Karl Donitz

Karl Dönitz (pronounced/karl ıdø felt like( listen)(Grünau bei Berlin, September 16, 1891-Aumühle, December 24, 1980) was a German navy who participated in the First and Second World War. Commanded the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany from January 30, 1943 until May 1, 1945, with the rank of Großadmiral. In his testament Adolf Hitler named him his successor as Reichspräsidenthe served from 30 April 1945 until 23 May 1945 when he was arrested by the British High Command.

Karl Dönitz was the one who ordered the signing of Germany's surrender to the Allies and the Soviet Union on May 8, 1945, thus ending the Second World War in Europe.

He was arrested by the Allies and taken to the city of Nuremberg, where he was convicted of crimes against peace and war crimes. He was accused of having trained his troops for war even in times of peace and of being responsible for Order No. 154, by which unlimited submarine warfare was developed, violating the principles of naval warfare. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison, and was released on October 1, 1956, retiring to live in a village near the port of Hamburg. He dedicated himself to writing about his experiences during the war, publishing two autobiographies. He died at age eighty-nine in 1980.

Biography

Youth and early years

Born in Grünau bei Berlin, near Berlin, Karl Dönitz entered the Imperial Navy in 1910 with the rank of cadet. He participated in the First World War as a member of the crew of the cruiser Breslau, which carried out various military operations in the Mediterranean Sea. When his ship became part of the fleet of the Ottoman Empire, Dönitz went into action in the Black Sea against forces of the Navy of the Russian Empire. In September 1916 he was transferred to the submarine force, where he served in three different units:

• FS U 39, carrying out five patrols between January and December 1917.
• SM UC 25, in which it conducts two patrols between March and September 1918.
• SM UB 68, in which it conducts a patrol between September and October 1918.

On October 4, 1918, his unit had watertight problems and, after shipwrecking and losing six men from the crew, Dönitz was captured by the British, remaining in a prison camp until 1920.^{[< i>citation required]} This year he participated in the Kapp coup d'état. He was part of the Reichswehr, being appointed lieutenant in 1921, lieutenant captain in 1928 and frigate captain in 1933 The following year he was commissioned as commander of the cruiser Emden, on which he carried out a one-year training cruise, in charge of training new Navy officers. In 1935 he was promoted to the rank of captain of the reconstituted Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany.

In September 1935 he received command of the 1st Wediggen submersible flotilla with only three units (U 7, U 8 and U 9). On January 1, 1936 he was appointed chief of the submarines or FdU (Führer der Unterseeboote), a position reformed on September 19, 1939 as BdU (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, supreme commander of the submarines). In January of that year, on the eve of the Second World War, Dönitz was promoted to the rank of commodore, and on October 10, once hostilities began, to that of rear admiral.

World War II

Before the Second World War, Dönitz had pushed for the German fleet to be based on submarines, as he considered that surface ships were highly vulnerable and, furthermore, the British Navy was much more powerful in this type of vessel. Of surface. Dönitz's calculations to remove Britain from the war and gain dominance of the Atlantic Ocean required a fleet of three hundred submersibles to cut off Allied supplies. In an opposite position was Admiral Erich Raeder, more conservative and who did not trust the German ability to confront the English fleet, who was then commander of the submarine force or U-Boote (according to the name in German), where he would achieve fame by commanding these forces during the Battle of the Atlantic.

At the beginning of the conflict, Dönitz found that the fleet was not prepared for war. It barely had fifty submersibles, some short-range or coastal, such as the Type II U-Boat. The Führer requested that such units be assigned to combat British Army units, instead of attacking supply units. Despite the above, and in the face of the serious defeat caused by the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, the admiral managed to reinforce his attacks against the merchant fleet, obtaining great triumphs.

However, direct operations against warships proved contrary to the German fleet, so the units focused on the objectives that Dönitz had already advanced in his day: merchant ships. In 1941, Dönitz decided to implement a new strategy in response to the introduction of supply convoys by Great Britain, which consisted of gathering his submarines and forming a long line of patrolling and using signals to approach the enemy with a stop. overcome the enemy's naval defense. This strategy was very effective in its first uses. The damage caused to the supply convoys was very great and the German navy received the first Type VII submersibles. But victory could not be achieved for two reasons. First, the entry of the United States into the conflict in December 1941 caused a serious change in the balance of naval forces; and second, obtaining the Enigma cryptographic machine allowed the Allies to decipher messages between German naval units. Only on February 1, 1942 did the Triton units of the fleet receive improved Enigma machines (M4), despite which their codes were deciphered within ten months by the Allies. During this interval, his forces again achieved great successes against the Allied convoy system.

Dönitz was promoted on January 30, 1943 to the rank of grand admiral (Großadmiral), equivalent to that of Generalfeldmarschall of the Heer and the Luftwaffe. This promotion in turn gave him the position of Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine or Supreme Chief of the Kriegsmarine, the highest position in the Oberkommando der Marine, replacing also Grand Admiral Erich Raeder in office. This did not prevent Dönitz from continuing to command the submarine warfare units.

At the end of the war, the last models of operational German submarines, the type XXI and type XXIII, were captured intact by the Allies, mainly North American and Soviet. These served as a basis for developing classes of submarines equipped with the advances of German naval engineering.

The capitulation

In the last days of the war, Hitler left Dönitz as heir to the Third Reich in his will, much to the surprise of the German High Command, a position he assumed on April 30, 1945 after Hitler's suicide. No He received the title of Führer, but he did receive that of Reichspräsident or head of state. On May 7, 1945, he authorized General Alfred Jodl to sign the German capitulation. On May 8, the surrender to the French, Americans and British in Reims and to the Soviets in Berlin came into effect. The next day Dönitz gave the order to surrender to all German forces. Dönitz then retreated to Flensburg-Mürwik, near the border with Denmark, ^{[citation needed]} and he continued holding meetings with his cabinet and verifying that his orders were carried out. In this way he ordered that the death penalty continue to be applied to army deserters and mutineers. The Allies never recognized Dönitz or his government, although they allowed him to continue in command of the units that had already surrendered and were moving through Europe.

On May 22, his assistant Lüdde-Neurath informed him that the Allied Control Council demanded that the next morning, accompanied by Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and Jodl, he transfer aboard the ship "Patria", where he was housed said commission. Once there, they boarded the ship without honors of any kind, except for the accompaniment of the flashes of the photographers' cameras. In front of a table where Dönitz, Jodl and Friedeburg were sitting, were seated the heads of the Allied Control Commission, formed by American Major General Rooks, Soviet General Truskov and British General Ford. After General Rooks read a communication in which it was stated that, by order of Eisenhower, he and the High Command of the Wehrmacht were detained, they were considered prisoners of war. When asked if he had anything to object, he simply nodded, saying: "Any word would be superfluous."

The Nuremberg trial and its final days

In the Nuremberg trials he faced charges of war crimes and crimes against peace. He was not accused of crimes against humanity, but he was accused of planning the war and giving orders not to provide aid to shipwrecked people in submarine attacks. This was the most important accusation and was based on a direct order given by Dönitz in 1942, after the sinking of the liner Laconia with thousands of British, Polish and Italian shipwrecked people. The submarine commander organized the rescue of the shipwrecked and declared the area neutral by Germany to allow the rescue. When the submarine was bombed by an Allied plane during the rescue, Dönitz literally ordered that:

"The rescue of ships thrown on the floor is forbidden, that is, to collect the shipwrecks or distribute food and drinking water. Because salvation is contrary to the most elementary demands of war at sea. "

Convicted of two of the three charges, he was sentenced to ten years to be served in Spandau prison. At first it was one of the most discussed sentences, given that Dönitz supposedly maintained a strictly military condition, equivalent to of the allied military. In this sense, Dönitz's defender presented an affidavit from American Admiral Chester Nimitz, in which he recognized that in the conflict with Japan, the Allies used the same tactics of not rescuing shipwrecked people.

These considerations have been, however, refuted by several historians of the Second World War, including the British Max Hastings. For them, Dönitz's role with his government in the aftermath of the war did nothing but prolong the carnage that loomed over Germany and the Allies. Not capitulating immediately after assuming his government was a decision that cost thousands of additional lives, when the outcome of the conflict was evident to everyone. By his express orders, death sentences continued to be applied to deserters and mutineers, continuing a senseless fight by the German Armed Forces on the Eastern Front.

The behavior that Dönitz showed during his brief and grotesque appearance as the last Fuehrer gave the transpire with his pretensions to make him see that he was just a Navy officer who had fallen into bad companies. He was lucky to escape from the loaf during the Nuremberg trials.

Max Hastings

His stay in prison did not prevent him from participating in the 1954 presidential elections, although he was far from his goal. After being released on October 1, 1956, he retired to the small village of Aumühle near Hamburg. There he wrote two books about his experiences as a sailor and briefly head of state. He died on December 24, 1980, and his former comrades-in-arms attended his funeral, held on January 6, 1981. The German government of the time prohibited the officers of the reconstituted Bundesmarine from wearing uniform, due to their political responsibilities during the Third Reich.

Decorations

• 07/11/1914: Iron Cross, 2nd class
• 05/05/1916: Iron Cross, 1st class
• 18/09/1939: Bar for your 2nd class Iron Cross 1914
• 20/12/1939: Bar for your 1st class Iron Cross 1916
• 27/02/1940: U-Bootkriegsabzeichen
• 21/04/1940: Cruz de Caballero
• 06/04/1943: Cross of Knight with Roble Sheets

Military ranks

• 01/04/1910: Seekadett
• 15/04/1911: Fähnrich zur See
• 27/09/1913: Leutnant zur See
• 22/03/1916: Oberleutnant zur See
• 01/01/1921: Kapitänleutnant
• 01/11/1928: Korvettenkapitän
• 01/10/1933: Fregattenkapitän
• 01/10/1935: Kapitän zur See
• 01/10/1939: Konteradmiral
• 01/09/1940: Vizeadmiral
• 14/03/1942: Admiral
• 30/01/1943: Großadmiral

Source:

Works

• Ten years and twenty days. Hamburg, 1958. Published in Spain in 2005 with the same title ISBN 84-9734-291-7.
• My life as a soldier or "My random life." Berlin, 1968.