Dönitz: The Last Führer (78 page)

‘This order, if you want to construe it like this and take it out of
context,’ he went on, ‘militates against your contention that I wanted to destroy these people; because I wanted to take prisoners, and if I wanted to kill somebody first, then I certainly could not have taken him prisoner.’

He was reminded of Heisig’s evidence about his remarks to the training course. He agreed that the German press had been full of the US shipbuilding programme at the time.

‘But the argument I am suggesting to you,’ Maxwell-Fyfe interrupted, ‘was that the building programme would be useless if you could destroy or frighten off sufficient Merchant Navy crews. That is the point in Hitler’s conversation and that Heisig said you said. Did you say that?’

‘I have always taken the view that losses of crews would make replacement difficult, and this is stated in my war diary together with similar ideas, and perhaps I said something of the kind to my midshipmen.’

He was shown the ‘Rescue ship’ order. ‘I just want you to look at the last sentence: “In view of the desired destruction of ships’ crews their sinking is of great value …” It is continually pressing the need for ships’ crews.’

‘Yes of course, but in the course of fighting …’

He was questioned about Möhle’s evidence: ‘Are you telling the Tribunal that Commander Möhle went on briefing submarine Commanders on a completely mistaken basis for three years without any of your staff or yourself discovering this? You saw every U-boat Commander when he came back.’

‘I am sorry that
Korvettenkapitän
Möhle, being the only one who said he had doubts in connection with this order, as he declared here, did not report this right away. I could not know that he had these doubts. He had every opportunity of clearing up these doubts and I did not know, and nobody on my staff had any idea, that he had these thoughts.’
⁹⁷

This is, of course, an incredible answer when taken together with Hansen-Nootbar’s recollection of his methods of debriefing, his insistence that Commanders tell him all their worries and criticisms.

Maxwell-Fyfe drew his attention to the cases of the
Noreen Mary
and
Antonico
, and he repeated his contention that statements from men in lifeboats had to be treated with scepticism, and these were the only two cases in five and a half years of war.

‘Yes, and of course for the two and a half of those years that the submarine Commanders have been shooting up survivors you
are not likely to get many cases, are you? I just want to ask you one other point—’

‘U-boat Commanders,’ Dönitz interrupted, ‘with the exception of the case of Eck, have never shot up shipwrecked persons. There is not a single case. That is not true.’

‘That is what you say.’

‘In no case is it proved. On the contrary they made the utmost efforts to rescue. No order to proceed against shipwrecked people has ever been given to the U-boat force with the exception of the case of Eck and for that there was a definite reason. That is a fact.’
⁹⁸

He was taken on to the faking of the U 30’s Log after the sinking of the
Athenia
, which he represented as the only case in which a Log Book had been altered, then to his speeches about the necessity for ideological training in the Navy. He defended his words on the necessity to preserve national unity and morale. When asked the meaning of ‘the spreading poison of Jewry’ in his Heroes’ Day talk, he replied, ‘I meant that we were living in a state of unity and that this unity represented strength and that all elements and all forces—’

‘No, that is not what I asked. What I am asking you, what did you mean by “the spreading poison of Jewry”? It is your phrase and you tell us what you mean by it.’

‘I could imagine that it would be very difficult for the population in the towns to hold out under the heavy stress of bombing attacks if such an influence was allowed to work, that is what I meant.’

‘Well now, can you tell me again, what do you mean by “the spreading poison of Jewry”?’

‘It means that it might have had a disintegrating effect on the people’s power of endurance, and in this life and death struggle of our country I as a soldier was especially anxious about this.’

‘Well now, that is what I want to know. You were the Supreme Commander and indoctrinated 600,000 to 700,000 men. Why were you conveying to them that Jews were a spreading poison in party politics? Why was that? What was it that you objected to in Jews that made you think they had a bad effect on Germans?’

‘That statement was made during my Memorial Day speech on Heroes’ Day. It shows that I was then of the opinion that the endurance, the power to endure of the people, as it was composed, could be better preserved than if there were Jewish elements in the nation.’

