Dönitz: The Last Führer (22 page)

It is interesting that at Nuremberg an affidavit by the United States Consul General in Berlin for this period, 1930–34, was produced which made the same point: ‘Karl Dönitz was always not well mentally balanced.’
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Dönitz disputed the possibility of the American having known him at that time as he was only a junior officer and working at Wilhelmshaven, and the Consul was unable to reply with chapter and verse of the meetings since he had not kept a diary. Nevertheless the description from a man who could not have read Canaris’ confidential report must be considered an astonishing coincidence if it was not founded on observation. It therefore lends some credence to the rest of his comments, which were: ‘He became one of the earliest high officers of Army or Navy to completely identify himself with Nazi ideology and aims.’
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This sentence is suspect since, of course, Dönitz was far from a high officer at the time in question, but there is no doubt it describes his later attitude. Does it also describe his attitude in this period immediately
preceding and after Hitler’s seizure of power? Certainly in his post as staff officer at Wilhelmshaven, he was intimately concerned with the political situation. He makes this clear himself in his second and only other allusion to this period of his career: ‘My tasks included measures of protection against inner [service] unrest. Often these questions were discussed in the Defence Ministry in Berlin with the competent representatives of all service commands.’
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This implies that he was not confined to Wilhelmshaven—as he stated at Nuremberg—but joined discussions in Berlin and could therefore have come to the attention of the United States Consul General; he was a thruster.

This is speculation. But in view of his undoubted ambition, fervent patriotism, temperament, personal experience of the dangers of Communism which the Nazis were dedicated to eradicating and his later documented hatred of Communists it would be surprising if he had not attached himself for emotional and practical career reasons to Hitler’s rising star.

In his own account of his attitude towards Nazism in replies to questions put to him in 1969 he gives the familiar picture of the Republic threatened from both Left and Right extremes; the middle classes had moved to the support of the extreme Right, Hitler, and the centre was therefore weak. In these circumstances it was clear to the representatives of the armed forces that they could not defend the State against both extremes simultaneously; ‘that would mean we would have had to fight against the great majority of the German people’.
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The armed services, he continued, were inclined towards the Nazis because of their commitment to free the nation from the shackles of Versailles and their attitude towards other questions such as reparations, and therefore welcomed Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. ‘We soldiers also hoped that through this change in the leadership the Communist danger would be removed.’

This explanation is true so far as it goes, but extraordinarily bland; as with all areas of controversy in his recollections, Dönitz skates around the real difficulties. The Army High Command recognized the Nazi Party as a revolutionary organization and Hitler’s brown-shirted street army, the SA, and the more recently created élite black-shirted squads of SS as quite as dangerous to the state as the Communists. By Dönitz’s own account his position involved him in guarding against these internal dangers and in discussions on these questions between representatives of
the services at the Ministry of Defence in Berlin; yet he chose to reveal nothing of the complex process or of the doubts and intrigue by which the armed services and the revolutionary army came together.

Another serious omission in his account is race ideology. This was central to Hitler’s view of the world; it was never disguised, it was the Führer’s
leitmotif
, infecting both internal and external relationships.

This was a theme close to the Imperial officer’s heart. The Navy supported Hitler, not simply to break the shackles of Versailles or annihilate Communists, but to fulfil the world mission that was Germany’s by right of racial superiority, and could only be accomplished with the aid of a powerful Navy.

In Hitler’s vision this was a two-stage process: first continental hegemony through the colonization of Eastern Europe by the
Herrenvolk
—for which he needed the friendship of Great Britain to secure his western flank—second the struggle with Great Britain and America for world domination.
⁵⁵
This had been the strategy of the Imperial government in the final years before the First War; it had failed because the threat posed by Tirpitz’s fleet had prevented England standing aside during the vital first stage. Hitler did not intend to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake; he wanted an alliance with Great Britain, or at least a firm understanding on the lines that Wilhelm’s Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, had been striving for from 1912 to 1914—a free hand in Europe in return for allowing Britain a free hand in the wider world. This was also the Navy’s view. They too had learnt from the failure of the Tirpitz strategy; in any case they could not compete with the Royal Navy with the minute fleet allowed them by the Versailles treaty; their strategy had to be to build a base for the oceanic future and in the short term to give no possible offence to Great Briatain.

Hitler was a political animal with a nose for the compulsions of those with whom he sought to do business and, despite occasional indiscretions such as publicly criticizing Tirpitz’s battle fleet and big ships in general,
he used the similarities between his own viewpoint and the Navy’s to woo Raeder, who, like the pro-Nazi General Blomberg, whose wife and family Dönitz’s daughter, Ursula, remembers meeting year after year on holiday on Borkum, like Hjalmar Schacht, the economist, and Thyssen and Krupp and the other industrial magnates, thought he was winning Hitler over. So National Socialism and naval policy were co-ordinated before Hitler came to power and the Nazis gained the support of another interest group.

