Karl Doenitz

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Karl Dönitz as Grand Admiral, 1943 Nazi propaganda collector's picture

Karl Dönitz (born September 16, 1891 in Grünau near Berlin , † December 24, 1980 in Aumühle ) was a German naval officer (from January 1943 Grand Admiral ), NSDAP member, follower of Adolf Hitler and, according to his will, under the title of " Reich President " for a few days last head of state of the National Socialist German Reich . Dönitz was one of the 24 defendants in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals . He was convicted of waging wars of aggression and war crimes and sentenced on October 1, 1946 to ten years' imprisonment, which he served in full until October 1, 1956.

At the beginning of 1936 Dönitz became the “ Führer der U-Boats ” (from 1939: “ Commander of the U-Boats ”) and was the driving force behind the development of the U-boat weapon in the German Navy . Appointed Commander in Chief of the Navy by Hitler at the end of January 1943 , he was named in his political will of April 29, 1945 as his successor in the offices of Reich President and Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht .

After Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, and Goebbels' suicide on May 1, 1945, Doenitz set up an Executive Reich Government , which had already been prepared at the end of April, under the then Finance Minister L. Schwerin von Krosigk as Chief Reich Minister , which moved into the special area of ​​Mürwik withdrew in Flensburg as the last base of the collapsing state power and therefore became generally known as the Dönitz government or "Flensburg government". About two weeks after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , which he authorized on May 7 and which came into force on May 8, Dönitz, the high-ranking generals of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and all members of the government were arrested on May 23, 1945 were found in the marine sports school at the naval base in Flensburg-Mürwik.

Life

Empire and First World War

Promotions:

Dönitz came from the social class of the state-loyal Prussian bourgeoisie. He was the son of the engineer and head of the patent department at Zeiss-Werke Emil Dönitz and his wife Anna, née Beyer. His mother died when he was not yet four years old; from then on he and his brother Friedrich, who was two years older, were raised by their father alone.

In 1898 the father moved with the children to Jena to take up his position at the Zeiss factory. Doenitz attended Stoy 'specific educational institution . When the family moved to Weimar in September 1906, he switched to the secondary school there at today's Rathenauplatz 3. After graduating from high school, Dönitz joined the Imperial Navy on April 1, 1910 as a midshipman . Martin Niemöller also belonged to this year of training, the so-called “ Crew 10 ” . Following infantry training at the Mürwik Naval School , Kadett Dönitz began on-board training on May 12 on the large cruiser SMS Hertha . On April 1 of the following year he returned to the Naval School to begin his officer training. On April 15, 1911 Dönitz was promoted to ensign . In the summer of 1912, he completed his infantry course with the II.  Seebataillon and a torpedo course on the tank corvette SMS Württemberg . By completing an artillery course at the ship artillery school in Kiel-Wik , Ensign z. S. Dönitz completed his training as a midshipman and on October 1, 1912, was commanded as an officer on watch and adjutant on the small cruiser SMS Breslau . The first officer of the Breslau , Kapitänleutnant Wilfried von Loewenfeld, was regarded as the paternal figure and mentor after the father's death . At that time, the Breslau was the most modern small cruiser in the German fleet. On September 27, 1913, he was promoted to lieutenant at sea .

At the beginning of the First World War , the Breslau and the battle cruiser SMS Goeben, under the leadership of Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon , managed to evade the French and British naval forces and escape to Constantinople , where the ships were subordinated to the Ottoman Navy . The Wroclaw took henceforth under the name of Lesbos in battles against units of the Imperial Russian Navy in the Black Sea part. Dönitz received several awards in the war year 1914.

In August 1915, the Midilli was in the Stenia shipyard near Constantinople (now İstinye, part of Istanbul) for repair work. During this time, Leutnant zur See Dönitz was transferred to the Dardanelles front and to San Stefano as an airfield manager of an aviation division , where he was also employed as an observation officer and trained as an aviator. In September Dönitz left Breslau .

His marriage in 1916 to Ingeborg Weber, the daughter of the Prussian major general Erich Weber , meant a social advancement for Dönitz.

In the meantime to first lieutenant z. S. transported to Doenitz volunteered to the new branch of the submarines and was on September 15, the U-section of the Imperial Navy assigned. The U-training started for him with another torpedo course, this time specially tailored to the requirements of the modern submarine weapon system. This course brought him back on board the Württemberg in October . Dönitz spent the turn of the year at the U-School. On January 17, he was commanded as an officer on watch on U 39 . On U 39 , Dönitz took part in a total of five enemy voyages under commanders Walter Forstmann and Heinrich Metzger until he disembarked in December 1917 to prepare for his own command. In the first half of 1917, the later theologian and resistance fighter Martin Niemöller also drove as a helmsman on U 39 .

On March 1, 1918, Dönitz was given command of UC 25 , a UC-II mine-carrying boat built by the Hamburg Vulkan shipyard . On the first of the two patrols that he undertook with this boat, he penetrated the Italian port of Augusta and sank a ship lying there. The torpedoes from UC 25 hit an Italian coal freighter and not, as ordered, intended and also later reported, the British workshop ship Cyclops . Assuming that Dönitz had sunk it, his flotilla chief recommended him for an award. As a result, Dönitz was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords on June 10, 1918 . In September 1918 he was given command of UB 68 , a considerably larger, ocean-going two - hulled boat . During an attack on a British convoy in the Mediterranean , UB 68 was incapable of diving and was seriously damaged, which is why it was abandoned by the crew. After leaving the boat, Dönitz fell into British captivity , which he used to learn the Spanish language. For health reasons he was released in July 1919 and returned to Germany to live with his wife and daughter Ursula.

Weimar Republic

Dönitz was taken over into the initially provisional Reichsmarine of the Weimar Republic and in July 1919 he was assigned to the staff of the naval station of the Baltic Sea , where he carried out auxiliary work, among other things, as a consultant for officer personnel. From March 1918 he was in command of various torpedo boats , namely the V 5, T 157 and G 8 . Dönitz, who was personally known to the chief of the station command, Vice Admiral Magnus von Levetzow , was appointed by him to command the torpedo boat "V 5" in order to support the putschists from the first day of the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch. to maintain law and order ”. According to the military historian Herbert Kraus , Dönitz experienced the "failure of the putsch [...] as a personal defeat on board his boat", as he had to recognize "that the old order could not be restored by force of arms [...]". On January 1, 1921, he was promoted to lieutenant captain and was subordinate to the I. Torpedo Boat Half Flotilla.

From spring 1923 he was a consultant and adjutant for the inspection of torpedoes and mines. During this time he received admiral staff training from the then Inspector of Education of the Navy Rear Admiral Erich Raeder . On November 3, 1924, Lieutenant Dönitz became a consultant in the Navy Department; he remained in this position for a little over two years. He was then used as a navigational officer on the cruiser Nymphe . In the autumn of 1927 he took part in a navigation instruction trip on the survey ship Meteor and completed a course in meteorology at the naval observatory in Wilhelmshaven .

On September 24, 1928 Dönitz became chief of the 4th torpedo boat semi-flotilla, and on November 1, 1928 he was promoted to corvette captain. Two years later he became 1st Admiral Staff Officer at the North Sea Naval Station .

The extremely positive evaluations Dönitz had received from his military superiors were helpful for the rapid rise - 13 in the period from July 1913 to November 1933. Only the later admiral and then sea captain Wilhelm Canaris criticized in his first evaluation in November 1931, Doenitz '"character formation" was "not yet completed", he was very ambitious and in need of approval, but declared these deficiencies in his second assessment a year later to have been completely remedied.

time of the nationalsocialism

Pre-war period

In the role of 1st Admiral Staff Officer at the North Sea Naval Station, he was promoted to frigate captain on October 1, 1933 . As the commander of the cruiser Emden , since the end of September 1934, Dönitz made a trip abroad to Southeast Asia for several months in 1935 . After his return, Dönitz was commissioned by the interim Admiral Raeder to build the new German submarine weapon. Doenitz first felt this new position was a sideline, but very soon revised this view. The construction of German submarines became possible after Adolf Hitler disregarded the Versailles Treaty in the same year with the German-British naval agreement by unilaterally declaring German military sovereignty .

