The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander

by Erich Topp

  At the conclusion of our talk the president hinted he would put no obstacles in my path. I also received unexpected support from the lower ranks of the council of university employees, the cleaning ladies. When asked whether they had anything against me they said no. But not only they spoke up on my behalf, I also received the unanimous endorsement of the university senate, which made the decisive difference. This way I joined Professor Graubner's staff as his scientific assistant on January 1, 1950.

  In 1576, after five long years in the dungeons of the Inquisition, the Spanish mystic and lyricist Luis de Leon, professor of theology at the University of Salamanca, stood ready to give his first lecture since his arrest. The room was filled to capacity, everyone eager to hear how he would address his students whom he had not seen in five years. He took a look at his audience and then began: "Dicebamus hesterna die ... " (As we mentioned yesterday ...). I now sensed something of this composure in me. I wanted to forget the victories and the defeats, and I envied those who managed to do just that. I wanted to be carried along by the great currents of our culture as I had experienced them before the years of terror and as they could be revisited now. At the same time I felt a certain uneasiness about this attitude of self-possession.

  In my search for historical parallels and how they had been captured by artists, I discovered Rodin, whose sculpture The Citizens of Calais mas terfully expresses the notion of unconditional surrender. We could empathize with the fate of these human beings who in 1347, after years of heroic resistance, utterly exhausted and feeling the noose tightening around their necks, were forced to give themselves up to the enemy. In his work Rodin has erected a monument to all those who, after passing through phases of hubris, collapse, unspeakable suffering, and tragic entanglements, had to endure despair without hope. Our complete military and political defeat was reflected in the justice system that the winners of the war imposed on the vanquished and in the dismemberment of the Reich into occupation zones.

  Under the pressure of these events we retreated at first into a kind of self-defense position. The totalitarian regime had created through its ideology a system of thought categories that kept on functioning for a while even after the collapse of the government. What made this ideology so powerful was that it had pervaded everything without opposition or alternative-the corporative organizations, the schools and universities, and the media. Those who abandoned the old categories and reoriented themselves too quickly or for opportunistic reasons were viewed with suspicion. But we found ourselves moving along in a gray zone, without clear guideposts, without an audience, full of doubts about the events around us, neither believing in our own system of justice nor accepting that of the others.

  Not until I took up the study of architecture with its links to art and the humanities did the old categories lose their power and became once again overshadowed by the values that had informed our culture over the millennia. We students lived on this Island of the Blessed in splendid isolation, as it were, away from the political questions of the day until we learned about the mass executions behind the front lines and the genocide against the Jews, no longer as mere rumors but confirmed by eyewitness accounts and pictures. This added a moral dimension to our defeat that went deeper than all apprehensions after our military surrender. It depresses us until this day. Nothing can drag my generation from beneath the shadows that the crimes of the National Socialist regime have spread over us. I still hold this conviction very deeply as I write these words in 1990. Several years in the United States and fourteen years of travels in South America, Southeast Asia, and India have allowed me as a soldier, businessman, or tourist to notice how this shadow still hangs over Germans who left their country for a new beginning elsewhere. I have looked at documents and listened to eyewitnesses. There is no doubt in my mind.

  A friend of mine, a physician, witnessed the following scene in a makeshift hospital for critically wounded soldiers toward the end of the war. One of the men, close to death, requests a private talk with the doc tor. He rejects the offices of a priest. He makes it known that he has never belonged to the Church throughout his life and does not require the consolation of such an institution. He needs to speak to a human being. The talk with the doctor turns into a confession.

  The man had been an ordinary policeman. After a while his superiors had attached him to a special unit. One day, he was asked along with others to attend a closed meeting where, under the seal of strictest confidentiality, they were told of the extent and methods of the Nazi genocide program against the Jews. The gist of the information was virtually identical with an address SS Leader Heinrich Himmler gave before an audience of Party notables in Posen on October 6, 1943. Himmler spoke immediately after Field Marshal Milch, Grand Admiral Donitz, and Reich Minister Speer had briefed the same audience about the current military and armament situation. Here are excerpts from Himmler's speech:

  Allow me to take up in this context and in this close-knit circle of Party comrades a question that most of you have come to take for granted but that has become the most pressing problem of my life, the Jewish question. Today you give no thought to the matter and are relieved that in your district there are no more Jews. All Germans with few exceptions are also aware that we would hardly be able to sustain ourselves through the current aerial bombardments and through a possible fourth, fifth, or sixth year of war if we still had this poisonous plague in our people's body. Gentlemen, it is easy to say: "The Jews must be exterminated." For those of us who must carry out this demand it is the hardest and most difficult task one can imagine. Some of you will say, "Well, of course, they are all Jews," or "They are only Jews." It is not that easy. You cannot imagine how many petitions I have received, Party comrades not excluded, that state that naturally all Jews are pigs but that so-and-so is a decent Jew who should be left alone. I dare declare that based on the number of petitions and opinions in Germany there must be more decent Jews in Germany than their overall share of the population. In other words, we have in Germany so many millions of people who want to protect their one, famous, decent Jew that their number is greater than the number of Jews altogether. I only mention this subject here because you probably know from your own district and your own experience with respectable and decent National Socialists that each of them knows at least one decent Jew.

