The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander

by Erich Topp

  Extensive experiments with U 2513 induced the U.S. Navy to modify its building program for fleet submarines in favor of so-called Guppy boats (Greater Underwater Propulsion Power). These boats had larger battery capacities, stronger electric engines, and an improved hull design for higher underwater speed. The six Tang class submarines were essentially modernized versions of the Type XXI boat. Also, the teardrop shape of the later nuclear submarines goes back to a German prototype, the Type XXVI design with a Walter propulsion system. The British, French, and Russians, too, used German models to redesign their submarines after the war. The British submarines Explorer and Excalibnr stood in the succession of the Walter boat, while the Russian "Whisky" class and the French Narval borrowed heavily from the Type XXI boat. It would be no exaggeration to say that the great navies of the world improved and developed their conventional submarines after the war on the basis of German wartime experiences. Indeed, Germans were leading in the construction of conventional boats and their propulsion systems during the war and have retained that role in the post-war period.

  Our stay at Krageroy gave us plenty of opportunities to contemplate our situation. Our parental homes and our educational institutions had failed to provide us with the guideposts that would have allowed us to steer a steady course in troubled times. We had been set adrift, left the proper channel, and run into shallow waters. For example, neither on the Karlsruhe nor at the naval academy did we learn that ever since the levee en masse during the French Revolution war is no longer the prerogative of those who prefer the military profession to other pursuits. What was left of the much-touted "warrior class of the nation"?

  The total war had touched everyone indiscriminately, soldiers and civilians, women and children. We also did not know that to die for a country or a principle became a senseless act of heroism if country, principle, and all good patriots went down in an all-consuming catastrophe.

  How did we see the entry into the war? On January 26, 1934, Hitler had concluded a nonaggression treaty with Poland. But the people's hatred was later fired up by supposed or actual actions by Poles against the German minority. Eventually we heard about the murder of hundreds of Germans at the hands of the Poles, about the raid against the German radio transmitter at Gleiwitz, and finally about that "Bloody Sunday" in Bromberg-all reported in gory detail by the regime's propaganda machine. Those measures as well as certain diplomatic complications had finally led to the German invasion of Poland from the west, while the Red Army moved in from the east in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Tied to Poland by their treaty obligations, England and France thereupon declared war against Germany. Why not against Russia? This question remained unanswered for us.

  Today we know that Germany's invasion of Poland at 5:45 A.M. on September 1, 1939, was not an act of self-defense; it had little to do with violated rights, protection of minorities, Danzig, or the Corridor. The invasion grew rather from a long-planned and now brutally enforced scheme to push Germany's borders eastward. In Krageroy, behind barbed wire and isolated from the latest news, we could not find answers to many of these questions. When Hitler marched into Russia, did he feel compelled to add expansion to expansion? Was the attack on Russia a preventive measure? How great was the gap between propaganda and reality?

  We had believed that Hitler's personal dynamic force as well as that of his government would create a New Order in Europe and that this second attempt under German leadership-the first one under Napoleon had failed-would be successful. At the same time we saw ourselves as liberating Europe from the Bolshevist menace. For those who organized this "Crusade," a drive for power linked up with political and racist ideology, an attractive mixture to which volunteers from all over Europe felt drawn. We may recall here that when Bernard of Clairvaux in 1147 spoke out with great eloquence in favor of a second Crusade against the infidels, he did not forget for a moment that he would deliver the elite of France's nobility to almost certain death and thus strengthen the Church in its power struggle against the secular forces in the country. And as we contemplate the actions of crusaders then and today, we should also bear in mind that many of them got caught up in the opportunities of the moment rather than in the pursuit of noble aims for the future. Perhaps some of our modern crusaders thought it wise to let their flags catch the prevailing winds in time so as to be better placed in a Europe under German rule.

  The "Crusade" became a war of annihilation on both sides with 17 million military casualties and 18 million civilian victims. Even when the guns stopped firing, murder in Europe continued in reprisals against refugees, against collaborators, against Quislings. "Oh Liberty, what crimes are being committed in your name!" These were the last words of a French freedom fighter before she was guillotined during the Terror of the French Revolution.

  I have no intention to somehow balance the dead and murdered on both sides, nor do I plan to downplay the National Socialist crimes for which Auschwitz will remain forever a terrifying reminder. All the past has become a shadow, that of the others as well as mine. Every good and every evil carried its own yardstick. The three old men who, we are told, at the Teheran Conference drew some lines on a map of central Europe in an old school atlas and thus affected the fate of millions of human beings, cannot escape the shadow any less than we can. But we are alive, and for that reason we must hang on to the shadow. We do not want to forget, for we know that Nemesis, the guardian of all true measure, has a historical dimension that judges in terms of centuries.

  One question is being raised again and again: How was it possible for a nation that has made such outstanding contributions to culture and world civilization, for a people that produced men like Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, or Beethoven, to commit such crimes, to lead a war of destruction that entangled so many in guilt? But then, what do we mean by guilt? In a religious sense every human being is guilty. Of this the doctrine of original sin and the tragedies of classical antiquity remind us all the time. In the context of this inescapable conflict I, too, feel guilty. Perhaps all the more so because denying guilt is always a critical obstacle in its removal and remission. Yet a confession of guilt can never be a collective one. Every single individual must check for himself how deep and how knowingly he was involved in the injustices and crimes of the National Socialist era and then decide on the proper standards by which to measure his personal guilt and responsibility.

  I reject the notion of a collective guilt or liability, for it includes those who were not involved and threatens to burden even those who were not yet born at the time. Above all, we must guard against efforts to make us objects in the political games of the present and likely of the future as well, games that demand as players German citizens plagued by neurotic feelings of guilt and prepared to exercise self-humiliation and suffer like flagellants.

  Naturally, we emerged from this terrible war as pacifists. But we did not subscribe to the view that governments should simply follow the will of the population, lay down all arms, and thus usher in eternal peace. No, our love of peace is strong, manly, knowing-the kind of love that has been a European tradition from Erasmus via Leibniz, Kant, and Max Weber all the way to Albert Einstein. We did not yet know that in a total nuclear war hundreds of millions of people are likely to die and that the question of life or death may be a simple function of the wind direction. It would also mean the death of millions of children whose opinion about freedom or oppression is immaterial to the decision makers. Today this frightful burden rests on those who feel responsible for our welfare. But those of us who are familiar with our history and mythology know also that the apocalypse has been threatening us at all times and that the seven-headed monster of the sea and the two-horned beast of the earth have always been there.

  I find it impossible to sum up the sense of loss, disappointment, bitterness, and despair at the end of the war-a war that had consumed all our energy and left us nothing but chaos and debris. To draw subtle lessons of experience from this war after thirty-fiv
e years, to describe them in all their color and complexity, is the task of historians. For me the years since the war have not softened anything; they may have eaten up the words, but they cannot stem the tide of images and visions that rushes through my mind. Perhaps a few lines from Buchheim's book, Das Boot, will help, if only to demonstrate how inadequate words remain when one tries to capture the craziness and grotesque dimension of those images: "A feeling of unreality overtakes me. This is not the old earth. We slide along on a layer of lead, on a moon orbiting dead and cold through space. Are we the same as in the old days? What does all this mean?"

  The men of U552.

  Final inspection of the crew prior to sailing.

  Engelbert Endrass welcomes me back after a war patrol.

  Commanding Officer, U552.

  The C.O. at the periscope.

  Entering St. Nazaire after my seventeenth war patrol. Note damage to conning tower caused by the Canadian corvette Sackville.

  Reception at the naval base.

  Anxious men in the central control room while a depth charge attack is under way.

  Deputy Inspector and Chief of Staff of the West German Navy.

  German liaison officer at SACLANT (Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic).

  My aunt, Anna Topp, before and after Theresienstadt.

  4

  After the War

  THE FATE OF A FAMILY

  There was a great stillness after the war. We had been silenced. My generation had lived a two-faced life. At first we pressed forward, eager, full of hope and energy. After the crash of Icarus, which touched us all, we turned inward, resigned, bewildered. We were survivors, carrying along our errors and trying to come to grips with them so that we might slowly step away from the shadow that had been cast upon my generation.

  The small circle of my immediate relatives revealed how hard we had been hit by the war and the regime. Both of my parents, who had lost their house in Hanover in a bombing raid, died shortly after the war, victims of a measure by the British occupation authorities. Gas for cooking purposes was a precious commodity in those days, and the British decided to activate the supply system for German households only in unpredictable intervals for short periods of time. One day, after opening the valve in the kitchen and while waiting for the gas to come, my mother fell asleep. She and my father did not wake up again after the gas finally arrived.

  My family lived and suffered through this war like most other families who, actively or passively, became a part of the struggle between the peoples on both sides: They were locked up, bombed out, became refugees. The war left its mark on all of them. Vicariously for them all, allow me to single out the fate of my wife's sister, Erika von Koller.

  She married into a family whose values and lifestyle had been shaped by Prussian traditions. Her husband's sister, Cornelia von Koller, was named after Goethe's sister Cornelia who was her great-grandmother in the female line. Cornelia had married Gerd von Tresckow, a cousin of Henning von Tresckow who headed the resistance movement against Hitler. In the Prussian civil service and as military officers, the male members of the family served their kings for generations. The greatest Prussian ruler, Frederick II, once put his credo into these words: "Our life consists of a fleeting transition from our birth to our death. During this period a man has the obligation to work for the benefit of the society to which he belongs."

  Erika von Koller gave birth to her third child, Gabriele, on December 22, 1944, in the hospital of Cammin in Pomerania, not far from the Kol- lers' estate at Schwenz. On New Year's Eve she was released and taken hack home on a horse-drawn sled. At the time, horror stories multiplied about the unchecked murders and rapes of German civilians by the approaching Red Army. This behavior was encouraged by brutal public addresses such as those of Ilya Ehrenburg:

  If you have killed one German, kill a second one. For us there is nothing more enjoyable than to see German corpses. Don't count the days, don't count the kilometers. Just count the Germans you have killed! Kill Germans! Your aged mother begs you to do it. Kill Germans! Your children urge you on. Kill Germans! The soil of your mother country calls out to you to do it. Do not hesitate! Make no mistake! KILL!

  But the Pomeranian nobility retained its steadfastness inwardly and outwardly. Servants wearing white gloves continued to serve the meals. A Koller does not leave her native soil. Everyone acted in a disciplined way and did his duty, even toward the state that nobody loved. And the state had decided, under the threat of severe punishment, that nobody was to join the trek to the west without the Party's permission. Everyone knew what that meant. After all, Erika's sister-in-law Cornelia had already had a run-in with the authorities. She had listened to foreign radio broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden. Someone denounced her. Two Gestapo officers showed tip to investigate. She had grown up with Prussian moral convictions; freedom and truth meant much to her. Frederick the Great himself had once said, "Newspapers, if they are to be interesting, must not be interfered with."

  For Cornelia the radio was like a newspaper. She not only expected freedom and truth from others but she also told others openly what she thought and did. Yes, she had listened to those foreign radio stations. When her two inquisitors shouted her down and added the rhetorical question, "You knew that it was against the law," she replied honestly and proudly, "I thought that applied only to ordinary people." For this enchanting but naive confession vis-A-vis her tormentors she paid with doing time in a penitentiary. Because of her frail health she was soon transferred to a regular jail, which looked more like a concentration camp, from which she was finally released, a broken woman, after a year and a half. Not long thereafter she committed suicide. Even before her death she had been divorced from Gerd von Tresckow, who happened to be in Italy when the attempt was made against Hitler's life. Since his arrest seemed imminent, a friend of his, a physician, offered to hide him in the hospital he was running. But Gerd was a Tresckow and turned himself in to the authorities. Before long word arrived that he had died of angina pectoris. In reality he had been executed.

  Early in January 1945, three days after her release from the hospital in Cammin, my sister-in-law Erika had to be readmitted because of high fever. Complications resulting from her difficult childbirth and the lack of medication forced her to stay in the hospital for the next two months. By early March she could hear artillery fire from the front some 20 miles away. The patients were told that the noise came from Germans blasting holes in the ice-bound Oder River. Then a female physician took Erika aside and told her, "Get out of here as fast as you can! "

  Weakened after her two-month hospital stay, Erika gathered her three children, one of them not even three months old, and got ready to head westward. The roads were clogged with crowds of hungry human beings; they were being strafed from the air by Allied fighter-bombers, all the while fighting for their very survival in the face of unimaginable terror, rape, and murder. In Cammin all hospital patients assembled on the market square. There were no cars available since they had already been commandeered for the Party bosses and their families. At that point Erika with her three children was fortunate to run into a military column. A sympathetic physician-her last operation had been just two days before-offered to take her in his staff car to Divenow and on back roads to Swinemunde where she caught a refugee train bound for SchleswigHolstein. With many interruptions, mainly caused by air attacks, the train moved slowly westward loaded with many casualties, dead and injured. Near Kiel she at last found emergency shelter.

  After the plunge into the abyss, I tried to analyze how these terrible events had come about.

  On January 30, 1933, the popular and respected Reich President Paul von Hindenburg had installed the new government. He did so essentially for two reasons. The previous cabinets had failed to gain majority support in the Reichstag, and after the elections of July 1932 the National Socialists had emerged as the strongest party. In the beginning, Hitler as Reich Chancellor led a coalition government that also contai
ned conservatives.

  Today we often hear the expression, "Wehret den Anfangen" (Catch evil early before it is too late!). It implies that already the Party program and Hitler's Mein Kampf should have signalled the dangers ahead. Well, in the 1920s and early 1930s there were more than twenty political parties. As today they not only made many promises to the voters but accused one another of dirty tricks. Libelous remarks were a daily occurrence. Educated people read party platforms only with strong reservations. Few had studied Hitler's Mein Kampf in any detail.

  All foreign nations recognized Hitler and his regime as Germany's legal government. They concluded internationally valid treaties with him. The Vatican took the lead in July 1933. All nations except the Soviet Union participated in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Even the Soviet Union maintained normal diplomatic relations with the Third Reich.

  After Hitler became Chancellor, he said in many public speeches that National Socialism meant no threat to peace. For example, on May 17, 1933, he spoke about disarmament and stressed Germany's readiness to forego military equality with other countries for another five years. He also declared that Germany was not interested in offensive weapons and invited an independent commission to inspect Germany's paramilitary forces. Only a few realized at the time that these and similar moves, while leading indeed to a certain detente in international relations, were nothing but diplomatic tricks to alleviate the mistrust of Germany's neighbors and to camouflage a massive rearmament program.

  In June 1935, England and Germany concluded a naval agreement that froze the relative size of the two fleets according to a ratio of 100 : 35 and promised eventual equality in the category of submarines. In November 1936, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, joined a year later by Italy. This pact against the menace of communism strengthened Germany's prestige abroad. We all agreed proudly with Hitler when he announced on February 27, 1937, in Munich's Hofbrauhaus: "Today Germany is once again a world power."