Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  None, however, dared speak openly of his fears. A soldier who criticized Hitler or the war effort could be charged with Wehrkraftzersetzung—the undermining of military authority—and tried before a war tribunal. No one knew exactly whom to trust. If Guschewski witnessed no joking among the men of U-869, he also saw none of the quarreling of his earlier service aboard U-602, none of the screaming matches when men became frustrated or claustrophobic on that boat. Somber and sober, the men of U-869 kept mostly to themselves. Sadly, to Guschewski’s eyes, no one bickered with anyone.

  Early in the summer of 1944, while docked in Gotenhafen, Neuerburg arranged an onboard celebration for his crew. Women were not invited. Brandt and Chief Engineer Kessler were sent ashore. Hard liquor, schnapps, and beer flowed freely aboard the submarine. Excellent foods were served. Popular music played on the boat’s loudspeakers. Before long, many crewmen were drunk. All the while, Neuerburg took not so much as a sip. He just watched the men, studying their behavior, listening for their opinions. Though inebriated, the crew seemed to whiff the idea of the party: Neuerburg was testing them, feeling for each man’s breaking point, waiting for any sign of disloyalty to him or, some likely thought, to the Nazi Party. Near his radio room, Guschewski drank slowly and thought, “This is unfair. This is not the way to test men.” None of the crewmen said a derogatory word. None of them expressed doubts. As the party ended, Guschewski thought, “Brandt would not test his crew like this. The two men are opposites.”

  Neuerburg’s celebration party caused some crewmen to further contemplate his Nazi Party allegiance. Though officers were forbidden to hold party membership, Neuerburg appeared so duty-bound and committed to formal procedure that it would have surprised few if it had turned out that he had Nazi sympathies.

  One day, as Neuerburg boarded U-869, the crew gave him the heil—the Nazi salute—in place of their usual military salute. A recent assassination attempt on Hitler had resulted in a new governmental order: military officers were now to use the heil salute. Neuerburg tore into the crew, telling them that he expected the military salute and that the heil was not to be used aboard his boat. Some crewmen tried to explain about the new order. Neuerburg told them he did not care. The heil would never again be used aboard U-869.

  If Neuerburg now seemed even more difficult to read, an incident in Hela only furthered the enigma. As the crew prepared to spend the night, Neuerburg announced that they would walk to a special barracks set in the thick woods of the peninsula. Inside, Neuerburg served Stark-Bier, a good and strong beer, and asked the men to gather their chairs in a circle. Inside the circle, he took a guitar, sat down, and began playing beautifully, an event that astounded the crew—no one had known of his musical talent. Neuerburg motioned for the men to join him in singing these lightly patriotic songs. Some sang along. Others only pretended. None questioned his motives. They could see by the way he sang and by the way he looked to no one in particular as he strummed the guitar that the music came from his heart. At eleven P.M., Neuerburg and the crew returned to their regular barracks.

  One of the crewmen who had likely sung along that night was nineteen-year-old torpedoman Franz Nedel. Nedel nurtured two loyalties as he trained with U-869. The first was to Hitler and the Nazi Party. The second was to his fiancée, Gisela Engelmann, whose name he had written on one of the forward torpedo-tube hatches, and who despised Hitler and the Nazis as much as her beloved Franz admired them.

  Nedel and Gisela had met in 1940 while she was attending a Hitler Youth program in the countryside and he was pursuing an apprenticeship as a butcher. He was fifteen, she fourteen. They loved each other straightaway. He delighted in her freethinking, fiery personality, and outgoing instinct. She adored his intellect—he seemed smart beyond his years, a thinker—and reveled in his compassion, his belly laugh, and even the way he spoke High German with the distinctive rolled r of his hometown region near Stettin. She was overwhelmed by Nedel’s mastery of the butcher’s craft; he oversaw the slaughter of animals with a confidence and equanimity she’d never seen in boys from her native Berlin. Inside a week they were boyfriend and girlfriend. He called her Gila. She called him Frenza. They knew they would spend their lives together.

