Karl Dönitz

1. Lead

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) was the commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, the man who came closer than anyone else to winning the war at sea for Germany, and the man Adolf Hitler chose as his successor. From 1935 he built the submarine arm of the Kriegsmarine almost from nothing; from 1939 to 1945 his U-boats sank about 2,800 Allied merchant ships, some 14 million tons of shipping, and brought Britain, in Winston Churchill’s own words, to the edge of defeat.

In 1943 he became Commander-in-Chief of the entire German navy, and in the last days of the war, on 30 April 1945, Hitler named him head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. Dönitz held that office for twenty-three days, presided over Germany’s surrender, and was then tried at Nuremberg, convicted of war crimes and crimes against peace, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Dönitz is one of the most controversial figures of the Second World War, and the controversy has never been settled. His defenders — and there have been many, including some Allied naval officers — argue that he was a professional sailor who fought a clean war at sea, that he never joined the Nazi Party, and that his conviction at Nuremberg was political, a piece of victors’ justice.

His critics answer that he was a loyal servant of Hitler to the very end, that he ordered his U-boats to continue a hopeless war long after it was lost, that he was complicit in the use of forced labour in the shipyards, and that his orders about the treatment of survivors of sunken ships helped to create the conditions for war crimes at sea.

Both sides can point to evidence. This article sets out the facts of Dönitz’s life and career, examines the arguments on both sides, and leaves the judgement to the reader — while making clear what the historical record does and does not support.

2. Key Facts

Full name	Karl Dönitz / Karl Dönitz
Born	16 September 1891, Grünau, near Berlin, Germany
Died	24 December 1980, Aumühle, West Germany
Rank	Grand Admiral (Großadmiral)
Service	Imperial German Navy 1910–1918; Reichsmarine; Kriegsmarine 1935–1945
Main commands	U-boat arm (Führer der Unterseeboote), 1935–1943; Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, 1943–1945
Head of state	30 April – 23 May 1945 (23 days)
Famous for	The U-boat campaign and “wolf pack” tactics; Hitler’s successor; Nuremberg trial
Trial	Nuremberg, 1945–46: convicted of crimes against peace and war crimes; 10 years’ imprisonment
Writings	Ten Years and Twenty Days (memoirs, 1958)

3. Early Life and the First World War

3.1. A Berlin Childhood and the Imperial Navy

Karl Dönitz was born on 16 September 1891 at Grünau, a suburb of Berlin, the son of an optical engineer. He entered the Imperial German Navy as a cadet in 1910 and was commissioned in 1913. He was twenty-three when the First World War broke out, and he served first on the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Mediterranean.

When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the Breslau and the battlecruiser Goeben were transferred to the Turkish navy, and Dönitz spent the first two years of the war in the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, an experience that taught him a great deal about the difficulties of naval warfare in confined waters and about the importance of supply lines to a country that depended on imports.

He was a quiet, serious young officer, known for his hard work rather than for brilliance, and his early service gave no sign of the commanding figure he would later become. His family background was solidly middle class, his education was conventional, and his ambitions were those of any young naval officer of his generation: promotion, command at sea, and the respect of his fellow officers.

3.2. U-boat Service, Capture and Defeat

In 1916 Dönitz volunteered for the U-boat service, and it was there that his career was made. He commanded the small coastal submarine UB-68 in the Mediterranean, and in October 1918, after sinking several ships, his boat was forced to the surface by British depth charges off Malta and scuttled; Dönitz and his crew were taken prisoner.

He spent the last weeks of the war and the first months of 1919 in a British prisoner-of-war camp. The experience left him with two convictions that would shape the rest of his life. The first was that the submarine, used in numbers and with aggressive tactics, could defeat a great naval power — a lesson he drew from the German U-boat campaign of 1917, which had nearly forced Britain to sue for peace.

The second was that Germany’s defeat had been a betrayal, not a military necessity. Both convictions stayed with him for the rest of his life, and both help to explain the choices he made when he was given command of the U-boat arm seventeen years later.

3.2.1. The “Stab in the Back” and the Small Navy

The idea that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” — betrayed by revolutionaries and politicians at home while its armies were still undefeated in the field — was widely believed in the German officer corps, and Dönitz shared it fully.

It prepared the ground, in his generation of officers, for the rise of National Socialism, because it taught them to distrust the Weimar Republic and to welcome a movement that promised to restore German honour. After the war Dönitz stayed in the small navy that the Treaty of Versailles allowed Germany to keep — the Reichsmarine.

