The last practice is evident in the turnover we have noted. All the other measures, however, can be seen in U-505’s earliest period, while training in the Baltic. Loewe’s original crew included only three U-boat veterans from other submarines. Two of the boat’s new Maschinenmaate came directly from the battleship Scharnhorst, their transfer preceding the arrival of their decoration with the Fleet War Badge each had earned. Another engineering petty officer proved a constant disciplinary problem from the start, yet Loewe’s efforts to arrange his transfer were rebuffed by higher authority—a reflection of the shortage of qualified personnel. When Loewe did depart on his passage patrol from the Baltic to Lorient, the lack of adequate training time and the recent arrival of six new crewmen compelled him to proceed with extreme caution (e.g., remaining submerged by day while close to the British isles) and continue onboard drills and exercises to try to whip his crew into shape.52
Another but much smaller cause of turnover lay in the German Navy practice of allowing new captains the prerogative to take or bring with them one or two selected crewmen from their former commands. Thus when Zschech became commander, he brought with him two boatswain’s mates from his former boat, U-124. One of them, Bootsmaat Hannes Bockelmann, later transferred back to U-124 only to die with thatsubmarine. After Nollau departed U-505 for his new command, he took with him to U-534 two enlisted engineering men from the original crew, Aloysius Hasselburg and Heinrich Klappich. In February 1944, Willi Jung, another original crewman just promoted to engineering petty officer, accompanied Kaptlt. Thilo Bode to his new command, U-858. And when Lange assumed command of U-505, he brought along Otto Dietz, another veteran from U-180 whose indiscretions had led to his transfer and severe wounding in an Army punishment battalion on the Eastern Front before being restored, at reduced rank, to the Navy.53
However, after the middle of 1943 the rapid turnover in U-505’s crew dramatically decreased. Whereas only 18 of the original 50 officers and men remained aboard after the first year of operations, 36 of the 52-man complement from early 1943 were still serving with U-505 more than a year later when she was captured. Even more instructive is the crew list for August 9, 1943, which reveals that three officers and 39 men of a total crew of 54 would still be on board ten months later. Why?
Part of the answer may lay in the relative contraction of the U-boat fleet after the middle of 1943. Into June of that year Donitz still planned accelerated production of existing submarine models and ever more crewmen to man them, until even Navy authorities acknowledged the proposed numbers of submariners simply could not be produced. The heavy U-boat losses that summer convinced Donitz by August to focus instead on the advanced Types XXI and XXIII, with much reduced personnel demands as the new models entered production. U-505’s prolonged repairs and inactivity during this period may have spared it a greater turnover in personnel. It must be noted, however, that U-172, another veteran Type IXC boat stationed at Lorient, endured major changes in her crew in October-November 1943 before departing on what proved to be her last mission.54
Another answer is suggested by reviewing those who represent the longest link of continuous service aboard U-505, the senior NCOs. Obersteuermann Alfred Reinig (age 28 in June 1944), Stabsobermaschinist Willi Schmidt (age 31), and Obermaschinist Otto Fricke (age 29) served on board the submarine from beginning to end. The fourth Feldwebel at the time of capture, Bootsmann Heinz Moller (age 29), had also spent his entire U-boat career on U-505, most of it as a petty officer. Only one senior NCO ever transferred off the boat. Granted that their seniority and expertise precluded frequent transfers, the retention of all four NCOs on one submarine for its entire operational career remains unusual. This suggests a specific decision, probably by the 2nd U-boat Flotilla but very likely approved—if not initiated—by higher authority, to keep these men together on U-505.
Former commander Axel-Olaf Loewe later concurred with Daniel Gallery’s opinion that after Zschech’s suicide, the crew of U-505 should have been broken up and redistributed among a dozen other U-boats. He speculated that “organizational reasons” lay behind the determination to keep them together.55 It is quite possible the decision to keep the original engineering senior NCOs on U-505 resulted from the severe damage sustained in November 1942, that their experience and long familiarity with the engines combined with the extensive nature of needed repairs and replacement parts compelled their retention. With Zschech’s suicide, however, this probably broadened to include the Seemänner senior NCOs and perhaps First Officer Meyer as well. Unable to determine (or confront) ultimate responsibility for a U-boat captain’s taking his own life at sea, Kriegsmarine officials decided to keep the boat’s officers and senior NCOs together with most of the crew, almost certainly to restrict knowledge of the incident to the smallest possible circle. Moreover, if doubts remained about the other officers and senior NCOs in their support of Zschech, keeping them together offered the best means of allowing them to prove themselves in the future. If this hypothesis of naval rationale is accurate, the German Navy itself first determined U-505’s crew was indeed a community bound together by fate.
Beyond the questions of turnover and continuity, several other general characteristics provide insights into the character of U-505’s crew. One is the question of age. Several writers have characterized the 1943-45 U-boat campaign as a “children’s crusade,” in which Donitz increasingly sacrificed ever-younger crews to superior Allied forces.56 In the case of U-505, this interpretation can be examined by a comparison of the available crew list for March 1943 (which includes birthdays) and the prisoner-of-war (POW) data for crewmen recovered by the U.S. Navy in June 1944 (Table 2, below).
TABLE 2.
Average Ages, U-505 Crew
Crew List
March 1943 POW Data
June 1944
Officers 24 31
Senior NCOs 28 29
Petty Officers 24 24
Enlisted Men 20 21
This information demonstrates U-505’s crew actually grew older rather than younger in every category from 1943 to 1944. Lest it be thought this represents a special case, the author’s own research among 611 U-boat officers and crewmen killed, captured, or surrendered in May 1945 confirms the average age at war’s end was older than that for the 1942-44 period.57 Sacrificed they might have been, but German submariners in the last year of the war proved more likely to be uncles rather than teenagers.
Some of U-505’s crew had indeed begun families. By March 1943, eight of the crewmen were married, four with children. Of the latter, two were among the relatively few transferred off over the next year, perhaps one of the criteria used in such determinations. Sadly, one of the remaining married men, Oberfunkmaat Gottfried Fischer, proved to be U-505’s only fatality on the day of her capture.
Granted this more mature age profile, it is appropriate to consider the lives of the crewmen before they entered the German Navy. During the war British intelligence officials noted an interesting class distinction between their Luftwaffe and U-boat POWs: German Air Force pilots and crewmen were solidly middle-class in background and more likely to have completed a secondary education, while the submariners demonstrated a working-class character in which a primary education was followed by apprenticeship in a craft or trade.58 Subsequent research expanded these findings to reveal a heavy reliance on metalworkers—particularly targeted for Navy recruitment for the skills they brought to the service—and consequently a geographic bias toward the industrial regions of central Germany, the great coal and steel cities of the Ruhr and Westphalia, and the diverse light metals plants of Saxony and Thuringia.59
The previous occupations listed by 29 of U-505’s enlisted crewmen (the only ones for whom interrogations are available) conform to this pattern. Only two of the 29 listed occupations that might be considered unskilled or semi-skilled labor (a farm worker and a coal miner); only four held jobs that qualified them as members of the Mittelstand, the lower- and middle-middle class (a draftsman, a ra
ilway employee, a warehouseman, and a merchant seaman). All the rest belonged to the elite of the working class: 16 metalworkers and skilled industrial workers (mechanics, machinists, toolmakers, lathe operators, electricians), and seven skilled craftsmen (three in woodworking, one each among painters, tailors, bakers, and butchers).60
For the crew’s geographic diversity within Germany, POW data for the entire crew are available. Here we have the advantage of the author’s previous study of this proportionate representation by birthplace from a sample of 937 U-boat noncommissioned officers and enlisted men who responded to background questionnaires during the period 1991-94. The comparative results of this data with that for the listed residences (places of birth were not recorded) of U-505’s 48 crewmen in the March 1943 crew list are provided in Table 3 (below). The evidence in the general sample indicates northern and central Germany were over-represented, and south Germany definitely under-represented; the evidence for U-505 not only strengthens these trends, but exaggerates them even more.
But if German submariners more likely originated from the old Kingdom of Prussia, the fact remains every crew included individuals from every corner of the Reich, thus guaranteeing the U-boat service reflected a truly national character. At a time when the German Army still relied on regional identification for its units, this quality contributed to the sense of a military elite.
TABLE 3.
Geographic Distribution of General Sample
of U-boat Crewmen and U-505’s Crew
(German boundaries as of May 1939)61
AREA POPULATION (millions) NO. IN GENERAL SAMPLE NO. IN U-505 CREW
Northern Germany 20.64 265 16
(port cities, Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Oldenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia, Brandenburg, Berlin)
Pct. of Total 26% 28% 33%
Central Germany 36.75 489 26
(Rhineland, Westphalia, Saxony, Thuringia, Anhalt-Dessau, Hesse, Silesia, Sudetenland)
Pct. of total 47% 52% 54%
Southern Germany
(Saar, Pfalz, Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Austria) 21.43 148 148
Pct. of Total 27% 16% 16%
Born outside of Germany — 18 in general sample, 1 from U-505
Therefore, the available collective data reveal much of the background and character of U-505’s crew, particularly in comparison with German submariners as a whole. But what led them to the U-boat arm to begin with? How did they become submariners? “By no means were submarine crews made up of volunteers,” Loewe observed after the war. “In general U-boat duty was by command.”62 For answers to questions about motivation and morale, we must examine individual cases.
Many early members of U-505’s crew could trace an active personal interest in the Navy, though sometimes for different reasons. Hans Goebeler’s boyhood fascination with German U-boats in the Great War ultimately led him to volunteer in August 1941. His performance at boot camp drew the attention of the submarine recruiters who approached him and the best of his recruit class to volunteer for submarines. Similarly, Aloysius Hasselberg developed an interest in the Navy as a youth in a small East Prussian village, ultimately leading to his enlistment in 1940 and volunteering for the U-boat arm. By contrast, Werner Reh was advised as an adolescent by a family friend to develop his technical skills and join the Navy as a way to see the world. He followed this advice and rose to the rank of Maschinenmaat while serving in various posts before being assigned to U-boat duty.63 Willy Englebarth had gone to sea as a cabin boy in the merchant navy at age 14, and simply changed uniforms three years later when he enlisted.64 Karl Springer, a veteran of U-565 before joining U-505 in late 1942, planned to serve his 12 years in the Kriegsmarine and then finish his career as a policeman or customs official; he only opted for U-boat duty as an alternative to serving on battleship Gneisenau. Heinrich Klappich, another of U-505’s original crew, chose the Navy simply because he did not “want to be in the infantry—I saw them drilling in Darmstadt and it shook me. My father,” he continued, “who had been in the Navy in World War I, told me ‘go with the Navy, it’s better than the Army.’ In training I volunteered for the U-boats, I would rather have been aboard a battleship but I went to the submarine service.”65
For those who joined U-505 later in her history, however, the U-boat arm was more likely to find them than the reverse. Torpedoman Wolfgang Schiller, who came aboard with Zschech, had already learned that his career-track involved involuntary assignment to submarines. Yet as a petty officer and a specialist, he understood and accepted the situation.66 More interesting are the claims of at least six enlisted crewmen—all of whom entered the Navy in 1941-42, and came to U-505 after January 1942—that they were not volunteers, but drafted into U-boat service.67 One of these, Ewald Felix, left his American captors with the impression he was a Polish conscript (although Polish surnames were common in the Wehrmacht, Allied interrogators assumed they were Polish nationals drafted as cannon fodder), but apparently offered his assistance in salvage efforts as well. The degree and significance of the aid he provided the Americans in keeping U-505 afloat during the first days after her capture remains a matter of some uncertainty, yet there is no doubt Admiral Gallery separated Felix from his erstwhile comrades with an invented story of his “death” from a stomach ailment, and that Gallery later praised Felix for his assistance.68 Whatever the truth, Felix’s case raises the question of motivation for members of an involuntary military elite.