  The couple was inseparable. When he played accordion in the band he had formed with friends, she sang along and crowds would gather, and as they played their favorite song, a French tune with the lyrics “Come back home, Zurich, come back;/I’m waiting for you;/You are all my happiness,” she believed that there was only one true love in a person’s life, and that she had found that love in Nedel.

  Nedel’s gentle nature, however, seemed at odds with one of his passions. He was fascinated by U-boats. He spoke of them constantly, promising to enlist in the submarine service when the inevitable day came for him to join the military. Gila begged him to reconsider.

  “These are swimming coffins,” she told him. “Get on a battleship or a cruiser. Get on anything besides the U-boat.”

  “No, Gila,” he replied time and again. “I want the U-boat.”

  Gila told him she understood. She had a shakier grasp, however, on Nedel’s political beliefs. The Nazis had imprisoned his father, a butcher, for holding anti-Hitler beliefs. Nedel did not speak much about his father’s ordeal, but his mother told Gila that her husband had been locked up for a considerable time before being released. Nedel loved his father. Still, he found himself sympathetic to Hitler and the rise of the Third Reich.

  Gila’s father also had been arrested by the Nazis. For months, he had delivered food and supplies to a Jewish family hiding in a nearby basement. In 1942, the Gestapo discovered the family. They hung the man by his feet from the ceiling, poured freezing water on him, and screamed, “Who is helping you?” When the man could take no more, he revealed that it was Gila’s father who had hidden his family. The Gestapo took the man to Gila’s house, where he pointed out her father and said, “I am so sorry. I could not take it any longer.” Gila’s father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he remained even as Gila and Nedel were falling more deeply in love. When Gila asked her boyfriend how he could sympathize with the Nazis after such treatment of both their fathers, he could only say, “I am very sorry this has happened, Gila.”

  Still, Gila loved Nedel deeply. He was kind and gentle to her, and envisioned a lovely future for them. As Nedel entered naval training in 1943, the couple became engaged. “I will take care of anything we need,” he promised. “When the war ends, we will have our life, I promise you.”

  That year, as Nedel left for home during leave from basic training, Gila waited for him at his mother’s home. There, she saw a photograph of Hitler hanging on the wall. She exploded. “Good God, you have his picture up!” she exclaimed.

  Before Nedel’s mother could react, Gila took the photo from its frame and clawed out Hitler’s eyes with her fingers. Then she placed the ruined photo in her fiancé’s bed.

  “Oh, my God, what is he going to do when he comes home and sees that?” Nedel’s mother asked.

  “I want him to see that! Leave it there!” Gila said.

  When Nedel returned home, he discovered the mutilated photo.

  “How can you do that?” he yelled at his fiancée. “How can you poke out Hitler’s eyes?”

  “Hitler is a Schweinehund!” she screamed.

  They argued louder. Nedel defended Hitler and the Reich. Gila could not abide the opinion. The argument ended the same as the others. They still loved each other.

  A few days later, after Nedel had returned to training, Berlin sustained a massive British bombing. When the explosions ended, Gila found a photo of Hitler and began to climb one of the large gas lanterns that lit the street. At the top, she hung the picture, a symbol of Hitler overseeing the devastation of Germany. She began cursing his name. A policeman arrived and warned her that the Gestapo was on its way.

  “Go ahead and rage, Gisela,” he said. “You have fifteen more minutes to curse up and down. Any more and th
ey will pick you up.”

  “You pig!” Gila screamed. “You already picked up my father. Now you’re going to have me picked up, too?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said.

  Less than a year later, Nedel was aboard U-869. He told Gila that he admired Commander Neuerburg and trusted the sub’s crew with his life. “When we’re out at sea, all we have is each other,” he said.

  Baltic training continued into summer’s dog days. At night, U-869’s crew were permitted to leave the barracks and spend their free time about the town. In happier days, U-boat crews had enjoyed near-celebrity status during their off-duty hours, guests of honor at the liveliest nightclubs, desired dance partners for the area’s prettiest ladies. Now U-869’s crew found many of the bars and nightclubs shuttered. Few felt like dancing, anyway. Only beer was available to numb the men’s worries. When the crew happened upon a band playing in a café, they sat quietly in their uniforms and listened.

