by David Wragg
WAR CRIMINALS
In the end, out of the original list of around 900 war criminals, just a dozen were brought to trial. This was no Nuremberg war trial. Instead, the accused went before the German Supreme Court. Two of the dozen had been watch officers aboard U-86, accused of sinking the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, itself contrary to the Geneva Convention and a breach of international law. The crime was compounded by the fact that they then gunned the survivors in the five lifeboats that had got away after it was discovered that the ship had not been carrying ammunition and combat troops, the excuse used for the attack. The commanding officer, Oberleutnant zur See Helmut Patzig could not be brought to trial as he had disappeared, although he later reappeared in the Abwehr, the Counter Intelligence Organisation.
The two hapless watch officers maintained that they had not fired the U-boats weapons and were simply obeying orders. Nevertheless, in a precursor of the eventual Nuremberg’s judgements, the court decided that:
Patzig’s order does not free the accused from guilt … the subordinate obeying an order is liable to punishment if it was known to him, that the order of the superior involved the infringement of civil or military law. This applies in the case of the accused … it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the lifeboats could be nothing else but a breach of the law.1
Despite this, the two men received sentences of just four years for their involvement in the mass murder of the ship’s company and wounded men, and even these lenient sentences provoked widespread public outrage. Neither man served the full term with one ‘escaping’ after four months and the other after just six months. No attempt was made to find them once on the run. This was par for the course, as another man found guilty and imprisoned at the time found himself better off in prison than when he had been free: that man was Adolf Hitler.
PLANNING FOR WAR
Unable to command U-boats, many of those who had been wartime U-boat commanders or second-in-command of a U-boat, were assigned to the torpedo-boats. Some maintain that many of them started to use their craft to practice U-boat surface attacks. Meanwhile, within the Torpedo and Mines Inspectorate at Kiel, a clandestine U-boat department was created, planning, ready for the day when the Reichsmarine could once again operate the forbidden craft. The German aircraft industry had not expired but in effect had gone into exile, with designers working in the Soviet Union, the Netherlands and elsewhere, so that there was no danger of a generation of progress in aircraft and aero-engine design being lost to Germany. Initially, submarine design was more difficult to send into exile in this way, but the means did exist. German plans for a new generation of U-boats, designers, engineers and construction experts went to Japan to help that country establish a strong submarine fleet, including a force of cruiser submarines. Other countries also welcomed the experience of the Germans.
In 1922, three German shipbuilders, AG Vulcan, Germaniawerft and AG Weser, finally grasped the nettle and established a company in the Netherlands, Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw, IvS, (the engineering office for shipbuilding) based at Rotterdam, to enable German submarine experts to continue their construction work in exile. The three companies that owned the Rotterdam business actually carried out the design work at their own facilities in Germany. The company operated for eleven years, but was wound-up after the Nazi Party assumed complete power in Germany in 1933.
Operations for Germany’s small Navy were seriously inhibited during the winter months by most of the Baltic freezing. While their ships were refitted and the crews drilled, many of the officers were given Winterarbeiten, ‘winter work’, conducting studies into naval theory. This almost amounted to providing staff college training for the small and exclusive cadre of officers, and in the winter of 1921–1922, no less than three of these exercises dealt with submarine warfare. Marschall, a former wartime U-boat commander, wrote one of these, covering surface attack by U-boats. This was timely as the late adoption of the convoy system by the Royal Navy during the First World War had forced the U-boats to adapt their tactics. Marschall allowed no doubts about a resumption of hostilities, writing that: ‘The coming war may or may not involve war against merchant shipping.’ He continued writing that U-boat commanders must be able to attack convoys since a warship squadron was also in effect a convoy. This was slightly doubtful reasoning as surface warships would be faster and more manoeuvrable than a merchant convoy. The paper advocated night surface attack, listing its many advantages, for these were the days before radar.
