Battleship Bismarck (72 page)

Even after the serial murders in the summer of 1934, my progress along the path of growing recognition of the depravity of the National Socialist regime was by no means straightforward and untroubled. For a young man, politically uninformed, fundamentally immature, in surroundings in which devotion and loyalty to Hitler were the order of the day, such a development would have been very difficult. Over and over, beside my doubts about Hitler, I felt doubts about myself. Could it really be that so many Germans viewed him wrongly and so terribly few rightly? And then there were always Hitler’s radio broadcasts. Whether I listened to them by order or was magnetized by the mere sound: what rhetorical cascades fell over me, what dizzying eloquence! What achievements could he not endlessly enumerate: the chaos in Germany overcome and order restored, unemployment conquered and millions of jobless reintegrated into the productive process, the dictate of Versailles dismantled step by step, German military sovereignty reestablished—a persuasive, incontrovertible presentation.

Once, in the beginning of 1936, he particularly praised the German soldier as the support of his state, as the armsbearer of the nation, flattering the German officer—how gullibly did we take the bait! Even the ceaseless repetition of such recitals was not wearisome, but allowed the glow of persistent past successes to light up the future, in which things would most definitely continue to improve. Like the beating of a powerful surf, Hitler’s speeches repeatedly swept me off
the ground of seemingly unshakable skepticism and aversion, and I found myself swimming against doubt: wasn’t I in error, musn’t I reorient my basic outlook? But, remarkably, such agonizing uncertainty never lasted more than two or three days and then I was myself again: No, his venomous speech, his burning fanaticism, his irrational outbursts of anger appeared somehow fraudulent, intellectually questionable, the man wasn’t right; instinct more than understanding told me these things. And so I could never fully explain myself rationally, could never “prove it.” It was a spectral existence, as if between two worlds.

“My God, why are you so dejected?” A girlfriend asked me that question when in the summer of 1937 I returned to Berlin after a long absence.

“If you’re thinking that something happened recently to depress me,” I replied, “it’s not that. I can’t think of anything of the sort this year, or even in 1936. No, it’s something else entirely, apparently insignificant, for a long time now even commonplace. I believe that today was the day I sat down once too often in a restaurant near some of those loud-mouthed, as you well know, black-uniformed people who consider bodily measurements and the color of one’s hair and eyes as valuable instruments of national policy. These physically trained, Weltanschauung-indoctrinated,
*
nationalistically supercharged men regard the Aryan as the measure of all things and as such entitled to rule the world and eliminate everyone not of their kind. When I come to think that such criminal nonsense has been stuffed into young people’s heads since 1933, that this will continue, and that it will never be possible to set things right in this state, then only some sort of historical catastrophe can put an end to such nonsense. When and how it will come, I can’t say. But it hangs over us, like eternity.”

That was only a year before the murderous Jewish pogrom, the public performance of racial madness. “Of course, where wood is planed, shavings fall”—someone applied this, which gradually became the most absurd of all sayings, to that outrage. Hermann Goring had used it once, in a speech at Essen in March 1933. The Jewish department stores there had then been shut down by the state and completely innocent people arrested and mistreated. The latter were the “shavings.” Thereafter the saying became very fashionable and was always thought suitable when referring to the victims of the
Brown tyranny. The “planing” went on, according to the “Führer’s” recipe, for twelve years. And when in 1945 the plane fell, the “shavings” included four million German war dead, the unity of the Reich, a thousand years of German territorial history, and ruins spread over the country. If only the great planer had tasted his testament.

Others who made their way through the Third Reich but felt budding doubts about its course engraved themselves in my memory with the words that they had to participate or remain at their posts in order to prevent “worse” from happening. No doubt many of them did individual good, meritoriously, even nobly. But, from a national perspective, did they prevent “worse”? If indeed so, then, unfortunately, it was only to the benefit of the “worst.”

If Hitler said any one thing that continually outraged me over the years, it was that he bore the responsibility for his policies “before history.” From his mouth, nothing more than a big, empty aphorism. For a head of government must face the constitutional judges of his time. If, like Hitler, he does not admit, or even eliminates them at the start of his regime, then in truth he permits no criticism and must therefore fear it, and the phrase “responsibility before history” turns out to be hollow nonsense. When does this “history” begin, who defines and evaluates it, and who sits on the judge’s bench? One of the subsequent “historical schools,” or a subsequent government
qua
“historical institute,” according to the demands of the day? As long as the frustrated politician who refers to history is alive, for him it will not have begun—a convenient court, namely, none at all. And does one who feels absolutely no official responsibility have need of even such a court?

My outer life until 1945—
Abitur
,
*
naval officer, war, victory and defeat—can truly be seen as the regulation sort for a man of my origins and upbringing, the internal and external challenges in perfect harmony. But the appearance is deceptive, for the harmony was broken as of 1934. Inwardly shaken to the core to see Hitler misusing the idealism of German youth and the patriotism of the mature generations more and more from year to year; gradually to recognize him as the gravedigger of civilized Germany, in the execution of the “Führer’s will” myself a servant of the state who would have to lay hands on the Reich; to have to assist in maintaining the defensive wall behind which Hitler could commit murder the more undisturbed; to be nothing other than one of the Führer’s “assistant undertakers of
the Reich”; to perform nationalistic “duties” instead of real duties; to pursue civic “values” instead of real values—in all of them I beheld the suffocating, crushing challenges of my time. But the insight upon which I did not act, which did not keep me from being among the “participants,” establishes guilt, personal guilt. Hitler’s ruthless tyranny, his deadly security apparatus, the senselessness of isolated resistance, a resistance without a chance, lessen the guilt. But a residue will remain until the end of my days. I cannot amortize it, too much is irretrievably past. It will live on only as shame and mourning—and as the life-long forfeiture of the claim ever again to step before a German youth.

