Karl Dönitz

Karl Dönitz
Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, Admiral and Reichspräsident of Nazi Germany.
4th President of Germany
In office April 30 1945 – May 23 1945
Preceded by	Adolf Hitler Führer und Reichskanzler
Succeeded by	Allied military occupation 1945-1949 Theodor Heuss (FRG) Wilhelm Pieck (GDR)
Personal details
Born	180px (1891-09-16)September 16, 1891 in Berlin
Died	December 24, 1980(1980-12-24) (aged 89) Aumühle, near Hamburg
Resting place	180px
Nationality	German
Political party	None
Parent	180px

Template:Foreignchar Karl Dönitz (IPA: [ˈdøːnɪts] ) (16 September 1891 – 24 December 1980) was a German naval leader who commanded the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) during the second half of World War II. Dönitz was also President of Germany for 23 days after Adolf Hitler's suicide. For his role in World War II, Dönitz was referred to as "der Löwe" (the Lion).

Dönitz was born in the Berlin suburb of Grünau. He entered the Imperial German Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) in 1911. During World War I, he served on surface ships before transferring to submarines (U-boats). He remained in the navy after the war and rose through the ranks of the German Navy of the Weimar Republic (Reichsmarine) and the German Navy of the Third Reich (Kriegsmarine). He became a Großadmiral and served as Commander of Submarines (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, B.d.U.), and later was Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine), despite never joining the Nazi Party. Under his command, the U-boat fleet fought the Battle of the Atlantic. He also served as Reichspräsident for 23 days following Adolf Hitler's suicide. He ended the war as a prisoner-of-war of the British.

After the war Dönitz was charged and convicted of "crimes against peace" and "war crimes" at the Nuremberg Trials and served ten years. By ordering the unrestricted submarine warfare conducted by Germany in the North Atlantic, he caused Germany to be in breach of the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936. However, as evidence of similar conduct by the Allies was presented at his trial, his sentence was not assessed on the grounds of this breach of international law. On his repatriation Dönitz moved to Aumühle, a small village near Hamburg. During his later years, he wrote two autobiographies covering different periods in his life. He died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 1980.

Early life and career

Dönitz was born in Grünau in Berlin, Germany. His parents were Emil Dönitz, an engineer, and Anna Beyer. Karl had an older brother, Friedrich.

In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the Imperial German Navy, or Kaiserliche Marine. He became a sea-cadet (Seekadett) on 4 April. On 15 April, 1911, he became a midshipman (Fähnrich zur See), the rank given to those who had served for one year as officer's apprentice and had passed their first examination.

On 27 September, 1913, Dönitz was commissioned as an Acting Sub-Lieutenant (Leutnant zur See). When World War I began, he served on the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Mediterranean Sea. In August 1914, Breslau and the battlecruiser SMS Goeben were sold to the Ottoman navy; the ships were retitled the Midilli and the Yavuz Sultan Selim, respectively. They began operating out of Constantinople, under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, engaging Russian forces in the Black Sea. On 22 March, 1916, Dönitz was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant (Oberleutnant zur See). When the Midilli put into dock for repairs, he was temporarily assigned as airfield commander at the Dardanelles. From there, he requested a transfer to the submarine forces, which became effective in October 1916. He served as watch officer on U-39, and from February 1918 onward as commander of UC-25. On 5 September 1918, he became commander of UC-68, operating in the Mediterranean. On 4 October, this boat was sunk by British forces and Dönitz was taken prisoner. He remained in a British camp as a prisoner of war until his release in July 1919 and returned to Germany in 1920.

Dönitz continued his naval career and became a lieutenant (Kapitänleutnant) on 10 January, 1921, in the new Vorläufige Reichsmarine, the naval arm of the Weimar Republic’s Armed Forces (Reichswehr). He commanded torpedo boats by 1928, becoming a Lieutenant-Commander (Korvettenkapitän) on 1 November of that year.

On 1 September 1933, Dönitz became a full Commander (Fregattenkapitän), and in 1934 was put in command of the cruiser Emden, the ship on which cadets and midshipmen took a year-long world cruise in preparation for a future officer's commission. On 1 September 1935, Dönitz was promoted to Captain (Kapitän zur See) in the new German Navy (Kriegsmarine). He was placed in command of the 1st U-boat Flotilla Weddigen, which included the U-7, U-8, and U-9.

