Dönitz: The Last Führer (73 page)

The worthlessness of both decree and covering letter is apparent; Dönitz and von Krosigk had allowed the chief architect of the camps to escape without seriously attempting to bring him to justice, and large sections of his entourage, including the Commandant of Auschwitz, were even then masquerading in naval uniform, while the
Reich
court was a simple tool of the State, whose most savage sentences over the past year had been reserved for men who had intended to act against the perpetrators of the crimes of the regime which both Dönitz and von Krosigk had supported. Eisenhower took no action; the letter was not even answered. In 1969 Dönitz wrote, ‘Apparently the allies then regarded us as unsuitable to prosecute these crimes in German courts.’
⁴⁰

Three days after drawing up the decree, he issued an order of the day to the
Wehrmacht
, announcing his ‘horror and regret’ at finding out about the inhuman conditions in the camps. The millions of German soldiers and members of the
Waffen SS
who had ‘fought honourably and cleanly’ had known nothing of these things and they rejected them with
horror. And he announced his intention of bringing to trial any who had ‘soiled the honourable uniform of the German soldier’.
⁴¹
It is as difficult to find genuine outrage and remorse in this as in the previous decree and covering letter. They were declamatory, stamped by a desire for self-justification and intended to convey to the occupying powers a picture of the ‘immaculate’ fighting forces on the one hand, and on the other a few criminal Party officials.

The other chief aim of the government was to assist the break between the eastern and western occupation powers, still anticipated at any moment—for then the west would need Germany to hold the line against the Bolshevik engine of expansion; this reasoning was sound as events were to prove—if a little premature; but the corollary that the west would turn to them (Dönitz’s administration) as the legitimate government, and that the German people could only be welded together to resist a force as strong as Bolshevism by an equally uncompromising ideology—National Socialism—showed once more a total misconception about the moral forces Nazi Germany had unleashed, and an extraordinary blindness to the genuineness of the revulsion felt in the west.

For the members of the government were locked into their past; unable to take a fresh look at their country in the light of defeat, they followed old patterns of thought and behaviour like rats trapped in a maze. Perhaps it was a natural human reaction, perhaps it was why they had reached the top in the National Socialist State, but it is chilling to see in the voluminous memoranda and proposals drawn up—for some reason not entirely clear, in an effort to ‘overwhelm the Allied Control Commission’
⁴²
—no trace of remorse, no doubts about what had occurred under the Third Reich, no questions about the means to an end which had so obviously backfired—except for Jodl’s assertion that they would have done infinitely better by using ‘the weapon of the law’! Whatever the reasons, there was no recognition—apart from Speer’s—of the crying need to atone for crimes past western imagination, to turn away from the system that had made them possible, to restore individual freedom of thought, hence rights and justice and the meaning of language itself, building dissent into the structure. It is only necessary to list these things to realize why no one thought of them; they were of the opposite polarity to National Socialism and simply beyond comprehension.

So Dönitz, who in any case had to live up to what was expected of him,
der Löwe
, by his troops—many of whom were more extreme than he—twisted and turned to regain along the familiar paths of deception and guile what had been lost by armed might, literally turning the clock back to 1919. Here is Eckhardt again, on May 17th:

This noxious distortion, which still finds currency in the west, was translated by Jodl into simpler terms:

Dönitz played this theme for all it was worth in a discussion with the US Chief of the Allied Control Commission, General Rooks, on May 17th, and on May 20th he invited both Rooks and his British number two, Brigadier Foord, to talks at which he pressed the case again with even greater urgency. He contrasted the friendly way in which the Russians were carrying out both reconstruction and rehabilitation in their zone—playing German music, offering the people cigarettes and sweets and hope—with the strict non-fraternization enforced in the western zones. In the west, he said, it was apparently assumed that the German people were all criminals; the newspapers were full of reports about concentration camps, which the German people knew were ‘largely exaggerated and were propaganda’;
⁴⁵
the talk was all of war-criminals, when everyone knew this was untrue. Here Dönitz was guilty of a flagrant lie and, because it was so obvious, of a gross tactical error.

He went on, ‘All sections of the German people and the
Wehrmacht
, even those formerly strongly Anglophile, are now rapidly turning away
from you towards Russia. The primary reason is this mistaken, ideologically inspired determination to destroy National Socialism root and branch. In my view this is a time of decision for the political future of Western Germany. If you continue to treat the German people as you have done so far, they will turn to Russia, and Stalin will undoubtedly seize his chance.’
⁴⁶

He pointed to the fact that he, himself, was being attacked continually in the Anglo-American press, something which had never happened even during the war and the ‘fierce but fair’ U-boat campaign. Despite the obvious tactical errors of playing down the atrocity stories as ‘propaganda’ and attacking the de-Nazification programme, his views evidently impressed General Rooks, for he repeated the arguments about a probable swing towards the Russians to the head of the Admiralty mission then visiting Flensburg, who reported them home.
⁴⁷

