Hitler, Donitz, and the Baltic Sea (38 page)

Following the failure of the Ardennes offensive and with the approach of operational readiness for the new-type XXI and XXIII submarines, Norway’s value to Dönitz grew. Guderian repeatedly demanded the evacuation of troops from Norway to defend the Reich, but as had been the case with Courland, Hitler refused. Early in February 1945 Assmann requested the Skl’s opinion on a proposal to withdraw additional divisions from Norway, which would result in the evacuation of northern Norway. The Skl replied that a retreat from the Tromsö–Narvik area would cause very serious problems for the U-boat war, since enemy pressure on the Trondheim area would then increase. The Skl regarded loss of the Trondheim area as totally unacceptable, and Dönitz agreed. At the beginning of May 1945 Gen. Franz Boehme, commander of German armed forces in Norway, reported to Dönitz that eleven divisions and five brigades remained in the country, the total strength of German forces in Norway amounting to 380,000 men.
⁹¹

In early March Boehme called for a withdrawal from northern Norway and for a curtailment of the construction of submarine bunkers due to shortages of coal, cement, and other supplies. The Skl again warned OKW
that these measures would cripple the U-boat war. A week later Jodl presented Hitler with the army’s request to withdraw south of Narvik in order to ease the supply situation. Hitler refused this proposal, because he feared the evacuation of northern Norway would entice Sweden to enter the war against Germany; he also claimed that Germany needed fish from the Lofoten Islands to feed its populace. In addition, he declared that Allied possession of northern Norway would threaten vital submarine bases in the southern part of the country.
⁹²
By the end of the month Hitler was continuing to insist on the defense of Tromsö, Harstad, and Narvik.
⁹³

To the very end Dönitz and the Skl clung to the dream of operating the Type XXI submarines from Norway. Boehme asked the navy’s commander in Norway at the end of April if he still considered occupation of the Narvik sector vital. On 27 April—three days prior to Hitler’s suicide—the Skl replied that despite the fuel situation, the Narvik area was essential as for submarines.
⁹⁴
On the night of 3 May the Skl instructed the U-boat operations staff that even if the enemy occupied all of northern Germany, the U-boat war would continue from Norway. For that reason Dönitz had sent Godt and Hessler to Norway that afternoon. Dönitz still had not given up. Only on 4 May did OKW order troops in Norway to avoid incidents that might provoke the Western powers.
⁹⁵
The location of operational Type XXI submarines at the end of the war provides additional evidence of Germans plans to renew the U-boat campaign from Scandinavia. Of sixteen Type XXIs submarines ready for action, ten were in Norway and three in Denmark, and seventeen of twenty Type XXIIIs were in Norway.
⁹⁶

Norway and Denmark had one factor in common with Estonia—they controlled entrance to the Baltic. The Skl feared the consequences of an Anglo-American breakthrough into the Baltic from the West almost as much as a Soviet one from the East. Dönitz informed Hitler that in the event of a major landing in Scandinavia, he planned to oppose the Allies with the task force in northern Norway as well as with warships from the Training Fleet and all available destroyers, torpedo boats, and motor torpedo boats in the Baltic, even those from training schools.
⁹⁷
Hitler had approved Dönitz’s decision not to send the fleet to combat an Allied landing on the French or Dutch coast, but Dönitz intended to engage the same enemy warships if they invaded Denmark and southern Norway. In other words, Dönitz was willing to risk a fleet engagement with either the Soviet or the clearly superior British fleet to protect any threat to his Baltic training areas.

C
HAPTER
10

A
DMIRAL DÖNITZ PLAYED
a pivotal role in shaping German grand strategy at sea and on land in the final years of the war, and his loyalty to Hitler allowed him to rise to a prominent position of leadership in the Third Reich.
¹
Dönitz gained influence in the fiercely competitively arena of Nazi politics because of the offensive nature of submarine warfare at a time when Hitler had increasingly few options to regain the initiative, and due to his close personal relationship with his Führer. Few military officers demonstrated their devotion to Nazi ideology and their loyalty and unquestioning obedience to Hitler as eagerly as did Dönitz, particularly in the final months of the war. Hitler’s admiration for and trust in his naval commander in chief is evident in his selection of Dönitz as his successor, a choice that came as a surprise to many people but not to those closest to Hitler.

