by Clay Blair
The situation demands of you, who have already achieved such memorable deeds and who therefore are longing for the end of the war a continued and unabated effort. I demand discipline and obedience. Only through the unconditional execution of my orders will chaos and ruin be avoided. He is a coward and a traitor who now shirks his duty and thereby brings death and slavery to German women and children.
The allegiance you pledged to the Fuhrer is henceforth to be given by each one of you to me as the successor designated by the Fuhrer. German soldiers do your duty. The life of our people is at stake.
In Eisenhower’s view, British forces under Bernard Montgomery, which manned the left (or north) flank of the massive line of Anglo-American forces invading Germany, were not moving fast enough to beat the Red Army to Kiel and Lübeck. Wishing to deny those places to the Red Army and to “seal off” Denmark, on April 23, Eisenhower temporarily assigned to Montgomery the crack American XVIII Airborne Corps (four divisions) commanded by Matthew B. Ridgway. In a little-known operation, which Omar Bradley characterized as “remarkable” and George Marshall, not given to superlatives, described as “sensational,” Ridgway’s corps crossed the Elbe River on May 1 and dashed north-northeast to Wismar on the Baltic. There the corps “linked up” with the Red Army and blocked it from moving farther northwest to Lübeck and Kiel, or Denmark and Norway. Meanwhile, on May 3, Montgomery’s slow-moving British XII Corps finally occupied Hamburg.
In the final hours of the Third Reich, Dönitz sought to hold the new German government together and to surrender as many German forces as possible to the Americans and British, rather than the more feared Red Army. In pursuit of the latter goal, he designated Admiral von Friedeburg as Special Emissary to negotiate terms. On May 3, von Friedeburg and another admiral, Gerhard Wagner, and the German Commander in Chief, Army Group Northwest, Ernst Busch, and subordinates arrived at Montgomery’s tactical headquarters near Hamburg. The delegation proposed that the three German armies (Third Panzer, Twelfth, Twenty-first) facing the Red Army in that area surrender to Anglo-American forces. When queried by Montgomery, Eisenhower rejected the proposal, stating that any formal German surrender must be “unconditional and simultaneous” in all theaters. However, as a “tactical” matter, Eisenhower authorized Montgomery to accept the surrender of German forces in Denmark, the Netherlands, Heligoland, and Schleswig-Holstein and any individual German soldiers who so wished.
This agreement was to take effect at 8:00 a.m. on May 5. As part of the terms, Dönitz directed all U-boat skippers to cease fire and prepare to surrender per instructions to be issued at a later time. He had one final message for these warriors, almost all of whom were unswervingly loyal to him to the very end.
My U-boat men!
Six years of U-boat warfare lie behind us. You have fought like lions.
A crushing material superiority has compressed us into a very narrow area. A continuation of the struggle is impossible from the bases that remain.
U-boat men, unbroken in your warlike courage, you are laying down your arms after an heroic fight that knows no equal. In reverent memory we think of our comrades who have sealed their loyalty to the Fuhrer and the Fatherland with their death.
Comrades, maintain in the future your U-boat spirit with which you have fought at sea bravely and unflinchingly during long years for the welfare of the Fatherland.
Long live Germany!
Earlier the U-boat force had conceived a plan to scuttle all boats h. la the Pyrrhic triumph at Scapa Flow in 1919. According to some sources, the codeword Regenbogen (Rainbow), the directive to initiate scuttling, was transmitted from Flensburg at 1:34 a.m. on May 5, German time, but rescinded by Dönitz or an aide eight minutes later. Whether this is true or not, it is certain that ambiguous orders of some kind regarding scuttling reached the U-boats. As a result, some skippers or surrogates commenced scuttling on May 5, but others did not. According to Allied documents compiled in September 1945 and subsequently revised, German submariners scuttled 222 U-boats, while another 174 U-boats surrendered to Allied forces.*
Still determined to do his utmost to avoid German surrenders to the Red Army, on May 5 Dönitz sent von Friedeburg to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France, to pursue negotiations. Eisenhower refused to see von Friedeburg or engage in any form of negotiations through surrogates. When von Friedeburg notified Dönitz of Eisenhower’s implacability, Dönitz sent Alfried Jodl, also a fierce opponent of surrender to the Red Army, to Reims. Viewing these emissaries and their imprecations to negotiate as merely vehicles for buying time while German armies all along the front fled to American or British lines, Eisenhower held firmly to his position. Seeing that the situation was completely hopeless, von Friedeburg and Jodl finally obtained permission from Dönitz to sign a formal surrender of all German forces on all fronts simultaneously.
In the early hours of May 7, von Friedeburg and Jodl and other Germans of the delegation met with senior Allied authorities in the war room of SHAEF headquarters, located at the Ecole Professionelle et Technique de Garcons, in Reims. The senior Germans signed the surrender document,† which was to take effect from midnight, May 8. Eisenhower then cabled Washington and London:
The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.
A TIME OF RECKONING
In a joint statement of October 30, 1943, which came to be known as the Moscow Declaration, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union pledged to hunt down and try all those Nazis suspected of committing atrocities and war crimes. At the Potsdam conference of the Big Three, from July 16 to August 1, 1945, the two new heads of state, Harry S. Truman and Clement R. Attlee, joined with Joseph Stalin to reaffirm the Moscow Declaration.
In retrospect, the Moscow Declaration on war criminals seems right and decent, but at the time it was not held in universal favor. Many questioned the legal right of one nation or several to try enemy heads of state for waging war against them. (The Kaiser was not tried for his role in initiating and waging World War I.) Some believed that to allow representatives of the bloody Stalinist regime to sit in judgment on high figures of the bloody Nazi regime would be the height of hypocrisy. Others questioned whether it was possible in the climate of the times to give the Nazis a fair trial. The proceedings might go down in history as a farcical and embarrassing kangaroo court, conducted by victors demanding vengeance and retribution. Still others wondered at the difficulties and cost of amassing and properly presenting hard evidence against what might prove to be thousands of Germans.
The public revulsion at the revelations of ever more horrible atrocities committed by the Nazis became so intense that disputes over legal niceties were soon swept aside. The governments in Washington, London, and Moscow appointed judges and prosecutors to what was officially called the International Military Tribunal, which was to convene at the symbolic soul of Nazism, Nuremberg, on November 1, 1945.
British naval authorities firmly opposed suggestions that Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz be indicted and tried. As reported by Ann and John Tusa,* historians of the Nuremberg proceedings, “The British Admiralty took the view that the German Navy had fought a pretty clean war... [and] they knew that the laws of naval warfare were notoriously vague and dangerously open to conflicting interpretations….’’ The Tusas went on to say that in October 1945, a distinguished legal expert at the Admiralty, Humphrey Waldock, later president of the International Court at The Hague, drafted a paper, “warning of legal difficulties in a case against the German Navy,” concluding, the Tusas wrote, that generally, the case against the Kriegsmarine was “shaky” and “weak.”
Senior naval authorities in the United States were of like mind. No evidence had yet come to light indicating that on the whole Raeder and Dönitz had conducted anything other than a clean naval war. Harsh and hard, but clean. Moreover, from December 7, 1941, the United States had conducted harsh and hard unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan, a naval campaign that
at times was more merciless than the German U-boat war. In their desire to avenge Pearl Harbor, American submariners shot at and sank Japanese merchant ships without warning, rarely attempted to assist survivors, and, on a few occasions, murdered Japanese survivors in lifeboats or the water.
Nonetheless, ranking government officials in Washington, Moscow, and London insisted that Raeder and Dömitz be tried. Not to do so would be politically and morally unacceptable. It would leave the heavy casualties in the Allied merchant-marine fleets and the ascendancy of Dönitz to the post of Fuhrer of the Nazi Third Reich unredressed.
Ironically, British prosecutors drew the task of making the case against Raeder and Dönitz. The chief of the British team was a well-known barrister and MP, David Maxwell Fyfe. In pursuit of incriminating evidence, he and his team combed through tens of thousands of pages of Kriegsmarine documents that a British combat intelligence team, assigned to George Patton’s Third Army, had captured at Tambach Castle near Coburg.* In addition, British naval intelligence provided synopses of relevant Enigma messages, such as “Policy and Tactical Orders to Submarines,” for background.
Apart from Dönitz’s numerous exhortations of praise for Hitler and National Socialism and his denouncement of “the spreading poison of Jewry,” the teams of British prosecutors found only a single document that could be interpreted as incriminating. This was the so-called Laconia Order of September 17, 1942, which Dönitz issued in the aftermath of the sinking of the British troopship Laconia by Werner Hartenstein in U-156. As related, due to the risks Hartenstein ran in the rescue of Laconia survivors, that order instructed U-boat skippers to “be harsh” and specifically not to assist the crews of torpedoed ships. One could argue that the language of the Laconia Order † was, per se, a violation of the laws of the Submarine Protocol, which Germany signed in 1936.
Owing to the ambiguity of the Laconia Order, the British prosecutors needed testimony from German submariners to the effect that it was a subtle instruction to kill the survivors of torpedoed ships. Astonishingly, the British obtained just such testimony from a prominent submariner, Ritterkreuz holder Karl-Heinz Moehle (from U-123), who commanded Training Flotilla 5 in the Baltic for four years, from 1941 to 1945. It happened that when Moehle was arrested at the end of the war, the British had accused him of issuing the Laconia Order. He swore in an affidavit, taken on July 21, 1945, that not only did he not issue the Laconia Order but he had in fact interpreted it to be a subtle order from Dönitz to kill survivors and, furthermore, that he had implied so to new skippers sailing to the war zones. Moehle agreed to testify in that vein if Dönitz were to be tried. ‡
Another German submariner willing to testify against Dönitz on this issue also appeared. He was a young lieutenant, Peter Josef Heisig, who had been captured by the Canadians from U-877 on December 27, 1944. Heisig was a close friend of August Hoffmann, a watch officer on Heinz Eck’s U-852, whom a British court had condemned to death for shooting survivors of the Greek freighter Peleus. In a futile effort to save his friend Hoffmann from a firing squad, Heisig had given that British court an affidavit on November 27, 1945, asserting that in an address to his class of midshipmen in October 1942, soon after the Laconia Order was issued, Dönitz had left the impression that the killing of shipwrecked survivors was desirable. He, too, would testify against Dönitz.
When the International Military Tribunal convened on November 1, 1945, prosecutors charged both Dönitz and Raeder on three counts:
1. Plotting to wage aggressive war
2. Waging aggressive war
3. War crimes
The tribunal commenced formal proceedings against Dönitz first, on May 7, 1946, one year after he surrendered Germany. The chief defense counsel was a brilliant naval officer, Otto Kranzbühler, who had held the post of Judge Advocate in the Kriegsmarine. He was particularly well prepared to deal with the Laconia Order and with the hostile witnesses Moehle and Heisig. In addition—and most important—with the assistance of one of the two American judges, Francis Biddle, he had obtained permission to interrogate by mail American Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz on his conduct of the American submarine war against Japan in the Pacific.
The chief British prosecutor, David Maxwell Fyfe, laid the case against Dönitz before the tribunal. Inasmuch as Dönitz was a relatively junior captain when the war began in September 1939, Fyfe was unable to convince the judges that Dönitz was guilty on count one, plotting to wage aggressive war. At the end, the tribunal acquitted Dönitz of that specific charge. Since it was the responsibility of Dönitz as a naval officer to wage war in accordance with orders from Berlin—from Raeder and Hitler—to the best of his ability, Fyfe was also unable to make a convincing case that Dönitz was criminally accountable on count two: waging aggressive war. Nonetheless, in a vague and confusing verdict, the tribunal found Dönitz guilty on count two.
It was on the third count, war crimes, that Fyfe mounted his most aggressive and telling attacks against Dönitz. He introduced the Laconia Order, argued that it was a subtle instruction to kill crews of torpedoed ships and, as foreseen, put Moehle and Heisig on the witness stand to buttress his case. Furthermore, he introduced the Peleus incident as one example of compliance with these instructions.
Defense counsel Kranzbühler counterattacked along three main lines.
• He showed the court that the Laconia Order prohibiting help to survivors of torpedoed ships was issued directly as a result of the Allied air attacks on U-156, and the other U-boats attempting to rescue Laconia survivors, which had asked in the name of humanity for a temporary cease-fire in that area. Furthermore, he argued that an order prohibiting assistance to survivors in no way carried with it an implication that survivors should be shot. To make the contrary case, he introduced another Dönitz order of May 20, 1943, in which he instructed U-boat skippers to capture whenever possible ship captains and engineers, stressing the point that the second order contravened any implication in the first to kill survivors. That is to say, it was not wise to rescue some survivors and to kill the rest because the captured German survivors could testify to the atrocity.
• He impugned the credibility of the hostile witnesses Moehle and Heisig. He brought out that each officer had had an axe to grind: Moehle to absolve himself of any blame for the issuance of the Laconia Order and his interpretation of it to the green skippers, and Heisig to save his friend Hoffmann from the firing squad. In his cross-examination, he established that Moehle had completely misinterpreted another important Dönitz order, that neither officer had ever seen a specific and unequivocal order from Dönitz or Control to shoot survivors, and that in Moehle’s twenty ship sinkings while in command of U-123 he had never harmed a survivor. In addition, Kranzbuhler introduced a deposition that he had obtained from Heinz Eck on November 21, 1945, just before Eck was executed, stating that he, Eck, had no orders to kill the survivors of the Peleus, that in fact, he acted in what he believed to be his own self-interest.
• He put Dönitz and his chief U-boat operations officers, Ritterkreuz holders Eberhard Godt and Günter Hessler, on the witness stand to vigorously deny that the Laconia Order was a subtle hint to kill survivors. He also introduced an affidavit, signed by sixty-seven U-boat skippers (then in British POW Camp 18), which stated, in effect, that the Laconia Order was not viewed as a subtle hint to kill survivors. “The undersigned declare that the German Navy was educated by their leaders to respect the written and unwritten law of the sea,” the affidavit concluded. “We have always seen it as fitting our honor to keep these laws and to conduct the combat at sea in a chivalrous manner.”
Finally, Kranzbuhler was permitted to introduce the written interrogation of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. In response to questions, Nimitz stated that with the exception of hospital ships and other vessels specifically granted safe passage, it was customary for American submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning and, furthermore, that “on general principles the U.S. submarines did not rescue enemy s
urvivors....”
The Nimitz document had a decisive impact on the tribunal, the Tusas write. The American judge, Francis Biddle, who opened the door for Kranzbuhler to obtain it, declared not inaccurately that “Germany waged a much cleaner [submarine] war than we did,” and he voted to acquit Dönitz on count three, war crimes. However, the other seven judges did not believe Dönitz should get off scot-free and voted him guilty on count three as well as count two. The tribunal then sentenced Dönitz on October 1, 1946, to serve ten years in prison, the lightest penalty assessed of any of those found guilty at Nuremberg. He served the full sentence at Spandau Prison and was released in October 1956.*
The trial of Raeder followed. Inasmuch as he had held a high military post in the Third Reich at the beginning of the war, he was found guilty of count one—plotting aggressive war—as well as counts two and three, waging aggressive war and war crimes. The tribunal sentenced the seventy-year-old Raeder to life imprisonment, but owing to his ill health, he was released in September 1955, at the age of eighty, after serving nine years.
The conviction of Dönitz at Nuremberg outraged a large number of senior Allied naval officers. Over one hundred of them wrote Dönitz to deplore the verdict and the sentence. Some American naval officers published their views. Typical of the comments on Dönitz of that era:
• Four-star Admiral and later U.S. Senator Thomas S. Hart wrote:
I rate Admiral Dönitz as the best of all of... [German commanders], land or sea. He was unique in his handling of the German submarines and they were our most dangerous enemy. His performance with them—and he did most of it himself—was the most outstanding Axis performance of the war. Then he succeeded to command all German naval forces. It was too late for real accomplishments but he made no mistakes and no one could have done better. Then he succeeded the Fuhrer himself, and Ms performance from there on seems to me to have been perfect. So I think D5nitz was the best.