Dönitz: The Last Führer (34 page)

Much more was accomplished than the sinking of one old battleship and her valuable crew; correctly anticipating that whether or not Prien succeeded planned air attacks would force the Royal Navy to move base while the Flow was rendered more secure, Dönitz had sent minelaying U-boats to foul the Firth of Forth and Loch Ewe. Successes were scored in both areas; the new heavy cruiser,
Belfast
, and the battleship,
Nelson
, were badly damaged and put out of action for a period. Perhaps the greatest effect of U 47’s success, though, was on the status of the U-boat arm within the Navy and within Germany. Hitler was ‘beside himself with joy’
²⁵
when the British Admiralty announcement of the loss of the battleship was intercepted; he had been briefed on the attempt by Raeder and he boasted to anyone who had occasion to see him at the Chancellery that day that the sinking was the work of a U-boat. Dönitz, who had been promoted Rear Admiral on October 1st, was advanced from
Führer
-to
Befehlshaber
(C-in-C)-
der U-boote
(BdU).

By the time U 47 returned, Prien and his men were heroes throughout Germany. Raeder and Dönitz were waiting to greet them on the quay, thronged with cheering crowds as a band played them in; when they had made fast, both Admirals went aboard and Raeder personally presented each member of the crew with the Iron Cross. Afterwards they were flown by aircraft of Hitler’s flight to Berlin, and driven through streets lined with hysterical crowds to the Kaiserhof Hotel as the Führer’s guests; from here they attempted to march through scenes of even wilder emotion across the Wilhelmplatz to the Reich Chancellery, but had to be rescued by the police. When they eventually arrived rather late Hitler shook hands with each of them, then after making a homely speech about his own time in the trenches, conferred on Prien the Knight’s Cross. Later, after lunching at the Chancellery, they were paraded before a Press conference; one of the correspondents, William Shirer, noted Prien as ‘clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi and obviously capable’.
²⁶

Prior to all this and further junketings that evening at which Goebbels basked in the reflected glory of the U-boat men, Hitler had given Raeder
permission to take the first major step in the proposed escalation of the U-boat war on trade; any ship definitely recognized as enemy could be torpedoed without warning, and passenger ships in a convoy could be attacked after an announcement to that effect had been promulgated.

This was not as far as Raeder and his operations staff wished to go; ‘certainly not only the enemy, but in general
every
merchant ship employed in supplying the enemy war economy with imports as well as exports’ was their target.
²⁷
This was a natural goal, but the chief interest of the brief which Raeder used for his meeting with Hitler lies in the attached draft of an announcement composed by his staff for the Führer to give out in order to justify the total campaign they required. This was composed by Heinz Assmann, number two in the operations division, and countersigned by the chief of the division, Fricke. It reveals that both these men were not simply convinced Nazis but exponents of the very essence of the system of lies and self-delusion on which it was founded. Goebbels could not have improved on the words they wished to put into Hitler’s mouth:

From a staff machine whose goals were to swallow up Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and the north coast of France to Biscay in order to defeat an enemy perceived as the chief obstacle to Germany swallowing up all the small nations of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, this is a little ironic. The question of whether the staff actually believed it belongs not here but to a study of group psychology within secret societies. It is important here for the light it throws on the particularly dangerous secret society to which Dönitz belonged. These men were in the grip of fantasy; at the simplest level they hadn’t the means to effect the siege of England and France, yet they were prepared to go off half-cock and alert their enemies.

The script is also interesting in psychological terms for its stress on England’s ‘base and unworthy’ way of fighting—the First War ‘hunger blockade’ which had bitten deep into the German naval mind—and the concept of genocide, or
Ausrottung
, of the ‘weak and defenceless’ peoples of Europe. In the looking-glass world the naval staff inhabited, they ascribed to their enemies their own deepest convictions—as will appear. So, incidentally, did British and American naval officers, who swallowed the post-war myth of the decency of the German Navy. At all events the draft speech composed by Raeder’s staff is one of the key documents for understanding Dönitz’s mind and actions after he took power later in the war. As with Hitler, he was not different from those he led, rather he exemplified their convictions to an unusual degree and with unusual force of will.