The treaty forbade Germany from possessing submarines at all, and Dönitz spent the 1920s in surface ships and staff posts, including a period as a staff officer in the Baltic. He was a capable, hard-working officer, but not a remarkable one. What changed his fortunes was the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933 and the decision to rebuild the German navy in defiance of Versailles.

In 1935 Hitler appointed Dönitz, then a captain, to command the new U-boat arm — a force that, on the day he took command, consisted of just three small submarines.

4. Building the U-boat Arm

4.1. The Wolf Pack Idea

Dönitz’s task in 1935 was to build a submarine force from almost nothing, and he did it with remarkable speed and imagination. He was given command of the 1st U-boat Flotilla, named the “Weddigen” flotilla after a First World War U-boat hero, and within two years he had several flotillas and a training organisation that was producing crews faster than the shipyards could produce boats.

He also developed the tactics that would make the U-boat the most feared weapon of the war at sea. His central idea was the “wolf pack” — the Rudeltaktik. Instead of sending single submarines to hunt alone, Dönitz would spread a line of U-boats across the expected path of an Allied convoy; the first boat to find the convoy would radio its position, and the others would converge at night and attack together on the surface, where the U-boats were faster than the escorting destroyers and almost invisible in the dark.

It was a tactic that depended on radio communication, on aggressive captains, and on Dönitz’s personal direction from his headquarters ashore — he followed every patrol by radio and gave his captains detailed orders.

4.2. The Building Race Against the Z Plan

Dönitz’s building programme was constrained by politics, not by his own ambition. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed Germany to build a navy up to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy’s strength, and Hitler’s grand naval plan, the Z Plan of 1939, gave priority to battleships and aircraft carriers rather than submarines.

Dönitz argued, before the war and during it, that Germany should have built 300 U-boats instead of a handful of battleships — and that with 300 boats he could have won the war at sea in 1940. When the war began in September 1939, he had only 57 U-boats, of which only 22 were suitable for operations in the Atlantic.

It was, by any measure, far too few for the task he had been given. The shortage of boats would haunt the U-boat campaign for its whole duration, and Dönitz’s failure to persuade Hitler to change the building priorities before the war remains one of the great “what ifs” of the war at sea.

4.2.1. Three Hundred Boats: The Arithmetic of Victory

Dönitz’s figure of 300 U-boats was not a guess; it was an arithmetic drawn from his experience of the First World War. He calculated that Britain needed a certain number of tons of imports every month to survive, that a U-boat on patrol could sink a certain number of tons, and that a certain number of boats had to be at sea at any one time to achieve the required rate of sinking.

Allowing for boats in refit, in transit and in training, he concluded that 300 boats in total would keep about 100 at sea — enough, he believed, to sink 800,000 tons a month and to starve Britain into surrender within a year. The calculation was probably too optimistic, because it underestimated the ability of the Allies to build new ships, to organise convoys and to develop new anti-submarine weapons.

But it shows how Dönitz thought: not as a romantic, but as a technician of naval warfare who believed that wars at sea could be reduced to numbers. The tragedy of his career is that he never had the numbers he needed, and that by the time the boats were finally being built in large numbers, the Allies had already found the answer to them.

5. The Battle of the Atlantic

5.1. The “Happy Time” and the First Crisis

The first two years of the war at sea went well for Dönitz. In 1940, after the fall of France gave his U-boats bases on the Atlantic coast, his captains enjoyed what they called the “Happy Time”: the British convoy system was still weak, the escorts were few and poorly equipped, and the U-boats sank ships faster than the Allies could replace them.

In 1940 alone U-boats sank over 2 million tons of Allied shipping, and in 1941 the figure was higher still. The wolf packs, operating at night on the surface, were almost impossible to stop: the escorts could not see them, the aircraft could not find them in the dark, and the convoys, once found, could be followed for days while more boats gathered.

Churchill later wrote that the U-boat campaign was the only thing that ever really frightened him during the war, and that the Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor of the whole conflict. Dönitz, directing the battle from his headquarters — first at Wilhelmshaven, then at Lorient in occupied France, then at Paris — became one of the most important German commanders of the war.

5.2. The Turning Point: 1943

In 1942 the U-boats sank more than 6 million tons of Allied shipping, the worst year of the war for the Allies at sea, and for a time it seemed that Dönitz might win. But in the spring of 1943 the balance turned, suddenly and decisively.

The Allies had cracked the German naval Enigma code, so that they could read Dönitz’s orders to his boats and route convoys around the wolf packs. They had built escort carriers and very-long-range aircraft that closed the “air gap” in the middle of the Atlantic, where the U-boats had previously hunted without fear of aircraft.

They had fitted their escorts with centimetric radar that could detect a surfaced U-boat at night, and with new weapons such as the Hedgehog mortar. In May 1943 — “Black May” — the U-boats lost 41 boats in a single month, and Dönitz was forced to withdraw them from the North Atlantic.

The battle was not over, but it had been lost: the U-boats never again sank ships at the rate needed to starve Britain, and from 1943 onwards the submarine war was a losing battle fought by brave men in a cause that was already doomed.

5.2.1. Black May: Forty-One Boats in a Month

The losses of May 1943 were shocking even by the standards of a war that had already cost the U-boat arm dearly. Forty-one boats were sunk in a single month — about a quarter of the boats at sea — and with them went some 1,500 trained submariners, men who could not be replaced quickly.

Dönitz, who had always been close to his captains and who knew many of them by name, was shaken by the losses, and he withdrew the boats to safer waters to regroup. He hoped that new technology — the schnorkel, which allowed a U-boat to run its diesels while submerged, and the new Type XXI boat, which was faster underwater than on the surface — would restore the balance.

But the Type XXI came too late, the schnorkel only delayed the inevitable, and the men who went to sea in 1944 and 1945 knew that their chances of coming home were poor. Of the roughly 40,000 men who served in the U-boats, about 28,000 were killed — a death rate of some 70 per cent, the highest of any branch of any service in the war.

6. Commander-in-Chief of the Navy

6.1. Replacing Raeder and the Surface Fleet

On 30 January 1943, in the middle of the crisis in the Atlantic, Hitler dismissed Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, and replaced him with Dönitz. The appointment was a surprise: Dönitz was a submariner, not a battleship admiral, and he had spent his career arguing that the surface fleet was a waste of resources.

As Commander-in-Chief he now had to defend the very ships he had criticised, and he did so with a loyalty that surprised his critics. He saved the heavy ships from being scrapped, sent the battleship Scharnhorst to its death in the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943, and kept the navy fighting until the end of the war.

He also proved to be a more effective administrator than Raeder, streamlining the naval staff and pushing the building of new U-boats with a ruthlessness that impressed even Albert Speer, the armaments minister. The promotion also changed Dönitz’s relationship with Hitler: he now met the Führer regularly, and he became one of the few senior officers Hitler trusted.

6.2. The Type XXI and the War of Desperation

Dönitz’s last hope was technology. The Type XXI U-boat, designed in 1943, was a revolutionary boat: it could travel faster submerged than on the surface, it could stay underwater for days, and it carried more torpedoes than any earlier boat. Dönitz ordered it into mass production, and the shipyards, using prefabricated sections built all over Germany, turned out more than a hundred of them before the end of the war.

But the boats were rushed, their crews were untrained, and only a handful ever went on patrol. The Type XXI was a weapon for a war that Germany had already lost, and its story is a symbol of the whole German war effort in its last two years: brilliant engineering, desperate improvisation, and a complete failure to understand that technology alone cannot win a war that has already been lost on every other front.

Dönitz also ordered his U-boats to keep fighting in 1944 and 1945, long after any hope of victory had gone, and hundreds of young submariners died in those last months for nothing.

6.2.1. Forced Labour in the Shipyards

The building of the Type XXI and of the U-boats in general depended on forced labour, and this is one of the gravest charges against Dönitz. The shipyards that built his boats used concentration camp prisoners and foreign workers brought to Germany against their will, and the conditions in which they worked were often lethal.

Dönitz was not the man who organised the forced labour system — that was Speer and the SS — but as Commander-in-Chief of the navy he knew what was happening in the yards that built his ships, and he pressed for ever higher production targets without asking how they were met. At Nuremberg the prosecution argued that this made him complicit in the crimes of the slave labour system.

His defenders reply that every German commander in the war depended on the same system, and that Dönitz’s responsibility was indirect. The truth is that Dönitz, like most senior German officers, chose not to look too closely at how his weapons were made, and that choice is part of his record, whether or not it amounts to a war crime in law.

7. Hitler’s Successor: Twenty-Three Days

7.1. The Testament and the Appointment

In the last days of April 1945, as Soviet troops fought their way into Berlin, Hitler dictated his political testament. In it he expelled Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the party for treason, and he named Dönitz — a man who was not a Nazi, who had never joined the party, and who was not even in Berlin — as his successor as head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces.

Why Hitler chose Dönitz has been much debated. The most likely explanation is that Hitler trusted Dönitz’s loyalty absolutely, that he believed the navy had fought to the end without betraying him, and that he wanted a soldier, not a politician, to carry on the war. Dönitz learned of his appointment by radio on 1 May 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide, and he was as surprised as anyone.

He had not sought the office, he had no experience of politics, and he took it up, as he later wrote, because he believed it was his duty as a soldier to obey the order of his supreme commander.

7.2. The Flensburg Government and the Surrender

Dönitz set up his government at Flensburg, on the Danish border, and his first priority was not to continue the war but to save as many German soldiers and civilians as possible from the advancing Soviet armies. He ordered his forces in the west to surrender to the British and Americans while holding the eastern front open long enough for refugees to escape westwards.

On 7 May 1945 his representative, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender at Reims; on 8 May Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed a second surrender in Berlin. The war in Europe was over. Dönitz and his government remained in office for another two weeks, trying to administer a country that no longer existed, until on 23 May 1945 the Allies arrested them all.

Dönitz had been head of state for twenty-three days, and he had used them, in the judgement of most historians, as well as anyone could have: to end the killing and to save lives, not to prolong the war.

7.2.1. Saving Lives in the East

The most important thing Dönitz did in his twenty-three days was to keep the eastern front open while the surrender was negotiated. In the last weeks of the war, millions of German civilians and soldiers were fleeing westwards from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, ahead of the Soviet advance, and Dönitz used the navy — the same navy that had fought the Battle of the Atlantic — to evacuate them by sea.

Operation Hannibal, the evacuation across the Baltic, had already begun in January 1945, and it continued under Dönitz’s orders into May, carrying more than a million people to safety in the west. It was one of the largest sea evacuations in history, and it was carried out at a terrible cost: the liners Wilhelm Gustloff, Goya and Thielbek, crowded with refugees, were sunk by Soviet submarines with the loss of many thousands of lives.

Dönitz’s defenders cite the evacuation as proof of his humanity; his critics reply that the same ships had also carried soldiers and war material, and that the evacuation was a military operation, not an act of charity. Both things can be true at once.

8. The Laconia Order and War at Sea

8.1. The Laconia Incident

The most serious war crimes charge against Dönitz concerned his orders about survivors. In September 1942 the German U-boat U-156, commanded by Werner Hartenstein, sank the British troopship Laconia off West Africa. Hartenstein discovered that the ship was carrying more than a thousand Italian prisoners of war as well as British civilians, and he began a rescue operation, taking survivors aboard, towing lifeboats, and broadcasting in plain language for help.

American aircraft, unaware of the rescue, attacked the U-boat, and Hartenstein was forced to abandon the survivors. Dönitz’s response was the so-called Laconia Order of 17 September 1942, which told his U-boat commanders that the rescue of survivors was forbidden, that they should not pick up men from the water, and that they should concern themselves only with the destruction of the enemy’s ships.

The order did not, in so many words, tell them to kill survivors, but it removed the last restraint on commanders who were already inclined to leave men to die.

8.2. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare

The Laconia Order must be understood in the context of the war at sea as a whole. From the first day of the war, Dönitz’s U-boats practised unrestricted submarine warfare: they sank merchant ships without warning, including ships of neutral countries, and they did so because the British had declared a naval blockade of Germany and because the U-boat, a fragile vessel that could not take prisoners, had no other way to fight.

The Allies did the same thing in the Pacific, and the American submarine campaign against Japan was, if anything, more ruthless than the German campaign in the Atlantic. At Nuremberg the tribunal accepted this argument in part: it found Dönitz guilty of waging unrestricted submarine warfare, but it did not punish him for it, because the Allies had done the same.

What the tribunal did punish was the Laconia Order itself, and Dönitz’s conduct of the war in general, on the grounds that the order had encouraged the killing of survivors.

8.2.1. Did the Order Mean Murder?

Historians still argue over what the Laconia Order meant. Dönitz himself always insisted that it was a defensive measure, designed to protect his boats from aircraft attack during rescue operations, and that it did not order the killing of survivors. The prosecution at Nuremberg produced evidence that some U-boat commanders had machine-gunned survivors in the water, and argued that the order created the conditions in which such crimes became possible.

The tribunal’s judgement was careful: it found that the evidence did not prove that Dönitz had ordered the killing of survivors, but it held that the order was a violation of the laws of war, because it forbade rescue. The distinction matters, and it is why Dönitz’s sentence was relatively light.

But it does not clear him: a commander who tells his men not to rescue the drowning cannot be surprised when some of them decide that the drowning should be helped along, and the moral responsibility for that choice rests with the man who gave the order.

9. The Nuremberg Trial

9.1. The Charges and the Trial

Dönitz was tried at Nuremberg in 1945–46 as one of the twenty-two major war criminals. He was charged on three counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, and war crimes. The case against him was weaker than the case against men like Göring or Ribbentrop: he had never joined the Nazi Party, he had played no part in the planning of the invasions of Poland or the Soviet Union, and his war had been fought at sea, far from the extermination camps.

But the prosecution argued that he had been a loyal servant of Hitler to the very end, that he had waged aggressive war as the commander of the U-boat arm, that his Laconia Order had been a war crime, and that he had been complicit in the use of forced labour.

Dönitz’s defence was that he was a professional sailor who had fought a clean war, that he had known nothing about the Holocaust, and that his orders had been no different from those of the Allied submarine commanders. The trial lasted for months, and Dönitz, who was one of the calmest and most dignified defendants in the dock, impressed many observers with his bearing.

9.2. The Verdict and the Sentence

The tribunal acquitted Dönitz of conspiracy, but convicted him of crimes against peace and of war crimes, and sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment. The sentence was the lightest given to any defendant convicted on those counts, and it reflected the tribunal’s own doubts: the judgement acknowledged that the Allies had practised unrestricted submarine warfare themselves, and that the evidence did not prove that Dönitz had ordered the killing of survivors.

Many observers, including some of the Allied prosecutors, thought the sentence was a compromise — a recognition that Dönitz was guilty, but less guilty than the men who had planned the war and organised the Holocaust. Dönitz himself regarded the verdict as unjust, and he spent the rest of his life insisting on his innocence.

He served his sentence at Spandau Prison in Berlin, alongside other convicted war criminals, and was released on 1 October 1956. He was sixty-five years old, and he had spent more than eleven years in prison.

9.2.1. The Nimitz Affidavit

One of the most remarkable documents in the trial was an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander of the United States Pacific Fleet. Nimitz stated, in writing, that the United States had waged unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan from the first day of the Pacific war, and that American submarines had sunk Japanese merchant ships without warning and without rescuing survivors.

The affidavit was introduced by the defence, and it is widely believed to have saved Dönitz from a much heavier sentence — perhaps even from the death penalty. It was an extraordinary moment: an Allied admiral, testifying on behalf of a German defendant, and admitting that his own navy had done the very thing the defendant was accused of.

The affidavit did not clear Dönitz of the Laconia Order, but it established a principle that has shaped the law of war ever since: that a practice cannot be a war crime when both sides practise it openly, and that victors’ justice, if it is to be justice at all, must apply the same standards to the defeated and to the victorious.

10. Later Life and Legacy

10.1. Spandau, Release and Memoirs

After his release from Spandau in 1956, Dönitz settled in the small town of Aumühle, near Hamburg, and lived there for the rest of his life. He wrote his memoirs, Ten Years and Twenty Days, published in 1958, in which he presented himself as a professional sailor who had served his country and done nothing wrong.

The book was a bestseller in Germany and was widely read in the English-speaking world, and it did much to shape the image of Dönitz as the “clean” German admiral. He also wrote a second book, My Ever-Changing Life, and he gave interviews in which he defended his record and attacked the Nuremberg verdict.

He never joined a political party, never expressed remorse for his service to Hitler, and never acknowledged that the regime he had served had committed the greatest crimes in history. He lost both of his sons in the war — Peter, killed aboard the U-boat U-954 in May 1943, and Klaus, killed in May 1944 — and the loss, by all accounts, haunted him for the rest of his life.

He died on 24 December 1980, at the age of eighty-nine, the last surviving Grand Admiral of the German navy.

10.2. The Verdict of History

The judgement of history on Dönitz is still divided, and it is likely to remain so. On the one hand, he was a brilliant naval tactician who built a weapon that nearly won the war at sea, and a commander who, in the last days of the war, used his brief authority to end the killing and to save lives.

On the other hand, he was a man who served Hitler loyally to the very end, who never questioned the regime he served, who ordered his men to keep fighting a hopeless war, and whose orders about survivors and whose demands for production helped to make possible crimes that he preferred not to see.

The “clean Wehrmacht” myth — the idea that the German armed forces fought an honourable war while the SS committed the crimes — has been demolished by historians, and Dönitz’s career is one of the cases that demolished it. He was not a Nazi, and he was not a monster.

He was something more common and, in a way, more troubling: a competent, honourable professional who served a criminal regime without asking what it was doing, and who discovered too late that loyalty to a criminal is itself a crime.

10.2.1. The “Clean Admiral” and the Myth

The image of Dönitz as the “clean admiral” was carefully constructed after the war, by Dönitz himself in his memoirs, by sympathetic biographers, and by a German public that wanted to believe that at least some of its commanders had been honourable men.

The image contains some truth: Dönitz did not order the murder of civilians, he did not take part in the Holocaust, and his conduct at the end of the war saved lives. But the image is also a myth, because it leaves out the Laconia Order, the forced labour, the refusal to question the regime, and the two years in which he sent young men to their deaths in a war that was already lost.

The honest judgement is neither the one his admirers offer nor the one his harshest critics offer. Dönitz was a man of real ability and real courage who served a cause that was evil, and who never, to the end of his long life, understood that this fact mattered more than his skill as a sailor. That is his tragedy, and it is also his guilt.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

How close did Dönitz come to winning the Battle of the Atlantic?
Very close in 1942, when U-boats sank more than 6 million tons of Allied shipping. Churchill later wrote that the U-boat campaign was the only thing that really frightened him. But in the spring of 1943 the Allies broke the Enigma code, closed the air gap and fitted escorts with radar, and in May 1943 the U-boats lost 41 boats in a single month. After that the battle was lost.

What was the wolf pack tactic?
Instead of hunting alone, U-boats spread out in a line across a convoy’s expected path. The first boat to find the convoy radioed its position, and the others converged at night to attack together on the surface, where they were faster than the escorts and hard to see in the dark. Dönitz directed the packs personally by radio from his headquarters ashore.

Why did Hitler choose Dönitz as his successor?
Hitler trusted Dönitz’s loyalty absolutely, believed the navy had fought to the end without betraying him, and wanted a soldier rather than a politician to carry on. Dönitz had never joined the Nazi Party, was not in Berlin, and learned of his appointment by radio on 1 May 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide.

What was the Laconia Order?
An order of 17 September 1942 forbidding U-boat commanders to rescue survivors of sunken ships. It followed an incident in which U-156 tried to rescue survivors of the troopship Laconia and was attacked by American aircraft. The order did not explicitly tell commanders to kill survivors, but the Nuremberg tribunal held that it violated the laws of war by forbidding rescue.

Why was Dönitz only sentenced to ten years at Nuremberg?
The tribunal acquitted him of conspiracy and found the evidence did not prove he ordered the killing of survivors. Admiral Nimitz’s affidavit showed the United States had also practised unrestricted submarine warfare, so the tribunal did not punish him for that. The ten-year sentence reflected the tribunal’s own doubts about the strength of the case.

Did Dönitz know about the Holocaust?
He always denied it, and no document has been found showing that he knew about the extermination camps. Historians generally accept that, as a naval commander, he was not involved in the Holocaust. But he served a regime whose crimes were widely known in Germany by 1944, and he never asked questions about what that regime was doing.

12. Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Karl Dönitz” — dates, commands, the U-boat campaign, the succession, the Nuremberg trial.
2. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Karl Dönitz” — life, career and assessment.
3. Karl Dönitz, Ten Years and Twenty Days (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959) — Dönitz’s own memoirs.
4. Peter Padfield, Dönitz: The Last Führer (Victor Gollancz, 1984) — the standard English-language biography.
5. Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, 2 vols. (Random House, 1996–98) — the campaign in detail.
6. International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Vol. I — the judgement on Dönitz.
7. Michael Gannon, Operation Drumbeat (Harper & Row, 1990) — the U-boat offensive off the American coast.

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