This question becomes even more significant in connection with German Navy discipline. Men of the U-Boot-Waffe usually enjoyed considerable latitude in this regard in “letting off steam,” as the occasion in June 1942 when the off-duty crews of U-505 and U-154 became so intoxicated they could not be aroused to take shelter during an air raid, for which they were punished with only two days’ denial of shore leave and canteen privileges.69 When individuals transgressed against basic regulations, however, they received no sympathy. One submariner who stole some coffee spent four months in prison before being reassigned to U-505 at reduced rank. Another who had been AWOL for three days served three months in prison and six months of combat duty in a punishment unit on the Eastern Front, after which he was returned to submarine duty and joined U-505. With the already-cited example of Lange’s protege Otto Dietz, at least three of U-505’s final crew had thus experienced considerable time in military prison.70
These examples of draftees and discipline cases further alter the notion of submariners as a select elite, but perhaps reinforce a perspective of qualified but otherwise ordinary seamen placed in the role of warrior elite. The harsh punishments reflect less on the character of the offenders or the offenses: theft of military supplies ranked first among wartime infractions committed by U-boat personnel (even more so than the Kriegsmarine as a whole), and overstayed leave was not uncommon among submariners (though more typical for the rest of the Navy).71 Rather, harsh discipline became an increasingly striking feature of the regime they served as the war entered its final years. On November 13, 1943, the Headquarters of the 2nd U-boat Flotilla announced the execution of seaman Johann Mainz, from the headquarters staff of another U-boat flotilla, for stealing personal property of a deceased submariner and using it as a gift for a French girlfriend.72 Two months later the I.W.O. of U-154, another boat in U-505’s flotilla, denounced his commander for “undermining military morale” through remarks opposed to Germany’s political and military leadership. As a result, Oblt.z.S. Oskar-Heinz Kusch was arrested in Lorient on January 21, 1944, court-martialed, convicted, and shot by a firing squad less than a month before U-505’s capture.73 Kusch joined as many as 30,000 members of the German armed forces who were executed by their own military tribunals and courts in World War II.74
As the worst of this slaughter fell on German Army personnel during the last year of the war, motivation and morale for U-505’s crew, and German submariners in general, rested on a foundation other than that built by fear alone. If U-505’s crew followed selected patterns of
age, skills, and geographic origin, they nevertheless represented more of a general cross-section of German society in motivation and political attitudes. Among the boat’s five senior NCOs and petty officers who were 18 or older when Hitler came to power, only one had joined the NaziParty.75 The average age of the enlisted men, on the other hand, was 10 at the time Hitler came to power, and nearly all of them passed through the “Hitler Youth” program that became compulsory in December 1936. One, Wolfgang Schiller, belonged to a unit pledged to join the Party on “graduation,” but his father—an old member of the Catholic Center Party—arranged to have his son transferred to another unit to avoid this.76 A review of the 97 book titles in U-505’s 1944 library reveals not a single political tract among a mix of fiction, adventure, and humor that included such authors as Theodor Fontane, Herman Hesse, Hans Grimm, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Similarly, the boat’s collection of 88 phonograph records (each with two musical pieces) consisted overwhelmingly of popular songs, tangos, waltzes, and foxtrots; only six discs presented traditional military marches, one of which was eventually replaced by a Spanish melody.77
Perhaps Hans Goebeler spoke for most of his comrades when he observed:
Whether one was a Party member or not didn’t matter a bit. Everyone I knew, without exception, was willing and eager to fight…a depth charge exploding over your head did not care about your politics…we considered ourselves patriots, pure and simple. Ideology at that point was irrelevant.78
The truth of these observations must also be balanced by an awareness of the motivation through fear that characterized National Socialist rule. Some tasted punishment directly, but all understood its reality and potential. Allied material and technological supremacy assured their defeat; Nazi intransigence compelled them to continue. The only question that remained concerned the circumstances of how they would meet their end.
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