Dönitz: The Last Führer (6 page)

Leave and promotion to
Fähnrich zur See
(midshipman) followed the completion of the training ship voyage. Dönitz went to stay with Hugo von Lamezan in Munich and when they returned after their leave they shared the same four-berth room in the Navy School at Flensburg-Mürwik on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein which was to be their home for the next year. Here the training was almost entirely theoretical, the main subjects navigation and seamanship, which included naval regulations; they also learned engineering, gunnery, mining, hydraulics, mathematics, shipbuilding, ship recognition and had an hour a week of English and French. Dönitz and von Lamezan sat next to each other in all the classes.

It was once again a strict regime, drinking, smoking and making music banned inside the grounds, and outside drinking only permitted at inns used by the officer corps. The same went for the choice of seats at theatres and concerts. They had acquired their sea legs and their introduction to the officer class; now they were at their finishing school. In order to ensure they lacked none of the requisite accomplishments, they were given instruction in fencing, horse-riding and dancing. Dönitz did not mention any of these activities, nor duelling, which was officially approved despite many questions in the
Reichstag
, but records that he and von Lamezan bought a ‘National Jolly’ dinghy between them and sailed it at weekends.

He did not enjoy the Navy School as much as the
Hertha
since, he wrote, the instruction was so theoretical, and in the final exams at the end of the year came 39th, a disappointing position which he put down to his insufficient knowledge of the service rules and regulations; they were in the service handbooks and he had thought it unnecessary to learn them.

From the school in the early summer of 1912 the midshipmen passed on to specialized courses in gunnery, torpedo work and infantry exercises,
in which he did rather better. It was during this period on June 23rd 1912, that his father died, apparently in Jena. Dönitz’s elder brother was training for the naval reserve at this time and the two young men arranged for their father’s funeral on the island of Baltrum which he had loved. Whether this was his wish or a touching act of sentiment by the brothers is not clear. They followed the coffin borne by fishermen through the lonely cemetery past the plain wooden crosses marked with the names of the island families. ‘Today,’ he wrote late in life, ‘my father’s grave and my most wonderful youthful memories are joined.’
⁴²

For the final year of their training the midshipmen served aboard sea-going ships of the fleet. Dönitz was appointed to the modern light cruiser,
Breslau
—a disappointment since his appetite for travel had been whetted and she belonged to the Home Fleet. Waiting on the pier at Kiel to join her, and no doubt gazing out across the harbour to the low, four-funnelled silhouette, he found von Loewenfeld beside him, and learned that he was the cruiser’s First Officer.

‘Are you glad,’ the great man asked, using the familiar and for a midshipman most flattering ‘
du
’, ‘to have been posted to me in the
Breslau
? I applied for you.’

‘No,
Herr Kapitänleutnant,
’ Dönitz replied. ‘I wanted to go to the Far East in the cruiser squadron.’

‘Ungrateful toad!’
⁴³

So began a posting which was of great importance for Dönitz in a number of ways. For it turned out the cruiser was despatched to the Mediterranean and he was able to enjoy a culturally and socially broadening life very different from that he would have experienced in the Home Fleet, whose officers lived at the few northern bases in closed societies no different from those of garrison regiments in provincial towns, where monotony manifested itself in excessive drinking, indebtedness and petty disputation over rank and status.

Similarly in professional matters, he obtained a far wider experience and many more opportunities to exercise initiative and judgement than would have come his way in the fleet. Also as a protégé of his idol, von Loewenfeld, his natural ability was fostered in a demanding, often unconventional but rewarding atmosphere. The first officer’s confidence in him was revealed immediately he reported to the Captain, von Klitzing, for he was given the important and for an inexperienced
Fähnrich
unusual post of signals officer. This was a particularly significant
assignment in a scouting cruiser in those days of the infancy of wireless telegraphy, and says more for the opinion von Loewenfeld had formed of him than a written report. Late in life he could still recall his horror when he was told of his assignment, especially when he learned he had just five weeks to prepare himself for large-scale fleet exercises. He was spared this test at the last moment; war broke out in the Balkans and the
Breslau
was despatched to the Mediterranean to uphold Germany’s interests in company with the new battlecruiser,
Goeben
.