Before World War II

Throughout 1935 and 1936, Dönitz had misgivings regarding submarines due to German overestimation of the British Asdic's capability. In reality, Asdic could detect submarines only 1 in 10 times during exercises. In the words of Alan Hotham, British Director of Naval Intelligence, Asdic was a "huge bluff".

German doctrine at the time, based on the work of Captain Afred T. Mahan and shared by all major navies, called for the submarines to be integrated with the surface fleet and employed against enemy warships. By November 1937, Dönitz became convinced that a major campaign against merchant shipping was practical and began pressing for the conversion of the German fleet almost entirely to U-boats. He advocated a strategy of attacking only merchant ships, targets that were relatively safe to attack. He pointed out destroying Britain's fleet of oil tankers would starve the Royal Navy of supplies needed to run their ships, which would be just as effective as sinking them. He thought that a German fleet of 300 of the newer Type VII U-boats could knock Britain out of the war.

Dönitz revived the World War I idea of grouping several subs together into a "wolf pack" to overwhelm a merchant convoy's defensive escorts. Implementation of wolf packs had been difficult in World War I due to the limitations of available radios. In the interwar years the Germans developed ultra high frequency transmitters which it was hoped made their radio communication unjammable, while the Enigma code machine made communications secure (or so it was believed). Dönitz also adopted Wilhelm Marschall’s 1922 idea (claiming credit for it) of attacking the convoys using surface or very near surface night attacks. This tactic had the added advantage of making a submarine undetectable by sonar.

At the time, many, including Erich Raeder, felt such talk marked Dönitz as a weakling. Dönitz was alone among senior naval officers, including some former submariners, in believing in a new submarine war on trade. The two constantly argued over funding priorities within the Navy, while at the same time competing with Hitler's friends, such as Hermann Göring, who received much attention.

Since the Kriegsmarine surface fleet was much smaller than the Royal Navy's, Raeder believed any war with Britain in the near future would doom it to uselessness, commenting at one time all they could hope to do was die valiantly. He based his hopes on war being delayed until the navy's grandiose “Z Plan” had expanded Germany's surface fleet to the point it could contend with the Royal Navy. Dönitz, in contrast, had no such fatalism and set about intensively training his crews in the new tactics. The marked inferiority of the German surface fleet would leave submarine warfare as Germany's only naval option once war broke out.

Role in World War II

File:Donitz with hitler.jpg

With Hitler

When the war started in 1939, Dönitz had recently been promoted to Commodore (Kommodore) on 28 January 1939, and leader of submarines (Führer der Unterseeboote). The German Navy was unprepared for war, having anticipated the war to begin in 1945, as anticipated by previously established war plans which the Plan Z was tailored for. The "Z" Plan called for a balanced fleet with a greatly increased number of surface capital ships, including several aircraft carriers. At the time war did start, Dönitz's U-boat force included only 57 boats, many of them short-range. He made do with what he had, while being harassed by Raeder and with Hitler calling on him to dedicate boats to military actions against the British fleet directly. These operations were generally unsuccessful, while the other boats continued to do well against Dönitz's primary targets of merchant shipping.

On 1 October 1939, Dönitz became a rear admiral (Konteradmiral) and commander of submarines (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote); on 1 September the following year, he was made a vice admiral (Vizeadmiral).

By 1941, the delivery of new Type VII U-boats had improved to the point where operations were having a real effect on the British wartime economy. Although production of merchant ships shot up in response, improved torpedoes, better U-boats, and much better operational planning led to increasing numbers of "kills". On 11 December 1941, following Adolf Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, Dönitz immediately planned for Operation Paukenschlag against shipping along the East Coast of the United States. Carried out the next month, with only nine U-boats, it had dramatic and far-reaching results. The U.S. Navy was entirely unprepared for antisubmarine warfare, despite having had two years of British experience to learn from, and committed every imaginable mistake. Shipping losses which appeared to be coming under control as the British Navy gradually adapted to the new challenge instantly skyrocketed.

On at least two occasions, Allied success against U-boat operations led Dönitz to investigate possible reasons. Among those considered were espionage and Allied interception and decoding of German Navy communications (the naval version of Enigma). Both investigations into communications security came to the conclusion that espionage was more likely, if Allied success had not been accidental. Nevertheless, Dönitz ordered his U-boat fleet to use an improved version of the Enigma machine (intended to be even more secure)—the M4—for communications within the fleet, on 1 February 1942. The navy was the only branch to use the improved version; the rest of the German military continued to use their then current versions of Enigma. The new network was termed Triton (Shark to the Allies). For a time, this change in encryption between submarines caused considerable difficulty for Allied codebreakers; it took ten months before Shark traffic could again be read (see also Ultra and Cryptanalysis of the Enigma).

By the end of 1942, the production of Type VII U-boats had increased to the point where Dönitz was finally able to conduct mass attacks by groups of submarines, a tactic he called Rudel and became known as "Wolf pack" (Wolfrudel) in English. Allied shipping losses shot up tremendously, and there was serious concern for a while about the state of British fuel supplies.

During 1943, the war in the Atlantic turned against the Germans, but Dönitz continued to push for more U-boat construction and technological development. At the end of the war the German submarine fleet was by far the most advanced in the world, and late war examples such as the Type XXI U-boat served as models for Soviet and American construction after the war. These, the schnorchel boats, and the Type IX U-boat, appeared very late because of Dönitz's indifference, even hostility, to new technology. His opposition to the larger Type IX was not unique; Admiral Thomas Hart, who commanded the United States Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines at the outbreak of the Pacific War, opposed fleet boats as "too luxurious".

Dönitz was very personally involved in operations, often contacting his boats up to seventy times a day with questions such as their position, fuel supply, and other “minutiae”. This helped compromise his cyphers, by giving the Allies more messages to work from. The replies also enabled the Allies to use direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its radio, track it, and attack it (often with aircraft able to sink it with impunity).

Dönitz replaced Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine) on 30 January 1943. It was Dönitz who was able to convince Hitler not to scrap the remaining ships of the surface fleet. Despite hoping to continue to use them as a fleet in being, the Kriegsmarine continued losing what few capital ships it had. In September, the battleship Tirpitz was put out of action for months by a British midget submarine. In December, he ordered the battlecruiser Scharnhorst under Konteradmiral Erich Bey to attack Soviet-bound convoys, but she was sunk in the resulting encounter with superior British forces led by the battleship HMS Duke of York.

Both of Dönitz's sons died during World War II. His younger son, Peter, was a watch officer on U-954 and was killed on 19 May 1943, when his boat was sunk in the North Atlantic with the loss of its entire crew. After this loss, the older brother, Klaus, was allowed to leave combat duty and began studying to be a naval doctor. Klaus would be killed on 13 May 1944. Klaus convinced his friends to let him go on the fast torpedo attack boat S-141 for a raid on HMS Selsey off the coast of England on his twenty-fourth birthday. The boat was destroyed and Klaus died, even though six others were rescued.

Relation to Jews and Nazism

On German Heroes' Day on 12 March 1944, Dönitz declared that without Adolf Hitler, Germany would be beset by "poison of Jewry", the country destroyed due to lack of National Socialism which, as Dönitz declared, gave defiance of an uncompromising ideology. At the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz stated he 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".

Ideologically, Dönitz was antisemitic. He was also recorded on several occasions of speaking about Jews in the "tone of Gauleiters". In 1943 Dönitz attended a conference in German-occupied Poznań in which Heinrich Himmler gave the Posen Speech about the need to "exterminate Jewry completely and that the "Jewish question" could be solved in a year. Himmler's speech came only after Dönitz himself addressed the gathered.[1] Later, during the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz claimed to know nothing about the extermination of Jews and declared that nobody among "his men" thought about violence against Jews.

Dönitz told Leon Goldensohn, an American psychiatrist at Nuremberg, that "I never had any idea of the goings-on as far as Jews were concerned. Hitler said each man should take care of his business, and mine was U-boats and the navy". To Goldensohn, Dönitz also spoke of his support for Bernhard Rogge, who was of Jewish descent, when the Nazi Party began to persecute the admiral.