  I ask you never to talk about what you are hearing today in this room. We must address another question: What about women and children? In this case I have decided to find a perfectly clear solution.

  I did not feel entitled to exterminate the men--that is, to execute them or to have them killed-in order to nurture our nemesis in the form of their sons and grandsons. [ had to make the toughest decision of all, namely, to have this entire people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out this operation it was the toughest assignment they have mastered to date. And the challenge has been met without our men and their leaders suffering mental or spiritual damage. There was a danger that this might happen. The path between the two existing possibilities, namely, either to become too cruel and heartless and to cease respecting human life, or to go crazy and suffer a nervous collapse-the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is terribly narrow.

  Himmier and his gang knew how to reach and stir the emotions, the instincts, and the irritability of unstable, authority-revering men. A general lack of logical thinking and historical awareness furthered this process. The inability to make precise judgments robbed them of the capacity to distinguish between truth and lies, between political necessities and outright crimes.

  The closed meeting for the members of the special unit that the dying man had attended set in motion a machinery of death, itself a piece of an isolated system without contact to the rest of society. Under no circumstances was news about the horror that was planned here and later carried out to reach the outside world. Emerging doubts or pangs of conscience were countered by constant indoctrination and the relegation of problems to an inner circle of
the initiated. These special units-there were six of them, each 120 men strong-operated behind the front lines. The men lacked nothing to numb their senses-alcohol, coffee, tea, the best food. Musical and cabaret entertainment were organized in such a way as to make any contact with the performers impossible. The main task of the units was to round up and liquidate Poles, Russians, and Jews, all of whom had been declared fair game through the so-called Martial Law Decree. The murders were carried out in different ways. Crowded together in meeting halls, factories, and even churches, the unfortunate were killed by means of machine-gun fire and hand grenades. Then the next group, the same procedure, until the buildings were full of dead. In the end the buildings were set on fire. It also happened that the victims had to dig their own mass graves and were then shot dead in the pits. Others then put a layer of earth and lime over the dead and even those who were still alive.

  The man who confided in the doctor on his deathbed had managed to escape from the psycho-terror of his unit when the eastern front collapsed. Even then, while military defeat loomed all around, he had briefly been assigned to a concentration camp to help out with the busy gas chambers. The man knew that he would have to die one way or another. He saw the defeat of his people as an act of retributive justice, the righting of a wrong to which he himself had contributed. He died the next day.

  From my meetings and talks with political extremists and fanatics I am prepared to draw the following conclusions. For adherents of a political ideology the end justifies the means. Many National Socialists and com munists were ready to throw their received moral obligations overboard in pursuit of a political goal of whose validity they had become convinced. They stood ready to lie, to steal, to kill, to liquidate hundreds of thousands of human beings who stood in their path. For these people the principles of Christian morality were empty abstractions, obsolete prejudices of a despised bourgeois world.

  Has it always been this way? Has the course of history always been accompanied and marked by violence? Has the end always justified the means? There can be no doubt that history has not been, at bottom, a "humane" process. Instead, it thrived on the use of force and violence. There are endless examples-Greece, Rome, the Persians, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Khomeini. Christianity has claimed more human lives in its religious wars, witch-hunts, the Inquisition, and its role in the colonization of non-European continents than both World Wars taken together. Power and the use of force have always lain close together.

  One is tempted to conclude under these circumstances that power should be executed by the best. But who are the best? Who knows the proper balance between power and spirit, between order and chaos, between the demands of the state and individual freedoms and liberties? A look at history, especially religious and intellectual history, suggests that every anthropological group requires absolute moral standards as the basis of its existence in order to survive. On my many travels I have become acquainted with the different customs and ethical traditions of many cultures. They appear to have many similarities. Everywhere in the world you will discover that courage, generosity, justice, and honesty are basic positive values no matter how unique the society in question may otherwise be. By contrast, treason, cowardice, malice, sexual licentiousness, and cruelty are despised the world over.

  Due to the regime's monopoly over information and the terror of the totalitarian state, we only learned after the war the full extent to which a criminal political leadership had perverted basic values of our existence and in many areas abandoned them altogether. It might have been possible to exploit certain weaknesses of the system to modify our otherwise uniform picture of the events. But even here the regime came prepared. It cleverly exploited the frequently false propaganda of the other side to further obscure the truth, just as had been the case in World War I. A thorough and correct analysis of all rumors, to sort the genuine from the manufactured news, became very difficult. In addition, the National Socialist system was very good at manipulating the fundamental traditional values of western civilization for its own purposes. Only truly independent minds were equipped to recognize such perversion of thought and word.