This was splendid news for the crew, and Dönitz when he heard the announcement so far forgot his reserve as to launch himself jubilantly at von Loewenfeld’s side; the first officer, as pleased as he, overlooked the indiscipline. They embarked stores, coal and ammunition hurriedly overnight and sailed early the next morning.

A few days and they were in milder southern weather, passing Gibraltar, the British lion couchant guarding the entrance to the middle sea; soon afterwards they were steaming through the narrows of Valletta harbour, Malta, to replenish bunkers at this British fortress commanding the centre of the strategic board. What, one wonders, were Dönitz’s thoughts as from his mooring station aft he gazed up at the formidable stone walls and battlements sparkling in the clear air and saw inside the basin the White Ensigns blowing from the jacks of the lines of warships of the British Mediterranean Fleet? He would have had more than a passing acquaintance with British naval history; it was studied with some fascination in the German service; Tirpitz and von Bülow had spent a great deal of the first decade of the century mesmerized by the 1807 Battle of Copenhagen when the British fleet had wiped out the Danish Navy in a pre-emptive strike without declaring war—and which the British First Sea Lord, Fisher, had been prepared to repeat, so it was believed, on the German Navy before it grew too large. ‘Lord Fisher of Copenhagen’ was the name he enjoyed in Berlin and Kiel.

Now a more serious danger threatened. It had been clarified by the very events in the Balkans which had brought the
Goeben
and
Breslau
racing out to the Mediterranean. For the fighting threatened to draw in Austria-Hungary against Serbia; Serbia was supported by Russia; Russia was in alliance with France, and as Germany was bound to support her ally, Austria, the great European war was only one rash step away. While the
Breslau
, after filling her bunkers in Grand Harbour, was on her way to the trouble spot, the German Ambassador in London was informed that in the event of the Balkans war spreading to the great
powers, Britain would find it impossible to remain neutral; she had formed links with France and Russia and she would come in on their side. The Ambassador sent a report of the interview to Berlin. The Kaiser erupted, scribbling impetuously in the margin, ‘The final struggle between the Slavs and Teutons will see the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and Gauls!’
⁴⁴
And he summoned his naval and military chiefs to a meeting at the Palace. This was not the goal he had sought when the new course had been set in 1897, but it was an inevitable way-station which should have been foreseen: Great Britain was bound by her vital interest to intervene if it seemed the balance of Europe would be altered; now the direct threat posed by Tirpitz’s fleet made it certain she
would
intervene. Yet the fleet was not remotely strong enough to influence the course of events—nor could it ever be without bankrupting the nation.

This was recognized by the Army, jealous and annoyed at the vast sums that had already been lavished on Tirpitz. In the fateful meeting that took place in the Palace at Potsdam that December 12th 1912, General von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff, called for war: war was unavoidable in the long run, therefore now was the time to strike before France or Russia could complete their preparations. Tirpitz objected that the Navy was not ready; he would prefer a postponement for eighteen months when the widening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal for dreadnoughts and the U-boat base in Heligoland would both be complete. ‘The Navy will not be ready even then!’ Moltke retorted contemptuously. ‘War! The sooner the better!’
⁴⁵

The Kaiser was no Bismarck; besides, the fleet was a factor that Bismarck had never had to reckon with. He was, however, an absolute monarch in all but name. The constitution he had inherited had been devised by Bismarck to fragment power and concentrate it all in his person, while giving the appearance of a democratic apparatus of lower and upper houses of parliament. In practice the elected lower house, the
Reichstag
, had only limited blocking functions—although too much for Tirpitz’s peace of mind—and could initiate nothing, and the upper house, the
Bundestag
, was controlled by Prussia. The Kaiser was King of Prussia and made the key appointments in his kingdom as, under his imperial crown, he made the key appointments in the government of the
Reich
; moreover, as Commander in Chief of the armed forces he made the key appointments in the Army and Navy, both of which were answerable to him alone, not to the civil government, nor to a defence committee of any kind. Tirpitz was one such appointment and it was
entirely due to the Kaiser’s support that he had been able to distort the finances and the internal and external relationships of the
Reich
to such an alarming extent against the opposition of the Army and—since it had been realized what his policy was leading to—against successive governments. Now the Kaiser was faced with the consequences.

