Karl Dönitz (1891–1980)

Picked up from a local used bookstore which recently acquired a large collection of WWII-themed paperbacks. Karl Doenitz’s memoirs are now sadly dated (originally published in 1959) - primarily because Doenitz had no clue about Ultra and thus didn’t understand why his crews weren’t picking up more convoys. Nothing particularly new about the U-Boat war – you’re better off with Clay Blair’s two-volume set. The supposed insight into the personalities of Hitler, Goering, and Bormann promised on the cover blurbs never appears – Doenitz never had that much access to the hierarchy of the Third Reich and was just as surprised as everybody else when Hitler appointed him successor. The parts of most interest to me were little details about other aspects of the naval war – actions in the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the performance (surprisingly good, at least according to Doenitz) of naval personnel as infantry during the last days of the war.

Doenitz is of the “I knew nothing” persuasion regarding the Holocaust – and may have been telling the truth; he spent most of the war in various ports and wasn’t particularly political. He tiptoes around the assassination attempt – being reluctant to praise anybody who violated their soldier’s oath but allowing that it might be acceptable in extreme circumstances (provided the perpetrators surrendered their own lives). However, he condemns with extreme prejudice “providing military secrets to the enemy” without naming names - I assume he means Canaris and the Red Orchestra. He defends his decision not to immediately surrender after Hitler’s death, claiming that he wanted to give troops in the east as much time as possibly to retreat westward.

Doesn’t really provide much psychological insight, and most of the military material is covered better elsewhere. An interesting sidelight gleaned from the WikiPedia article on Doenitz – he had the third highest IQ of anybody tried at Nuremberg.… (meer)