The Seeker, the dive boat conceived and built by Nagle and used to discover and dive the U-Who, continues to run charters. Its current owner, Danny Crowell, goes to the Stolt Dagali, USS Algol, and many other popular wrecks. Crowell rarely runs to U-869. “I’d go if people were interested,” he says. “There’s just not that many of those kind of divers around these days.”
A few dive boats, such as Howard Klein’s Eagle’s Nest and Joe Terzuoli’s John Jack, continue to take customers to U-869. Since Chatterton pulled the identifying tag from the wreck in 1997, however, the U-boat has surrendered no important artifacts. Still, Chatterton and Kohler believe that there’s a remote chance that Commander Neuerburg’s diary survived and lies buried in silt and rubble. Were that diary to be recovered with its writing intact, history would have a first-person insight into the boat’s doomed patrol.
The technology of deep scuba diving has evolved since Chatterton and Kohler identified U-869. Today, perhaps 95 percent of deep-wreck divers breathe trimix, the blended gas believed by many in the early 1990s to be voodoo. About half of deep-wreck divers have abandoned their open-circuit gear—the decades-old tank-and-regulator combination—in favor of the rebreather, a smaller, computer-controlled device that recycles exhaled air. Rebreathers make very deep dives possible by obviating the need to carry several tanks of decompression gas. They remain, however, more unreliable than open-circuit systems. It is thought that more than a dozen divers worldwide have died using rebreathers. Chatterton was one of the first to adopt the new technology. Kohler has stuck with his open-circuit gear.
In 1997, less than a month after he identified U-869, Chatterton and Kathy divorced. A year later, as a member of an elite expedition to Greece, Chatterton became the first person ever to dive HMHS Britannic, the sister ship to the Titanic, using a rebreather. As part of an October 2000 mission to the Black Sea sponsored by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he searched for the Struma, an overflowing refugee ship on which 768 people—mostly Romanian Jews—lost their lives fleeing persecution in 1942.
In November 2000, PBS’s Nova series aired Hitler’s Lost Sub, a documentary about the mystery U-boat. The program became one of Nova’s highest-rated episodes ever. The same month, Chatterton was diagnosed with metastasized squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil, likely a result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He was back diving shipwrecks by May of the next year. On September 11, 2001, as terrorist-hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, Chatterton was overseeing a commercial dive job under the World Financial Center, directly across the street from Tower One. He and his divers escaped the area without injury.
In January 2002, Chatterton married Carla Madrigal, his girlfriend of three years. The couple wed and honeymooned in Thailand, then moved to a beachfront home on the New Jersey shore. In September 2002, Chatterton quit commercial diving after a twenty-year career to pursue a history degree and teaching certificate at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. After graduation, he hopes to teach high school or college history. Chatterton and Kohler remain close friends and still dine together at Scotty’s. By May 2003, Chatterton’s cancer was in remission. In July 2003, he began hosting Deepsea Detectives, a program about shipwrecks, for the History Channel. Kohler even cohosted on several episodes.
Chatterton’s involvement with U-869 largely ended the day he identified the wreck. Unlike Kohler, he felt no pressing obligation to find the crewmen’s families or to deliver news of their loved ones’ fates. “I cared about those things,” Chatterton says. “But they were in Richie’s heart. There was no one in the world who should have done that besides Richie.”
The first person Kohler called after he and Chatterton identified U-869 was Tina Marks, his girlfriend. She had believed in him, understood his feelings of obligation to the crewmen and their families, and supported his diving. The couple grew closer. She became pregnant. Tina, however, was being harassed by a former boyfriend who begged her to return to him. She refused. One day in 1998, when Tina was eight months pregnant with Kohler’s child, the man showed up at her door, shot her with a nine-millimeter pistol, then shot himself. The police found both of them lying dead inside the residence. In a moment, Kohler’s love and future had disappeared.
As it had for years, diving served as his salvation. In 1999, he became co-head of a British-American expedition to identify previously discovered World War I and World War II U-boats sunk in the English Channel. Of twelve target boats, the team identified four. In the fall of that year, Kohler opened a second branch of Fox Glass, in Baltimore. His son, Richie, and daughter, Nikki, who continue to live with him, became honor-roll students.
