Karl Dönitz (; 16 September 1891 – 24 December 1980) was a German naval officer and politician who briefly succeeded Adolf Hitler as the head of state of Germany in the Nazi era after the latter's suicide during the Second World War in April 1945. He held this position until the dissolution of the Flensburg Government, about two weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies. As Supreme Commander of the Navy beginning in 1943, he played a major role in the naval history of the war.
He began his career in the Imperial German Navy before the First World War. In 1918, he was commanding , and was captured as a prisoner of war by British forces. As commander of UB-68, he attacked a convoy in the Mediterranean Sea while on patrol near Malta. Sinking one ship before the rest of the convoy outran his U-boat, Dönitz began to formulate the concept of U-boats operating in attack groups Rudeltaktik (German for "pack tactic", commonly called a "wolfpack") for greater efficiency, rather than operating independently.Thames Television (9 January 1974), 10. "Wolf Pack: U-Boats in the Atlantic (1939–1944)", retrieved 16 September 2023
By the start of the Second World War, Dönitz was supreme commander of the Kriegsmarine U-boat arm ( [BdU]). In January 1943, he achieved the rank of (grand admiral) and replaced Grand Admiral Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. He was the main enemy of Allied naval forces in the Battle of the Atlantic. From 1939 to 1943, the U-boats fought effectively but lost the initiative from May 1943. He ordered his submarines into battle until 1945 to relieve the pressure on other branches of the (armed forces). 648 U-boats were lost — 429 with no survivors. Furthermore, of these, 215 were lost on their first patrol. Around 30,000 of the 40,000 men who served in U-boats perished.
On 30 April 1945, following the suicide of Adolf Hitler and in accordance with his last will and testament, Dönitz was named Hitler's successor as head of state in what became known as the Goebbels cabinet after his second-in-command, Joseph Goebbels, until Goebbels's suicide led to Dönitz's cabinet being reformed into the Flensburg Government instead. On 7 May 1945, he ordered Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (German: (OKW)), to sign the German Instrument of Surrender in Reims, France, formally ending the War in Europe. Dönitz remained as head of state with the titles of President of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces until his cabinet was dissolved by the Allied powers on 23 May de facto and on 5 June de jure.
By his own admission, Dönitz was a dedicated Nazi and supporter of Hitler. Following the war, he was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg trials on three counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; and crimes against the laws of war. He was found not guilty of committing crimes against humanity, but guilty of committing crimes against peace and crimes against the laws of war. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment; following his release, he lived in a village near Hamburg until his death in late December 1980.
Early career and personal life
Dönitz was born on 16 September 1891 in Grünau, near Berlin, to Anna Beyer and Emil Dönitz, an engineer. Karl had an older brother. In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the ("Imperial Navy").
On 27 September 1913, Dönitz was commissioned as a (acting sub-lieutenant). When World War I began, he served on the light cruiser in the Mediterranean Sea. In August 1914, the Breslau and the battlecruiser were sold to the Ottoman Navy; the ships were renamed 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 . He requested a transfer to the submarine forces, which became effective on 1 October 1916. He attended the submariner's school at Flensburg-Mürwik and passed out on 3 January 1917. He served as watch officer on , and from February 1918 onward as commander of . On 2 July 1918, he became commander of , operating in the Mediterranean. On 4 October, after suffering technical difficulties, Dönitz was forced to surface and scuttle his boat. He was captured by the British and incarcerated in the Redmires camp near Sheffield. He remained a prisoner of war until 1919 and in 1920, he returned to Germany.
On 27 May 1916, Dönitz married a nurse named Ingeborg Weber (1893–1962), the daughter of the German general Erich Weber (1860–1933). They had three children, whom they raised as Protestant Christians: a daughter named Ursula (1917–1990) and their sons Klaus (1920–1944) and Peter (1922–1943).
Both of Dönitz's sons were killed in action during World War II. Peter was killed on 19 May 1943 when was sunk in the North Atlantic with all hands. Hitler had issued a policy stating that if a senior officer such as Dönitz lost a son in battle and had other sons in the military, the latter could withdraw from combat and return to civilian life. After Peter's death, Klaus was forbidden to have any combat role and was allowed to leave the military to begin studying to become a naval doctor. However, on 13 May 1944, his 24th birthday, he persuaded his friends to let him go on the E-boat S-141 for a raid on Selsey. The boat was sunk by the and Klaus was killed.
Interwar period He continued his naval career in the naval arm of the Weimar Republic's armed forces. On 10 January 1921, he became a (lieutenant) in the new German navy (). Dönitz commanded torpedo boats, becoming a (lieutenant-commander) on 1 November 1928. On 1 September 1933, he became a (commander) and, in 1934, was put in command of the cruiser Emden, the ship on which cadets and midshipmen took a year-long world cruise as training.
In 1935, the was renamed . Germany was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from possessing a submarine fleet. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed submarines and he was placed in command of the U-boat flotilla , which comprised three boats; ; and . On 1 September 1935, he was promoted to (naval captain).
Dönitz opposed Erich Raeder's views that surface ships should be given priority in the during the war, but in 1935 Dönitz doubted U-boat suitability in a naval trade war on account of their slow speed. This phenomenal contrast with Dönitz's wartime policy is explained in the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement. The accord was viewed by the navy with optimism, Dönitz included. He remarked, "Britain, in the circumstances, could not possibly be included in the number of potential enemies." The statement, made after June 1935, was uttered at a time when the naval staff were sure France and the Soviet Union were likely to be Germany's only enemies. Dönitz's statement was partially correct. Britain was not foreseen as an immediate enemy, but the navy still held onto a cadre of imperial officers, which, along with its Nazi-instigated intake, understood war would be certain in the distant future, perhaps not until the mid-1940s.
Dönitz came to recognise the need for more of these vessels. Only 26 were in commission or under construction in the summer of 1935. In the time before his command of submarines, he perfected the group tactics that first appealed to him in 1917. At this time, Dönitz first expressed his procurement policies. His preference for the submarine fleet was for the production of large numbers of small craft. In contrast to other warships, the fighting power of the U-boat, in his opinion, was not dependent on its size, as the torpedo, not the gun, was the machine's main weapon. Dönitz had a tendency to be critical of larger submarines and listed a number of disadvantages in their production, operation and tactical use. Dönitz recommended the Type VII submarine as the ideal submarine. The boat was reliable and had a range of . Modifications lengthened this to .
Dönitz revived Hermann Bauer's idea of grouping several submarines together into a ("pack tactic", commonly called "wolfpack") to overwhelm a merchant convoy's escorts. Implementation of wolfpacks had been difficult in World War I owing to the limitations of available radios. In the interwar years, Germany had developed ultra-high-frequency transmitters, while the Enigma machine was believed to have made communications secure. A 1922 paper written by Wessner of the (Defence Ministry) pointed to the success of surface attacks at night and the need to coordinate operations with multiple boats to defeat the escorts. Dönitz knew of the paper and improved the ideas suggested by Wessner. This tactic had the added advantage that a submarine on the surface was undetectable by ASDIC (an early form of sonar). Dönitz claimed after the war he would not allow his service to be intimidated by British disclosures about ASDIC and the course of the war had proven him right. In reality, Dönitz harboured fears stretching back to 1937 that the new technology would render the U-boat impotent. Dönitz published his ideas on night attacks in January 1939 in a booklet called , which apparently went unnoticed by the British. The Royal Navy's overconfidence in ASDIC encouraged the Admiralty to suppose it could deal with submarines whatever strategy they adopted — in this they were proven wrong; submarines were difficult to locate and destroy under operational conditions.
In 1939, he expressed his belief that he could win the war with 300 vessels. The Nazi leadership's rearmament programme prioritised land and aerial warfare. From 1933 to 1936, the navy was granted only 13% of the total armament expenditure. The production of U-boats, despite the existing Z Plan, remained low. In 1935, shipyards produced 14 submarines, 21 in 1936 and 1 in 1937. In 1938, nine were commissioned and in 1939, 18 U-boats were built. Dönitz's vision may have been misguided. The British had planned for contingency construction programmes for the summer of 1939. At least 78 small escorts and a crash construction programme of "Whale catchers" had been invoked. The British, according to one historian, had taken all the sensible steps necessary to deal with the U-boat menace as it existed in 1939 and were well placed to deal with large numbers of submarines, prior to events in 1940.
World War II
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France soon declared war on Germany, and World War II began. On Sunday, 3 September, Dönitz chaired a conference at Wilhelmshaven. At 11:15 am, the British Admiralty sent out a signal "Total Germany". B-Dienst intercepted the message and it was promptly reported to Dönitz. Dönitz paced around the room and his staff purportedly heard him repeatedly say, "My God! So it's war with England again!"
Dönitz abandoned the conference to return within the hour, a far more composed man. He announced to his officers, "We know our enemy. We have today the weapon and a leadership that can face up to this enemy. The war will last a long time, but if each does his duty, we will win." Dönitz had only 57 boats; of those, 27 were capable of reaching the Atlantic Ocean from their German bases. A small building program was already under way, but the number of U-boats did not rise noticeably until the autumn of 1941.
Dönitz's first major action was the cover up of the sinking of the British passenger liner Athenia later the same day. Acutely sensitive to international opinion and relations with the United States, the death of more than a hundred civilians was damaging. Dönitz suppressed the truth that the ship was sunk by a German submarine. He accepted the commander's explanation that he genuinely believed the ship was armed. Dönitz ordered the engagement to be struck from the submarine's logbook. Dönitz did not admit the cover up until 1946.