In the general strategy of the German Navy, the interruption of the enemy's sea routes ( according to the military doctrine of the time , especially the British Royal Navy ), the submarine weapon system was not intended to play a major role. On September 22, 1935, frigate captain Dönitz was appointed head of the Weddigen submarine flotilla and on October 1, 1935, was promoted to sea captain. In January of that year he received the Cross of Honor for Frontline Fighters on application . As early as January 1, 1936, Dönitz's post was upgraded and renamed the Führer der Unterseeboote (FdU). In the same year, German submarines under the leadership of Dönitz took part in a secret operation in the Spanish civil war . This was revealed in 1991 through an essay by Bodo Herzog in Die Zeit . On January 28, 1939 he was appointed commodore .

Second World War

Dönitz welcomes crew members of a submarine, Wilhelmshaven 1940 Nazi propaganda picture posted

One month after the outbreak of the Second World War , Dönitz was appointed Rear Admiral on October 1, 1939 . On September 19, his post was renamed Commander of the Submarines (BdU) .

Aware of the political crises in the years 1935 to 1938, Dönitz had to consider the possibility of British opposition in the strategic direction of the submarine weapon. According to Dönitz, an effective trade war requires a nominal strength of the submarine weapon of around 300 boats. According to the “third parity” doctrine, a third of the boats should be in the front line, another third should be on the march to and from and the last third to be overhauled in the home ports. In the Z-Plan of March 1, 1939, the construction of 249 submarines was decided. The sea war in the Atlantic began with a small number of submarines (57 submarines, only 37 of which were suitable for the Atlantic), but with successes for the German side. Because of this, Dönitz was promoted to Vice Admiral on September 1, 1940 .

Dönitz had the submarine crews trained to fight against convoy trains, with this he planned to counter massing on ships with massing on submarines - the so-called pack tactic .

In the course of the reduced allocation of raw materials to the Kriegsmarine, which took place in November 1941 and only provided 60% of the required amount of steel and aluminum for 1942, Dönitz demanded funding for submarine construction at the expense of the larger units. In a submission to the naval war command, he assessed the advances of the German warships into the Atlantic as failed and as hopeless in the future. This indirect criticism of Raeder's strategy, in which Doenitz repeated a criticism of Hitler that had already been expressed, revealed a fundamental conflict between the commander in chief of the navy and the commander of the submarines, which, however, did not initially develop into an open power struggle because the German capital ships were not operational at this point. When in spring 1942 the two battleships of the Scharnhorst class and the cruiser Prinz Eugen had to leave their base on the Atlantic in Brest at Hitler's insistence and transferred to Norway with the battleship Tirpitz , Raeder's offensive operational strategy had essentially failed. From Brest and the other bases on the northern French Atlantic coast, Dönitz now fought the battle in the Atlantic with submarines . At first, the high number of dumps in the spring of 1942 seemed to indicate the success of the "tonnage war" he defined. On March 14, 1942, Dönitz was promoted to admiral .

Commander in chief

On January 30, 1943, Dönitz was promoted to Grand Admiral, omitting the rank of General Admiral, and appointed Commander in Chief of the German Navy as Erich Raeder's successor . The appointment was preceded by a confrontation between Raeder and Hitler, which resulted in Raeder's resignation. At a position lecture on January 6 in the Wolf's Lair , Hitler had naval warfare the state of the Navy as a whole and in particular Raeder strategy ( operation rösselsprung in June 1942 and company Rainbow criticized in December 1942), and the use of large ships like the Bismarck , the Was sunk in 1941 and criticized the Tirpitz , which had been isolated in Norway for a year at that time. Under the impression of this criticism, Raeder immediately offered his resignation, which Hitler accepted.

In a letter dated January 14, Raeder named two officers at Hitler's request who, in his opinion, might be possible successors. Besides Dönitz, this was General Admiral Rolf Carls . For the seven years older Carls, who, like Dönitz, was also a submarine commander in World War I, according to Raeder, spoke the extensive experience in the management of military operations with regard to different types of ships as well as organizations. In addition, his appointment would be possible "without any friction", because no officer of equal merit would be skipped in the promotion. In favor of Dönitz was that his appointment placed a recognizable focus on the submarine weapon. Hitler decided on Dönitz, who on January 30th - the tenth anniversary of the so-called seizure of power - was appointed Commander in Chief of the Navy.

Right at the beginning of his activity as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Dönitz sent a message to all naval agencies about his promotion on January 30, 1943. The ships at sea also received this via radio. The intelligence officers responsible sent the text verbatim and after encryption with all relevant encryption methods. This was the cryptologists of the opposing decryption centers, z. B. in Bletchley Park , an ideal opportunity for all marine encryption methods to decode the method. Sending the information as ciphertext was a serious secret service mistake, as the German press was informed - quite publicly - the next day.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Dönitz did not give up the post of Commander-in-Chief of the submarines. After the Atlantic battle failed in spring 1943 due to the technological inferiority of the outdated submarine types, he tried, on the one hand, by mass production of new submarines and, on the other, by inconsiderate appeals to the submarine crews that were objectively justified by nothing to regain a strategic offensive option: “… do not dive, shoot and defend in front of aircraft. If possible, run over water in front of destroyers. Be tough, come forward and attack. I believe in you. ”However, this meant, in the words of British non-fiction author Andrew Williams:“ Any submarine commander who would obey Doenitz's orders to fight on the surface of the water signed his own death warrant. ”

During the invasion of Normandy (1944) he let 36 submarines run out:

“Any enemy vehicle used for landing, even if it only brings about half a hundred soldiers or a tank ashore, is a target. It is to be attacked, even if you run the risk of losing yourself. [...] The boat, which causes losses to the enemy on landing, has fulfilled its highest task and justified its existence, even if it stays that way. "

Given the massive Allied water and air superiority at the time, this was a kamikaze order , as there was little chance that a submarine would survive an attack on the heavily secured convoys in the canal or on the concentration of ships off the coast of Normandy .

Although the number of submerged submarines continued to increase in the period that followed, the possibility that the Allies could finally have deciphered the German Enigma machine was still ruled out. Instead, it was assumed that submarines and with them Enigma machines and key documents had fallen into Allied hands.

Despite the crushing own losses and the very sharp drop in sinking successes, Dönitz could at no time, apart from a brief phase in the middle of 1943, decide to draw the conclusions and break off the submarine war. He justified this with strategic considerations. In his opinion, breaking off the Atlantic Battle would have enabled the Western Allies to free large numbers of people and material that would then have been deployed elsewhere against Germany.

The result of this attitude can also be seen in the loss figures: of the around 41,000 German submarine drivers of the Second World War, almost 26,000 died in action by the end of the war. Dönitz's younger son Peter was among the dead. The other son, Klaus, fell on the speedboat S 141 in an attack on the southern English port town of Selsey .

In the 68-month battle, 781 of 820 German submarines (95.2 percent) were lost, and 632 were verifiably sunk by the Allies. No other branch of arms had such a loss rate, neither on the German nor on the Allied side.

The submarines were commanded first from Wilhelmshaven (1939/1940), then from Kernével Castle near Lorient (1940-1942), where the BdU conducted the operations with only six staff officers, and finally from the Koralle headquarters in Bernau near Berlin (1943–1943). 45). The small number on the German side was blatantly disproportionate to the hundreds of staff officers with whom the British anti-submarine defense from London and Liverpool strategically and tactically coordinated and technically revolutionized its countermeasures.

