Dönitz: The Last Führer (27 page)

By the beginning of 1936 the inevitable balance of payments crisis had arrived. Hitler’s master economist, Schacht, now pleaded for a reduction in the armaments tempo in order to cut imports. The Führer went the other way, attacking the problem with a ‘Four-year Plan’ designed to make Germany largely self-sufficient in the most essential raw materials for war. It was a triumph of will over common sense. The resources to be hurled into the production of synthetic oil and rubber at costs far above the price of the real articles on the world market were bound to aggravate the crisis; his choice of Göring to mastermind the plan was another predictable disaster. It is interesting to speculate whether Hitler already realized that he was hedged in on a path leading to inevitable destruction. He could not turn back because the Party and the propaganda he had created crowded him on; ahead were the very dangers he had been determined to avoid but which his policy inevitably raised, above all the English danger hanging as threateningly over Raeder as it had over Tirpitz. Hitler’s response was to press forward faster. It was a characteristic reaction: at crises throughout his political career he invariably committed himself to positions which admitted of no retreat, as if he feared that otherwise he might falter or turn back.

Raeder was already in difficulties over steel quotas, hence delivery dates for his new ships. Through 1937, while he played with the idea of adding a huge
ninth
battleship to the programme and arming her with a battery far outmatching the latest British
King George V
class, the steel position deteriorated and the delays in his construction programme grew longer. At the same time his worry about the possibility of Great Britain siding with France in any conflict—hitherto a taboo subject for official discussion because it was too painful to contemplate—came out into the open with an Operations Division study entitled ‘The Tasks of Naval Warfare 1937/8’.
¹²

That autumn Dönitz carried out the first large-scale exercises to test the group tactics on which he had been working; it is significant that a report he wrote afterwards called ‘The Employment of U-boats in the Framework of the Fleet’ started off on another tack altogether: ‘The World War brought the realization that the U-boat is suitable for threatening the enemy sea communications, the enemy trade.’
¹³

He went on to say that for a State whose lack of surface forces, bad strategic position and lack of colonial bases—all points forming the staple of German naval strategic thought—prevented any prospect of fighting for naval mastery, the U-boat would always be ‘an excellent,
perhaps the only means … effectively to threaten the vitally important enemy sea communications and under certain conditions to be able to damage them war-decisively’.

This is his first recorded endorsement of the U-boat for trade war since his appointment to the new arm; it marks a radical change from his thinking the previous autumn and from his original paper in September 1935. He is obviously dealing here with the possibility of England siding with France, and following the trend of current naval thought favouring trade war over the Tirpitz battlefleet doctrine which had been found wanting.

However, the entire paper, apart from these introductory remarks, was taken up with the tactical question of U-boats operating with surface forces, both as scouts able to remain off enemy bases unseen and report movements, and as attacking groups which could be positioned in the enemy’s path. While these were essentially world war ideas, it is plain that a great deal of work had been done in communications. For instance, he already accepted that because of the U-boat’s very limited range of visibility and communication facilities it was essential to control group operations from a command post ashore which could receive reports from all parts of the operations area and issue orders on the basis of the general picture; he did this from his command ship in Kiel during the Baltic exercise.

The other interesting point—looking back—is his attitude to aircraft. He was clear that in areas where a strong and continuous air patrol was maintained the manoeuvrability of the boats would decline and the group system would revert to simply taking up submerged waiting positions on the probable path of the enemy; however, he did not expect
continual
air patrols and thought that
passing
patrols would only limit manoeuvrability for a short time and not really affect the group system. This suggests he was looking back to his own war experience. It also reveals his habitually optimistic cast of mind, a determination that his arm and his system
would
prevail—entirely appropriate for a front-line leader, less so for an overall strategist. Like the rest of the service he was of course handicapped here by the Air Force chief, Göring’s, jealous retention of everything that flew. The paper did have a section on U-boats working with aircraft, but without a naval air arm or proper co-operation with the Air Force it had to be largely theoretical.

The paper concluded:

German naval planning was in a transitional stage, anxious about Great Britain but concerned in practice with the two-front continental war; Dönitz’s ideas were similarly divided; he was not yet an exponent of trade war as the chief concern of his boats.

The paper was dated November 23rd; this was just over a fortnight after a notorious meeting between Hitler and his service chiefs, at which the Führer displayed exactly the same ambivalence; it would be interesting to know whether Dönitz heard about the conclusions reached then—perhaps through his fleet chief—or whether his opening remarks about trade war were simply reflections of the new thinking about England within the service.

It seems likely that the meeting—usually known by the name of Colonel Hossbach, Hitler’s Adjutant and author of a memorandum describing it—was provoked by Raeder. He had been issuing regular appeals for larger steel and other metal quotas for his programme since 1936; finally on October 25th 1937, he issued an ultimatum: unless he was allowed larger quotas he would have to cut his building back drastically to be sure of having at least a few modern ships available ‘in a conceivable time’. Faced with this, Hitler called together his Army chiefs, Blomberg and Fritsch, Göring for the Air Force, Raeder and the Foreign Minister, von Neurath.