Admiral von Rosenberg, commanding the Baltic Fleet, read the report and noted at the end that the arguments in favour of night surface attack were valuable and of interest to torpedo-boat officers as well as those serving in U-boats. This was true, for a surfaced U-boat was in effect a torpedo-boat, albeit much slower.
These exercises and the planning they resulted in were the preparation of war plans for the U-boats and E-boats during the Second World War. The tactics were that the target should be identified and followed out of sight during the daylight hours, with U-boats and E-boats then attacking under cover of darkness. The implication was that both types of vessel would operate in a flotilla or ‘pack’. This period seems almost certain to have been the time when the concept of the U-boat pack emerged and that Dönitz adopted the strategy early on rather than, as many suggest, inventing it. This was reinforced by a paper prepared in July 1922 for the Wehrabteilung, or Naval High Command in Berlin, by Kapitanleutnant (lieutenant-commander) Wassner, who recalled that as a U-boat commander he had found surface attacks to be the most successful, but that solo U-boat attacks on convoys were relatively ineffectual so that ‘in future it will be essential for convoys to be hunted by sizeable numbers of U-boats acting together.’2
Step by step, the Versailles Treaty was being circumvented.
In planning for the future, the identity of a the potential enemy had to be established. The Germans were not alone in this, and it was not until the early years of the twentieth century that the Royal Navy had stopped using France as a potential enemy in its planning and its exercises. While the Germans wanted to return to war with the British, and specifically to see battle with the Royal Navy, that was some way in the future. In the meantime, the ‘enemy’ was Poland, which under the terms of Versailles had been given a link to the Baltic port of Danzig, known as the ‘Polish Corridor’ although it was not in fact the shape of a corridor. The Polish Corridor isolated East Prussia from the rest of Germany and so the threat existed of Polish annexation of the territory. The strategic thinking also considered that in the event of hostilities with Poland, France would intervene on the side of Poland, and U-boats would be necessary to stop French battleships and battlecruisers forcing their way through the Skaggerak and Kattegat into the Baltic.
Helping in the preparation of these war plans was Kapitanleutnant Dönitz, posted to the U-boat department within the Torpedo, Mine and Intelligence Inspectorate at Kiel in spring 1923, as a Referent, an expert or adviser. While Dönitz maintains in his memoirs that he was not happy with this posting, to his superiors he was ideal, with his U-boat and torpedo-boat experience.
Earlier that year, in a show of strength and to enforce collection of arrears in war reparations, a joint force of Belgian and French troops had invaded the Ruhr. The German government’s response was to call a general strike in the region, and to finance this it made the grave mistake of printing money, so that the value of the currency started its dramatic fall and the period of hyperinflation began that impacted most on the middle and professional classes, but also led to a vast army of industrial workers becoming unemployed.
During a period of such economic turmoil, the government nevertheless managed to give the German armed forces 100 million marks in gold, effectively inflation-proofed, so that it could commence a rearmament programme over and above what was permitted by the Versailles Treaty. While most of the money went into the German Army, the Navy received a share and this was allocated betwe
en two secret rearmament funds, one in the Naval Transport Department under Kapitan zur See Lohrmann and the other into the Weapons Department under Kapitan zur See Hansen. The latter worked closely with the Torpedo, Mine and Intelligence Inspectorate at Kiel.
Meanwhile, the German industrial giants played the economy, expanding their tangible assets by discounting huge bills of exchange at the Reichsbank, buying them back as the currency devalued further, and using the resulting funds to expand through the acquisition of struggling small and medium-sized concerns. This consolidation of German heavy industry was eventually to be of considerable use to the Nazi Party, making it easier to control the economy and direct industry.
Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the German Navy, the Reichsmarine, was allowed to replace its ships as and when necessary. The first warship to be ordered post-Versailles was the light cruiser Emden, 5,400 tons, completed in 1925. Initially, she burned coal, the one fuel that was abundant in Germany, but in 1934 she was converted to burn oil. Another three cruisers were completed in 1929, Karlsruhe, Koln and Konigsberg, all of 6,000 tons, and then in 1931, these were joined by the Leipzig, also of 6,000 tons. These four ships were diesel-powered, giving much longer range, with the implication that their future use as surface raiders was already in mind.
DÖNITZ MOVES UP
In autumn, 1924, Dönitz was posted to an even more senior staff appointment at the Marineleitung, part of the Wehrabteilung or Naval High Command, in Berlin. Before moving he went on a short formal staff course run by Rear Admiral Raeder, who had been on Tirpitz’s staff during the war and post-war had been an aide of Trotha. After the Kapp putsch, Raeder had been moved sideways into a low profile position. Raeder, the future commander of the wartime German Navy, was impressed by Dönitz, and recommended strongly that he should not be retained in technical positions, but given the opportunity to broaden his experience. In particular, his leadership skills made him suitable for the development of younger officers.
In fact, the staff course may also have been a screening exercise to see whether or not Dönitz would fit the future German Navy. It was clear that he and Raeder saw eye to eye at this stage.
Dönitz was moving ever closer to the centre of power and of rearmament plans for the Reichsmarine. His memoirs indicate that his main preoccupation was with service regulations and a new military code, which involved him in liaison with the Army to ensure that the conditions were coordinated, as well as being adjusted to reflect the specific conditions in the Navy, while the whole had to be approved by the Reichstag. Clearly, in view of the Supreme Court judgement on war crimes, his work was highly sensitive.
These continued to be difficult times for the new German republic. There continued to be constant activity against the republic and the armed services by the Communists. Again, it was the role of Dönitz’s department to combat propaganda, which at times took on bizarre forms. An organisation known as the Rote Marine, Red Navy, staged as a propaganda exercise the ‘proletarian theatre’ production commemorating the 1918 naval mutinies and proclaiming the cruelty of the officers and ending with the execution of the leaders of the mutinies.
The Marineleitung continued the clandestine planning for rearmament that had started immediately after the Armistice. Dönitz’s immediate superior was Kapitan zur See Werth, who worked closely with Wilhelm Canaris, the future wartime head of the Abwehr, as well as Arno Spindler and von Loewenfeld, and all of them reported to Rear Admiral Adolph Pfeiffer. As pressure for the reestablishment of the U-boat arm increased, responsibility for planning was transferred from the Torpedo, Mines and Intelligence Inspectorate in Kiel to Berlin and Spindler was put in charge, under the guise of U-boat countermeasures. Meanwhile, in a bid to continue U-boat development outside Germany, Canaris became the link between the Marineleitung and Spain, which it was hoped would develop a submarine arm under German tutelage.
Spindler wasted no time in planning the specification for U-boats that would be needed for the foreseen war with Poland and France, by this time known in German military planning circles as Case A, starting in January 1926. He studied the wartime logs of the U-boats and interviewed most of the surviving commanders. Canaris became involved as he wished to have firm proposals to offer the Spanish. Spindler settled on three types. The first of these was a small 270-ton U-boat for operations in the Baltic. The other two were both of 500-tons and intended for operations in the North Sea, or the Mediterranean, with one fitted for torpedoes and the other for laying mines. The intention was that the larger craft would be used to defeat any attempt to enforce a blockade against Germany, as well as protecting the Baltic from entry by enemy warships.
The actual design of these craft was by the parent companies of the IvS organisation in Rotterdam, which took the specifications and up-dated them in line with current developments in warship building. Just as the Soviet Union was being used by the aircraft manufacturers, the Reichsmarine then encouraged the USSR to become involved in U-boat production. In July 1926, no less than three naval missions visited the USSR, with which secret trade treaties were fostering the development and production of aircraft, armaments and ammunition, and armoured vehicles, in the hope that contracts would be placed for the new U-boats. Development was furthered by an international commission having recommended a loan of 800 million gold marks to support the Reichsbank and stabilise the German economy. Far from being used for its intended purpose, this money was for the most part used by the major German industrial concerns to develop weapons and also enhance the production systems, as well as continuing the clandestine rearmament by the two armed services.