  That summer, First Officer Brandt took a short leave to visit his family in Zinten. He played with his thirteen-year-old brother, Hans-Georg, then enjoyed his mother’s turkey and bacon and eggs. As the evening settled, he and his father went into the study and closed the door. Hans-Georg tiptoed to the room and pressed his ear against the keyhole.

  “I am taking a pistol with me on U-869’s patrol,” Brandt told his father. “I will not wait until the end should something happen.”

  Hans-Georg’s heart pounded. What did his brother mean by saying he would “not wait until the end”? Their religion prohibited the taking of one’s own life. Still, Siggi had said he would not wait until the end. Hans-Georg strained to hear more.

  “I can tell you this,” Brandt continued. “I can fully count on each and every one of my men. From the youngest enlistee to Commander Neuerburg, every man aboard U-869 is truly my comrade.”

  At the leave’s end, Brandt dressed in his military uniform and kissed his brother and parents good-bye. Before walking out the door, he sat at the piano. He played his favorite song, “La Paloma,” a longing sailor’s lament with the words “Good-bye, my dove.” His mother bit her lip and asked him to stop. The family members hugged one another. A moment later, Brandt disappeared down the street on his way back to U-869.

  A short time later, Brandt invited Hans-Georg and his mother to visit the U-boat in Pillau, where it was stationed for training. Hans-Georg could barely contain himself during the train ride; soon he would see a real, battle-ready U-boat, and one on which his brother was an officer! At the harbor, Brandt picked up his mother and brother in a small boat and took them to a back port where the warships were docked. As the boat approached, Hans-Georg picked out U-869 right away, a massive, miraculous sculpture of gray fighting technology, brand-new and proud and invincible, the Olympic rings standing sentinel on the U-boat’s conning tower to protect his brother from everything.

  Brandt invited Hans-Georg to board the U-boat, meanwhile apologizing to his mother; Commander Neuerburg did not permit women on his submarine, as he considered their presence aboard bad luck. If she would not mind waiting, he would give Hans-Georg a tour. She smiled and agreed. Hans-Georg’s heart pounded. “This is the greatest moment in my life,” he thought to himself. “None of my schoolmates has a brother like mine.”

  The Brandt brothers walked across a rickety wooden gangway to the U-boat. When they reached its deck, Hans-Georg saw a man dressed in shorts and with a scarf around his neck lying on his back, sunning himself. The man saw the Brandts and rose. Hans-Georg bowed, as was proper for a young man of the day. The man reached and shook Hans-Georg’s hand.

  “Ah, this is Brandt Junior!” he exclaimed.

  “Commander Neuerburg, this is my brother Hans-Georg,” Brandt said. “With your permission, I would like to show him the boat.”

  “Of course,” Neuerburg said. “We are honored to have him as our guest.”

  Hans-Georg stood wide-eyed. All his life, he’d known that U-boat men were special, and that U-boat commanders were the most special of all. Now he had met a commander who was tall, handsome, and powerful, and as he walked with his brother across the deck, he knew he was living a truly amazing day, a day when he’d seen a U-boat commander standing on board his submarine in shorts.

  The Brandts climbed through the conning tower down a smooth, freshly painted metal ladder. Inside, Hans-Georg stood mesmerized by the thickets of technology that grew from the walls and ceilings of the boat—could anyone possibly know the function of all these machines? Brandt began the tour. Hans-Georg knew not to touch anything. Brandt showed his brother the diesel engines, the electric motors, the radio room, the torpedoes. Everything smelled of oil. Brandt pointed Hans-Georg to his bunk. The boy looked at him as if to ask, “May I?” Brandt nodded. A moment later, Hans-Georg was sitting on his brother’s bed.

  At the base of the conning tower, Brandt showed his brother the periscope.

  “You can look through it,” he told Hans-Georg.

  The younger Brandt white-knuckled the periscope’s handles and pressed his face to the lens. Before him, he saw the harbor’s warships, so close that he could read their names, and as he stared at these ships his brother told him exactly what he was looking at; he knew the name of every warship in the sea. Even though this was a U-boat destined for war, even though Hans-Georg knew his brother would be leaving soon, he felt safe with Siggi standing behind him.

  “No one,” he thought, “has a brother like mine.”