Hitler's successor

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Scan of Hitler's original testament showing that Dönitz was chosen to succeed Hitler as Germany's president.

On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide. In his last testament, Hitler expelled both Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the Nazi Party. He surprisingly designated Dönitz his successor as Head of State (Staatsoberhaupt) and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Significantly, Dönitz was not to become Führer, but rather President (Reichspräsident), a post Hitler had abolished years earlier. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was to become Head of Government and Chancellor of Germany (Reichskanzler), although he committed suicide a day after Hitler's death. Hitler believed the leaders of the army, air force, and SS had betrayed him; because the navy had been too small to majorly affect the war, the leader of the navy became the only possible successor by default..

On 1 May, following Goebbels' suicide, Dönitz became the sole representative of the crumbling German Reich. He appointed Count Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk as Reichskanzler and they attempted to form a government. During his brief period in office, Dönitz devoted most of his efforts to ensuring the loyalty of the German armed forces and trying to ensure German troops would surrender to the British or Americans and not the Soviets. He correctly feared vengeful Soviet reprisals. However, the Dönitz government was not recognized by the Allies and was for some days more or less ignored.

The rapidly advancing Allied forces limited the Dönitz government's jurisdiction to an area around Flensburg near the Danish border, where Dönitz's headquarters were located, along with Mürwik. Accordingly his administration was referred to as the Flensburg government. The following is Dönitz's description of his new government:

These considerations (the bare survival of the German people) which all pointed to the need for the creation of some sort of central government, took shape and form when I was joined by Graf Schwerin-Krosigk. In addition to discharging his duties as Foreign Minister and Minister of Finance, he formed the temporary government we needed and presided over the activities of its cabinet. Although he was restricted in his choice to those men who were in northern Germany, he nevertheless succeeded in forming a workmanlike cabinet of experts.

The picture of the military situation as a whole showed clearly that the war was lost. As there was also no possibility of effecting any improvement in Germany's overall position by political means, the only conclusion to which I, as Head of the State, could come was that the war must be brought to an end as quickly as possible, in order to prevent further bloodshed.

Late on 1 May, Heinrich Himmler attempted to make a place for himself in the Flensburg government. The following is Dönitz's description of his dismissal of Himmler:

At about midnight he arrived, accompanied by six armed SS officers, and was received by my aide-de-camp, Luedde-Neurath. I offered Himmler a chair and I myself sat down behind my writing desk, upon which lay, hidden by some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything of this sort in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be.

I handed Himmler the telegram containing my appointment. “Please read this,” I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed of consternation, spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. “Allow me,” he said, “to become the second man in your state.” I replied that that was out of the question and that there was no way in which I could make any use of his services.

Thus advised, he left me at about one o'clock in the morning. The showdown had taken place without force, and I felt relieved.

On 4 May, German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, and northwestern Germany under Dönitz’s command surrendered to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath southeast of Hamburg, signaling the end of World War II in western Europe.

Dönitz dentention report and mugshot from 1945.

On 7 May, Dönitz authorized the Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies. Jodl signed these surrender documents in Rheims, France. The surrender documents included the phrase, “All forces under German control to cease active operations at 23:01 hours Central European Time on 8 May 1945.” The next day, shortly before midnight, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel repeated the signing in Berlin at Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters, and, at the time specified, the Second World War in Europe ended.

On 23 May, the Dönitz government dissolved when its members were captured and arrested by British forces at Flensburg.

War crimes trial

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The Defender's dock, with Karl Donitz in the back row, first from left, wearing dark glasses.

Following the war, Dönitz was held as a prisoner of war by the victors, who accused him of war crimes. He was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg trials on three counts: (1) "conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity", (2) "Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression", and (3) "crimes against the laws of war". Among the war crimes charges, he was accused of waging unrestricted submarine warfare for issuing War Order No. 154 in 1939, and another similar order after the Laconia incident in 1942, not to rescue survivors from ships attacked by submarine. By issuing these two orders he was found guilty of causing Germany to be in breach of the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936.

