Dönitz: The Last Führer (41 page)

These conclusions were not drawn. An experimental type with high
underwater speed had been under development by its inventor, Professor Walter, since before the war; a small prototype had been built, achieving 28 knots submerged in 1940, since when designs for a coastal type and a larger ocean-going boat had been prepared. But Hitler’s allocation of priority to tanks and aircraft that January caused a radical reappraisal of all naval building and work on the Walter boats was stopped. Walter immediately travelled to Paris to seek Dönitz’s aid; he was not disappointed; Dönitz was enthusiastic—naturally he wanted high speed under water—and pressed Raeder to continue development. As a result work was resumed on the coastal prototype in February, not, however, with any sense of urgency.

The Walter idea involved new technology; the high-speed underwater drive was provided by a fuel containing its own oxygen, whose combustion did not, therefore, exhaust the oxygen in the boat which the crew needed to breathe. Naturally there were problems with such a new concept, and the naval construction department believed these so serious the war would be over before they were solved; they were right. However, if the seriousness of the position facing existing boats had been realized the most urgent priority must have been given to the search for any means of gaining speed under water—not necessarily Walter’s. Dönitz and his staff and the U-department in Berlin must share the blame for not perceiving this and not impressing it on Raeder and the naval staff.

They, for their part, were still day-dreaming, planning great three-way pincer movements across half the world, one thrusting south from the Caucasus and through Iraq towards the head of the Persian Gulf, another via North Africa through Alexandria and Suez to the Red Sea, while the Japanese fleet operated in the Indian Ocean to prevent supplies reaching the British in these areas; and assuming this strategic centre of the board was in their grasp—thanks to the exertions of the Army and their Japanese ally—they were making detailed plans for the
post-war
fleet necessary to hold it!
¹⁰⁷

‘These people dream in continents,’ the Chief of the Army General Staff, Halder, noted in his diary after a conversation with Schniewind, Raeder’s Chief of Staff.

Such at the crisis of a great war was the extent of the total breakdown of the German command organization.

Dönitz for his part was a front Commander whose strengths lay in personal leadership charisma, undaunted devotion and unquenchable optimism. It was not in his nature to take a negative view; consequently he brushed aside the threat from the increased efficiency of the British escort groups and air cover just as he had brushed aside Fürbringer’s doubts about U-boat war on commerce in 1938. And although naturally supporting Walter’s revolutionary boat, he was more immediately concerned to increase numbers of existing types
to find
the convoys in the battle about to be rejoined in the North Atlantic.

He also called for improved weapons, and here we reach a dark area matching the darkness that had fallen over Germany and the occupied territories of Europe. On January 3rd Hitler had discussed the strategic situation with the Japanese Ambassador, Oshima, in the presence of Ribbentrop. Coming to the war in the Atlantic, he had stressed the importance he attached to the U-boat campaign, and had said of US shipbuilding capacity that however many ships they built, one of their chief problems would be manning them.

‘For that reason,’ he went on, ‘merchant shipping will be sunk without warning with the intention of killing as many of the crew as possible. Once it gets around that most of the seamen are lost in the sinkings, the Americans will have great difficulty in enlisting new people. The training of sea-going personnel takes a long time. We are fighting for our existence and cannot therefore take a humanitarian viewpoint. For this reason I must give the order that since foreign seamen cannot be taken prisoner, and in most cases this is not possible on the open sea, the U-boats are to surface after torpedoing and shoot up the lifeboats.’
¹⁰⁹

Oshima agreed with this and said the Japanese would be forced to use the same methods, as indeed they did. Dönitz denied ever having heard of this conversation or receiving this order, and the record of lives saved from the sinkings off the US coast suggests that he did not give such an instruction. Nevertheless, this conversation re-echoes down the
later years of the U-boat war, and it was heard at this May 14th conference.

Prophesying that U-boat losses would increase once convoy battles were resumed, and stressing that it was therefore necessary to improve the U-boat’s weapons against the enemy escorts, he said the most important development was an
Abstand
or non-contact pistol for torpedoes. This would have a more certain effect against destroyers than existing pistols but ‘above all will accelerate the sinking of torpedoed ships’; this would result in ‘the great advantage that in consequence of the very rapid sinking of the torpedoed ship the crew will no longer be able to be rescued. This greater loss of ships’ crews will doubtless aggravate the manning difficulties for the great American building programme’.
¹¹⁰

Both he and Raeder insisted at the Nuremberg trials that this reference to US manning difficulties was provoked by Hitler at the conference. There is nothing in the record to suggest this. The most likely explanation, perhaps, is that at some time after his discussion with Oshima Hitler did propose the elimination of survivors to Raeder who discussed it with Dönitz. Now Dönitz was proposing a legal and morally defensible method of gaining similar ends.

Step by step the necessities of submarine warfare and Germany’s struggle against insuperable odds were increasing the pressure on him to move from accepted codes of warfare. It was but a step back from here to the barbarities of the Middle Ages—already being practised in the eastern campaign.