Kohler remains a voracious reader of history, though he says he reads differently since his quest to identify U-869. “In the back of my mind I question a little of everything,” Kohler says. “To me, that makes history even more interesting.”
Kohler’s involvement with U-869 entered a new phase after he and Chatterton identified the wreck. In 1997, he set out to find the crewmen’s families and deliver them news of their loved ones’ fates. With help from Kirk Wolfinger and Rush DeNooyer of Lone Wolf Pictures (who directed the Nova special), and from the German media giant Spiegel, which had begun work on a television documentary about the divers and U-869, he found contact information for Barbara Bowling, the half sister of Otto Brizius, at seventeen the youngest of U-869’s crewmen. He also found Martin Horenburg’s daughter.
Bowling, it turned out, had been living for nearly twenty years in Maryland. She and Otto shared the same father, a man who had spoken lovingly of Otto since Barbara had been a baby. All her life, Bowling had grown up admiring and loving this brother she had never known, always believing he lay at the ocean’s bottom off Gibraltar. When Kohler visited Bowling at her home he could hardly believe his eyes. Her son, Mac, was the image of Otto, whose Kriegsmarine photos hung proudly in her house. Bowling, a fluent German speaker, agreed to help Kohler with his further search for family members.
Horenburg’s daughter was less eager to speak to Kohler. Her mother had remarried after U-869’s loss, and her stepfather had raised her as his own. Out of respect to this man, she preferred not to pursue contact with Kohler. Through an intermediary, she expressed gratitude to the divers and supplied them with several photos of her father. Chatterton took the knife off his desktop—a knife that had spoken to him for seven years—carefully packed the artifact, and drove it to the post office. A week later, the knife belonged to Martin Horenburg’s daughter.
For a time, Kohler found himself frustrated in his efforts to locate more families. He focused on his personal life and began dating Carrie Bassetti, an executive for a New Jersey pharmaceutical company and the woman who would later become his wife. He had met Bassetti on a wreck-diving trip aboard the Seeker, and was moved not just by her passion for diving, but by her innate sense of adventure and old-school appetite for living. By 2001, he had secured excellent contacts with crewmen’s families from his source at Spiegel. He booked a trip to Germany. He needed to see these relatives in person.
Just before departing for Europe, Kohler chartered a boat and took Bowling and her family to the wreck site. There, he read a short memorial he had written, then splashed into the ocean and affixed a wreath and ribbons to U-869. On New Year’s Day 2002, accompanied by Bowling as his translator, Kohler landed in Hamburg. He had finally come to do what he had needed to do for years.
Kohler’s first appointment was with Hans-Georg Brandt, First Officer Siegfried Brandt’s younger brother. Now seventy-one years old and a retired auditor, Hans-Georg waited nervously at his son’s home for Kohler’s arrival, his son and grandchildren also eager to see the face of one of the divers who had risked his life to find Siggi. Kohler knocked. Hans-Georg, dressed for the occasion in fine tan slacks, a brown cardigan sweater, and a tie, opened the door. For a moment, the men just looked each other over. Then Hans-Georg stepped forward, took Kohler’s
hand, and spoke in halting English.
“I am deeply touched that you have come. And I am so sorry for what happened to the brave divers who lost their lives on the U-boat. Welcome.”
For six hours, Hans-Georg remembered his brother Siggi, a brother he loved today as much as he had at thirteen when Siggi showed him the secrets of his U-boat and allowed him to look through its periscope out into the world. The conversation was emotional and painful for Hans-Georg at times. At the day’s end, Hans-Georg thanked Kohler again and helped him find his coat.
“I brought you something,” Kohler said. He reached into his briefcase. A moment later he produced a metal schematic he had recently recovered from U-869’s electric motor room.
“You were probably in this room when you visited your brother,” Kohler said.
Hans-Georg took the schematic and stared at the metal, at its writing and rust. For several minutes, he could not break his gaze from the artifact. Finally, he began tracing his fingers along its edges and over its crusty surface.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I will save this forever.”
The next morning, Kohler and Bowling drove several miles outside Hamburg to meet with a sixty-year-old surgeon. The man, thin, tall, and handsome, welcomed the Americans into his home. He introduced himself as Jürgen Neuerburg, the son of U-869’s commander, Helmuth Neuerburg.
Jürgen could produce no memories of his father, as he’d been just three years old when U-869 was lost. But he remembered well his mother’s stories, and the fondness and love with which she’d told them. For hours, while his wife listened closely, he shared these stories with Kohler, showing dozens of photographs and diary entries in between.
“Since I was a child, I believed my father had been lost off Gibraltar,” Jürgen said. “When I learned that divers had found the boat off the coast of New Jersey, I was very surprised. But in the end it did not change how I felt. I suspect it might have shocked my mother, such a revelation after so many years of believing the official version of events. For this reason, I’m happy she never found out about it. She loved him dearly. She never remarried.”
Kohler asked Jürgen if his father had siblings. Indeed, his father had an older brother, Friedhelm. Kohler asked if Jürgen might provide a telephone number for Friedhelm. Jürgen gave him an old number.
“I don’t even know if he’s still alive,” Jürgen said. “Sadly, we have fallen out of touch.”
Jürgen and his wife thanked Kohler for his efforts and asked him to thank Chatterton when he returned to New Jersey. That night at the hotel, Kohler and Bowling dialed the number. An elderly woman answered. Bowling introduced herself as the sister of one of U-869’s crewmen. The woman said she would be happy to bring her husband to the phone.
For the next hour, eighty-six-year-old Friedhelm Neuerburg remembered his brother, Helmuth.
“When I close my eyes and picture my brother today,” Friedhelm said, “I see him doing his duty. I think he had a premonition that he wasn’t coming back. He did his duty.”
In the morning, Kohler and Bowling drove from Hamburg to Berlin. That evening, Kohler met with forty-year-old Dr. Axel Niestlé, the head of a private engineering firm that works on waste-disposal projects. Niestlé’s doctorate, earned in water-resources science, was based largely on work he did in North Africa. In his spare time, as a sort of hobby, Niestlé had made himself the world’s foremost authority on the reassessment of U-boat losses. It was Niestlé who, in 1994, had thought to look at the intercepted radio messages between U-869 and U-boat Control, an idea that had occurred to no one else in the world for history’s certainty that U-869 lay sunk off Gibraltar. He’d communicated his findings in a written report to Robert Coppock at the British Ministry of Defence, who’d then relayed the information to Chatterton and Kohler via letter. During their meeting, Kohler marveled not just at the depth of Niestlé’s knowledge but at his passion for the subject. He asked Niestlé why he wasn’t teaching at a university.
“U-boats are my avocation,” he said. “Perhaps it would be boring if I were to earn money from it. It’s the detective’s way of treating these matters that moves me. Once you find out history is wrong, once you start investigating it and, with some luck, correcting it, that is satisfaction enough.”
The next day, Kohler and Bowling took the Berlin subway to the quaint home of an elderly lady. On a mantelpiece in the living room’s center were framed photos of her children and one of a young, handsome man from World War II who seemed to look forward into the ages. The woman introduced herself as Gisela Engelmann. The man in the photo, she said, was her fiancé, Franz Nedel, one of U-869’s torpedomen.
For hours, Engelmann told Kohler about tearing the eyes out of Hitler’s picture, about climbing the gas lamp and displaying Hitler’s photo for all Berlin to see, about the going-away party at which Franz and his fellow crewmen broke down in tears, about how she knows more than ever that there is only one true love in a person’s life, and for her that love was Franz.
“My two husbands knew about Franz, of course,” she said. “When I would speak of Franz to my children, they would roll their eyes and say, ‘Mother, you’ve told us this story a hundred and fifty times already.’”
As with the Brandts, Engelmann was left to wonder about her loved one’s fate long after the war’s end. It was not until October 1947 that she received official word that U-869 had been declared a total loss.
“I missed him every day of my life,” she told Kohler. “I have his photograph in my bedroom, and I have looked at it every day, through two marriages and four children, since I waved good-bye to him.”