Dönitz was found not guilty on count (1) of the Indictment, but guilty on counts (2) and (3) and was sentenced to ten years in prison. However, in view of all the facts proven, and in particular of an order of the British Admiralty announced on 8 May 1940, according to which all vessels should be sunk on sight in the Skagerrak, and the answers to interrogatories by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, stating that unrestricted submarine warfare had been carried on in the Pacific Ocean by the United States from the first day that nation entered the war, Dönitz's order to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare was not officially included in his sentence. He was imprisoned for ten years in Spandau Prison in West Berlin.

Later years

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A scan of the rare first edition of Dönitz’s memoirs in English, Ten Years and Twenty Days (1958).

Dönitz was released on 1 October 1956, and he retired to the small village of Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. There he worked on two books. His memoirs, Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage (Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days), appeared in Germany in 1958 and became available in an English translation the following year. This book recounted Dönitz's experiences as U-boat commander (ten years) and President of Germany (twenty days). In it, Dönitz explains the Nazi regime as a product of its time, but argues he was not a politician and thus not morally responsible for much of the regime’s crimes. He likewise criticizes dictatorship as a fundamentally flawed form of government and blames it for much of the Nazi era’s failings.

Dönitz’s second book, Mein wechselvolles Leben (My Ever-Changing Life) is less known, perhaps because it deals with the events of his life before 1934. This book was first published in 1968, and a new edition was released in 1998 with the revised title Mein soldatisches Leben (My Life as a Soldier). Most editions today combine Mein wechselvolles Leben and Mein soldatisches Leben into a single volume.

Late in his life, Dönitz’s reputation was rehabilitated to a large extent and he made every attempt to answer correspondence and autograph postcards for others. Unlike Albert Speer, Dönitz was unrepentant regarding his role in World War II[2][3][4]since he firmly believed no one will respect an individual who compromises with his belief or duty towards his nation in any way, whether an individual's betrayal was small or big. Of this conviction Dönitz writes (commenting on Himmler's high-level betrayal):

The betrayer of military secrets is a pariah, despised by every man and every nation. Even the enemy whom he serves has no respect for him, but merely uses him. Any nation which is not uncompromisingly unanimous in its condemnation of this type of treachery is undermining the very foundations of its own state, whatever its form of government may be.

Dönitz died of a heart attack on 24 December 1980, in Aumühle. As the last German officer with the rank of Grand Admiral, he was honored by many former servicemen and foreign naval officers who came to pay their respects at his funeral on 6 January 1981.

See also

• Naval officer ranks
• Wolf pack Endrass
• Wolf pack Blücher
• Wolf pack Hecht

References

• Dönitz, Karl, Grossadmiral. Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days. Da Capo Press, USA, 1997. ISBN 0306807645. (reprints 1958 German-language Athenäum-Verlag edition).
• Guðmundur Helgason. "Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (BdU) Karl Dönitz." at Uboat.net.
• Padfield, Peter. Dönitz: The Last Führer. Cassell & Co, UK, 2001

Background information

• Cremer, Peter. U-Boat Commander: A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic. 1984. ISBN 0870219693
• Davidson, Eugene. The Trial of the Germans: Account of the Twenty-two Defendants Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. 1997. ISBN 0826211399
• Hadley, Michael L. U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters. McGill-Queen's University Press: 1985. ISBN 0773508015.
• Macintyre, Donald. U-boat Killer. 1999. ISBN 0304352357
• Werner, Herbert A. Iron Coffins: A U-boat Commander's War, 1939–45. 1999. ISBN 0304353302
• Prien, Gunther. Fortunes of War: U-boat Commander. 2000. ISBN 0752420259
• Herwig, Holger H. Innovation ignored: The Submarrine problem in Murray, Williamson and Millet Allan R. ed. "Military Innovation in the Interwar Period". Cambridge University Press 1998
• Failure to Learn: American Anti-submarine Warfare in 1942 in Cohen, Eliot A. and Gooch, John. Military Misfortunes Vintage Books 1991

Further reading

• Jason Pipes The Reichsmarine 1919–1935
• Jason Pipes Kriegsmarine - The Navy 1935–1945
• Re-birth of the U-boat

External links

• Archives of news and details about Karl Dönitz