Dönitz: The Last Führer (32 page)

At the appointed hour on September 1st German soldiers dressed up by Admiral Canaris’
Abwehr
in Polish uniforms, provided the border ‘provocation’ that led to the planned ‘counter-attack’ by the
Wehrmacht
, and at 10.00 Hitler broadcast the news to the nation—and the world. Listening to him in Berlin, William Shirer had the impression that the Führer was ‘dazed at the fix he had got himself into’
⁵⁹
and a little desperate about it. No doubt he was; once again he had put himself into a position from which no retreat was possible, and this time he knew with the rational part of his mind the inevitable, momentous consequences.

They followed somewhat as they had on the first day of August 1914, although there was a delay in presenting the British ultimatum; this reinforced the impression in Germany that the Führer had worked another of his miracles. But eventually at 9 o’clock in the morning of the 3rd the ultimatum came; it gave Germany two hours to call off the attack and withdraw her troops from Poland. There was no reply. At 11.15 the British Prime Minister broadcast to the country, ‘…all my long struggle to win peace has failed’.
⁶⁰
The uncoded signal had already gone out to the fleet: ‘Total Germany’.

It was intercepted by the German Radio Intelligence Service, and minutes later Dönitz was handed a note of it in his operations room in the
headquarters hut at Wilhelmshaven. He was stunned. After expecting war with England, then not expecting it, then thinking it must surely come to it, then beguiled by the delayed ultimatum and the propaganda machine into thinking perhaps the miracle had happened, assured by Raeder earlier that morning after news of the ultimatum that Hitler intended avoiding and would avoid war with England—suddenly to be confronted with it.

His staff officers observed his consternation. Holding the signal in his hand he paced back and forth apparently sunk deep in thought, repeating more to himself than to those following him with their eyes, ‘
Mein Gott! Also wieder Krieg gegen England!’
⁶¹
(‘My God! So it’s war against England again!’). Then, as if suddenly rousing himself from his thoughts he made for the door with rapid steps.

Raeder, presiding at his daily conference, suffered a similar shock when the news came. He too left the room. A silent man, he let his despair pour out in a memorandum which was filed for the record:

He went on to detail the fleet he would have available under the Z-Plan had the war been postponed, as the Führer had told him it would be until 1944/45. Then, ‘particularly with the co-operation of Japan and Italy’, there would have been good prospects of defeating the English fleet and severing English supply lines, ‘that is to say finding the final solution to the English question’. As it was, the
Kriegsmarine
was in no way prepared for ‘the great battle’ and ‘could only show that it understood how to die with honour in order to create the foundations for later reconstruction’.

William Shirer was not far away in the Wilhelmplatz when the announcement came that England had declared war; the people standing about him in the late summer sunshine were silent. ‘They just stood there
as they were before. Stunned. The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war.’
⁶⁴

In the Chancellery Hitler turned to a strangely subdued Ribbentrop. ‘What now?’

CHAPTER FIVE

The Battle of the Atlantic

The orders to the U-boats in waiting positions around the British Isles were to conduct their operations against merchant shipping strictly in accordance with Prize Law; this involved surfacing, stopping and searching ships, and when it was found necessary to destroy them, ensuring that the crew and any passengers got away in the boats and were close enough to land to find safety. These rules were adhered to, not from humane motives or because Germany had been a signatory to the treaty enshrining them—as she had—for they were manifestly unsuited to U-boat operations—but simply for political effect on neutrals. A staff paper dated ‘beginning September 1939’ makes this clear.
¹
It started with the premise that an ‘unrestricted’ campaign with U-boats attacking without warning would bring a greater sinking rate than the Prize Rules allowed, but it would also bring conflict with neutrals.

However, the paper went on, the enemy was arming his merchant ships against U-boat attack; this fact should be used to work up a political propaganda justifying the treatment of
armed
merchant ships as warships – hence justifying their sinking without warning. As it was expected that all British merchantmen would soon be armed an ‘unrestricted’ campaign like that of 1917 could be brought in as it were by the back door. The main concern was with the most powerful neutral, the United States of America:

The cynical—or
real
—nature of German adherence to the Prize Rules is encapsulated in the conclusion of the paper:

However sensible this staff appreciation, Raeder actually favoured the declaration of a blockade zone around England and an unrestricted campaign within it as the means of ‘achieving the greatest damage to England with the forces to hand’.
⁴
Hitler still hoped to come to terms with England or France, however, by driving a wedge between them directly he had settled the Polish question, and would not agree to any such illegal action which might lead to an irreversible breach.

Dönitz, of course, did not make the rules; he simply carried out the policy decided in Berlin. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon of September 3rd he sent a message to his Forces, ‘U-boats to make war on merchant shipping in accordance with operations order,’ and noted in the war diary, ‘This should exclude any misunderstanding as the operations are under the express orders for war on merchant shipping in accordance with Prize Law.’
⁵

Nevertheless one of his Commanders, Julius Lemp, waiting in U 30 some 250 miles north-west of Ireland, was filled with such ardour to distinguish himself with a telling blow against England that he disregarded the orders. Sighting a large steamer approaching that evening on a westerly course, he intercepted and delivered a submerged torpedo attack without warning.

The ship was the 13,581-ton Donaldson liner,
Athenia
, bound from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,103 passengers, including over 300 United States citizens; what Lemp was thinking about will probably never be known; from the range at which he fired his torpedoes it must have been impossible to have mistaken her for anything but a passenger liner—the number of lifeboats alone would have indicated this. Dönitz claimed in his memoirs that Lemp mistook her for an auxiliary cruiser; however, she was not armed, it was evident from her position that she had sailed before the outbreak of war, and it was official German naval policy to give precisely the excuse Dönitz used to explain any breaches of international law!