Hitler, elated after his astoundingly quick victory over Poland, was nevertheless still constrained by considerations of neutral opinion and the German economy. Neither the totally unrestricted campaign for which Raeder was pressing, nor the absolute priority in materials which he needed for a massive U-boat construction programme, could be granted—the one because of the President of the United States—‘the
Jew-loving Roosevelt’—who would have liked nothing better than to mobilize American opinion against Nazi Germany in the wake of another
Lusitania
—the other because of the Army’s urgent needs for ‘Case Yellow’, the armoured assault on France.

Dönitz’s standing orders to his U-boats at this time show the precise extent to which the United States was treated as a special case. Inside the area around England US ships were to be treated like any other neutral; outside the area though:

Raeder continued to press his case for a completely unrestricted U-boat campaign doggedly at every audience through October and November. He seemed unperturbed by Hitler’s failure to limit the war and as unconcerned for the strains on the German economy—visible as they were to every man in the street—as he had been when proposing the Z-Plan, unaware too it seems of the dangerous situation being created in the east as Russia advanced into the spheres of interest agreed in the Nazi-Soviet pact; looking at military and continental affairs from his world-oceanic eyrie, unchecked by any top-level cabinet or Chiefs of Staff committee, blindly following his Führer’s star, he shut his eyes to the military, political and moral vortex into which the Fatherland was being sucked.

‘No one expects anything of Raeder,’ Ulrich von Hassell noted in his diary at this time. Hassell was one of those intelligent and sensitive Germans wracked by his nation’s dilemma: the war could not be won militarily, the economic situation was critical, he was ashamed of being led by ‘criminal adventurers’ and revolted by ‘the disgrace that has sullied the German name through the conduct of war in Poland, partly through the brutal use of air power, partly through the shocking bestialities of the SS, above all against Jews.’ His diary entry continued:

Through October and November German propaganda, while concentrating on proving that the British arming of merchantmen, orders to merchantmen to ram U-boats, and radio signalling when attacked made them an arm of the Royal Navy, also carried the inference that it was suicidally dangerous for ships of any nationality to enter British waters; on November 24th the message was spelled out in an official warning to all neutral nations that ‘in waters around the British Isles and in the vicinity of the French coast, the safety of neutral ships can no longer be taken for granted …’
³¹

In fact neutrals had already been sunk without warning; ‘unrestricted U-boat warfare’ was already being waged
unannounced
as recommended in the naval staff appreciation at the beginning of the war. Dönitz’s standing orders make this clear; No. 154 issued some time in November or early December ends:

The passengers and crews of destroyed ships, the boats, the weather conditions and nearness to land, all had to be taken into account under the International Prize Rules; in detailing them specifically as of no consequence, Dönitz was making it plain to his commanders that the Prize Rules no longer applied. The orders did have a section on the extreme care necessary when conducting war under the Regulations, but this only applied now to ships outside the large area around Britain and France extending as far as 20 degrees west into the Atlantic.

These orders of Dönitz’s are revealing examples of his personality and method; they are full of the terse aphorisms with which he liked to put his message across; reading them one feels something of the flavour of his special brand of wholly-committed leadership. Here is Standing Order No. 151—presumably issued some time in November:

The previously quoted order 154, marking the practical end of the Prize regulations, enjoined Commanders to ‘attack with stubborn will until the destructive end is really accomplished!’ and went on:

The order went on to state that in war one was always further off than one imagined, especially at night—‘therefore advance!’ Shooting from close range was also safer since escorts did not drop depth charges in the close proximity of ships; furthermore, if forced to go deep it was easy to escape under the ships of the convoy where again one was safe from attack. After attacking in daytime, boats should refrain from going deep: ‘Do not forget that surrendering oneself to the deeps makes one blind and the boat passive. Therefore attempt for as long as possible to remain at periscope depth’, and again he repeated the injunction that if forced under by the possibility of being rammed or sighted by aircraft, all efforts had to be made to regain touch by making off afterwards at highest speed in the direction of the convoy.

The always aggressive, optimistic spirit of his orders is thrown into sharper light by the difficulties he was facing. He was still desperately short of boats; by the end of October he had lost seven from unknown
causes, and these had not been replaced by new boats coming into service; he noted in the war diary that this ‘must lead to paralysis of U-boat warfare if no means can be devised of keeping them [losses] down’.
³⁵
Assuming that the losses must have been caused by boats being surprised on the surface in bad weather or damaged in surface action, he issued orders forbidding gun action: ‘Ships are to be sunk by torpedo only.’
³⁶