  One thing that disturbs me profoundly is that many people today still express themselves in the language and diction popular in the Nazi era. I am appalled about the customary vocabulary one encounters in certain newspapers and books, or in the speeches given in some veterans' organizations, all under the protective mantle of the right of freedom of expression. Perhaps these are remnants of fossilized types who will die out with the passage of time. But I am worried when I receive letters from young people who express themselves in the language of yesterday.

  We must be watchful and recognize that to sharpen the consciousness of mankind requires a permanent effort. To do so it is helpful to revisit again and again the experiences that can be drawn from the course of history and one's own life. Weigh your words! Take on a limited function in life, but carry it out in a conscientious manner! These lessons seem crucial to me.

  From time to time my past has caught up with me. One day I was informed that the various certificates accompanying my military decorations, some signed by Hitler himself, and other such memorabilia had been found. Obviously I was interested in these historical documents because they constituted a part of my life. Their story mirrors the confusion of those days.

  My parents had deposited the documents with the city administration in Hanover. When the last Nazi district leader took off in a hurry to seek refuge in the Harz Mountains before the advancing Allied armies, he took the documents with him in a safe deposit box. Since then I had considered the items as gone forever. Not long afterwards the leader of a Hitler Youth detachment that had just been dissolved at the end of the war found an abandoned truck along a country road in the Luneburg Heath south of Hamburg. It carried the marking, "District Hanover." Since the man himself had once worked for the city of Hanover, he examined the truck's trailer and saw a safe deposit box that had been partially broken into. One drawer, however, was jammed and he opened it by force. In it he discovered my certificates and my ceremonial dagger. The man decided to ask his sister to safeguard the items while he himself went to be processed in a demobilization camp.

  To hide and protect the items was easier said than done. It was well known in the family's hometown that the son had been a Hitler Youth leader and that his sister had occupied a prominent position in the National Socialist youth organization for girls. Not surprisingly, the house was subject to frequent searches and the family was the victim of reprisals, especially after the gates of a nearby concentration camp had been opened. Even though carrying or concealing a weapon could be punished by death, the man's sister customarily carried the dagger hidden under her dress, just in case she needed to defend herself against bodily harm. The certificates rested in a closet underneath some children's toys. Once, British authorities decided to search the house from the attic to the basement. In the process they also began to dismantle the closet in question until they found a number of tin soldiers. They started playing with them and became so engrossed that they never completed their search.

  To make a long story short, despite a number of close calls the family managed to hang on to the documents and the dagger. When matters quieted down politically they resisted selling the items to Allied collectors who would have paid them good money at a time when their family suffered financial hardship. One day they invited me to their house behind the dike along the River Stur, which flows into the Elbe. Both brother and sister were there, along with lots of children, to extend a cordial welcome to me. The house resembled a museum. Painted ceilings, beautiful old doors, and rustic cabinets testified to the culture and taste of these people.

  After a speech that was as kind as it was solemn, they handed me the documents and decorations while sharing with me the adventurous story of their odyssey. Suddenly everything came back to me: the sea, my men, the boat. I told them all about my life as a U-boat commander. Images I
had already given up as lost forever now reappeared. But it was as if I was looking into a blind mirror, for the images were hazy and faint, without clarity or luster.

  We parted company late that night. A short while later I sent the sister a golden ornamental clock from my mother's inheritance from the early nineteenth century. It meant much to me, but it was little compared to what I had received on that evening. I am not talking about the documents and decorations. I mean the satisfaction that even in the darkest of times there are people of character and courage, and also among those who are marked by our political past.

  FREELANCE ARCHITECT

  My association with Professor Graubner was a most rewarding one, especially after we entered into a partnership in January 1953. He was a gifted artist with an uncanny sensitivity for proportion and detail. He had first drawn attention to himself when he planned and designed the Horticultural Exhibition in Stuttgart. A disciple of Professors Bonatz and Schmitthenner, he stood in a tradition of architects who preferred naturally occurring building materials such as freestone and wood. As far as principles of construction are concerned, we thought in terms of the industrial age, used steel and concrete, and did not reject artificial building materials such as plastics. We did not close our minds to the Bauhaus school of architectural design, which had advocated the equal impor tance of technology, function, and form. Whenever we had to decide between the two latter criteria, we favored form over function.

  In 1919 the architect Walter Gropius founded his Bauhaus to prevent the enslavement of mankind by the machine. Gropius wanted to guard against a kind of mechanical anarchy, especially with respect to interior design and the industrial mass production of household items. He desired to remove the drawbacks of the machine without sacrificing its advantages. The result was humanized housing and industrial design.