Kohler had one more appointment before flying back to New Jersey. He and Bowling flew to Munich, rented a car, and drove west through miles of breathtaking, snow-covered rural landscape. Kohler exited at the small town of Memmingen and followed his directions. A few minutes later, he found himself in the city center, a place of winding streets, centuries-old buildings, and church spires that reached into the heavens. Memmingen, he thought, was a painting, the storybook Germany that Mr. Segal, the circus strong man, had described to his father.
Kohler maneuvered down narrow side streets until he arrived at one of the town’s most ancient homes. He rang the doorbell. A minute later, a handsome and dignified eighty-year-old gentleman opened the door. Dressed in a blue suit and red tie, his cotton-white hair combed perfectly, he looked as if he had been expecting his visitor for years.
“I am Herbert Guschewski,” the man said. “I was the radioman aboard U-869. Please welcome to my home.”
In his living room, surrounded by his family, Guschewski told Kohler the story of how he had survived U-869.
On a warm November morning in 1944, just days before U-869 was to leave for war, Guschewski found himself feeling ill. When he stepped outside for fresh air, he became dizzy and collapsed, unconscious. Onlookers rushed him to the hospital, where he remained in a coma with a high fever for three days. When he came to, the doctors told him he had contracted pneumonia and pleurisy. Though U-869 was to depart in hours, he would be forced to remain in intensive care. He was also told he had visitors.
His hospital door opened. Standing before him, holding chocolate, cookies, and flowers, was Commander Neuerburg. Behind him were First Officer Brandt and Chief Engineer Kessler. And behind them were many of the U-boat’s crew. Neuerburg approached Guschewski. He wiped the radioman’s forehead and stroked his arm.
“You’ll be all right, my friend,” Neuerburg said.
Brandt stepped forward and took Guschewski’s hand.
“Get well, friend,” he said, smiling the same smile Guschewski had seen after he’d told Brandt his jokes. “You will pull through.”
Kessler came forward, as did Horenburg and the other radiomen. Many had tears in their eyes. They wished Guschewski well.
“It finally came time to say good-bye,” Guschewski told Kohler. “I had the feeling that we would not see each other again. When I looked into th
e eyes of some of my comrades, I could see they thought the same.”
Like everyone else, Guschewski had believed that U-869 had been sunk off Gibraltar. When he’d got word that divers had found the U-boat off New Jersey, he’d contacted Spiegel. It was through Spiegel that Kohler had come to know of Guschewski.
Kohler stayed for two days. Guschewski spoke for hours about Neuerburg, Brandt, Kessler, and the other men he knew from U-869. He recounted the bombing of the barracks in Stettin, singing along to Neuerburg’s guitar playing, inadvertently dialing in Radio Calais, Fritz Dagg’s ham theft, his friendship with Horenburg. He spoke at length about Brandt’s kindness and ready laugh and his willingness, even at age twenty-two, to bear the fear and trembling of others. He told Kohler that he missed his friends.
“It is horrible for me to see the way the boat lies broken in the ocean,” Guschewski said. “For more than fifty years I remembered it as new and strong, and I was part of it. Now I look at the film and pictures and see the remains of my comrades. . . . It is very difficult and sad for me to think of it this way.
“I believe in God and an afterlife. It would be wonderful to be reunited with my friends, to see them again, and to see them continue in peace, not in war, not in a time when so many young lives were lost for no reason. I would like to see them like that.”
After a second day of conversation, Kohler and Guschewski rose and shook hands. Kohler’s flight to New Jersey departed in just a few hours, and Guschewski, an esteemed town councillor, had a meeting that evening. Each had more questions for the other. Each promised another visit so that the questions would not go unanswered for long.
As Kohler reached for his coat, Guschewski made a request.
“Might it be possible to send me something from the boat?” Guschewski asked. “Anything would do. Anything I could touch.”
“I would be happy to,” Kohler said. “I will send you something the moment I return home.” He already knew what he would send—a five-by-six-inch plaque from the emergency life raft canister explaining that item’s operation.
Shadow Divers Page 38