‘This sort of talk, “Spreading poison of Jewry”, produced the attitude
of mind which caused the deaths of five or six million Jews in these last few years. Do you say that you knew nothing about the action and the intention to do away with and exterminate the Jews?’

‘Yes, of course I say that. I did not know anything about it, and if such a statement was made then that does not furnish evidence that I had any idea of any murders of Jews. That was in the year 1943.’

‘Well, what I am putting to you is that you are joining the hunt against this unfortunate section of your community and leading six or seven thousand of the Navy in the same hunt …’

‘Nobody,’ Dönitz interrupted, ‘among my men thought of using violence against Jews, not one of them, and nobody can draw that conclusion from that sentence.’
⁹⁹

The prosecution did not have the text of his speech at the Flag Officers’
Tagung
, in which he had referred to eating earth rather than allowing his grandson to grow up in ‘the Jewish spirit and filth’, since 51 of the 52 copies distributed had been ‘weeded’ from the files, nor did they have the war diary entries referring to Admiral Fricke’s contemplated action against Jewish refugee ships since these, too, had been ‘weeded’.
¹⁰⁰
Had they been in possession of these, Dönitz could hardly have maintained that none of his men thought of using violence against Jews.

He was then questioned on the decree of April 1945 in which he had praised the petty officer in the prisoner of war camp in Australia, who had surreptitiously got rid of Communists. His explanation was that he had been told there had been an informer in the camp who passed on information to the enemy, on the strength of which U-boats were lost; consequently the senior man in the camp had decided to remove the informer as a traitor. That was what he had been advised and what he would prove with a witness. Asked why he had not put that in the decree but had referred to Communists in the plural, he said there may have been intelligence reasons for not divulging it.

When Gilbert visited his cell in the evening Dönitz asked him what he thought now. He had shown he was on the side of the west; he had said that Germany belonged to the Christian West. And he went on to tell Gilbert how a US Admiral among the spectators had passed a message to Kranzbühler to say that he considered Dönitz’s naval warfare beyond reproach.
¹⁰¹

‘I told Kranzbühler to tell him,’ Dönitz went on, ‘that the Russians have been trying to get hold of the technicians who have been working
on our new U-boat—the one that can go around the world without surfacing.’

Gilbert said that would make it look as if he were trying to play the west against the east for personal advantage.

He realized that, Dönitz replied, and for that reason had changed his mind about Kranzbühler passing the message. ‘But
you
ought to tell him,’ he urged Gilbert. ‘It is your duty. Ever since the armistice the Russians have been trying to get hold of these technicians and experts on the X-boat [the Walter boat]. And do you know why? Because it has a cruising range all round the world without surfacing for recharging the batteries—and it is foolproof against any weapons—even the atomic bomb! And if Stalin is as generous as I believe he is in these matters it will be a simple matter for him to build a few thousand of these U-boats, and then he will control the seas of the world. And what will you do against a U-boat that never has to surface? Now I have imparted this information to you, it is your duty to inform that admiral because six months from now I will say that I told you about it, and you don’t want to carry it around in your heart.’
¹⁰²

It seems possible that Kranzbühler had been informed on the Navy courier link that former SS men who had dived into the service at the end of the war were being recruited by US Intelligence for anti-Communist operations. At all events Gilbert thought to himself that for an honest soldier who condemned dirty politics, this was a clever move.

Admiral Wagner, who had been Dönitz’s personal liaison with the High Command during the last year, was called to the stand after Dönitz. He said he had been a prisoner of war with Heisig at the time the latter had made the statement recounting Dönitz’s speech to the U-boat course; Heisig had told him then that he had learned from his interrogators that one of Eck’s officers, Hoffmann, had testified to hearing a speech by Dönitz in the autumn of 1942, which he had considered was a demand for killing shipwrecked survivors. Heisig had been told, ‘If you confirm this testimony of Hoffmann’s, you will not only save Eck and Hoffmann but also two others who have been sentenced to death… Of course you will thus incriminate Grand Admiral Dönitz but the material against Admiral Dönitz is of such tremendous weight that his life has been forfeited anyway.’ Wagner went on to say that Heisig had also told him, without any prompting, that at the time he heard Dönitz’s speech he had been deeply distressed. He had just returned from witnessing the terrible
consequences of a bombing raid on Lübeck; his mind was set on revenge for these brutal measures and Heisig considered it possible that his emotional state might have influenced his interpretation of the speech.