He was incapable of dealing with them. Whether anyone could have controlled the Bismarckian
Kaiserreich
at this potent stage in its development may be doubted; one thing is certain: Kaiser Wilhelm II was not the man.

During his childhood he had been alternately spoilt by his mother, Queen Victoria’s daughter, ‘Vicky’, and tortured by doctors trying to compensate for a tilt to his neck, lack of balance and a deformed arm, while his education had been entrusted to a humourless tutor who had sought to instil with a pitiless regime of work just those ‘Prussian’ virtues in which Dönitz had been grounded, hard work, self-denial, duty. Earnestly as the tutor had worked, he found the boy unable to concentrate on any subject; he had a lively intelligence and a good memory but his mind flitted. He also showed alarming inclinations to selfishness, vanity, autocracy, traits which his mother had also sadly noted, so it was decided to send him to school to mix with other boys. Far from having the ego knocked out of him, the young Prince had found that he could use his position and a natural aptitude for telling amusing stories to enhance his self-esteem. Meanwhile Bismarck was also shamelessly playing up to his vanity in an attempt to sever him from the dangerously liberal influences of his mother, ‘the English Princess’.

From school he travelled the Hohenzollern monarch’s inevitable path to the First Regiment of Guards at Potsdam, the vaunting stronghold of all that was most swaggeringly masculine and Prussian, thus most autocratic and most alien to all the ideals his over-zealous mother had tried to instil in him. It is scarcely surprising that he emerged, to all appearances a monster of grotesque vainglory; in fact he lived much of his time in an interior world of Teutonic myth and suffered complete nervous prostration when real events forced themselves in upon him.

The outside world saw only a wilful braggart at the head of what had become the mightiest nation in Europe, one which, in his own inimitable idiom, sought its ‘rightful place in the sun’ and was prepared to use its ‘mailed fist’ to get there.

The reality was even more dangerous. Wilhelm was still incapable of concentration, his mind still flitted as it had as a boy; he could memorize
details of things that interested him, particularly specifications of all the world’s warships culled from
Jane’s Fighting Ships
, with a virtuosity that amazed all, and he could tell amusing Irish stories very well all night. But he was incapable of making any synthesis of his store of largely useless information or the signals entering his command post from the different interest groups within the
Reich
. Consequently he was incapable of making coherent policy decisions and sticking to them; he was constantly swayed by whim, vanity and the latest flatterer who caught his ear. The result was that what appeared from the outside to be the most dynamic and highly organized industrial nation in Europe was actually under no supreme command.
⁴⁶

This was epitomized in the result of the meeting of December 12th 1912. The civil government was not represented, the Army wanted an immediate Bismarckian war, the Navy was rightly alarmed at such a prospect, and Wilhelm, his vanity outraged by Great Britain once again setting him limits, and in any case compelled to play the compensatory role of ‘All-highest’ war lord, ordered not war—for that would have been real—but every preparation for war in the near future. Bills were to be prepared for increases in the Army and Navy, plans to be laid by both services for the invasion of England; the Foreign Ministry was to seek alliances wherever it could, the Press to prepare the people, warning them of the imminence of a Slavic invasion so that when it came to the day, they would know what they were fighting for.

Whether, as could be argued, this was a decision for war in eighteen months’ time—summer 1914—when dreadnought battleships would be able to traverse the Kiel Canal, or whether it was just another act in Wilhelm’s private theatre, is not important; the consequences were beyond measure. It not only violently increased the speed at which the
Reich
was moving towards collision with the rival powers, it convinced the Army which wanted to be convinced that war had indeed been decided on. The Army demanded and succeeded in obtaining the largest peacetime increase in its history, and—as contemptuous of the new enemy, Great Britain, as of the Navy which had brought Great Britain into the ring—finalized its plans for the continental war on two fronts.