Dönitz and Hitler in the Führerbunker in 1945

On April 20, 1945 Dönitz congratulated Hitler on his birthday in the Führerbunker in Berlin and received the order from him to “immediately prepare for the complete exhaustion of all personal and material possibilities for the defense of the northern area in the event of an interruption of the land connection in Central Germany”. Doenitz said goodbye to Hitler on the afternoon of April 21 and left Berlin the next day at 2:00 a.m. for his new headquarters on Suhrer See near Plön , where he arrived late in the morning. The naval staff , which the camp Stadtheide used since March 27 as alternative quarters had Doenitz and his staff a few barracks vacated.

Stations during the Second World War:

Hitler's "successor" as Reich President

Hitler appointed Doenitz in his will to succeed him as supreme commander of the armed forces, War Minister and President of the Reich . That did not correspond to the still valid Weimar constitution . But Hitler had passed his own law for the process: the law on the successor of the Führer and Reich Chancellor of December 13, 1934, which Hitler wrote on the same day but never published. In it he declared for himself the power of attorney "to determine his successor himself in the event of his death or any other settlement of the combined offices of Reich President and Reich Chancellor". Dönitz accepted his appointment after receiving a telegram from Martin Bormann in Plön on May 1, 1945, 3:18 p.m. of Hitler's death. On April 30th, Bormann Dönitz had announced his appointment as Reich President without revealing that Hitler was dead, which until May 1st almost nobody in the German Reich knew. Doenitz considered this appointment as President of the German Reich to be so important that in 1975 he wrote a kind of “will” in which he wanted to transfer the office of Reich President to the Federal President of the Federal Republic.

Dönitz announced his position as the “successor of the Führer” with a speech to the German people and a subsequent order of the day to the Wehrmacht, which the Reichsender Hamburg initiated on May 1, 1945 at 10:30 p.m. with the untrue announcement that Hitler was “this afternoon in his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting for Germany against Bolshevism to the last breath ”. Doenitz also didn't say that Hitler had killed himself; he also spoke of the fact that Hitler had "fallen" and of his "heroic death". From May 3, the provisional seat of government was in Flensburg-Mürwik , in the Mürwik special area set up there , the last as yet unoccupied part of the Third Reich. After the capitulation on May 8, the Flensburg government was ousted by the Allies on May 23 and Dönitz arrested, who was subsequently charged with war crimes and planning a war of aggression in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals.

surrender

Doenitz and the executive government of the Reich sought a separate peace with the Western Allies in order to push the Red Army back from Germany. After American President Franklin D. Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender of the war opponents had already been passed at the Allied Conference in Casablanca in 1943 and Churchill feared a conflict with the Soviet Allies, the Western Allies refused to accept any partial surrender . After the war, Dönitz also justified the continuation of the war with the fact that as many German soldiers as possible should be brought into captivity by the Western Allies in order to protect them from Soviet captivity. However, this representation is in part questioned by recent historical research and presented as euphemistic, since Dönitz only ordered two days before the surrender to use all available ships to rescue refugees (see e.g. the work of Heinrich Schwendemann in Bibliography). Furthermore, naval courts of war in the area still controlled by German troops, citing Dönitz 'orders to hold out, passed numerous death sentences for desertion and " disruptive military service " until the days after the total surrender . Doenitz personally insisted on keeping the Hitler salute as a tribute and leaving all Hitler pictures in their place.

General Jodl Signs the Unconditional Surrender of the German Wehrmacht in Reims (May 7, 1945)
Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel signs the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht on May 9, 1945 in Berlin-Karlshorst.

On May 2, 1945 in Berlin General Weidling ordered the cessation of all fighting in the capital. Doenitz immediately prepared a partial surrender to the Western Allies. General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg arrived on May 3rd at 11:30 a.m. at the British headquarters of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Wendisch Evern near Lüneburg to prepare a partial surrender in northwest Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark . It was signed on May 4th at 6:30 p.m. and came into effect on May 5th at 8:00 a.m. On 5th / 6th May 1st General Admiral von Friedeburg and on May 6th Colonel General Alfred Jodl arrived at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters because of a further partial surrender to the Western Allies. Eisenhower, however, insisted on a total surrender, but with the admission that 48 hours could be left for implementation after signing. With this, the Dönitz government had achieved its goal of protecting large parts of the Wehrmacht in central and southern Germany from being captured by the Soviets and letting them flee behind the Western Allied lines.

On May 7th at 2:41 a.m., Colonel General Jodl signed the unconditional total surrender of all German armed forces on May 8th at 11:01 p.m. on behalf of Dönitz at the operational headquarters of the SHAEF ( Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force ) in Reims, France . On May 8th at 12:30 p.m. Dönitz announced the armistice at 11 p.m. to the German people via the Reichsender Flensburg . Since no high-ranking Soviet officers had participated in Reims, the signing had to be repeated at the Soviet headquarters at Stalin's request. Therefore, on May 9 at 12:16 a.m. at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst, the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel ), the Chief of the General Staff of the Air Force (Colonel General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff ) and the Commander in Chief of the Navy (General Admiral von Friedeburg ) with the authorization of Dönitz another document of surrender.

post war period

After the surrender

On May 23, 1945 Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, General Alfred Jodl and Speer were arrested by British soldiers, and in the presence of the international press in the police headquarters yard in Flensburg presented .
Karl Dönitz, U.S. government arrest card dated June 23, 1945

Heinrich Himmler , who had arrived in Flensburg with a large retinue , tried to become a member of the new Reich government, but Dönitz did not consider him in his government, which he appointed on May 5th. At a meal on May 6, Dönitz spoke to Himmler about it. On May 10th, Dönitz agreed that members of the SS could be provided with personal papers of the Kriegsmarine so that they could conceal their membership in the SS, because it was obvious that members of the SS etc. a. would be held responsible for the genocide of the Jews and war crimes committed by them.

Doenitz's political view did not reveal much insight into the realities after the lost war. In his opinion, the Wehrmacht, including the Navy, had proven itself. In contrast to the First World War, she did not turn against the government. Mutiny and revolution failed to materialize. Doenitz vehemently rejected the pluralistic form of government of the western democracies.

“The true national community that National Socialism created must be preserved; the madness of the parties as before 1933 must not take place again "

he wrote a week after the surrender. He refused to accept responsibility of the Nazi leadership for the events in the concentration camps. That these are not state crimes, but normal legal cases that can be blamed on individual perpetrators, can be seen in his order to the Wehrmacht of May 18. Doenitz was still trying to enforce an ordinance through Dwight D. Eisenhower that would have made the Reichsgericht responsible for the crimes in the concentration camps. He also advised Eisenhower to limit his actions against National Socialism, otherwise a Bolshevikization of Germany threatened. In personal conversations with the Allied envoys on May 17 and 20, he presented these views again. On May 23, 1945 Dönitz and the members of the OKW Jodl and Friedeburg were summoned to the Patria , where the Allied Monitoring Commission for the OKW resided under the American Major General Rooks and the British Brigadier General Foord. There they were informed of the arrest as prisoners of war ordered by General Eisenhower and with the consent of Soviet General Zhukov . The members of the executive government were also arrested that day. The arrested persons were then brought before the world press in the courtyard of the Flensburg Police Headquarters . On June 5, 1945, the Allies announced in the Berlin Declaration that they were taking over the supreme power of government over Germany .