One torpedo hit the port side of the liner, destroying the bulkhead between the engineroom and boiler room and hurling a huge column of water up the side. The explosion also destroyed the stairs to the third class and tourist class dining saloons—particularly unfortunate since the passengers were at dinner at the time. Most of the 112 who lost their lives were killed in the explosion or drowned because they could not get up on deck from the saloon. Lemp surfaced about 800 yards off the port side as the lifeboats were being manned; some eyewitness accounts suggest that he fired a single shell, others that another torpedo passed under the liner’s bows—all agree that the U-boat’s midship area was shrouded in smoke which was thought to be gun smoke. Then U 30 made away.
⁶

According to Dönitz’s war diary, news of the sinking picked up by the Radio Intelligence service did not reach U-boat headquarters until 10.35 the following morning. This seems a long time since it would not have required decoding. He noted: ‘The orders given so far were checked again. It is inconceivable that they could have been misinterpreted.’ In order to make absolutely certain, however, another signal was sent to all U-boats emphasizing that they were to operate against merchantmen according to Prize Rules. Hitler, alarmed at the possibility of another
Lusitania
incident bringing the United States in with the western powers, ordered that no action of any kind was to be taken against passenger ships, even if they were sailing in convoy. This went out just before midnight. No definition of passenger ship was given.

By this time Goebbels had been active: ‘The
Athenia
must have been sunk in error by a British warship or else have struck a floating mine of British origin.’
⁷
This was broadcast on the afternoon of September 4th. Through the following days his inventions took wing, and the affair was soon shrouded in a fog of absurd distortion designed to confuse neutrals: Churchill had manoeuvred the incident in order to bring America into the war; the
Athenia
would still be afloat if she had had no Americans aboard; the British ‘Ministry of Lies’ had changed the British torpedo into a German one.

Photographs reaching Germany of British ships which had gone to the scene to pick up survivors gave Goebbels the opportunity to claim—with pictorial evidence—that the liner had been sunk by Royal Navy destroyers. A telegram which had been sent to the Berlin shipping agent’s offices on September 2nd, advising ‘Do not forward passengers
Athenia, Aurania, Andania, Ascania
pending further advice’ since other sailings had been cancelled and there might not have been room on these ships, was adduced as evidence that German citizens were not wanted aboard these ‘death ships’ in case they saw what the British were doing.

The treatment of the
Athenia
incident vindicated Hitler’s and Goebbels’ rule that the larger the lie the more likely it was to be believed; the American authorities and law courts and several American newspapers appear to have been confused until the evidence was finally produced at the Nuremberg trials. It is more interesting for the light it throws on the inevitable spread of corruption to all organs and levels of a totalitarian State. In this example Dönitz and his staff knew very well that U 30 was in the area in which the
Athenia
was sunk, and since it is inconceivable that they were unaware of the incredible stories being broadcast in the newspapers and on radio, they were, whether they liked it or not, accomplices to this deliberate campaign of lies. And it is a reflection of the way the Navy had been absorbed into the Nazi State that when U 30 returned towards the end of the month and Lemp confirmed that he had sunk the
Athenia
they became active accomplices. Dönitz and his staff carried out Raeder’s instructions to swear the entire crew to secrecy, to have the boat’s log doctored so that no mention of the episode appeared, and similarly to fabricate the headquarters record; the war diary entry for September 27th, when ‘U 30 entered port’, credited her with sinking SS
Blair Logie
and SS
Fanad Head
—‘total 9,699 tons’!

*     *     *

Dönitz’s belief that U-boats could throttle British supply lines if only there were enough of them, and his despair at the small force available on the outbreak of war reinforced his passionate conviction that a huge construction programme at the expense of the surface units of the Z-Plan had to be put in hand. He put this forcefully to Raeder again, this time offering himself as the officer best qualified to be in overall control to push the programme through. He realized, as he noted in the war diary, that it was wrong in principle to deprive the arm of its Commander just as his training and leadership was to be put to the test; ‘on the other hand it is a fact that the operational activities of the arm will fairly soon be practically non-existent and control of it superfluous unless we succeed in building up quickly a numerically strong and effective U-boat arm’.
¹⁰

After long telephone conversations with Raeder’s chief of staff, Admiral Schniewind, who gave the High Command view that he could not be spared from his post at the front, he travelled to Berlin on the 7th to put his case to the C-in-C in person. Raeder was at the Chancellery, however, in conference with the Führer, and he had to be content with an assurance from the staff that the request would be put. His mood of frustration and determination to prove what his U-boats could accomplish is caught in a passage from his war diary that day:

Besides capturing something of his intense desire for distinction, the entry illustrates his chief failure as a Commander, impatience and lack of proper evaluation of the enemy’s situation or even of the probable consequences of his own action. Here the impatience was to test his ‘group tactics’ and score a ‘great success’—yet by his own admission he had far too few boats to follow up any success achieved and he knew practically nothing of how the enemy were going to operate their convoys; finding them would be a matter of chance. Above all the surprise he hoped to inflict on England would be frittered away.

On the following day, the 8th, Schniewind phoned him to say that
Raeder did not want him to come to Berlin: an officer had been appointed to the post he wanted, and the C-in-C would explain his reasons for keeping him (Dönitz) in his front command in a personal letter.

There can be little doubt that Raeder retained him in command of U-boats because of the standard of high efficiency and devotion he had inspired in the arm. As the fleet chief, Admiral Boehm, reported that autumn, he had ‘made the U-boat arm an outstanding instrument of war …’
¹²

The first definite convoy sighting of the war was made by U 31 on the morning of the 15th; she reported ships steering west from the Bristol Channel. Dönitz ordered three other U-boats in the vicinity to close the position, entering in the war diary: