Black May (47 page)

Recorded 9 May 1943
⁴¹

N
OWROTH:
You’ve no idea how many prisoners of war make a getaway in Germany—every day!

S
CHAUFFEL:
Really!

N
OWROTH:
When I was on leave at Bonn recently, everything was suddenly barricaded off. I was in civilian clothes with my wife [and] … wanted to cross the Rhine by tram, that is, the fast Rhine-bank electric line. I had my naval identity card with me. The tram suddenly stopped on the bridge, all the traffic was held up. The police came in and asked for our identity cards. Everybody who hadn’t identity cards had to get out and was taken away. I had my naval identity card with me, with a photograph in it and then he took a good look at me. It was a photograph of me when I was a midshipman. It was still a good likeness.… I was stopped twice more on the way. There was a terrific roundup of forty-six English officers who had suddenly gotten away, just imagine it, and they only caught thirty-nine of them. A waiter who was there was in the auxiliary police and in his free time he worked as a waiter and he knew all about it, how many they recaptured and [how] seven of them had completely disappeared. They didn’t catch them again. Dirty business … There was frightful scandal about it. How on earth is it possible for forty-six officers to escape?

S
CHAUFFEL:
Germans do it now.

N
OWROTH:
… The whole of Germany is a military machine today. There are Italians, Croats, … Belgians. All the races are represented. It’s a fact: if we were to lose the war, the enemy would already be in the majority in the country.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Yes. We’re in a sorry state. My wife can shoot with rifle and pistol. I suggested pistol shooting. I said to her: “You know what you have to do if I shouldn’t come back, which we hope won’t happen, that you at least are.… Shoot anyone you see.”

N
OWROTH:
… It was always the aim of the Jews to make the Christians their slaves and the only way they could succeed was by means of a war between Christian and Christian.

S
CHAUFFEL:
We may well thank God that we’ve got the Führer and Hermann [Goring].

N
OWROTH:
Yes, yes.

S
CHAUFFEL:
I have nothing against the English and the English have nothing against us. It’s just the Jews who are responsible for the war.

N
OWROTH:
That’s right.

Recorded 31 May 1943
⁴²

K
LOTZSCH:
I went with my wife to Weimar, which is the quietest, most idyllic and peaceful town in the Reich, but you keep meeting grousers there. I had several arguments with them, and my wife used to say to me: “Let them talk.” I replied: “I can’t do that. They are miserable creatures who have never been anywhere near the enemy and here they are, grumbling and grousing. Are we to come from U-boats and listen to that sort of thing?”

I came back from leave. In rather less than a fortnight we sailed. I spent three hundred and four Reichsmarks on drink. Oh my God, how Germany has changed! They aren’t National Socialists any longer, they are agitators, nothing but agitators. They just shoot their opponents. I’ve told my wife that if ever we have a boy, the last thing we must do is to put him in the Hitler Youth.
We
are responsible for the child.

Recorded 3 May 1943
⁴³

O
POLKA:
When guerrillas are captured behind the lines [in Russia] they are naturally shot, but this guerrilla warfare has slackened off there. When it was very bad and people were continually being shot and the miscreants were never caught, they killed one hundred thousand for every German who was shot. That worked.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Well, I don’t know whether that would always work.

O
POLKA:
Oh yes.

S
CHAUFFEL:
What? To kill one hundred thousand people for one German who’s shot?

O
POLKA:
Well it did work.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Well, in France at any rate it didn’t. Nor in Poland.

O
POLKA:
In Poland? It worked in Poland, too. There were no more afterwards. It’s quite true what the English say about our having killed masses of them there.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Well, that had to be.

O
POLKA:
I’d like to see the infantry officer here who wouldn’t kill a crowd like that if he’d driven into a town in an armored vehicle and a few Poles had come creeping out with their hands up and then thrown in a hand grenade when he opened the roof. That’s not cricket!
[Das gehört sich ja nun nicht!]