Defendant in the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals

The dock in the Nuremberg trial in 1946: front row v. l. No. Goering , Hess , Ribbentrop , Keitel , behind them Donitz, Raeder , Schirach , Sauckel

Dönitz was interned with other high Wehrmacht members and representatives of the NSDAP hierarchy in POW camp No. 32 ( Camp Ashcan ) in Bad Mondorf , Luxembourg . In October 1945 he was transferred to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and charged . The former naval judge Otto Kranzbühler took over the defense . The 38-year-old in 1934 before joining the Imperial Navy in law studies and was appointed to Doenitz 'desire to his defense. He was assisted during the trial by Hans Meckel, the former commander of U 19 . The two Kurt Assmann , who had headed the naval archives (the war science department of the Navy) until 1943 , and Eberhard Weichold , who had served several times in the high command of the Navy and helped Meckel find exonerating material, helped with the search for files . Kranzbühler's team, which, in Meckel's opinion, was “fairly supported” by the British, obtained acquittals on one of three counts for Dönitz. Doenitz was not charged under Count IV of Crimes against Humanity . With regard to Count I, it was established that Dönitz was not involved in the conspiracy to wage a war of aggression because of his position . A conviction was given with regard to Counts II Crimes against Peace and III Crimes against Martial Law .

The Laconia order of September 17, 1942 came from Dönitz , which forbade rescuing relatives of sunken ships or giving them food or water when they were in lifeboats. Doenitz had given this order after an American bomber had bombed the submarine U 156 , which was towing lifeboats with other German submarines with survivors of the British troop carrier Laconia , which had been sunk earlier .

During an inspection of a submarine formation in October 1942, Doenitz said:

“The submarine successes had decreased, but the situation would soon improve because it was very difficult for the Allies to find enough crews for their ships. A stage has now been reached when total war must also be waged at sea. The ship's crews are just as much a target for the submarines as the ships themselves! "

In the Atlantic Operation Order No. 56 of October 7, 1943, there was a new paragraph, the so-called rescue ship order, for the freshly departed submarines in the Atlantic, which, according to some Allies, confirmed Hitler's intention to destroy the crews of the Allied merchant navy as far as possible:

“Rescueships
Every convoy generally includes a so-called rescue ship, a special ship up to 3,000 GRT , which is intended to take in the shipwrecked after submarine attacks. These ships are usually equipped with on-board aircraft and large motor boats, heavily equipped (Wabowerfer) and very agile, so that they are often addressed by the commanders as submarine traps. Their sinking is of great value in view of the desired destruction of the steamers' crews. "

In fact, rescue ships were neither heavily armed nor did they have airplanes on board, nor did they serve as submarine traps, as Dönitz claimed in the trial. He did not know that they were equipped with Huff-Duff devices during the war and that they were involved in locating the German submarines that were sentiently according to pack tactics .

American intelligence officers who interrogated the eight surviving crew members of the torpedo supplier U 1059, sunk on March 19, 1944, including its commander Leupold, who was hired against the Nazis, wrote:

“Before U 1059 left the port, Leupold had a conversation with Corvette Captain Karl-Heinz Moehle, the boss of the 5th submarine flotilla. In the course of issuing orders for the patrol, Moehle Leupold sent special verbal instructions from the admiral in charge of the submarines ( Eberhard Godt ) that all survivors should be destroyed if the ship was sunk . When the commander of U 1059 was surprised and indignant about such an order, Moehle told him that this was an express order from the Commander-in-Chief (Dönitz) and part of the total war that had to be waged now. Before his departure, Leupold had the opportunity to discuss this order with other submarine commanders. All these commanders told him, regardless of orders, that they did not intend to obey this instruction. "

For reasons unknown, the Allies presented Leupold's allegations neither at the war crimes trial against the commander of U 852 , Eck, nor at the trial against Dönitz.

Two officers of the Kriegsmarine reported in Nuremberg , Karl-Heinz Moehle (head of the 5th School Flotilla) and First Lieutenant Peter Josef Heisig, an officer on watch of U 877 who was captured on December 27, 1944 . According to Blair, both gave the impression under oath that Dönitz had secretly requested submarine commanders to murder shipwrecked crews in order to prevent the manning of further ships, which Blair describes as untrue.

According to Blair, no evidence was found in the documents of the Kriegsmarine despite an extensive search. In addition, Kranzbühler had succeeded in shaking the credibility of the Dönitz incriminating witnesses Karl-Heinz Moehle and Peter Josef Heisig during the trial. Moehle may have wanted to exonerate himself from the charge of having issued the Laconia order and, moreover, completely misunderstood it. Heisig may have wanted to save his friend Hoffmann, who was a second officer on Eck's boat, who was accused in the Eck trial , from the firing squad. According to Blair, 67 submarine commanders are said to have given affidavits that the Laconia order was not viewed as a request to kill castaways. The commander of U 852 , who was accused in the Eck trial , also stated that he only acted in the interests of his own interests.

One of the signatories of the affidavit was the commander of the submarines U 560 , U 351 , U 1007 and U 1231 , Oberleutnant zur See Helmut Wicke. However, he is said to have declared on September 28, 1998 that he had been instructed that it was important in the war not to allow shipwrecked people to survive. According to the author Dieter Hartwig , there have also been clear indications of the disappearance of compromising files.

The defender of Dönitz, Otto Kranzbühler, succeeded in having the serious accusation of "sinking enemy merchant ships without warning" ( prohibited according to the London submarine protocol of 1936) against his client and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder , which the two admirals said the death penalty preserved. In particular, the written testimony of the Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz , contributed to this, in which he stated that American submarines had sunk merchant ships in the sea ​​war against Japan without warning if they were not recognizable as hospital ships. Enemy survivors had not been rescued by the US Navy if it would have meant an additional threat to their own submarine. In fact, American submarine crews had actually murdered Japanese survivors in lifeboats or while swimming in the water.

Doenitz was a supporter of the Nazi regime and, in his testimony before the court, condemned all those who had turned against Hitler, especially the “ July 20th coup ”. During the trial, Dönitz was questioned by the prosecution about his radio speech on Memorial Day on March 12, 1944:

“What would our home be today if the Führer had not united us under National Socialism? Torn into parties, permeated by the dissolving poison of Judaism and accessible to it, since the defense of our current uncompromising worldview was lacking, we would have long since succumbed to the burden of war and been subjected to the merciless destruction of our opponents. "

When asked what he meant by the “dissolving poison of Judaism”, Dönitz expressly confirmed that he agreed to the expulsion of the Jews from Germany. Other subjects of the trial were 12,000 concentration camp prisoners who were used to build and repair ships in Denmark, and the shooting of British commandos in Norway in 1943 on the basis of the command order .

On October 1, 1946, the Tribunal acquitted Dönitz of the charge of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression, as he was not involved in the planning. The charge of crimes against humanity (Counts I and IV) had not been brought against him. But Dönitz was convicted of waging wars of aggression. For these " crimes against peace " and for war crimes , he was sentenced to ten years in prison in Spandau . His fellow prisoners there were Rudolf Hess , Erich Raeder , Walther Funk , Albert Speer , Baldur von Schirach and Konstantin von Neurath . For the lawyer Walter Hasenclever (1910–1992), commissioned by the Allies to interrogate Wehrmacht commanders , prisoner Dönitz was "apparently the only one among the highest commanders of the Wehrmacht who remained committed to National Socialism to the end".

