Dönitz: The Last Führer (5 page)

Karl Dönitz entered into his new environment with enthusiasm, so it appears from his Memoirs, from the very beginning: ‘How interesting, almost enrapturing was Kiel harbour, where at weekends warships, battleships and cruisers lay at the buoys. How interesting the long mole at Kiel-Wik where on working days torpedo boats lay alongside and cast off …’
²⁷
He wrote these recollections late in life, lonely after a series of personal tragedies, and dwelling, according to one discerning visitor, ‘increasingly in his wonderful past’.
²⁸
But what sailor in old age does not look back to the innocent days of youth when shared expectation of adventure and new lands and the first indescribable smells of ships and salt-water return sharp-edged and glowing again in the imagination? Certainly for Dönitz the impact of his service initiation by a Spartan regime of infantry drill and hardening physical training in Kiel shone ‘in altogether beautiful memory’.
²⁹

After six weeks acquiring a soldier-like bearing the cadets were sent to schoolships: Dönitz and 54 others went to the training cruiser
Hertha
. Here, during a cruise to the Mediterranean, they learnt the basic sailors’ skills practically about the ship and in the boats, also acquiring a grounding in navigation, gunnery and engineroom practice—and spending three debilitating weeks stoking the boilers. It was a strenuous
regime deliberately made in the nature of an ordeal. They had to learn in just over ten months what officers in the Royal Navy, who entered at thirteen, picked up over five years. At times they were worked close to the limits of their strength. ‘Thus we had opportunity to test and prove ourselves and so gain a better knowledge of ourselves. God be thanked that it was so.’
³⁰

In such a forcing school comradeship is strong. Dönitz had already struck up a friendship with a cadet who stood next to him in the ranks when they fell in for the initial infantry training. Now they were in the same division and they became inseparable, according to Dönitz, sharing identical attitudes to their new life and their fellow cadets, working together, going ashore together. The youth was Hugo, Freiherr von Lamezan from a Bavarian family descended at some distance from the French nobility.

The two could scarcely have been more dissimilar: Dönitz reserved, deeply earnest, tight-lipped, the younger son of an aspiring father who had brought him up to the stern necessity for hard work and stamped him with the particularist arrogance—to use Karl Dönitz’s own phrase—of the North German, in fact Prussian, habit of mind, and von Lamezan, the aristocrat from the more easy-going south, whose darker complexion and features indicated the Latin blood that had mixed with the German in his forebears. Many deep friendships are cemented in just such contrasts. So it was with Dönitz and von Lamezan.

The officers placed in charge of the cadets had a great influence in this strenuously formative introduction to the service. The
Hertha
cadets were fortunate, according to Dönitz, in having first-rate officers, the senior of whom he described as ‘a model of quiet, superior, cultured behaviour’.
³¹
These not only supervised the training but sought to inculcate the ethos and standards of the service. Personal decency, appearance and bearing, Dönitz wrote, were accorded the highest priority, and it is true this was perhaps the most important part of the cadet officers’ task, for it has to be stressed the Imperial Navy was very much the junior service, a
parvenu
, and exhibited all the characteristics of the
parvenu
. The compulsions of its officers were to be in attitude and conduct more noble than the nobility of the sword, in professional matters more professional than the officers of the Royal Navy, originally its professional model. Therefore each batch of chiefly middle-class, chiefly North German, but otherwise rather heterogeneous cadets from all regions of the empire had to be pressed into a common mould.

Asked in later life what was the fundamental principle of his training as a sea officer, Dönitz replied that it had been ‘the Kantian principle of the Categorical Imperative … duty fulfilment was the highest moral value’.
³²
No doubt this answer, written after the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was consciously or unconsciously as concerned with his defence—‘duty’—as with his training as a cadet. The same can be inferred from his concern to record the decency and fairness with which the naval cadets were brought up. ‘Next to the principle of duty fulfilment and bound up with it was the demand for decency, thus to do nothing that offended against the
moral
basis of good behaviour.’ And he wrote that he could think back with gratitude to the training and example given by his two sea cadet officers and ‘still today with a quiet, sure satisfaction have the feeling: it was all good, as it was managed and as it turned out’.
³³

It turned out a disaster from almost every point of view except perhaps narrow and specialized efficiency. More valuable for any study of German naval training of the period, and more interesting so far as his own character-formation is concerned, is what he failed to reveal in his memoirs: he stressed the extraordinary physical demands made on the cadets but not the brutal punishments still in vogue and practised particularly on the cabin boys, the nucleus of the future petty officer corps, who were also trained in these schoolships. Flogging was still common, and for minor breaches of the regulations cabin boys were still tied to the mast.
³⁴

Nor, of course, did he describe the conscious drive to foster social exclusiveness in the naval officer corps by stamping the cadets with the style of the Prussian Army officer; this meant adopting a harsh, high, rather nasal barking, a deliberately crude, often ungrammatical mode of speech, a prickly concern for personal and caste honour—the duel, the Kaiser’s consent to marry, the Court of Honour to try breaches of the code of chivalry—particularly with regard to the duel and relationships with unsuitable women!—and on board ship insistence on exaggerated marks of deference from specialist officers, petty officers and ratings to the person of the élite executive officer. Perhaps he did not mention these marks of overweening exclusiveness because they were the very things that later blew up in the Imperial naval officers’ faces.

