The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander

by Erich Topp

  Anna Topp was issued a registration number that enabled her to receive packages from her relatives. But the relatives, too, suffered dearly and did not have much to share. Anna Topp was allowed to acknowledge the receipt of the packages on preprinted postcards. Any additional personal messages were forbidden. Indeed, any contact with the outside world was strictly outlawed under pain of severe punishment. Anna Topp benefitted from her command of foreign languages, Hungarian and Czech in particular. This enabled her to work as a supervisor and interpreter.

  After Germany's surrender the camp was dissolved. Anna Topp regained her freedom in July 1945. The picture on her release papers speaks for itself. She had not been mistreated physically, but mentally she had suffered torment, as her stony face would show forever after. She never talked about Theresienstadt. Even though she found employment for some time on the staff of the Foreign Office and was active in the Organization for Persecuted Persons, she remained an outsider in her public life as well as to her family. She was a broken human being, without dreams or tears, and lived her life apart from the rest of society. Her physical appearance and mental state deteriorated visibly. In the end she was admitted to a hospital where she took a turn for the worse, bodily and mentally. Anna Topp died on March 10, 1965. Her face in death, freed at last from her inner fears and pain, showed the profile of a beautiful woman.

  All this I learned after the war, which had allowed us virtually no time off for family affairs. During the entire conflict I saw my parents only once. The same holds true for my cousin Else. She kept silent in order not to implicate me. But I could have found out earlier about the fate of my Aunt Anna. It does not give me a sense of relief to suspect that her family ties to the famous U-boat commander Topp probably saved her from deportation to a death camp. I also fear a personal intervention on my part, had I known her fate, would have made no difference.

  In my house I have decorated an entire wall with a panel of twenty-five pictures painted by Erich Klahn, all of them showing details of Odys seus's wanderings before his return to Ithaca. The goal at the end of all his wanderings, the motive for all his acts of commission and omission, is to return home, to return to the basic values of the human existence. Like Odysseus we drifted through the days and nights, through the years of war, not to seek glory but to bear life such as it is in a manly fashion. The final picture shows Athena warning Odysseus against any desire of carrying on his struggles forever: "Son of Laertes and the gods of old, Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways, command yourself. Call off this battle now, or Zeus who rules the world will be angry."

  The Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis wrote his Odissia in 1938. He takes up Dante's interpretation of a man being restlessly tossed here and there, a man conquered and overpowered, lonely and without hope, but nevertheless determined to fight on. In Alistair MacLean's book, H.M.S. Ulysses, I discovered many parallels to my own war experiences. The British cruiser Ulysses is engaged in seemingly endless missions, escorting Allied convoys through the Arctic Ocean to Russia. Weary and torn by suspense, the ship's crew must not only overcome, again and again, the challenges of the icy polar nights and merciless winter storms, but must also battle the German enemy who endures heavy losses himself while attacking the Ulysses with aircraft and submarines in order to destroy the convoy. Without asking the purpose of their mission, the men transcend the limits of ordinary suffering. Bitter, worn out, and on the verge of mutiny, they grow to undergo a metamorphosis that leaves them doing their duty stoically under the onslaught of events. Their commanding officer could offer no explanation for this transformation of his men, nor was he able to make the Admiralty comprehend the situation. He was overwhelmed by the realization that nothing he said made the slightest impact on his superiors.

  In Giovanni Pascoli's Ultimo Viaggio, Odysseus, after his safe return to Ithaca, takes off for one last voyage in search of perfect happiness. Whatever happiness may be-love, wisdom, truth-Odysseus is looking for it in vain. Instead, what overwhelms him at the end of his voyage is the notion that man in his endless wanderings between truth and error remains unchanged. He is still apprehensive about apocalyptic rejection and painfully aware of the fateful limitations of the human condition, a burden we have to bear daily.

  I have always felt a special affinity to Homer's Odyssey. This includes the many added interpretations and variations presented to us over the span of 2,000 years by men like Virgil, Dante, Kazantzakis, Tennyson, James Joyce, Pascoli, and others.

  Back from Norwegian internment, I find myself in Bremerhaven on a campground closed off by barbed wire. After several hours two old friends, the writer and war correspondent Wolfgang Frank and the former PT boat commander Friedrich Wilhelm Wilcke, both working for the Americans as interpreters, come to see me. They invite me to accompany them to the American officers' mess. Soon "I am surrounded by mountains of butter, bread, and meat. I notice how American soldiers sitting next to me empty their half-eaten meals full of nutritious food into the trash cans. My friends tell me the German population is starving, not because there is a lack of food but as punishment for having followed Hitler into the war and for having fought to the bitter end. Our longsuffering people, exhausted and bled white, must now starve as a form of punishment! The winners appear to have forgotten in this arbitrary treatment that they entered the war out of humanitarian concerns in the first place. Suddenly I have lost all my appetite.

  I return to my tent at the campground. The next day I am released. Wilcke accompanies me to the employment office, where I receive the proper papers to transfer into the British Zone, for my destination is Travemi nde. I assume that is still my wife's place of residence. I am joined by an army major, both of us in uniform and with our decorations. We are told that the wearing of decorations is no longer allowed. We don't care. That night Wilcke invites us to the half-destroyed house of an uncle of his in one of Bremen's suburbs.

  In the still intact living room a well-laid table awaits us along with the best the kitchen and cellar have to offer. We eat by candlelight because there is no electricity. Besides the host and his wife, their two sons, thirteen and fifteen years old, are present. In his words of welcome, directed more toward his sons than to us, our host expressed much of what was on his mind. It must be unique in the course of history, he said, that a whole people-soldiers and civilians, women and children-had fought for six years under the greatest deprivations and with terrible losses, only to discover in the end that it had fallen victim to political leaders who pretended to punish crimes but in reality were more than anyone guilty of committing them. He added that this realization in no way diminished the feats of the soldiers. These words were obviously directed at the major and me. I have never forgotten this encounter. Those words, and the friendly atmosphere in which they were spoken, seemed like an anchor tossed out into troubled waters.

  The next day the major and I hopped on a coal train bound for Lubeck. There we parted company. He went on to see his family in nearby Schwartau while I found a truck driver who took me along to TravemUnde. At last I stood in front of Consul Kroger's house where I had taken leave of my wife. I soon learned that only hours after my wife had moved into the house, the British had forced her to leave again. My wife sat literally on the street not knowing where she might spend the next night with her two little children. Finally a sympathetic soul saw her misery and offered my pregnant wife shelter at her house. Thus my wife lived with Mrs. Hinrichsen until friends helped her move to Celle where, protected by my parents, she could await the birth of our son. I followed her atop another coal train.

  In Celle I encountered the following situation. Shortly before the end of the war my parents' house in Hanover had been completely destroyed in an air raid. What few belongings they could salvage they took along to Celle, where they now lived in extremely modest and crowded conditions. Here my wife had joined them after an adventurous trip by truck over roads in bad need of repair. It is a miracle that she did not lose her child during this ordeal.
We finally saw each other again in that house at No. 6 Trift, which was to become both our home for the next seven years and a source of constant torment.

  Words cannot recapture our feelings when we saw each other again. For my wife all worries that had burdened her in the past fell away. Once more she had me as her protector, for she needed protection not only to give birth to our child but also to survive in an environment full of hostility and need, and short on understanding. For me it meant the end of immediate dangers to my life, the reunion with my family, and an invitation to move on to new shores. It also meant a complete reassessment of our situation.

  Celle had been spared by Allied bombs, but all around roads and towns lay in ruins. Hanover, my native city, was a heap of rubble. Factories that had survived the bombing were dismantled. All food was rationed; it was too much to starve, too little to live on. Any deeper analysis about the war and the recent past had to be postponed until we won the struggle for our daily bread. We thought of little else besides the necessities of daily life. To ponder professional options for the future was a luxury I could not afford. Protecting and feeding my family came first. Any intellectual ambitions had to take a backseat fora while.

  A friend of mine recommended me for a job with the "Nordsee" Fishing Company in Cuxhaven. As an ordinary seaman I would go out into the North Sea on trawlers and other fishing boats that had originally been destined for the scrap heap but were now deemed good enough to visit the fishing grounds of the Dogger Bank and the Fladengrund.

  ORDINARY SEAMAN

  A letter:

  Cuxhaven, November 1, 1945

  Things around here are somewhat adventurous. I assume the letter I wrote from Hamburg has reached you. No sooner had I dropped it into a mailbox when a car stopped and took me down to Wischhafen. There I sat on the road again with all my luggage. Then a motorcycle drove by, bound for a German POW camp nearby. I thought I might find better transportation there and hopped aboard, again burdened down by my heavy load. After a few incidents we arrived safely at the camp, and indeed the next morning I caught a ride on to Cuxhaven. By chance I met my former executive officer, Lieutenant Klug. I was able to talk him out of a sack of white cabbage for you. So don't be surprised if it shows up at our place in the near future.

  Cuxhaven looks exactly the way I had imagined it from a book of seafaring stories I had devoured as a boy. But if I had imagined myself so far to be a true mariner, there were still lots of new things to learn, such as the financial arrangements, the muster roll, or keeping a registration book. I received my gear and clothing in a house guarded over by a stony-faced old fisherman. Rubber boots up to my belly, oilskin clothing, a sou'wester, a knife and gloves to kill the fish, and many other things. I threw everything into a huge seabag, which I slung over my shoulder and carried aboard.

  Then everything went very fast. On November 1, 1 joined the crew of the Max M. Warburg, a fishing trawler of 184 tons. There are nineteen of us on hoard. I lodge with eleven others in the forecastle. Things are primitive, but we will manage. We will sail at 7 A.M. on November 4. We will be away for twelve days, stay in port for 36 hours, and off we go again. That will be the routine for the foreseeable future. Ashore I have rented a decent room in the house of a construction official who works for the city. The house is about 30 minutes from the train station. I include the rest of my ration stamps along with a postage stamp on which you will recognize without difficulty your U-boat man. Until now I did not know about this stamp.

  Best regards from your ordinary seaman.

  Diary:

  My first day aboard the Max M. Warburg. It was still dark when I left Groden, where I live, to march to the harbor. The watchman hands me my seabag, which I had left with him while telling me all about his heroic deeds during the war. I barely listen to him. By means of an almost vertical ladder I climb on board. Mariners are known to be taciturn. I enter the deck. "Morning." No reply. "I am the new seaman." A few men raise their eyes from whatever trivial activities they are engaged in. Nobody stirs. It turns out there is no mattress for me. Reluctantly, a locker is cleared so that I can stow away my belongings. After half an hour, as I am about to leave the deck to go outside, a question: "What's your first name?" Apparently the ice is broken.

  Work begins. We drag nets around, roll barrels full of salt, and do other chores. In the meantime we have gotten under way, crossing the Elbe River to Brunsbuttel where in 1940 1 lost my boat U 57 in a collision. There is no time to dwell on those events. We demagnetize the vessel. My formerly clean suit is a mess already, as if we had been out here for days. The men work hard, but their manners are coarse, their utterances unfriendly. A soft soul would not be able to stand it for very long. The men, having somehow learned that I am a former Uboat commander, do not quite know what to make of me. They address me by my first name as they do with everyone else, but they hesitate to shout me down the way they do it to our cabin boy, the former naval ensign von Seydlitz. By the way, he is a nice young man. I will look out for him. In the evening they begin to ask me about my past. The atmosphere becomes more friendly. Deep down they are as simple as children.

  Letters:

  It is Saturday afternoon and I owe you a report before I will go to Kaltenberge with my former chief engineer, Lieutenant Peter, to spend Sunday there.

  But back to the adventures of your seaman. As I walked through the darkness to the harbor, everyone was still asleep except a few others who likewise had to be aboard their vessels early. I realized for the first time that I had joined a different social class. I now belong to the working class.

  The ship was ready to sail when I arrived. My work station was on the forecastle and I handled the forward lines as we got under way. Soon we were on the Elbe headed for the Dogger Bank. There are no time-outs for ordinary seamen. We repair the nets, get them ready for the catch, stand watch. Perhaps it was good that I had no time to think things over. After 24 hours we reached the Dogger Bank and brought out the net. At the same time a storm set in-it is November, after all. It would not abate for the remainder of our outing.

  When we lowered the net for the first time, one member of the crew got caught in the steel hawsers and was dragged overboard. While the boat lay stopped, we hauled the net back in. The man was unconscious, his foot crushed. The captain's reaction from the bridge: "You idiot!" Nothing else. We took the man to our deck. There were no medications on board, only rubbing alcohol to ease the pain and prevent infections. My limited medical knowledge from my U-boat days helped a little. We put the foot in splints and tried to straighten out the bones. Everything is up to the healing process and the goodwill of Hippocrates. There are no coastguard cutters that might be called in. To break off our fishing trip was out of the question. Human lives are of little value around here. The man remained on board for the next ten days. We cared for him as best we could. Not once did the captain show up to take a look at the man.

  About half of our catch is commercially usable. We fall into an exhausting routine. We haul up the catch, empty the net onto the deck, bring it out again, then sort, kill, and stow away the fish before we repeat the entire process. You asked if we get any sleep. Practically none. While the fishing routine is under way there is no time off. For ten long days we are wet and cold, our hands bloody and worn, toiling like slaves without respite. Every once in a while we process the old catch before the new one is heaved aboard. On those occasions we collapse for a half hour's rest. While we wolf down our meals the net stays out just a little longer than usual.

  Our mess deck is dirty. Nobody has time to wash up or to brush his teeth. Perhaps it is not necessary anyway since we swallow so much salt water involuntarily. Whenever we get some sleep we never bother to undress because it would mean wasting time. I always wake up bathed in sweat because right next to my place is the stove that keeps us warm. That is our world for twelve days at a time. I am back again. While looking for a new place to stay I made the acquaintance of a simple woman full of humor. On one occ
asion she said: We Germans are in the habit of pursuing one goal at a time, using up all our energy. In the process we forget that to the right and left of our path there are beautiful things that alone make our lives worth living. As a result we usually collapse in a state of exhaustion before we even reach our goal.

  Today I received a telegram informing me that I will not be able to enroll at the Technical University in Hanover at this time. I have decided to stick with the fishing business for another while. After all, I am pretty good at negotiating with people and organizations.

  Once more your sailor has solid ground beneath his feet. We docked at 1:30 rr.M. right near the huge fish-processing facilities and began to spit out the catch we had stowed away in the ship's belly over a period of ten days. We seamen are ready to go ashore, freshly washed and shaved, in civilian clothes that look little different from what we wear at work. Our next task is to smuggle our goodies past the guard on the pier, for the situation is this:

  As soon as the vessel makes port it is taken over, along with its entire cargo, by the fishing company. A guard is posted near the gangway to make sure that no fish that is not accounted for leaves the vessel. Every crew member-except the captain, who enjoys special privileges-is entitled to 5 pounds of fresh fish, or 10 pounds if he is married. In reality everyone tries to beat the system. Your sailor, knowing his feeble wife at home needs all the food he can lay his hands on, managed to take ashore, besides his ration of fresh fish, a few cans of cod liver, two bottles of cod liver oil, and a small barrel of salt herring. If you consider that the Warburg returned from this trip with 115 tons of fish, you will forgive your sailor that he cheated the guard after his very first voyage.