Dönitz must have known by now that his time was running out. There was an air of desperation about these efforts to force his views on the Control Commission, as about his determination to preserve the façade of an administration that had no power outside the school buildings in which it met. He had long since lost his military High Command chief, Keitel, summoned to Eisenhower’s headquarters never to return; he had been arrested. Two of the civilian ministers had gone the same way, leaving no word. His wife, Ingeborg, who had been working for the Red Cross at Malente, near his previous command post at Plön, had not come with him to Flensburg; facing the enmity of anti-Nazi Germans she assumed her maiden name and later went to stay with Frau von Lamezan on the Lamezan smallholding near Neumünster in Holstein.
⁴⁸
Yet Dönitz, in immaculate uniform, was driven every morning the quarter of a mile or so from his quarters to the naval school in a large, armoured Mercedes which Hitler had given him, there to convene the daily ‘cabinet’ conference. Speer coined the phrase ‘tragedy had turned to tragi-comedy’.
⁴⁹

On the afternoon of May 22nd Lüdde-Neurath received a telephone call from the Control Commission summoning Dönitz, Jodl and von Friedeberg to the liner
Patria
—which General Rooks had taken over—at 9.45 the following morning. When he was told this Dönitz said curtly, ‘Pack the bags.’
⁵⁰

If Dönitz realized that this was the end for his government—as he surely did—he must also have realized that the text of an address to the officer corps which lay in his desk would be found by the allies. He left it
there; it must be assumed he intended it to be found!—as it was. It was sent to Naval Intelligence, London, and from there a translation went out to the First Lord of the Admiralty, First Sea Lord, the War Office, the Air Ministry, Washington, Ottawa and a variety of other commands.
⁵¹

The first section was a detailed review of the situation on his own assumption of power at the end of April, and his actions to deal with it, couched in his habitual style of self-justification. Thus: ‘This agreement with Montgomery enabled us to avoid complete capitulation and hence to save thousands of German lives in both the west and the east’—it is interesting that he did not claim ‘millions’. And of the final surrender: ‘I found myself being coerced … I had therefore to decide to capitulate. But there was something gained and that was that General Jodl, by clever negotiation, had at least delayed the capitulation by 48 hours.’

Jodl had had no choice; the timing, like the other terms, had been dictated by Eisenhower. This first part of the address might perhaps be compared with Hitler’s political testament. The second part was evidently for current allied consumption; he would have been gratified to know that when the Director of British Naval Intelligence circulated the translation on August 11th, he wrote in a covering letter ‘Attention is particularly invited to paragraphs 15, 16 and 17 …’
⁵²

This must surely have been a direct appeal to the west to recognize him as a leader who would keep Germany in the western camp against the swing towards the east of which he had warned. The sting in the tail was timeless, and he repeated it as he reiterated the message to the occupation powers stressed in all his previous speeches:

And he concluded with an urgent appeal to preserve the greatest boon of National Socialism—‘the unity it has given us’.

There was no officer to greet his party when they arrived punctually at the pier the next morning, no guard to salute, only a posse of importunate reporters and photographers. There was no doubt any longer about what awaited them. Dönitz mounted the
Patria
’s gangway, Jodl and von Friedeberg following, and they were led to the liner’s bar, serving as a waiting room. Five minutes later General Rooks entered, followed by Brigadier Foord, a Russian representative and an interpreter; waving the three Germans to chairs arranged along a table, the allied officers sat opposite.

‘Gentlemen,’ Rooks began, ‘I am in receipt of instructions from Supreme Headquarters, European Theatre of Operations, from the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, to call you before me this morning to tell you that he has decided, in concert with the Soviet High Command, that today the acting German government and the German High Command, with the several of its members, shall be taken into custody as prisoners of war. Thereby the acting German government is dissolved …’
⁵³

The head of the British Admiralty mission to Flensburg was aboard the
Patria
. He reported:

German naval officers had been confined to their quarters that morning, British tanks had taken up positions in the streets and a detachment of troops surrounded the Mürwik police buildings where Dönitz and the members of his administration were brought under guard, each with one case of personal belongings. They were gathered into a waiting room and from there called one by one into an adjacent room to undergo a body search for poison phials; sitting silently on benches against the walls, they watched the different reactions as each returned from his humiliating ordeal. Afterwards Dönitz, Jodl and Speer were led out into a courtyard whose surrounding roofs were lined with machine guns to face a battery of press and newsreel photographers. Later they and their baggage were bundled into trucks and driven in a long, armoured convoy to the airfield.

One man who did not go with them was von Friedeberg. He had been behaving in a nervously excited way all morning, as the head of the Admiralty mission noted. It is probable the past had much to do with his agitation, and that he was a victim of the all-powerful legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ by the Novemberlings’ who had signed the armistice after the First War; on this occasion he had signed and was answerable to posterity. At all events, arriving back at his quarters to collect his belongings, he had asked the British officer escorting him for permission to write to his wife. After writing the letter, he went to the bedroom where his 22-year-old son was packing his things; he was followed by the British officer, who thought he was acting ‘somewhat peculiarly’ and walking unsteadily.