In his memoirs Dönitz claimed that “as a result of the Russian breakthrough in January [1945], it became clear that the U-boat arm, in spite of the new weapons which had restored its superiority over the defense, would not again be engaged in large-scale operations. The U-boat campaign was no longer the navy’s most important task.”
²
If this represented Dönitz’s belief at the time, he did an amazing job of concealing it from Hitler and from everyone else. Meisel certainly never gained this impression, maintaining that Dönitz viewed the anticipated U-boat offensive as the only means to win the war.
³
In mid-February 1945 Dönitz boasted that the navy’s current total of 450 U-boats represented the highest number Germany had ever possessed. Two days later he briefed Hitler that two Type XXIIIs were operating off the coast of England and that the first Type XXI would sail for the American coast at the end of February or beginning of March. At the end of the meeting, Hitler emphasized the importance he attributed to the revival of the U-boat war for Germany’s overall situation. Dönitz predicted great victories with the revolutionary new submarines, which could travel from Germany to Japan without surfacing.
⁴
Despite
Dönitz’s earlier warnings that loss of the Bay of Danzig would cripple U-boat training, submarine training continued to the end in waters off Sassnitz, Lübeck, Warnemünde, and Travemünde.
⁵

Dönitz submitted a report to Hitler on 28 February that contained his true assessment of the U-boat war. He reviewed prewar operational thinking and the course of the U-boat war since 1939, and after discussing the reasons for the defeat of Germany’s submarine force in the spring of 1943 as he saw them, Dönitz turned to the possibilities offered by the new models of U-boats. He maintained that a submarine that operated completely underwater would turn the tide of the war at sea and that thus it was vital to send into action as many of these U-boats as possible. The next day he again assured Hitler that the Anglo-Americans had no means of locating and combatting submerged submarines. In the summer of 1945 Dönitz prepared a report for his captors clearly stating that the imminent arrival of Germany’s miracle weapons, especially his new submarines, “completely justified the hope for a reversal in the nick of time” and that his goal in the war’s final months had been to try to hold out long enough for these weapons to become operational.
⁶
These statements hardly indicate that Dönitz no longer regarded the U-boat war as a priority.

Dönitz’s attempt to revive the Battle of the Atlantic conformed to Hitler’s vision of waging war offensively, and in many ways Dönitz’s political views also mirrored those of Hitler. Despite his claims to have had nothing to do with politics prior to his appointment as Hitler’s successor,
⁷
Dönitz was a firm, even unconditional, adherent of National Socialism. Dönitz’s daughter later insisted her father never joined the Nazi Party, but records from the former Berlin Document Center prove that he became a Party member early in 1944.
⁸
In truth, Dönitz enthusiastically embraced Nazism. Several leading naval officers maintain that Dönitz was “clearly under Hitler’s influence” and “closely tied to Nazi ideology and Hitler.”
⁹
Raeder wrote that after an “inappropriate” speech to the Hitler Youth, he acquired the nickname “the Hitler-Boy Dönitz.”
¹⁰
Speer attempted in February 1945 to enlist Dönitz’s support in circumventing Hitler’s scorched-earth policy, but Dönitz replied, “I am here only to represent the navy. The rest is none of my business.”
¹¹
At about the same time, Dönitz issued an order warning that any naval officer, regardless of rank, who impaired the troops’ spirit of resistance would be placed at the army’s disposal. He could not use such officers.
¹²

There is ample evidence in his public and private statements of Dönitz’s anti-Semitism. When the Swedes closed their waters to German shipping, for example, Dönitz blamed their action on “fear and dependence on international Jewish capital.”
¹³
In a speech of March 1944 he referred to
“degraded Jewish enslavement” and declared, “What would have become of our country today if the Führer had not united us under National Socialism? Split parties, beset with the spreading poison of Jewry, and vulnerable to it because we lacked the defense of our present uncompromising ideology, we would long since have succumbed under the burden of this war.”
¹⁴

When prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials asked exactly what he meant by this statement, Dönitz replied, “It means that it might have had a disintegrating effect on the people’s power of endurance. . . . I was of the opinion that the endurance, the power to endure, of the people, as it was composed, could be better preserved than if there were Jewish elements in the nation.”
¹⁵
Dönitz thereby voiced his approval of the expulsion of the Jews from Germany—at his trial.
¹⁶
In August 1944 Dönitz proclaimed to his commanders, “I would rather eat dirt than see my grandchildren grow up in the filthy, poisonous atmosphere of Jewry.”
¹⁷
He told interrogators in the summer of 1945 that “the whole nation of course agreed that such a thing as the control of all business life and economic power, up to 80 or 90 percent, by Jews, was intolerable. That situation had to be corrected and some check imposed on them.”
¹⁸
Such comments require no further elaboration.

Dönitz would claim to have known nothing about the murder of the Jews, but the extent of his knowledge of the Holocaust is uncertain. He attended the infamous
Gauleiter
(regional Party leader) conference in Posen in October 1943, but it is not clear whether he was present for Himmler’s speech acknowledging the extermination of the Jews. He could not rid himself of his anti-Semitism in Spandau, still envisioning the supposedly pernicious power of the Jews. In 1953 he told Speer that if it were up to the Americans, Speer would be released before he was, because “the American Jews would make sure of it.”
¹⁹
Dönitz apparently embraced Nazi racial ideology in its entirety, including the drive to eliminate “inferior elements” from the gene pool. Although there is no direct evidence of Dönitz’s support for the forced sterilization or euthanasia programs, in 1943 he declared that a soldier’s asthma “endangered the national community [
Volksgemeinschaft
].”
²⁰

When Dönitz became the navy’s commander in chief, he brought many changes to the service. Unlike Raeder, who rarely visited Hitler’s headquarters and remained as briefly as possible, Dönitz came frequently and for extended periods. He saw Hitler on 119 days between February 1943 and April 1945.
²¹
Hitler soon developed a genuine admiration of and fondness for Dönitz. Hitler’s satisfaction with the navy in general, and Dönitz in particular, grew especially in the final months of the war. As Michael Salewski has stated, in Dönitz Hitler saw the ideal soldier of the
Third Reich.
²²
Hitler praised the navy’s loyalty and fighting spirit on a number of occasions and was keenly aware that very few naval personnel had been implicated in the Resistance following the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944. In the autumn of 1944 Hitler remarked that in contrast to 1918, wherever the navy fought it now displayed exemplary behavior and unparalleled aggressiveness. Once when Admiral Fuchs dined with Hitler, a high-ranking Nazi Party official commented that Hitler was so interested in the navy that he would have become a naval officer if he had had the chance!
²³
Hitler also displayed great confidence in the naval units fighting on land in the war’s final months, declaring that the navy was an example for the other branches of Germany’s armed forces. Several times he commented on naval units’ steadfastness and insisted they receive the best equipment available, exclaiming that “first-class soldiers must receive first-class weapons.”
²⁴
In March 1945 Hitler considered appointing naval officers to command “fortresses” in the West. He declared that many fortresses, but as yet no ships, had been lost without fighting to the last man.
²⁵
Not only Hitler but also army generals like Guderian and Raus praised the courage of naval troops fighting as infantry.
²⁶

There are also many examples of Hitler’s personal fondness for Dönitz. During air raids, Hitler sometimes phoned Dönitz to make sure he had gone to his shelter, and on several occasions when Dönitz visited Führer Headquarters Hitler invited the grand admiral to dine with him.
²⁷
In the fall of 1943, in response to Dönitz’s request, Jodl issued instructions that in the future Dönitz should receive a copy of all proposals submitted to OKW that affected naval interests.
²⁸
This gave Dönitz advance warning of threats to what he perceived as the navy’s interests. With this knowledge he could arrive at Hitler’s headquarters with well-prepared arguments to contest unpalatable proposals.