Dönitz and National Socialism

The military law in force at the time Dönitz joined the Reichsmarine denied members of the Reichswehr not only the right to vote and other civil rights, but also membership of any party. These provisions were specified in the new version of the Armed Forces Act as part of the establishment of the Wehrmacht in March 1935 - from now on membership of the NSDAP in particular was prohibited for the duration of the service. On January 30, 1944, Dönitz received the NSDAP's golden party badge and from this point on - with membership number 9664999 - was listed as a member of the NSDAP. However, the mere possession of this award, which was assigned to some exposed members of the Wehrmacht - for example Eduard Dietl , who wore it with pride, or Erich Raeder , who destroyed it - does not make Dönitz a National Socialist. The speeches, which he gave in particular at the submarine school and in front of recruits, were, however, bursting with Nazi ideology and called for fanatical willingness to make sacrifices. The idealization of the suicidal operations of the small combat units of the Kriegsmarine and the request to his submarine commanders to sacrifice their crew and boats, and above all his commendation about the murder of fellow prisoners in an Australian prison camp, illustrate his Nazi-typical, inhuman attitude. In a secret decree of April 19, 1945 on the promotion of "responsible personalities", Dönitz welcomed the fact that a sergeant-major as a camp elder in a prison camp in Australia had the communists who made themselves felt among the prisoners "deliberately and inconspicuously killed by the guard". This non-commissioned officer deserves recognition for his decision and his implementation: "I will support him by all means after his return, since he has proven that he is suitable as a leader". Contemporaries also report an admiration for Hitler. Participation in his assessment of the situation led him to conclude, for example, "how insignificant we are all in comparison with the Führer". In speeches he repeatedly emphasized his full agreement with Hitler's eliminatory anti-Semitism and accused “international Jewry” of the planned annihilation of the German people.

According to confidants, Dönitz remained connected to National Socialism even after the end of the war and his stay in prison. In his 1963 essay Marine, National Socialism and Resistance , Walter Baum put forward the thesis that it was thanks to Dönitz's attitude, actions and, above all, his statements after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 that Hitler later appointed him his successor. Doenitz planned to contradict the proximity of the German Navy to or susceptibility to National Socialism and the description of his person as "political", as admiring Hitler and as convinced of his ideology, namely racial madness, which was also claimed in this article. He gave up the plan to publish a reply in 1967.

Release from prison and old age

After serving his sentence in full on October 1, 1956, Dönitz lived in Aumühle near Hamburg. His wife Ingeborg died in 1962. His two sons had died: Leutnant zur See Peter Dönitz on May 19, 1943 as a watch officer on U 954 , Oberleutnant zur See Klaus Dönitz on May 13, 1944 on the S 141 speedboat . The daughter Ursula, who died in 1937 had married the naval officer Günter Hessler , survived the war.

Grave slab of the children of Karl Dönitz

In 1958 there was a scandal when the defense expert of the SPD, Fritz Beermann , spoke at a conference of officers and candidates of the Bundeswehr about the tradition of the German Navy and stated that he rather sympathized with Max Reichpietsch and Albin Köbis , sailors executed as mutineers in the First World War , because with Dönitz and Raeder. The naval officers present then left the room. The Federal Ministry of Defense limited the scandal by declaring that the former Grand Admirals were no longer role models for the German Navy.

Another scandal caused Dönitz 'only post-war appearance at a school on January 22, 1963 in the Otto Hahn Gymnasium (Geesthacht) . At the suggestion of his history teacher Heinrich Kock, the student representative Uwe Barschel , later Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein , invited Dönitz to give a lecture on the Third Reich in front of students in grades 9 to 13 . The students were not prepared for the performance by their teachers. Therefore, there were no critical questions, neither from the students nor from the teachers. After the Bergedorfer Zeitung had published an enthusiastic report on this history lesson at its finest, national and foreign media took up the case. The Kiel state government was confronted with strong criticism of the process at a press conference. After a government councilor from the Ministry of Culture visited the school on February 8, 1963 and talked for several hours with the headmaster Georg Rühsen (* 1906), he drowned himself in the Elbe that same evening. His body could not be recovered until April 25, 1963.

funeral

As the last German officer in the rank of field marshal , Dönitz died in 1980 at the age of 89 and was buried next to his wife in the forest cemetery of Aumühle-Wohltorf. Although Dönitz would have granted an escort of honor according to the Central Service Regulations on the part of the Bundeswehr both in terms of rank and on the basis of his knight's cross , on December 25, 1980 the Federal Ministry of Defense issued an order prohibiting soldiers in uniform from attending the funeral who had no military honors have to be done. This decision generated a wave of outrage directed against Defense Minister Hans Apel . The process that led to this decision, which the ministry had made long before Dönitz's death, stretched back to 1969 and was initiated by the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr Ulrich de Maizière , who had proposed to then Defense Minister Gerhard Schröder ( CDU ), to express the distance of the Bundeswehr from Dönitz in the event of his death by renouncing speeches, escorting and laying wreaths. De Maizière replied to the objections and suggestions for changes made by the Inspector of the Navy , Gert Jeschonnek , who spoke out in favor of precisely these honors, by saying that "the soldier Dönitz cannot be separated from his political behavior around and after July 20, 1944". In 1971, Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt once again clarified Schröder's view of the Defense Ministry on this matter and went beyond de Maizière's suggestions by forbidding active troop superiors to make speeches at a Dönitz funeral. Schmidt stuck to this attitude when de Maizière's successor Armin Zimmermann, at the suggestion of the now inspector of the navy and former submarine officer Heinz Kühnle, once again advocated a softening of this decision. In principle, Schmidt's successor Georg Leber also informed Inspector General Zimmermann, but had Kühnle work out a text that could be read out as a speech and formulated a wreath dedication. This state of affairs was changed by the successor of Zimmermann, Jürgen Brandt , who - according to the later naval inspector Hans-Rudolf Boehmer - said of Dönitz that he was "already a Nazi in Kiel at that time and made Nazi speeches", changed and accordingly by Apel decided.

At the funeral service in the Aumühler Bismarck Memorial Church on January 6, 1981, 5000 mourners took part. About 100 of them wore their knight's cross. Participants recognized the former commandant of the Führerbunker Wilhelm Mohnke and Hans-Ulrich Rudel , who distributed autographs. After the pastor's speech, the mourners sang the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied . In his work Mein Jahrhundert , the author Günter Grass commented on the event in a drawing that depicts a coffin in the shape of a submarine with the year 1981, which is carried by coffin bearers with knight's cross and naval cap. Some members of neo-Nazi movements were also present at the funeral . Some honors and commemorative events of right-wing extremist organizations took place at Dönitz's grave, and the NPD regularly laid wreaths.

reception

Mythmaking

Karl Dönitz was largely responsible for the attempt to reinterpret the German defeat in World War II as a moral victory and to present the Wehrmacht positively. He and his advisors had already started doing this immediately after taking over state power on May 1, 1945. The last Wehrmacht report of May 9, 1945 portrayed a flawless and efficient Wehrmacht that had succumbed to an overpowering enemy. The apology contained therein became the starting point for the legend of the “ clean Wehrmacht ”. Since, for Dönitz, the Second World War was not lost because of the superiority of the enemy but because of the German people's lack of national unity, it also revived the myth that the collapse of the “home front” was the cause of the defeat, and followed up on the stab in the back legend from the end of the First World War. In the reception of the events in Plön and Flensburg shortly before the end of the war, Dönitz was sometimes perceived as a “savior” who had pushed through the surrender against Hitler's will. However, from the first radio message of April 30, 1945, with which he was succeeded by Hitler, Doenitz had already concluded that Hitler wanted to pave the way for surrender and thereby left him complete freedom of action. In continuation of earlier efforts to achieve a separate peace, such as those undertaken by Ribbentrop, Himmler, Goebbels and Göring, Doenitz consciously sacrificed parts of the navy in order to improve his negotiating position with the Western Allies. However, he had no leeway for negotiations or tactics.

