Karl Dönitz

Karl Dönitz

4th President of Germany
Term of office	April 30 1945 – May 23 1945
Preceded by	Adolf Hitler Führer und Reichskanzler
Succeeded by	Theodor Heuss (FRG) Wilhelm Pieck (GDR)
Date of birth	September 16 1891
Place of birth	Grünau, near Berlin
Date of death	December 24 1980 (aged 89)
Place of death	Aumühle, near Hamburg
Spouse
Political party	None

Karl Dönitz (IPA pronunciation: [ˈdøːnɪts] ); September 16, 1891–December 24, 1980) was a German naval leader, who was in command of the Kriegsmarine during World War II and was President of Germany for 23 days after Adolf Hitler suicide.

Dönitz was born in Grünau near Berlin. He entered the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) in 1911. During World War I, he served on surface ships before transferring to submarines. He remained in the navy after the war's conclusion and rose in the ranks of the Reichsmarine and Kriegsmarine, becoming a Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) and serving as Commander of Submarines (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, B.d.U.) and later 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 famous Battle of the Atlantic. He also served as Reichspräsident for 20 days following Adolf Hitler's suicide. He ended the war a prisoner-of-war of the British.

After the war he was charged and convicted of "crimes against peace" and "war crimes" 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 the international law. On his repatriation he moved to a small village near Hamburg. During his later years, he wrote two autobiographies covering different periods in his life.

Early life and career

Dönitz was born in Grünau near Berlin to Emil Dönitz and Anna Beyer. His father was an engineer. Karl had an older brother, Friedrich. In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the Imperial German 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 and had passed their first examination.

On September 27, 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 battle cruiser SMS Goeben were sold to the Ottoman navy and began operating out of Istanbul, under Rear Admiral Souchon, engaging Russian forces in the Black Sea. On March 22, 1916, Dönitz was promoted to sub-lieutenant (Oberleutnant zur See). When the Breslau/Midilli put into dock for repairs, he was temporarily assigned as airfield commander at the Dardanelles. From there, he requested his 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 September 5, 1918, he became commander of UC-68, operating in the Mediterranean. On October 4, 1918, this boat was sunk by British forces and Dönitz was taken prisoner.

He remained a prisoner of war in a British prison camp until his release in July 1919, and returned to Germany in 1920. Dönitz continued his naval career and became a Lieutenant (Kapitänleutnant) on January 10, 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 November 1, of that year.

In 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. The ship returned to Germany at Wilhelmshaven in July 1935, and in September Dönitz was promoted to Captain (Kapitän zur See) in the new Kriegsmarine. He wrote about the cruise in his autobiography. Dönitz was placed in command of the 1st U-boat flotilla Weddigen, which comprised three U-boats: U-7, U-8, and U-9.

Before World War II

After the Second World War, Dönitz and some of his supporters would create a mythology of maverick submariners led by him waging a lonely, seemingly doomed, yet ultimately triumphant battle against the “big ship” fanatics embodied by Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the naval commander-in-chief. Reality is somewhat more nuanced. Throughout 1935 and 1936, Dönitz fully shared Raeder's misgivings regarding submarines. This was due to the Germans' immense overestimation of the British Asdic's capability. That mistake is hard to fathom, given that the Germans' own attempts to develop a sonar system had been plagued with difficulties. In reality, the fabled Asdic only succeeded to detect submarines 1 in 10 times during exercises. It was in the words of Alan Hotham, British Director of Naval Intelligence, a "huge bluff."

German doctrine at the time, fully backed by Dönitz (based on the work of Captain A.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, however, Dönitz had become convinced that a new major campaign against merchant shipping was entirely practical and began pressing for the conversion of the German fleet to one that would be made up almost entirely of U-boats.

He advocated a strategy of attacking only 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 could knock Britain out of the war.

In order to deal with the inevitable convoys and their escort ships, he revived the World War I idea of grouping several subs together into a "wolf pack" to overwhelm the defence. In World War I, implementation had been difficult due to the limitations of available radios. In the interwar years, this was no longer the case, since the Germans had developed ultra high frequency transmitters believed to be unavailable to anyone else, which it was hoped made their radio communication unjammable, while the Enigma code machine made them secure, or so it was believed. Dönitz also adopted Wilhelm Marschall’s 1922 idea (claiming credit for it), of attacking the convoys using night surface, or very near surface, attacks. In the sonar age, this tactic had the added advantage of making a submarine undetectable by sonar.

At the time, many, including Raeder, felt that such talk marked him 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 fighting with Hitler's friends, such as Hermann Göring in the Luftwaffe, 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 that 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 that it could contend with the Royal Navy, though given that Raeder was skeptical of aircraft carriers, dismissing them "only gasoline tankers," it is doubtful whether any amount of time would have done him any good.

Dönitz, in contrast, had no such fatalism and set about intensively training his crews in the new tactics. The inexorable logic of the situation, namely the marked inferiority of the German surface fleet, would leave submarine warfare as Germany's only naval option once war broke out. (This, of course, was precisely the conclusion arrived at in the 1890s by France's Jeune Ecole, which proposed commerce raiding against Britain, a doctrine repudiated by Mahan.)

Role in World War II

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 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 United States east coast shipping. 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 then-sole remaining operational capital ship (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.

Hitler's successor

Old scan from Hitler's original testament where it shows that Donitz is chosen to succeed Hitler as Germany's Fuhrer

On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide and Goebbels followed suit a day later. In his last testament, Hitler surprisingly designated Dönitz 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).

On 1 May, following Goebbels' death, Dönitz became the sole representative of the crumbling 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 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 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 the German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, and northwestern Germany under Dönitz’s command were surrender to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in the Lüneburg Heath southeast of Hamburg, signaling the end of World War II in western Europe.

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 this 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. Dönitz was the highest ranking German captured.

War crimes trial

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, but was still the main reason why most judges wanted him convicted. He was imprisoned for ten years in Spandau Prison in West Berlin.

Later years

Dönitz was released on October 1, 1956, and he retired to the small village of Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein (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. Dönitz died of a heart attack on 24 December 1980 in Aumühle. As the last German officer with 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 January 6, 1981.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Dönitz, Karl: Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days. Da Capo Press, USA, 1997. ISBN 0306807645
• Padfield, Peter: Dönitz: The Last Führer. Cassell & Co, UK, 2001. ISBN 9780304358700
• Cremer, Peter. U-Boat Commander: A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic Annapolis, Md. : Naval Institute Press 1984. ISBN 0870219693
• Davidson, Eugene. The Trial of the Germans: Account of the Twenty-two Defendants Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri Press 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 London : Cassell, 1999. ISBN 0304352357
• Werner, Herbert A. Iron Coffins: A U-boat Commander's War, 1939-45London : Cassell Military, 1999. ISBN 0304353302
• Prien, Gunther. Fortunes of War: U-boat CommanderCerberus Pub 2005. ISBN 9781841450537

External links

• The Reichsmarine 1919–1935 Retrieved August 8, 2007.
• Kriegsmarine - The Navy 1935–1945 Retrieved August 8, 2007.
• Re-birth of the U-boat Retrieved August 8, 2007.
• Judgement: Dönitz Retrieved August 8, 2007.

Preceded by: Adolf Hitler (as Führer and Reich Chancellor)

President of Germany 1945

Succeeded by: Allied military occupation 1945–1949 Divided into East and West in 1949 West Germany: Theodor Heuss East Germany: Wilhelm Pieck

Principal defendants at the Nuremberg Trials

Bormann · Dönitz · Frank · Frick · Fritzsche · Funk · Göring · Hess · Jodl · Kaltenbrunner · Keitel · v.Neurath · v.Papen · Raeder · v.Ribbentrop · Rosenberg · Sauckel · Schacht · v.Schirach · Seyss-Inquart · Speer · Streicher

Key: Sentenced to death · Imprisoned · Acquitted

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