as a result of which U-boat affairs were moved from the Torpedo- and Mines-Inspectorate in Kiel up to Berlin—under cover of U-boat counter-measures—and placed under Arno Spindler.

Spindler’s first task was to select which types of boat should be designed for the mobilization plan for Case A—war with France and Poland. He set about it by studying the performances of the various world war types as recorded in the war diaries, and questioning U-boat Commanders; Karl Dönitz’s name appears among the list of those he intended questioning; whether he did see Dönitz is not clear but as he was so immediately accessible it would be surprising if he was not among the first consulted; this was in January 1926. Prodded by Canaris, impatient to have firm type specifications for his dealings in Spain, Spindler recommended a small 270-ton type for the Baltic and two 500-ton types, one for minelaying, one for torpedo attack, in the North Sea. It is interesting that although war against commerce was in the ascendant so far as long-term naval expansion was concerned, Spindler based his recommendations for U-boats entirely on operations against enemy warships. The 500-ton boats were to act against ships maintaining a distant blockade of the exits to the North Sea, against French squadrons attempting to enter the Baltic, and against French squadrons and troopships in the Mediterranean.

The design teams at IvS in Rotterdam were set to work to produce up-dated plans for the three chosen types. Shortly afterwards, in July 1926, three naval missions were sent to Russia, the first under Spindler, the second under Loewenfeld, to seek U-boat contracts under the mantle of the trade treaties which were already allowing clandestine development and production of tanks, ammunition and aircraft for Germany. This surge of confidence and activity was partly in response to a buoyant economy: the Ruhr crisis had led to an international commission recommending a credit of 800 million gold Marks to support the
Reichsbank
. The greater part of this foreign loan went directly to Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens and other key industrialists for weapons, who had already been drawn into the web of rearmament preparations, and since the government at the same time increased the Army and Navy budgets dramatically, the effect was to boost the secret rearmament.

In public meanwhile the foreign minister, Stresemann, was pursuing a policy of ‘fulfilment’ of the reparations and other clauses of the Versailles treaty; he was rewarded in January 1927 by the withdrawal of the Allied Control Commission, which had been attempting to monitor the arms limitation clauses; the Commission’s final report stated that Germany had never disarmed, never had any intention of doing so and had done everything in her power to deceive and circumvent their efforts.
²⁸
This was common knowledge, but despite detailed exposés by Socialist deputies in the
Reichstag
the key government ministers continued to promote rearmament behind their public protestations of abiding by the treaty.

The Navy, meanwhile, carried on without interruption. Eight of ten
Winterarbeiten
in the winter of 1926–7 were set on U-boat topics. In February Spindler started working with Dönitz’s immediate superior, Werth, to have a U-boat course for midshipmen incorporated in the torpedo course, and in April, as the first of the German-designed submarines for Turkey was completed at the Krupp-controlled yard in Rotterdam, a former U-boat Commander, Werner Fürbringer, and a former U-boat chief engineer took it out on trials, reporting every detail to the U-department at the
Marineleitung
via a front company formed by Lohmann with his secret fund.
²⁹

The main drive of the
Marineleitung
in all this was of course to break the ‘shackles’ of Versailles, restore autonomy in weapons to the service and to the Fatherland, and regain self-respect. Beyond this was a general disdain for parliamentary government and longing for a return to the old
certainties; this had been mitigated to an extent by the election of the old Field Marshal von Hindenburg as President of the Republic after the death of the first President in 1925. He was a man to whom they could give their wholehearted allegiance; nevertheless the manoeuvring and compromising of the party political game in the
Reichstag
and the extent of socialist, pacifist and generally anti-military sentiment that found expression there was deeply distasteful, while the strengths and ideals of democracy itself were outside the view of most naval officers—especially so for this small nucleus, hand-picked after the war for their ‘sound service-outlook’ and professional competence. They had passed their formative years in the headiest age of the Bismarckian
Kaiserreich
; they remained at heart Imperial officers, believing profoundly in Germany’s mission in the wider world, their national and racial consciousness and contempt for parliamentarianism sharpened by the humiliations which they and the nation had suffered since 1918. As a body they were in a dangerous, prickly state of mind.

One of those wielding great influence was von Loewenfeld; his view of the world as expressed at a meeting in 1926 was probably typical. In Europe he saw Russian Bolshevism in alliance with the ‘Slavic wave’ as the greatest threat to Germany and western culture, although Poland and France were the more immediate threats. On the other hand was Italy under Mussolini, France’s rival in the Mediterranean, therefore a potential ally—while Mussolini himself, ‘Dictator and outspoken destroyer of Italian social democracy and the Jewish freemasonry’
³⁰
was an enemy of German democracy. As for England; he advised a systematic and tactful attempt to form ties with her since she was ‘for the moment’ the leader of western culture. The historian, Jost Dülffer, sees implicit in this phrase ‘for the moment’ the expectation that Germany would recapture this position at some time in the future.

The similarity of von Loewenfeld’s and Hitler’s world views, as expounded at this time in
Mein Kampf
, is striking. Soon the Navy and the Nazis were to form unofficial ties through the former Kiel station admiral at the time of the Kapp
Putsch
, since retired, von Levetzow, who became Hitler’s mentor in matters naval.

Dönitz, according to the widow of his friend, von Lamezan, was apolitical—in contrast to her husband who liked to theorize and argue about world affairs. Dönitz had no time or taste for such speculation; his work was his life, and von Lamezan envied him his good fortune in having a task to which he could dedicate himself so wholeheartedly.
However, Dönitz’s ‘apolitical’ attitude contained acceptance of everything the naval officer corps stood for. This is implicit in all the reports on him by his superiors, in his later known attitudes, in his fierce ambition and in his life-long regard for Loewenfeld, the quintessential hardline, anti-Communist, anti-Social Democrat, anti-Jewish, nationalist rearmer.

As to Dönitz’s part in the clandestine development of the U-boat arm, he was not a key figure; his name does not appear among the members of the committees which took decisions, but as leader of an essentially co-ordinating section in the
Wehrabteilung
, no doubt he played some part. In 1927, the year that practical U-boat training began with Werner Fürbringer’s trials crew in Holland, and his own chief, Werth, became directly involved with Spindler in theoretical U-boat courses, there appeared for the first time among the personal and service details which prefaced the annual report on him: