Karl Dönitz (help·info) (pronounced [ˈdøːnɪts]) (September 16, 1891 – December 24, 1980) was a naval leader in Germany during World War II. Despite never joining the NSDAP, Dönitz attained the high rank of Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) and served as Commander in Chief of Submarines (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote or B. d. U.), and later Commander in Chief of the German Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine). Under his command, the U-boat fleet fought the famous Battle of the Atlantic. He also served as President of Germany for twenty days following Adolf Hitler's suicide.
He was charged and convicted of war crimes and served a sentence of 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 the international law.[1]
Early life and career
Dönitz was born in Grünau near Berlin to Emil Dönitz and Anna Beyer (d. March 6, 1895). His father was an engineer. Karl had an older brother named Friedrich Dönitz. In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the German Imperial Navy (Kaiserliche Marine), becoming a sea-cadet (Seekadett) on April 4. On April 15, 1911, he became a midshipman (Fähnrich zur See), the rank given to those who had served for one year as officer's apprentice.
On September 27, 1913, Dönitz was commissioned as an ensign (Leutnant zur See). When World War I began, he served on the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Mediterranean Sea. In August 1914, Breslau began operating out of Constantinople (Istanbul) (part of the Ottoman Empire), engaging Russian forces in the Black Sea. On March 22, 1916, Dönitz was promoted to second lieutenant (Oberleutnant zur See); in October of that year he was transferred to the small submarine UC 68.
On 4 October 1918, Dönitz was captured by the British; he remained a prisoner of war in a British prison camp until his release in July 1919, and returned to Germany in 1920. While back in Germany, Dönitz continued his naval career, and became a first lieutenant (Kapitänleutnant) on January 10, 1921 in the new Vorläufige Reichsmarine, the naval arm of the Weimar Republic Reichswehr. He commanded torpedo boats by 1928, becoming a lieutenant commander (Korvettenkapitän) on November 1 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 yearlong world cruise in preparation for a future officer's commission. The ship returned to Germany at Wilhelmshaven in July 1935, and on 1 September Dönitz was promoted to captain (Kapitän zur See) in the new Kriegsmarine. Dönitz was placed in command of the 1st U-boat flotilla, Wediggen, which comprised three U-boats: U 7, U 8, and U 9.
Before World War II
Karl Dönitz as an
Oberleutnant aboard
U-39 in World War I
Before the war, Dönitz had pressed for the conversion of the German fleet to one that would be made up almost entirely of U-boats. He advocated a strategy of attack only against merchant shipping, targets that were relatively safe to attack. He pointed out that 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 claimed that with a fleet of 300 of the newer Type VII U-boats, Germany would knock Britain out of the war. In order to deal with the ever-present escort ships, he proposed grouping several subs together into a "wolf pack," overwhelming the defence.
At the time many, including Dönitz's commander, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, felt that such talk marked him as a weakling. The two constantly fought for funding priorities within the Navy, while at the same time fighting with Hitler's friends such as Hermann Göring in the Luftwaffe, who received much attention. Raeder had a somewhat darker attitude; notably he apparently did not believe the German fleet of capital ships was of much use, since the Kriegsmarine surface fleet was much smaller than Great Britain's, commenting at one time that all they could hope to do was to die valiantly. Dönitz, in contrast, had no such fatalism.
Role in World War II
When the war started in 1939, Dönitz had recently been appointed commodore (Kommodore) on January 28, 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 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 Hitler calling on him to dedicate boats to military actions operating 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 September 1, 1939, Dönitz became a Rear Admiral (Konteradmiral) and commander of submarines ("Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote"); on September 1 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 boats, and much better operational planning led to increasing numbers of "kills." On December 11, 1941, following Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, Dönitz immediately planned for Operation Paukenschlag (commonly Drumbeat, with connotations of "tattoo" or "thunderbolt" in German), against the eastern coast shipping. Carried out the next month, with only nine U-boats, it had dramatic and far-reaching results.
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 February 1, 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 boats had increased to the point where Dönitz was finally able to conduct mass attacks by packs of submarines, which became known as Rudel ("pack"). Allied shipping losses shot up tremendously, and there was serious concern for a while about the state of British fuel supplies. In 1943, Dönitz replaced Erich Raeder as the Commander in Chief of the War Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine).
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.
In a way, Dönitz helped bring about the loss of his U-boats. He was a very involved man, often contacting U-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 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).
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 May 19, 1943, when his boat was sunk in the North Atlantic with the loss of its entire crew. After this loss, Peter's older brother, Klaus, was allowed to leave combat duty and began studying to be a naval doctor. Dönitz lost Klaus almost a year after Peter died, on May 13, 1944. Klaus convinced his friends to let him go on the fast torpedo attack boat S 141 for a raid on the Selsey off the coast of England on his twenty-fourth birthday. The boat was destroyed and Klaus died, even though six others were rescued.
Hitler's successor
In his last testament, Adolf Hitler surprisingly designated Dönitz as his successor as Head of State (Staatsoberhaupt), expelling both Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the Nazi Party. 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). Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and Goebbels followed suit a day later.
Dönitz became the sole representative of the crumbling Reich. The rapidly advancing Allied forces limited his 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. On May 7, 1945 he authorized the Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, to sign the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies. The surrender documents included the phrase "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours Central European Time on 8 May 1945." The next day, shortly before midnight, Jodl repeated the signing in Berlin at Zhukov's headquarters and at the time specified the end of World War II in Europe occurred.
Dönitz appointed Ludwig von Krosigk as Chancellor (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, fearing vengeful Soviet reprisals. However his government was not recognized by the Allies and was dissolved when its members were captured and arrested by British forces on May 23, 1945, at Flensburg.
Trial and later years
Dönitz's memoirs, entitled
Ten Years and Twenty Days, were published in
1958.
Following the war, Dönitz went on trial as a war criminal in the Nuremberg Trials. Unlike many of the other defendants, he was not charged with crimes against humanity, although in his speeches he had thanked Hitler for showing the "danger of poison of Jewry". However, he was charged with "Conspiracy to wage aggressive war" (count one), "Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression" (count two), and "crimes against the laws of war" (count three). Specifically, he faced charges of waging unrestricted submarine warfare and of issuing an order after the Laconia incident not to rescue survivors from ships attacked by submarine.
As one of the witnesses in his own defence, Dönitz produced an affidavit from American Admiral Chester Nimitz who testified that the United States had used unrestricted warfare as a tactic in the Pacific and that American submarines did not rescue survivors in situations where their own safety was in question. Despite this, the tribunal found Dönitz guilty of charges two and three, although it stated that in light of Nimitz's affidavit that Dönitz's order to conduct unrestricted warfare would not be included in the sentence. Thus, he was sentenced to eleven and a half years. He served ten years in Spandau Prison, West Berlin.
Of all the defendants at Nuremberg, the verdict against Dönitz was probably the most controversial; Dönitz always maintained that he did nothing that his Allied counterparts did not. Testifying to the controversial nature of the decision, numerous Allied officers sent letters to Dönitz expressing their dismay over the verdict of his trial.
Dönitz was released on October 1, 1956, and he retired to the small village of Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein, near Hamburg. There he worked on two books. His memoirs, Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage ("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 (20 days); hence the title. 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 Soldier's Life"). Most editions today combine both Mein wechselvolles Leben and Mein soldatisches Leben into a single book.
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. After Dönitz died of a heart attack on 24 December 1980 in Aumühle, many former servicemen and foreign naval officers came to pay their respects at his funeral on January 6, 1981.
External links
References
Footnotes
- ↑ Judgement : Doenitz the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
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.
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz under GFDL