The legend was helped by the emotional ties between many soldiers and civilians who had been evacuated by the navy across the Baltic Sea during the last days of the war . Up to the present day, broad sections of the German public admit that Dönitz behaved in an exemplary manner in evacuating the population from the East. The East Prussian Landsmannschaft awarded him their highest award in 1975, the “ Prussian Shield ”. Dönitz's continuation of the war towards the west was seen in the reception as necessary in order to gain time for the evacuation of refugees from the east. What is overlooked is the fact that Dönitz itself hindered the rescue operation, which was initially only aimed at soldiers, through fuel restrictions and that soldiers and the population in the German-occupied areas were further terrorized.

The conviction in the Nuremberg war crimes trial, which was expressly not based on Dönitz's "violations of the international provisions for submarine warfare", encouraged the creation of legends. Since former opponents of the war, who had used their submarines in a comparable way, attested to having fought honorably in the German Navy, the conviction of Dönitz was assessed by the members of the Navy as a “victorious justice”. "Karl Dönitz became a martyr", argues Jörg Hillmann, "because he had to bear a guilt for the entire Navy, which was based either solely on the fact that the war was lost and / or in the successor to Adolf Hitler". Traditional naval associations such as the German Navy Federation subsequently complained about the "martyrdom" Dönitz, which they perceived only as an exemplary troop leader. In his address to the first volunteers of the newly founded German Navy on January 16, 1956 , the acting head of the Navy Department, Karl-Adolf Zenker , also recalled the Grand Admirals Raeder and Dönitz, who had been sentenced to prison terms for political reasons. In April 1956, Zenker's declaration of honor for Dönitz led to a major inquiry from the Social Democrats in the German Bundestag and to a decision, taken by a large majority from among the government and the opposition, that Dönitz's supposed military achievements could not be separated from his political failure as Commander-in-Chief . However, by portraying the events and people of the First World War as unencumbered in the debates, some of which were passionate, a maritime glorification was promoted at the same time. According to Jörg Hillmann's analysis, the West German maritime community of solidarity tried to decouple political functions and military behavior and to combine the Grand Admirals with the navy, emphasizing military efficiency and military virtues.

A critical view of Dönitz 'was made difficult by the honorary testimonies of the earlier enemies, which had already indicated themselves during the war and which lasted until Dönitz' death. The right-wing American publicist H. Keith Thompson , who tried to rehabilitate Dönitz, began in 1958 with the collection of statements by high military officials on war crimes trials in general and in particular Dönitz's conviction, which he interpreted as a "dangerous precedent" by asking suggestive questions. Within a year, Thompson had already collected 237 statements, in addition to those from 115 Allied officers, politicians and private individuals. Thompson found in his endeavors that high ranks in particular, such as Joseph J. Clark , Jesse B. Oldendorf and H. Kent Hewitt , were more involved than lower ranks, and British officers were significantly less inclined to contribute to his revisionist collection , as American. Thompson's collection of apologetic remarks by 385 mainly American officers, politicians and prominent private persons, who praised the soldier Dönitz and criticized the Nuremberg Trial, appeared in 1976. At the beginning of his collection, Thompson had already contacted Dönitz and provided him with numerous statements which he supported planned to use his own book project. In 1967 Dönitz passed on some of the texts to Ewald Schmidt di Simoni with the request that they examine their possible journalistic value. From this or from Dönitz himself, his crewmate Maximilian Fels received the texts from Thompson's collection. On the occasion of the publication of Doenitz's book Ten Years and Twenty Days, Fels had published some exclusively British judgments about it in the association journal of the German Navy Federation . Seven years later he published a selection of 38 unilaterally positive, mainly American, voices on Dönitz in the form of a commemorative publication under the title Dönitz in Nuremberg and thereafter . The 22-page text is framed by Fels' personal views and a long quote from a publication by Kranzbühler, was widely distributed and can still be found today in numerous bequests.

After his release from prison on October 1, 1956, Dönitz himself disseminated his view of the events of the years 1935 to 1945 through books and interviews and built up a picture of the apolitical career officer who was not responsible for the crimes of the Nazi regime. This was also due to the fact that relevant research files were not accessible for a long time, so that Dönitz had a knowledge advantage. Doenitz always referred to Prussia . He doesn't know any individual spirit, only the Prussian sense of community. If he had previously understood the National Socialist national community as a direct consequence of this Prussian community feeling, he was able to ignore the National Socialist ideas after the war and still use virtues such as a sense of duty, responsibility and loyalty to stylize the image of a faultless officer. Compared to Albert Speer's statements to the contrary, Dönitz insisted that he had induced Hitler to appoint him as his successor, thereby emphasizing his own sacrifice. He withheld his unconditional allegiance, his anti-Semitic smear campaigns and perseverance slogans. “Karl Dönitz”, concludes Jörg Hillmann, “has stylized himself as an apolitical victim of the Nazi dictatorship and portrayed his work as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy as a military task far away from the regime and the special importance of the submarine weapon both before and During the war, as at the end of the war and in the history of reception, completely overemphasized. ”According to Lars Bodenstein, the bestseller Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim triggered a change in the image of Dönitz , in which Dönitz is characterized as an incompetent muzzle. Even Ian Kershaw called Doenitz, unlike the aforementioned partially postulated image of a professional military as "Erznazi".

Historical research

The documents of the German Navy were initially confiscated by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Even if the return of the files began in the early 1960s, this made it difficult to critically examine Dönitz's role in World War II. The memoirs in post-war Germany and the autobiographies written by Dönitz shaped the image of a Navy and its commander-in-chief who seemed disconnected from the Holocaust . Dönitz's own books contain little personal information, but are mainly stories of his life in the Navy up to 1935 or detailed accounts of the submarine warfare in World War II. He was to a greater extent an author himself than Erich Raeder, for example, whose memoirs were written by a team of authors. Until his death, however, he was supported by the historian Jürgen Rohwer , a former officer in the Navy, whom Dönitz had met soon after the end of the war and who advised him on technical issues relating to naval warfare.

The generation of contemporary witnesses tended to write an unemotional history of operations, in which every military operation was examined in detail and compared with the operations of the enemy, but this also tended to relativize and was linked to glorification and heroization by reducing the guiding motives to soldiery virtues were. The scientific studies by Reimer Hansen and Marlis G. Steinert , some of which were critical of the Dönitz government as early as the 1960s, went largely unnoticed by the public. The biographies written by Fritz-Otto Busch (1963), Walter Görlitz (1972) and Karl Alman (di Franz Kurowski ) (1983), but also the almost novel-like depictions of the submarine war, for example by Günter Böddeker , Jochen Brennecke , Harald Busch and Wolfgang Frank , do not meet scientific standards. The critical work that the naval historian Bodo Herzog in 1986 (in the Tel Aviv issued) Yearbook of the Institute of German history published, based inter alia on historically dubious sources, namely on statements by former submarine commander, in 1981 in the journal concretely were published and polemicize against Dönitz as an example of the supposedly prevalent militarism in West Germany. Regardless of objections in detail, the biography written by Peter Padfield (1984) is largely meaningful.

The three-volume account of Michael Salewski's Die deutsche Sekriegsleitung 1933–1945 (1970–1975) is also fundamental to understanding Dönitz's role in World War II . In this context, Jörg Hillmann states that the way of dealing with contemporary witnesses and naval historians is becoming increasingly hardened, also on the occasion of Salewski's account. This prevented the reappraisal of the submarine operation in World War II in the following years and always culminated in the person of Dönitz. The work of Jost Dülffer , Weimar, Hitler and the Navy (1973) and the contributions of Werner Rahn in the publication The German Reich and the Second World War contributed to a new Dönitz image . Herbert Kraus and Howard Grier dealt with Dönitz under special questions. Clay Blair (1996 and 1998) undertook an overall view of the events of the submarine war on both the German and the Allied sides. Jörg Hillmann (2004 and 2007) and Lars Bodenstein (2002) published works on the “myth” Dönitz. Dieter Hartwig, naval history teacher at the Naval School Mürwik and the command academy of the Bundeswehr , gave lectures on Dönitz from 1987 and published a publication in 2010 in which he deals with Dönitz on the basis of thematic issues.

Movie

In the two- parter Laconia (2011) Karl Dönitz was portrayed by Thomas Kretschmann . The film focuses on the events that led to the issue of the Laconia command on September 17, 1942.

Fonts

Together with Theodor Kraus

  • The cruises of the Goeben and Breslau. Ullstein, Berlin 1932.
  • The submarine weapon. ES Mittler & Sohn, Berlin 1942.
  • I will invoice. Munich 1953. In: Quick 19/1953.
  • German strategy at sea in World War II. Bernard & Graefe-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970, ISBN 3-7637-5100-9 .

Own publications

  • The voyages of the "Breslau" in the Black Sea. Ullstein, Berlin 1917.
  • 10 years and 20 days. Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn 1958.
  • My changeful life. Musterschmidt-Verlag, Göttingen 1968 (2nd, improved edition 1975).

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Dönitz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Karl Dönitz  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 158.
  2. ^ Herbert Kraus: Karl Dönitz and the end of the "Third Reich" in Flensburg 1945. In: Broder Schwensen, Gerhard Paul , Peter Wulf: Long shadows: End of the Nazi dictatorship and early post-war years in Flensburg. City archive Flensburg 2000, ISBN 3-931913-05-8 , p. 96.
  3. ^ Gerd Sandhofer: Documents on the military career of Grand Admiral Dönitz. In: Military history messages (MGM). Issue 1/1967, p. 59 f .; Herbert Kraus: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs . Primus, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-727-9 , p. 316.
  4. ^ Walter Görlitz : Karl Dönitz. The Grand Admiral. Musterschmidt, Göttingen / Zurich / Frankfurt am Main, p. 9.
  5. ↑ François-Emmanuel Brézet: Doenitz. E-book. Perrin, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-262-06116-6 , limited preview in Google Book Search (French).
  6. ↑ The chronicle of our school. In: falkschule-weimar.de . Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  7. ^ Herbert Kraus: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs . Primus, Darmstadt 2011, p. 316.
  8. ↑ Martin Niemöller: From the submarine to the pulpit . Berlin: Martin Warneck Verlag, 1938.
  9. ↑ Peter Padfield: Dönitz - the devil's admiral. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1984, p. 98.
  10. ↑ Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The U-Boat War 1939-1945. Volume 5: The knight's cross bearers of the submarine weapon. ES Mittler & Sohn , Bonn 2003, p. 27.
  11. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 15.
  12. ^ Herbert Kraus: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs . Primus, Darmstadt 2011, p. 316 f.
  13. ^ Gerd Sandhofer: Documents on the military career of Grand Admiral Dönitz. In: Military history messages. (MGM). Issue 1/1967, pp. 59–81, summarizing evaluation of the assessments, pp. 65 f .; Assessments from 1913 to 1931 as Documents No. 1-13, pp. 69-77; Assessments by Canaris (Doc. No. 12 and 13), p. 76 f.
  14. ↑ Bodo Herzog: Pirates in front of Malaga; First revealed: "Company Ursula" - Painted over license plates, wrong radio messages - confidentiality was lifelong. In: Die Zeit vom November 29, 1991. (on the hitherto secret use of submarines under the leadership of Karl Dönitz in the Mediterranean in 1936.)
  15. ^ Michael Salewski : The German Naval Warfare 1935-1945. Volume 1. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 445 f.
  16. ↑ Werner Rahn : Strategic options and experiences of the German naval command 1914 to 1944. On the chances and limits of a central European continental power against sea powers. In: Werner Rahn - Service and Science. Edited by Wilfried Rädisch i. A. of the MGFA . Potsdam 2010, ISBN 978-3-941571-08-2 , pp. 27-72.
  17. ↑ Clay Blair : The Submarine War. The hunted 1942–1945. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-453-16059-2 , p. 203.
  18. ↑ Peter Padfield: Dönitz The Devil's Admiral. Ullstein, Berlin [a. a.] 1984, ISBN 3-550-07956-7 , p. 301.
  19. ↑ Michael Pröse: Encryption machines and deciphering devices in the Second World War - the history of technology and aspects of the history of IT. Dissertation. Chemnitz University of Technology, Leipzig 2004, qucosa.de (PDF), p. 169.
  20. ^ From the order to attack 27 submarines on convoy HX 239 , May 1943, cited above. n. Andrew Williams: Submarine War in the Atlantic. Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2007, ISBN 978-3-8289-0587-0 , p. 265. (Original edition The Battle Of The Atlantic 2002 for BBC Worldwide Ltd.).
  21. ↑ Andrew Williams: Submarine War in the Atlantic. Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2007, ISBN 978-3-8289-0587-0 , p. 265.
  22. ↑ Andrew Williams: Submarine War in the Atlantic. Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2007, ISBN 978-3-8289-0587-0 , p. 283.
  23. ↑ "of 39,000 U-boat drivers were more than 32 000" Surfaced . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1961, pp. 32 ( online ).
  24. ↑ Appeared . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1961, pp. 32 ( online ).
  25. ^ Peter Longerich : Hitler. Biography. Siedler, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-8275-0060-1 , p. 993.
  26. ↑ Quoted from Martin Moll (Ed.): “Führer-Erasse” 1939–1945. Edition of all surviving directives in the fields of state, party, economy, occupation policy and military administration issued by Hitler in writing during the Second World War, not printed in the Reichsgesetzblatt. Steiner, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-515-06873-2 , p. 493.
  27. ^ Günther Walter Gellermann : Deep in the enemy's hinterland. Selected companies of German secret services in World War II. Bernard & Graefe, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-7637-5998-0 , p. 104.
  28. ^ Otto Rönnpag: Eventful April Days 1945 in Plön. Grand Admiral Dönitz at the “Forelle” headquarters on Lake Suhr. In: Yearbook for local history in the Plön district. Vol. 15, 1985, ISSN  0343-0952 , p. 74.
  29. ↑ Files of the Reich Chancellery , Hitler Government, II / 1, p. 241 f.
  30. ↑ Bernd Mertens: Legislation in National Socialism . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2009, p. 67 . See also Thomas Moritz and Reinhard Neubauer: The legitimacy of the “Dönitz Government” or: How constitutional was the “Third Reich”? In: Kritische Justiz , 1989, pp. 475–481, nomos.de (PDF; 710 kB).
  31. ↑ Jörg Echternkamp : The 101 most important questions - The Second World War . Beck, Munich 2010, p. 120. After Dönitz's death on December 30, 1980, the lawyer Otto Kranzbühler forwarded the document to the incumbent Federal President Karl Carstens . Since the Federal President's Office and the Federal Chancellery did not attach any legal relevance to this “will”, the public only found out about it in 2005 through a letter to the editor from Hans Neusel , the former head of Karl Carstens’s office in the Frankfurter Allgemeine : Karl Dönitz to Karl Carstens . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Archive, June 2, 2005. See the digitized version: 40 Years: The Political Testament of Karl Dönitz , bundesarchiv.de ( Memento from October 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) from May 7, 2015 , now at 40: The Political Testament of Karl Dönitz ( memento from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  32. ^ Andreas Hillgruber / Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Second World War. Calendar of military and political events 1939–1945. Athenaeum, Königstein im Taunus; Droste, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-7610-7218-X , p. 282.
  33. ^ Reproduction of the speech on the 25th anniversary of Karl Dönitz's death. ( Memento from October 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Stiftung Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv DRA. December 24, 2005.
  34. ↑ Cf. Broder Schwensen in: Flexikon. 725 aha experiences from Flensburg! Flensburg 2009, article: "Reich capital".
  35. ↑ Gerhard Paul: The last spook . In: Die Zeit No. 19, May 4, 2005.