Later Wagner confirmed Dönitz’s story about the spy in the Australian prisoner of war camp; asked why in that case the word Communists in the plural had been used, he thought the only explanation was that the true state of affairs had to be concealed from enemy intelligence. He denied that Dönitz had been considered a fanatical Nazi—‘he was carrying on his duties as a soldier to the end’.
¹⁰³

Cross-examined by Colonel Phillimore on his testimony about Heisig, he was asked whether he knew that Eck and the others had been executed before the conversation he described took place.

‘No, I just found it out now.’

‘At any rate the witness Heisig knew it before he gave his evidence, did he not?’

‘Obviously not. Otherwise he would most likely have told me about it—’

Phillimore read him an extract from the questions put to Heisig showing that he had been told that the death sentence had been carried out.

‘I can only say, in that case he told an untruth to me.’
¹⁰⁴

This pitiable attempt by a senior officer to cast doubt on Heisig’s evidence suggests the weight attached to it in the German camp. It is noticeable, too, that Wagner referred to the allied bombing wherever possible in his evidence, insinuating the
tu quoque
—or ‘you too’—principle by the back door.

On May 14th Admiral Godt took the stand. He insisted under cross-examination that he did not remember that he and Hessler had tried to stop the
Laconia
orders being sent.

‘I suggest to you now,’ Phillimore said, ‘that this order was very carefully drafted to be ambiguous deliberately so that any U-boat Commander who was prepared to behave as Eck did was entitled to do so under the order, isn’t that right?’

‘That is an assertion.’
¹⁰⁵

After him Hessler came to the stand and described how as a U-boat Commander in the early years of the war he had given survivors their exact position and course to the nearest land and assisted them with water and medical supplies. He too denied having tried to dissuade Dönitz from sending the
Laconia
orders. Pressed by the President, he
said, ‘We talked it over just as we discussed every wireless message drafted by us. As time went on, we drafted many hundreds of wireless messages so that it is impossible to remember what was said in each case.’
¹⁰⁶

This answer is hard to square with Dönitz’s own account in his memoirs ten years later of the circumstances in which the order was drafted. ‘There was a very
temperamentvoll
discussion in my staff.’
¹⁰⁷

Raeder took the stand next; he explained that his pre-war notes about building ‘against’ England had meant using England as a yardstick. He had been thoroughly taken in by Hitler, he said, and as his former Chief of Staff, Schülte-Monting, later confirmed, had never believed in his intentions to attack. Asked about the Führer’s assertion in his presence that he would ‘smash’ Czechoslovakia, he replied that Hitler had wanted to smash lots of things! He admitted he had known the
Athenia
had been sunk by a U-boat, but as Schülte-Monting explained afterwards, placed the State’s interest—not to have complications with the United States—above newspaper articles.

For Dönitz the low point in his examination probably came when the prosecution tried to put in an affidavit Raeder had made while in captivity in Russia immediately after the war. This was not read in court, but Dönitz had an opportunity to see it and was not flattered. Raeder had said that relations between the two of them were very cool since Dönitz’s ‘somewhat conceited and not always tactful nature did not appeal to me’, and that mistakes ‘resulting from his personal viewpoint, which were known to the officer corps, soon became apparent, to the detriment of the Navy’. He had gone on to accuse Dönitz and Speer of casting aside tried and tested methods at a critical moment, and said Dönitz’s political inclinations had produced difficulties: ‘His last speech to the Hitler Youth, which was ridiculed in all circles, earned him the title of “Hitler-boy” Dönitz.’ He then said Dönitz had hardly been qualified to become C-in-C—a remark very difficult to reconcile with his own recommendation in 1943!
¹⁰⁸