F
OERTSCH:
Things have happened which should never have been allowed to happen.

O
POLKA:
However that may be, it’s a question of “bend or break.” Either the thing goes well—in that case it will have been all right because a problem will have been removed from the Reich with a sudden, momentarily painful brutality, which in the long run will have been a good thing. And if things go wrong, it’s all up with us anyway. It’s a pity. If we had avoided a war with England, the whole world would have belonged to us.

F
OERTSCH:
That’s the opinion of the English, too.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Yes, I should only like to know what went wrong that time, with [Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain.

O
POLKA:
Chamberlain was thoroughly friendly towards the Germans. Perhaps, even if he wasn’t that, he at least saw that reason [existed] to cooperate with Germany.

F
OERTSCH:
The trouble was that something went wrong that time at Munich—that’s my opinion for what it’s worth.

O
POLKA:
Nothing at all went wrong there. Everything was conceded to us except the [Polish] Corridor.

Recorded 10 June 1943
⁴⁴

K
LOTZSCH:
Adolf [Hitler] is unmarried. He hates humanity and he is driving the whole German nation to ruin. He has no normal human feelings. He has a bestial hatred of mankind. We are bleeding to death in Russia—Tunisia has fallen. Here we’re well treated; in Germany the English POWs are in chains. I loathe that arch-liar [Propaganda Minister Josef] Göbbels, with his evil tongue, and his twenty-two million tons that have been sunk. Then there’s [Labor Front head Robert] Ley with his four or five villas on the Rhine, that villainous
blackguard, with his three marriages and his countless illegitimate children; however the war ends, he’ll be murdered one day. Here they tell you the truth. Every Englishman can listen to the German radio. Here you can eat in restaurants without coupons. When I was on leave recently, my father warned me about one-sided propaganda. I must admit now that he was right.

Recorded
13
May 1943
⁴⁵

C
HIEF RADIOMAN FROM
SLLVAPLANA:
I was responsible for all the German ciphers in France, the general Enigma and the officer’s Enigma machines, all the recognition signals, for the period June to May. I took it as a compliment myself, but I often thought it was quite wrong to give things like that into the keeping of an Other Rank. I could have had the things photographed and no one could have raised a finger against me, no one would have noticed it. And then all the civilians—there are so many of them who sail as wireless officers on merchant ships, and they are all given these ciphers and so on to look after; it’s not right at all. And, then, as I said, in France, where espionage activity is even greater.

K
LOTZSCH:
I also had all our own minefields which we’d laid in the Northern Hemisphere on my grid map, and I used to think: “An Englishman would give me a great deal of money for that map.”

Recorded 9 May 1943
⁴⁶

F
OERTSCH:
We went ashore with revolvers, then we shot up the brothel and came back with far more money than we had started out with. They cleared out the brothel later. There were female agents there; there usually are in those bars. A girl working there would earn five Reichsmarks in ten minutes, but there aren’t any seamen there; they don’t pay anything.

Recorded 8 June 1943
⁴⁷

F
OERTSCH:
In the Royale [a brothel in Paris] there was a spy—an English girl. She was caught. The Germans didn’t notice it, but the French girls did. She got into trouble with the French police. Some
statements or other were false and she was seized. She hadn’t yet done any harm. She was only there together with somebody. [Pause] If we lose the war, it will be [Grand Admiral] Raeder’s fault. He didn’t build enough U-boats, or didn’t switch construction over quickly enough. [Pause]

S
CHAUFFEL:
One must admit that Churchill is very much on the alert. One has to hand it to him.