Dönitz dropped no hint of these deep currents when he framed his careful replies in 1969; indeed he sought to obscure them by starting: ‘It is difficult today to write about the past because we today know things which men then did not know.’
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If they did not know it was because they did not wish to. The character of the Führer and his party was hideously evident in deed and word. Helmuth James von Moltke of the famous Field Marshal’s family was by no means the only member of the landed and military classes who saw before the Nazis came to power that ‘whoever votes for Hitler votes for war’.
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Dönitz’s explanation went on to excuse the armed forces from involvement in Hitler’s rise to power on the grounds of their political neutrality; this obliged them ‘as soldiers to serve the whole German people and the State, whose form had been given by our fellow countrymen’.
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This is plainly false. Naval officers’ hostility to, indeed incomprehension of, parliamentary democracy is copiously documented. Dönitz had served in the departments in Berlin which had dealt with the
Reichstag
and was therefore intimately involved in the deliberate circumvention of parliamentary democracy by the Navy. Moreover, the myth of political neutrality hides the hard fact that Hitler’s racial and world views were nothing more than the propaganda of Imperial Germany rendered more brutally simple in his crude mind, and therefore keyed in with the naval officers’ basic prejudices. This is indisputable; apart from the enthusiasm for the Nazi Party, especially noticeable amongst the younger serving officers and in the retired officers’ Associations ashore, most naval officers who met Hitler personally were impressed. He had the Kaiser’s extraordinary memory for technical detail and interest in ship design and weaponry; he appeared to have the future of the Navy at heart; above all he spoke of the future of Germany in terms they approved. In May 1933, three months after Hindenburg was forced reluctantly to invite Hitler to be Chancellor, the leader of Raeder’s staff officer training scheme—a key post so far as the Navy’s attitude was concerned—spoke before a
gathering of SS, SA,
Stahlhelm
and Nazi Party leaders in terms that might have been used by Tirpitz:

There was a deeper understanding between the frustrated officers of the
Reichsmarine
and the Nazis than hatred of Communism and the Versailles treaty; it was nothing less than a revival of the national goals of 1914. By seeking to obscure this and over-simplify the service machinations and the intrigues of his one-time chief in the combined services department in the Defence Ministry, von Schleicher, Dönitz completely undermines confidence in his account and leaves a large question mark over his own attitude during this critical period.

During his second year on the staff at Wilhelmshaven, Dönitz apparently calmed down; Canaris gave him a far better report:

The report was countersigned by the Vice Admiral commanding the naval station, ‘An officer of much promise well worth noting’.

There is no doubt that by this time he was recognized as a brilliant officer throughout the service, and the fact received official confirmation in the shape of a Hindenburg travel grant for the following year, 1933. These grants were made annually to one outstanding officer from either
the Army or the Navy to allow him to travel abroad and increase his knowledge of the outside world. Dönitz chose to visit the British and Dutch colonies in the east, or perhaps this was suggested to him as a useful idea; in either case it was a natural objective for an officer from a Navy which saw its long-term future as the bearer of German culture outside Europe.

He sailed in February 1933 within days of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, and was away until the summer, thus missing the first onslaught of terror which swept Germany in the ‘March days’ as the Nazis settled scores with their enemies and with parliamentary democracy itself—as they had promised.

Dönitz’s account of his travels on the Hindenburg grant, apparently intended for publication, but never published and omitted entirely from his memoirs, is the most revealing of all his surviving writings, opening startling glimpses beneath the severely controlled façade he presented to the world. Sections of it have been cut, probably by himself after his release from Spandau prison; one can only speculate about the reason, but it may be significant that of the six obvious cuts—there may be others for the copy is incomplete and the pagination curious—three come directly after mention of things British—a British submarine which his own U-boat missed torpedoing during the war, the inscription over the British governor’s palace in Malta, a British cruiser which rescued survivors from a wreck on Cape Guardafui; the other cuts occur on passage down the English Channel, the Red Sea and homeward bound through the Mediterranean. Perhaps the censorship was to hide anti-English feelings—yet these come through between the lines of surviving portions of the script.

The other possible reason for the cuts is that the deleted passages were pro-Nazi; judging by the context an anti-British bias seems the more likely explanation. There may be another.

More striking is the script’s revelation of the 42-year-old Dönitz as a fantasist. The first example of this can perhaps be written off as a yarn told to enliven the evening dinner table on board the steamer bearing him to the east. According to his account he was telling an innocuous tale about an experience in U-boats when one of the ladies listening told him not to have so much regard for their susceptibilities; they wished to hear about the
real
U-boat war. On this he launched into what seems to be a complete fabrication of a gun encounter with a ‘Q-ship’ while watch
officer of U 39; chasing a small merchantman through a smoke screen they came upon her suddenly, lying stopped; flaps dropped from her sides and four guns opened on them.

This exciting encounter is not mentioned by Forstmann, nor in the official German history!

A second description of an encounter, the memory of which was brought on by the sight of Cape Bon as they steamed through the Mediterranean, is equally difficult to believe. It was his own boat this time; he had attempted a submerged attack on an escorted convoy by moonlight, but had not got to shooting range. Seized by ‘the Teutonic rage’, he had thereupon ordered the boat to the surface and made an approach run.