  On August 30, 1944, U-869 was docked at the U-boat flotilla base at Stettin. Already, much of the town lay ruined from Allied bombing. That night, the crewmen were awakened in their barracks by the sound of air-raid sirens. Some dove into underground bunkers. Others, including Guschewski, remained in bed, presuming that the approaching airplanes would bypass Stettin. But when Guschewski heard antiaircraft fire from German ships, he knew the attack was intended for them. He leaped from his bed and rushed toward the bunker. On his way, he noticed that a few men remained in the adjoining barracks. He flung open their door.

  “People! Get out!” he yelled. “This attack is meant for us!”

  Guschewski could hear the bombs falling. He ran for the underground bunker but found its door closed. He beat on it with all his might. A fellow crewman opened the door, and Guschewski jumped in. Bombs exploded. The crewmen waited inside the bunker. When it was safe to emerge, the men surveyed the area. Craters lay where their barracks had stood. One of U-869’s crewmen had been killed in the attack. At the bottom of one of the craters, Neuerburg and Horenburg sifted through charred corpses. As the men climbed out of the crater, the crewmen bowed their heads. Guschewski looked at his commander and at the crew. No one said anything, but he could read their thoughts. Each of them, he believed, was thinking, “The war is lost. Why isn’t there peace?”

  The fall season gave the crew a reprieve from the searing summer temperatures, which could reach 110 degrees inside the U-boat. It would now be just a matter of weeks before the boat was assigned a war patrol. In October, however, a scandal hit the submarine.

  At night, while U-869 was anchored and most men slept ashore, someone stole a large slice of ham from one of the several large hams stored onboard. When the cook discovered the theft, he alerted Neuerburg, who summoned the crew. Stealing from comrades—Kameradendiebstahl—was rare aboard a U-boat and was a grave offense in this community bound by fate. Neuerburg raged before the crew.

  “I cannot assure you that I will not press charges for this theft,” he yelled.

  For a minute, no one moved. Then twenty-four-year-old machinist mate Fritz Dagg stepped forward. “I do not want anyone wrongly accused,” he said. “I stole the ham.”

  Neuerburg motioned Dagg to his quarters. The crew dreaded the punishment Neuerburg was certain to impose on the well-liked Dagg. A few minutes later, Dagg emerged from Neuerburg’s quarters. Neuerburg had not punished him. Instead, the commander told the crew to go about its business. The boat exhaled. Guschewski admired the deci
sion. He believed Neuerburg appreciated that Dagg felt sick about the theft, and he also knew that Dagg—an excellent crewman—could not perform properly if further embarrassed. The men welcomed Dagg back to the fold. No one was angry with him. The war was growing more hopeless, but at least everyone had enough to eat.

  By late October, U-869’s crew knew that its maiden war patrol was just a week or two away. Brandt took a one-day leave to visit his family in Zinten. His father gathered the family in the living room and prayed. Siegfried was dressed in his full officer’s uniform—he had not even brought along a change of clothes. Snow fell thick outside the window. Otto Brandt asked for peace and the safe return of his sons Siegfried and Norbert. He asked for a time like the one that now seemed from another life, a time when his family could eat and sing and wake up at ease together.

  Brandt returned to U-869. He was entitled to several more days of home leave. Instead, he gave his remaining share to married crewmen so that they might spend more time with their families. While these men were away, he sat in his tiny bunk aboard the sub and wrote letters to his family.

  “I learned yesterday,” Brandt wrote in one such letter, “that Fritz C., the radioman with whom I always met, did not return from his first war patrol. It was his first deployment at the front. Just a few weeks ago we sat together in a restaurant. That’s life—hard and inexorable.”

  In mid-November, he enclosed two small photos of himself along with a short note that asked his family, “Please think of me.” In one photo, he was seated and asleep on the deck of U-869, his knees tucked into his chest, his back against the ship, his head bowed forward. Though his mother owned many photos of Siegfried, this was the only one that made her cry. When Hans-Georg asked why she wept at this picture, she told him that it was the way Siggi was sitting—it reminded her of a child, a baby, and even though Siggi was a proud warrior, she could still see her little boy in that picture.