Another significant omission was his failure to mention the tense and extraordinary relationship of the Imperial Navy towards Great Britain.
On the one hand the officers of the Royal Navy were respected as blood brothers; as Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia remarked to the British naval attaché, ‘other large European nations are not “white men” ’—a sentiment with which the attaché entirely concurred: ‘His Royal Highness voiced in a peculiarly British way a view that is very prevalent in our own service.’
³⁵
On the other hand, the Imperial Navy was being consciously and very strenuously prepared for
der Tag
, the day of reckoning when the younger, more virile, harder-working, more efficient German Navy, riding the tide of history—as defined by Treitschke—would wrest the trident from the ageing mistress of the seas in a great battle in the North Sea.

None of the cadets could have been unaware of this relationship. The battleship-building competition which Tirpitz had set in motion in 1897 had become the central issue in the external and internal affairs of the
Reich
—quite apart from its dramatic impact on naval affairs. It had forced England to react, first by securing an alliance with Japan and an
Entente
with her traditional rival France, enabling her to bring her battlefleets home from the Far East and the Mediterranean to face the growing German fleet in the North Sea, second by building superior battleships known after the name of the first as ‘Dreadnoughts’ and forcing Tirpitz into a qualitative as well as a numerical race. This had increased the financial stakes hugely, indeed exponentially, for the Royal Navy stepped up the size with each new class laid down and Tirpitz had to respond or drop out of the competition.

He had no intention of dropping out, and the Kaiser, his master, had no intention of allowing the British to dictate to him what size his Navy should be; consequently the fleet was increasingly built on borrowed money and the national debt and the taxes required to service the debt rose alarmingly. This had the opposite effect on the workers to that originally intended; it also re-opened the natural rift between the traditional land-owning Junkers and the new merchant-industrial class. In short, it had become thoroughly counter-productive, decreasing Germany’s freedom of movement in international affairs, drawing Great Britain into the alliance, ‘encircling’ and seeking to control her growing might, and seriously deepening the tensions within the
Reich
. So much was this the case that in Dönitz’s cadet year, 1910, the leader of the Social Democrats, August Bebel, took the extraordinary step of opening a clandestine correspondence with the British Foreign Office to alert them to the dangers.

The failure of the naval policy was plain by now to many in government circles, including von Bülow. But the Kaiser could not be deterred from building his magnificent fleet while Tirpitz—now ennobled—had his gaze fixed on a distant goal which even August Bebel had not fully discerned, and which was so fantastic as to cast serious doubt on his sanity. It was nothing less than a giant battlefleet of 60 ships, each with a lifespan of 20 years
fixed by law
, thus an unalterable building ‘tempo’ of three great ships a year, which the
Reichstag
would not be able to interfere with! His external goal was to neutralize the Royal Navy, his internal goal to emasculate the
Reichstag
!
³⁷

So the great naval race was destined to continue, the taxes to rise, the Socialists and the Junkers to become more entrenched in their opposition, until the crisis in the
Reich
became unmanageable by peaceful means—while on the other side of the North Sea the British became ever more certain that the great fleet could only be for use against the Royal Navy.

This was the background to Dönitz’s training years, the looming struggle with the Royal Navy and the deepening crisis and polarization inside the Bismarckian
Kaiserreich
, to which he was bound both by the moral imperative and by sentiment. As the British naval attaché reported in the same year, 1910, ‘The whole Navy without exception are absolutely devoted to HM [the Kaiser], not only as their Emperor but also particularly in a personal sense.’
³⁸

Two years earlier another British naval attaché had reported on the anti-English feeling that it had been necessary to create in Germany in order to obtain funds for the fleet; this feeling had now grown so out of
hand that he doubted whether the Kaiser ‘much as he might desire it, could restrain his own people from attempting to wrest the command of the sea from Britain if they saw a fairly good chance of doing so’. He concluded his report:

This was the vision that animated the Imperial Navy; it would be surprising indeed if the young Karl Dönitz remained unaffected by the approach to ‘
der Tag
’!

Of the influences about which he did write, probably the most important was the navigating officer of the
Hertha
, von Loewenfeld; he was a strong, highly individual character with a wide range of interests who was not afraid of unorthodox methods if the circumstances seemed to him to demand them. Later, in the chaos to which Germany was reduced after the First World War, Loewenfeld was one of those who formed a
Freikorps
of loyalist officers and men to fight against the anarchic Communist bands, which he put down with complete ruthlessness. There is no doubt that Dönitz hero-worshipped him, while he thought highly of the eager and capable cadet; indeed it is probable Dönitz was his favourite.

Halfway through this first year, while the cruiser lay off the turreted walls of Tangier, the cadets were examined in the professional knowledge they had gained. Dönitz came equal second.
⁴⁰
He recorded in his memoirs that first place went to Helmut Patzig, but did not mention that Patzig later distinguished himself as a U-boat Commander in the war by gunning down surviving doctors and nurses from a hospital ship he had torpedoed. The three top cadets were included in an invitation to the officers from the German Embassy where they were provided with horses and taken on ‘an unforgettably beautiful’ ride along the coast to Cape Spartel.

Three other shore excursions from the
Hertha
remained sharp and delightful in his memory when he came to write his memoirs. For the most part, though, it was unrelenting work, and they returned home
after the ten-month voyage with hands made callous from much boat-pulling and physical work and the good feeling that they had passed through a stern apprenticeship and become sailors. They had also had many corners knocked off; in Dönitz’s words, ‘the egocentricity [
Ichsucht
] of each, the human tendency to regard oneself as the most important, was dampened through the necessity in a community to show consideration for others’.
⁴¹
This is an interesting observation from Dönitz, since his later career showed that if the flames of his ego really had been dampened, they were by no means extinguished.