  36. ^ Federal Archives : Northwest Capitulation. ( Memento from April 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  37. ^ Federal Archives: Total surrender. ( Memento from June 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  38. ^ Copy of the document on the total surrender from the Federal Archives. ( Memento from July 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  39. ^ Federal Archives: Repetition of the total surrender. ( Memento from July 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  40. ↑ Alexei Filitow / Hermann Wentker : The Potsdam Conference 1945. In: Helmut Altrichter et al. (Ed.): Germany - Russia. Stations in common history. Places of remembrance. Vol. 3: The 20th Century. Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-75524-4 , p. 162 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  41. ^ Herbert Kraus: Karl Dönitz and the end of the "Third Reich" in Flensburg 1945. In: Broder Schwensen, Gerhard Paul , Peter Wulf: Long shadows: End of the Nazi dictatorship and early post-war years in Flensburg. City archive Flensburg 2000, ISBN 3-931913-05-8 , p. 96.
  42. ↑ a b Herbert Kraus: Karl Dönitz and the end of the "Third Reich". In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.): End of the Third Reich - End of the Second World War. A perspective review. Published on behalf of the Military History Research Office , Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12056-3 , p. 14.
  43. ^ As well as in Walter Rahn: Deutsche Marinen im Wandel. Pp. 537 , 544 fn. 53 .
  44. ^ Herbert Kraus: Karl Dönitz and the end of the "Third Reich" in Flensburg 1945. In: Broder Schwensen, Gerhard Paul, Peter Wulf: Long shadows: End of the Nazi dictatorship and early post-war years in Flensburg. City archive Flensburg 2000, ISBN 3-931913-05-8 , p. 37.
  45. ↑ Cf. Peter Padfield: Dönitz - the devil's admiral. Ullstein Publishing House, Berlin 1984, p. 503.
  46. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 42 .
  47. ↑ Günter Krause: U-boat and U-hunt . 2nd, corrected edition. Military publishing house of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1986 (war crimes at sea, p. 63.).
  48. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010 (documentation, document 2, p. 404).
  49. ↑ Clay Blair : Submarine War 1942–1945. The hunted . Verlagsgruppe Weltbild, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-8289-0512-9 (book three, chapter six, section: Further failures on the North Atlantic route. P. 627, note 1).
  50. ^ Clay Blair: Submarine War 1942–1945 . US title Hitler's U-Boat War . Licensed edition for Bechtermünz Verlag by Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 2004 (anthology 2, Feindfahrten from and to the Far East. P. 773, misprints corrected, in the original B-boat instead of U-boat).
  51. ^ Clay Blair: Submarine War 1942–1945 . US title Hitler's U-Boat War . Licensed edition for Bechtermünz Verlag by Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 2004 (anthology 2, Feindfahrten from and to the Far East. P. 769).
  52. ^ Clay Blair: Submarine War 1942–1945 . US title Hitler's U-Boat War . Licensed edition for Bechtermünz Verlag by Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 2004 (anthology 2, Die Zeit der Abrechnung. P. 1003).
  53. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 42, 43, 315 .
  54. ^ Clay Blair: Submarine War 1942–1945 . US title Hitler's U-Boat War . Licensed edition for Bechtermünz Verlag by Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 2004 (anthology 2, Die Zeit der Abrechnung. P. 1000).
  55. ↑ Telford Taylor: The Nuremberg Trials. Background, analyzes and findings from today's perspective. Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-08021-1 , p. 472.
  56. ↑ Walter Hasenclever: You will not recognize Germany. Memories. Köln 1975 and dtv 1978, p. 157 ( limited preview in the Google book search). Walter Hasenclever, who had forcibly emigrated in 1936, was a cousin of the expressionist writer of the same name . In the 1960s he led the Literary Colloquium with Walter Höllerer .
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  61. ↑ Quoted from Andrew Williams: Submarine War in the Atlantic. Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2007, ISBN 978-3-8289-0587-0 , p. 279.
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  64. ^ Walter Baum: Navy, National Socialism and Resistance. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , vol. 11, issue 1, published i. A. of the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich 1963, pp. 17 ff., 39; ifz-muenchen.de (PDF; 700 kB).
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  66. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 162.
  67. ↑ Ingeborg Doenitz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1962, pp. 98 ( online ).
  68. ↑ Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historical communications. 15 (2002), p. 17.
  69. ^ Johanna Lutteroth: Dönitz tells of the war. Affair about Hitler's successor. In: Spiegel Online , November 18, 2011. The Dönitz Affair - The Grand Admiral and the Small Town. Winner entry in the Federal President's competition Annoyance, sensation, indignation: scandals in history ; ohg-geesthacht.de (PDF; 2.3 MB) Work of the history course of class 13a of the Otto-Hahn-Gymnasium Geesthacht, February 2011.
  70. ↑ Kai Gerullis: An affair that still divides today. In: Bergedorfer Zeitung , February 6, 2010.
  71. ^ The grave of Karl Dönitz. In: knerger.de, accessed on October 26, 2011.
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  75. ↑ Peter Padfield: Dönitz - the devil's admiral. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1984, pp. 12-16.
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  77. ↑ Peter Padfield: Dönitz - the devil's admiral. Ullstein publishing house, Berlin 1984, p. 13.
  78. ↑ Volker Weiß : "Heroes' memory" on the forest cemetery. In: Frankfurter Rundschau of November 30, 2011.
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  81. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 46.
  82. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 19.
  83. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The "Reich Government" in Flensburg . In: Jörg Hillmann u. John Zimmermann (Ed.): End of the war in Germany in 1945 . R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, pp. 35-65, here pp. 41, 64.
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  87. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 60.
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  90. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The "Myth" Dönitz. Approaches to an image of history. In: Bea Lundt (Ed.): Northern Lights. Awareness of history and history myths north of the Elbe. Böhlau, Cologne 2004, p. 253.
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  96. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 55.
  97. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 56.
  98. ↑ Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historische Mitteilungen 15 (2002), p. 18.
  99. ↑ Ian Kershaw: The Eternal Question "Why?" (Audio contribution), broadcast by Passage , SRF, June 3, 2012, min. 27.
  100. ↑ Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historische Mitteilungen 15 (2002), p. 3.
  101. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The "Myth" Dönitz. Approaches to an image of history. In: Bea Lundt (Ed.): Northern Lights. Awareness of history and history myths north of the Elbe. Böhlau, Cologne 2004, p. 245.
  102. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, pp. 12-14.
  103. ↑ Jörg Hillmann: The Navy and its Grand Admirals in the collective memory. In: Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 10. Hillmann names works by Friedrich Ruge , Jürgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen , Kurt Assmann , Cajus Bekker , Gerhard Bidlingsmaier and Rolf Güth .
  104. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 12.
  105. ↑ Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historische Mitteilungen 15 (2002), p. 3 f .; Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 11.
  106. ^ A b Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historische Mitteilungen 15 (2002), p. 4.
  107. ↑ Lars Ole Bodenstein: The role of Karl Dönitz in World War II. The critical historical analysis of a myth. In: Historische Mitteilungen 15 (2002), p. 6.
  108. ↑ a b Jörg Hillmann: The "Myth" Dönitz. Approaches to an image of history. In: Bea Lundt (Ed.): Northern Lights. Awareness of history and history myths north of the Elbe. Böhlau, Cologne 2004, p. 251 f.
  109. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 12 f.
  110. ↑ Review: Alexander Rost: Finally clarity about Dönitz: Little remains of Hitler's admiral. In: Die Zeit , No. 41/1984.
personal data
SURNAME Donitz, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Grand Admiral and Commander in Chief of the German Navy in World War II; last German President
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Grünau
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1980
Place of death Aumühle