No doubt Hitler prepared the notes for his opening address to this group as carefully as he did for his public speeches. He started with the usual premise that Germany needed living space; like all his beliefs this was picked from a national stock of accepted ideas; his listeners would not have questioned it. Germany comprised over 85 million people which by its numbers and shut-in position in the centre of Europe represented an enclosed ‘race-core’ whose like was not to be found anywhere else. And he went on to outline his two-stage programme for expansion, first ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe, then overseas colonies and world power. Naturally there were risks:

Finally, after detailing weaknesses in both British and French Imperial positions and glancing at the risks Frederick the Great and Bismarck had necessarily run in the cause of German greatness, he came down to cases:

A further two cases were detailed in which a solution before 1943/45 might be expected: if France should be weakened by an internal political crisis or a foreign war.

From this lengthy preamble it is evident that Hitler realized that his plan for wooing England by holding back naval construction had little chance of success, or at the least there was a grave risk he would not be allowed to get away with his continental plan without British intervention. Nevertheless the plan was to proceed, rearmament was to be hurried on, particularly naval rearmament! This is evident from the second stage of the meeting, when Raeder was promised an increase in his steel quota from 40,000 to 75,000 tons; Krupp’s mills were to be extended largely for this purpose. Here is another instance of Hitler forcing himself into an exposed position from which there could be no retreat, for naval building was the one area which was certain to force Great Britain into the opposing camp.

For Raeder, Hitler’s speech must have come as confirmation of his own Tirpitzian world view, the practical ratification of his programme, a confirmation of the necessity for his long-term challenge to the Royal Navy. His only misgivings, again like Tirpitz’s previously, were that he would not be allowed to complete his preparations before the outbreak
of war; he continually sought reassurance from Hitler on this point; Hitler continually reassured him.

It is tempting to see parallels between the ‘Hossbach’ meeting of November 5th 1937 and the Kaiser’s meeting with his service chiefs in December 1912; both showed the boxed-in position to which a policy of massive rearmament for aggrandizement had brought the leadership, and the petulant, aggressive temper this provoked in the supreme leader. In the event both called the advance, and this seems to have had more to do with group psychology than with any rational balancing of arguments. At bottom both meetings were dominated by the intractable problem of Great Britain’s role as continental make-weight.

There were essential differences between the two, however: the Army came out of the Kaiser’s meeting convinced of its mission and able to command the lion’s share of future defence increases, while the Navy was thrust aside; at Hitler’s meeting Raeder got all he asked for. And whereas it was Tirpitz who sounded the warning to the Kaiser when von Moltke called for immediate war, it was the Army chiefs, Blomberg and Fritsch, who questioned Hitler’s forward policy; they did not believe that the western powers would stand idly by for the preliminary stages of his drive for eastern living space, the incorporation with the
Reich
of the German-speaking peoples of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Raeder, on the other hand, does not seem to have questioned Hitler’s aims, apparently satisfied with his assurances that he would not involve the
Reich
in a war with England before 1943.

Within five months of the ‘Hossbach’ meeting both Blomberg and Fritsch had lost their posts; Fritsch, like other senior Army officers, was contemptuous of the Party and increasingly fearful of the road down which its fanatic leader was forcing Germany. Such attitudes were not lost on Hitler; he could not tolerate men of independent judgement; his entourage had to perceive the truth as it dropped from his lips as uncritically as his unsophisticated followers in the Munich cafés. He arranged a homosexual scandal to unseat Fritsch while Blomberg hastened his own removal by marrying a former prostitute! Hitler took his functions upon himself by assuming the post of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Next he replaced the professional Foreign Minister, von Neurath, with the amateur Ribbentrop, and his economic genius, Hjalmar Schacht—who told him the economy could not stand continuous rearmament—with a Party hack and uninstructed economic dabbler, Funk.

Of all the men who had either attended the ‘Hossbach’ meeting or, like Schacht, been concerned with its inevitable consequences, only Göring and Raeder remained. Göring, of course, had been one of the original Party faithful and was as personally corrupt as the Führer was fanatical. Of all the professionals whom Hitler had retained on his assumption of power, only Raeder remained; of all the key departments of State, Defence Ministry, Army, Police, Interior Ministry, Economics Ministry, Foreign Ministry, only one did not have to be purged—the Navy. A post-war taunt by Raeder that Dönitz was known in the service as ‘Hitler-boy’ indicated some lack of self-knowledge.

Shortly after Hitler had removed all professional constraints, completing the revolution of unreason and destruction in his own image, in mid-March 1938 he seized Austria with a combination of internal subversion, terrorism and threats. His propaganda chief, Goebbels, justified the annexation as saving Austria from chaos; completely fabricated stories of Communist disorder, fighting and pillaging in the streets of Vienna were broadcast in press and radio.

Dönitz had just returned from a month’s skiing holiday at Selva in the South Tyrol with his daughter and son-in-law, Günther Hessler, when the tremendous news broke. No doubt he believed the stories put out by Goebbels for there was no other news to be read or heard. For the same reason he would have been unaware of the extent and frightfulness of the destruction and looting of Jewish property and the humiliations imposed on Viennese Jews by the triumphant young Nazi toughs who had engineered the
Anschluss
. Vienna had been a stronghold of anti-semitism, it was where Hitler had been infected. An American correspondent in the capital, William Shirer, saw groups of Jews of all ages and sexes rounded up by jeering Stormtroopers and made to clean the pavements on their knees; he heard of others forced to scrub out lavatories with the sacred praying bands, the
Tefillin
.