I have spoken of hope for Germany, hope after 1945, perhaps too great a one? No, until now, at any rate, it has not shown itself to be too great—the twelve-year wait has been rewarded and apparently continues to be rewarded. In a sadly reduced area, to be sure—a cost of Hitler—and painfully separated from my beloved Silesia, the land of my childhood, for decades now I have been a citizen under the most liberal constitution that I have been politically conscious of experiencing in Germany. Until now our citizens have on the whole made good use of it. But a constitution is nothing more than an instrument of the intellect. And in the presence of the authoritarian tendencies deeply imbedded in the German mind, in the end it will only be the citizen himself who develops it into the instrument of a lasting democracy—or does not.

*
Walter Jens,
Die alten Zeiten niemals zu verwinden
(Address on the 50th anniversary of the book burning of 10 May 1933), Akademie der Künste, Anmerkungen zur
Zeit
, Nr. 20 (Berlin 1983).

†
Ibid.

*
A comprehensive perception of the world from a specific point of view

*
School-leaving examination qualifying the student for admission to a university

Afterword

“National Socialism” was identical to the greatest mass movement Germany ever brought forth. Its historical roots were deep and abundant. They made it easy for Hitler immediately to transform his initially “legal” government into a diabolical regime such as even the most authority-enamored among us would never have believed possible. It was a mentality formed by centuries that the great demagogue manipulated—but it was a mentality, and these grow and change only slowly. So it would be a wonder if National Socialism should have disappeared as abruptly and totally as the battleship
Bismarck
and our surface strategy did in the Atlantic on 27 May 1941 or as abruptly as the succession of outward phenomena since 8 May 1945 might indicate. And, indeed, such a wonder neither occurred nor is to be expected around the next corner. The dark past a closed chapter, dead and buried by authority of a democratic constitution? No, unfortunately not. What takes long to ripen takes long to wither.

The preamble for such a speedy burial would have been lacking when the time came for it. What was the situation at the beginning of the democracy? The generation responsible for reckoning with the results of the vile regime continually suppressed the past and withdrew into a stony silence. Neither the school teachers nor the parents at home enlightened the children properly, surely out of shame or cowardice. An immediately inaugurated age of political restoration brought former leading Nazis to the highest positions in the Federal Republic. The democratically imperative need to square accounts
with the “perpetrators” of the vanquished regime, including its legal aspects, was pursued hesitantly, half-heartedly, or not at all, as Jörg Friedrich has given us another convincing proof in his book,
Die Kalte Amnestic
Judges who sat on the murderous “People’s Court” and on the more than twenty “Special Courts” supposedly responsible for “criminal and political offenses” but in reality serving to suppress the political opposition, were seldom if ever held to account and for the most part escaped due expiation for their misdeeds—they and other merciless persecutors of members of the opposition and enlightened patriots have often experienced undeserved clemency under the jurisdiction of the Federal Republic.

Of course, for a long time there has been talk that we must “overpower” (
bewältigen
) the past. But what does this miserable word really mean? Its phonetics alone indicate an unnatural act of force, a sweeping-under-the-carpet of all the horrors and, if this succeeds, please don’t bring them up again. Only, a large enough carpet has not been found and never will be. Therefore why not, in place of fits of overpowering, a simple, honest assessment of the past, a true self-examination? It would be the proper, until now neglected step on the path to a self-ordained instead of decreed democracy. So many unhealthy symptoms are appearing ever more unmistakably: the again increasingly evident anti-Semitism; the necessity to resist the “Auschwitz Lie” with a penal law—which in its part was diluted by a mentality of setting off the post-war expulsions of Germans against the Auschwitz horrors; the scandalous conduct of neo-Nazi groups; the belittling of the victims of the resistance to Hitler; a recent glaring attempt on the part of members of the ruling conservative Bonn coalition to bend the course of justice in a social democratically governed state to its wishes, in other words, to make, as it were, the legal system the “whore of politics.” Citizens who saw through this political game being played for the preservation of political power and to the detriment of the administration of justice and who had lived through Nazism could immediately recall Goebbels’s dictum, “The legal system must not be the master, but the servant of state policy.” This dictum of March 1942 was the prelude to the resolution of the “Great German Reichstag” of 26 April which officially made Hitler the “Supreme Magistrate” of the Reich. And whoever remembers that also remembers Winston Churchill’s words that vigilance is the price of freedom. It always will be.

Epilogue

The news of the discovery of the
Bismarck
wreck by Robert Ballard on 8 June 1989 gave me a great emotional shock. There should have been no such shock because I had previously known of the intended search for the battleship by Dr. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the wreck of the
Titanic
. Ballard had given me the first hint of his
Bismarck
plan when we met in Frankfurt/Main in October 1987 at a luncheon given during the Book Fair by a publisher for whom both of us had written works. And hearing of such a project from a man with a reputation for high competence and determination was to me almost tantamount to the success of that search once it was undertaken. The subsequent failure of Ballard’s initial search for the
Bismarck
in 1988 had not diminished my conviction that he would not be deterred but would once again try harder—and succeed. Thus, no shock should have resulted from a discovery I had expected.

And yet, there the shock was. During the decades since the loss of the ship in May 1941, the operation of the
Bismarck
had been described in many books and press articles, as well as in films. I had written two books on the subject—the second, an expanded version of the first, in which I tried to solve or at least shed light on some of the questions that had not yet been answered concerning Exercise Rhine.

And after all that had been said or done,
Bismarck
to my mind had come to be thought of as a naval cemetery on the bottom of the
ocean, a grave of fallen seamen that no human would possibly ever see again—a place to be held in respectful memory.