In helping to foster Soviet armaments industry for her own ends, Germany was playing a dangerous game for senior officers at this time made no secret of the fact that Bolshevism and the so-called ‘Slavic wave’ were the main threats not just to Germany, but to Europe as a whole. Poland and her ally France were seen as more immediate threats because Russia was still backward and under-industrialised, as were the other Slav nations in post-Versailles Europe. Nevertheless, the USSR was advancing industrially and therefore militarily, with German help.
Just as the prewar German government had accelerated the development of its armed forces while placating foreign governments, the foreign minister, Stresseman, was assuring the Allies that Germany was doing her best to fulfil the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. In January 1927, the Allied Control Commission withdrew, despite its final report which maintained that Germany had failed to disarm and was unlikely to do so, but instead was actively seeking to re-arm, and had done everything possible to make inspection by the Commission difficult. The situation would not have been made any easier by the death of the first president of the republic in 1925, for his successor was none other than Field Marshal von Hindenburg, not only a popular choice amongst the armed forces and their officer corps, but also a reassuring symbol of the ‘old’ prewar Germany.
Meanwhile, a retired senior officer, Rear Admiral von Loewenfeld was publicly expressing views that were almost identical to those of Adolf Hitler. Even before the Fuhrer took power, unofficial links were established between the Reichsmarine and the Nazi Party, and Admiral Levetzow, who had commanded the naval base at Kiel at the time of the Kapp putsch, later became Hitler’s adviser on naval matters.
The Reichsmarine continued its policies and that included the annual Winterarbeiten. It was a sign that the secret preparations were leaking down into the officer corps that no less than eight of the ten produced during 1926–1927 dealt with submarine matters. Werth and Spindler started to prepare a course on U-boats for midshipmen as part of their torpedo course. In April, the first of a batch of submarines for Turkey was completed at Rotterdam, and the sea trials were conducted by Werner Furbringer, a former wartime U-boat commander, with the aid of a former U-boat engineer, so that a full report could be prepared for the Marineleitung.
REARMAMENT EXPOSED
Hitler’s rearmament and rebuilding of the armed forces shoc
ked Western sensibilities in the mid-1930s, especially when the Luftwaffe or Air Force was unveiled, but rearmament had been the plan from the Armistice onwards. The first revelations about rearmament were the reservations expressed by the Allied Control Commission in January 1927, but a second and public revelation followed in August of that year. The financial editor of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper decided to investigate the financial affairs of a film company, Phoebus, which produced propaganda, and in his researches discovered the network of companies funded by the Seetransport office at the Wehrabteilung. When published, it awakened the concerns of the pacifists in the Social Democrat party and also alerted the anti-militarist Communists. Dönitz had to prepare the Reichsmarine’s case for the Reichstag, and also help the Army as well, which in his liaison with them had discovered that the seafarers were far better at handling political matters, and had set up a department that was the mirror-image of his own.
Anxious to appease opinion both within and without Germany, the government hastily distanced itself from the Reichsmarine. A number of senior naval officers were sacrificed in the cause, including the head of the Seetransport officer, Lohrmann, while others, such as von Loewenfeld and Werth, were sent back to sea. Some were retired, others discharged and the more fortunate moved to less sensitive posts. The Defence Minister was another victim, as was the commander of the Reichsmarine, Zenker, who was succeeded by none other than Dönitz’s former tutor on staff matters, Raeder. Dönitz and Canaris were both sent to sea, and out of the way. The former became navigating officer aboard the cruiser Nymphe in the Baltic, flagship of the Commander-in-Chief, Baltic, who was none other than Rear Admiral von Loewenfeld!