Recorded 8 June 1943
⁴⁸

S
CHMELING:
We only experienced one real air raid at Danzig, when they dropped those damned bombs on the town. We had just brought our boat back from tactical exercises, and had put in to Danzig Harbor at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon. At about seven o’clock the sirens went. The flak fired marvelously. That evening there were about twenty-two boats lying there, there were three Type Nines and at that time an order had come out at Danzig that there must always be a watch on board, either the port or the starboard watch, so that they could take the boats in tow. All the twenty-five boats fired—you can imagine the din—and then there was the flak from the Schichau shipyard and the heavy flak on the
Haraldsberg.
They were blazing away all round. Then there were several flak trains there. Twelve aircraft made the attack and four of them they shot down over Danzig itself and two more later when they were flying away; that is exactly half. They dropped incendiaries in the center of the town, mainly in the old town, on dwelling houses. One fell on the children’s ward of the Sisters of Charity Hospital and there were forty-eight killed. One fell on the Danzig shipyard, right on the goal of the football field.… We had flak guns manned by youths, members of Hitler Youth or schoolboys. They are on the searchlights too.

Recorded 28 May 1943
⁴⁹

K
ALISCH:
The U-boat shelter at Brest certainly is a large one.

S
PITZ:
Does it only take boats from one flotilla?

K
ALISCH:
Yes.

S
PITZ:
How many pens are there?

K
ALISCH:
There are five pens and ten docks.

S
PITZ
: Can three U-boats get into each pen?

K
ALISCH
: Yes.

S
pitz: That would be … for one flotilla.

K
ALISCH:
Yes. At present the Ninth and the First are together, but they are enlarging the thing now. They are beginning to build again.

S
PITZ:
Are they in a row now?

K
ALISCH:
Yes, side by side. They are building on another five pens to it now. Just imagine how many boats can get into it.

S
PITZ:
Five pens, that means fifteen U-boats.

K
ALISCH:
There are more than fifteen U-boats.

S
PITZ:
Ten docks.

K
ALISCH:
That makes twenty-five and another fifteen.

S
PITZ:
That makes forty U-boats.

K
ALISCH:
At present they’ve got a four meter-thick roof. Now they’re adding another four meters to it.

Recorded
13
May 1943
⁵⁰

G
EIMEIER
[Re: Lorient]: The U-boats lie inside in the pens, like cars in a motor garage. When there’s an air-raid alarm, the French people and everyone about have to go into the shelters. We then closed the doors there; not a soul could get in or out.

P
HILLIPPS:
Under what sort of conditions do the fellows live in the one thousand-man shelter?

G
EIMEIER:
They have their rooms there.

P
HILLIPPS:
As big as this one?

G
EIMEIER:
Yes, bigger.

P
HILLIPPS:
How many men to a room like that?

G
EIMEIER:
It varies, four or five. You spend the first week after you put into port and the last week before you put out, down in the shelter. Everything is in one compartment in the shelter, the noncommissioned officers and ratings are all together. These doors, the movable doors, are all… guards outside, wire entanglements, and barbed wire. We lived inside them.… The inside of the shelter is lined with wood and there are bunks there. You’re together with four or eight men, it all depends. The noncommissioned officers, ratings, and officers all live separately. The last week before the boat puts out to sea and is in the hands of the shipyard, when it is lying in the pen in a dry shelter, we lived in the big shelter all together. It’s right on the harbor, we have about ten minutes walk to reach the boat. They’re still building shelters; … hundreds of Frenchmen are employed there. There are twelve mixing machines where the shelter is being built, all in use. There are two shifts of French workmen—they are building another shelter where we were—who do the shoveling. One shift looks on, smoking cigarettes, while the others work, and then the other relieve them. And then this new layout; the concrete is five meters thick, and then there was scaffolding on top; they are adding another meter of concrete on top.

P
HILLIPPS:
On top of the shelters?

G
EIMEIER:
Yes. The men now no longer live in the shelters. They live farther outside, about thirty kilometers away, right in the woods. An artificial lake has been installed, and a big mess built, there are hutments there with steam heating and everything in them. They are driven there in buses every day. By the time we were due back from this patrol, the camp would have been ready. There are several flotillas there. I believe the Tenth and the Second are at Lorient, and then there are the ones from St.-Nazaire, too.