The savagery Hitler had unleashed in the east was now rebounding on the German people. German soldiers captured by the Red Army were being shot, beheaded, hanged upside down, burned alive. In the west, British area bombing raids against German and German-occupied cities were claiming hundreds of civilian victims; resistance movements in the occupied countries were mounting campaigns of harassment and assassination, which had led to a vicious cycle of reprisal and counterterrorism. One captured rating from a U-boat based on Lorient told his British interrogator that he thought the shooting of hostages in reprisal for the killing of German sentries might whip up such feeling among the French that they would fall on and annihilate a number of garrisons.
¹¹¹
Hitler decreed that all commands in France must have forces under their direct control; this compelled Dönitz to prepare a move back to Paris—‘a
regrettable step,’ he noted, ‘since the direct contact with the front, i.e. the personal touch between the commanding officer and the front boats and crews will not be possible to nearly the same extent …’
¹¹²

The day after he wrote that entry a British raiding party attacked St Nazaire. No U-boats were lost, but it was obvious that a similar raid on Kerneval and the British could have had the entire staff of U-boat Command! He accelerated the move.

The building chosen for his second Paris headquarters was a modern apartment block on the Avenue Maréchal Maunoury. The switch-over from Kerneval took place at 10 am on March 29th.

This was two days after the first train-load of 1,112 Jews left Paris for Auschwitz, purportedly in reprisal for attacks on German servicemen in the capital; in truth it was the beginning in the west of the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem agreed at a conference chaired by Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, at Wannsee, Berlin, on January 20th.
¹¹³
There is no reason why Dönitz should have known about this; it was a closely-kept secret and all his time and energy were devoted to the U-boat campaign. If the round-ups and deportations impinged somewhere at the periphery of his attention they would not have appeared anything out of the ordinary; similar episodes had been commonplace since the Nazis seized power. Some of his own U-boat men had served spells in concentration camps and suffered the
Gleichschaltung
, or reduction to the Nazi philosophy, meted out by the guards; others had suffered spells of hard labour in punishment camps; the ultimate deterrent was transfer to a punishment battalion on the eastern front.

Dönitz went on holiday with his family to Badenweiler that summer soon after his meeting with the Führer at the
Wolfschanze
; his daughter, Ursula, went too and took his grandson Peter. Her husband, Günther Hessler, had made his name as one of the ace U-boat Commanders, having returned from a cruise to the South Atlantic the previous summer with a bag of fourteen ships totalling 86,699 tons, a record for a single voyage which was never equalled.
¹¹⁴
Dönitz had called him to U-boat headquarters where he now served as first staff officer directly under Eberhard Godt.

By the time Dönitz and Hessler returned to Paris after the holiday the campaign against French Jews was in full swing. They were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star now on their left breast as in Germany and Poland; while it is doubtful if Dönitz would have chanced across any during his intensive daily round it is inconceivable that he would have
remained unaware of the mounting scale of operations in the capital. Horror stories broadcast by the BBC must also have reached his ears; his staff listened for the serious purpose of gleaning information particularly about U-boats reported sunk. It is scarcely conceivable that anything as dramatic as the first accounts of the massacres of Jews in the east reported from July onwards were not drawn to his attention—unless the idea of mass murder was by then a commonplace in Germany. One rating from a U-boat sunk at the end of the previous year told his British interrogator that Germans had sterilized or shot so many Poles, he believed that if Germany lost the war a huge number of his countrymen would be sterilized in return—he understood that 20,000 British doctors had already been mustered for the purpose.
¹¹⁵
In the face of this kind of evidence it is apparent that not only Jews and Communists, but Germany itself was caught up in
Nacht und Nebel
—night and fog. To ask how Dönitz viewed the intensification of the internal war would probably be an irrelevance; his commitment to the struggle was absolute, and he made no difference between enemies outside or inside.

Early in September it was reported that British destroyers had machine-gunned survivors from the German minelayer
Ulm
in their lifeboats. Hitler’s response suggests that Raeder and Dönitz had indeed rejected his earlier suggestion to shoot up shipwrecked survivors for he called for vengeance: ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We must straightaway declare that from now on parachuting airmen will be fired on and our U-boats will shell the survivors of torpedoed ships regardless of whether they are soldiers or civilians, women or children!’
¹¹⁶

Raeder, told of his intention to take reprisals, immediately set up an investigation into the
Ulm
and similar cases. On the 13th, while the staff was still analysing the results, Hitler called for a report from Dönitz on the situation in the U-boat war:

To gain an idea of Dönitz’s state of mind and preoccupations at this time it is necessary to backtrack briefly. The easy successes on the US coast had come to an end during July when coastal traffic had at last been organized in convoys; although a few ‘soft’ areas of independent traffic remained around the West Indies for a few weeks more, Dönitz had been
forced back in his main attack to the North Atlantic. He had more boats by this time: on August 1st he was operating no less than 113 in the Atlantic out of a total 342 in service. His new tactic for the main theatre was to organize the newly-sailed boats in groups at about the limit of British air reconnaissance in the eastern Atlantic, from where they travelled slowly westwards, combing the probable convoy routes so that when they found a convoy they could fight it on its way across, refuel from a tanker in the west, reform off Newfoundland and comb back eastwards on the homeward leg.

By this time the potentially decisive threat of radar-equipped aircraft, noted by the British in April, had been forced in on all at U-boat Command. Boats on passage to and from the Biscay bases were being attacked by day and night, and often the first the U-boat lookouts knew of the danger was a searchlight trained on them from close astern as the plane which had located the boat by radar made its visual run in for the kill. An apparatus to detect the radar transmissions—actually a French device given to Dönitz gratuitously by the French Admiral Darlan—had been supplied to the boats to give them warning and time to dive, and Dönitz made urgent demands for aircraft to win command of the airspace over Biscay; the few he obtained were quite insufficient. By August 21st a note of desperation was evident in the U-boat Command war diary: