In mid-January 1981, a three-page handwritten document arrived at the West German Federal Chancellery in Bonn through a back channel. Its title caused immediate alarm among government officials: “Political Testament. ” It was signed by Karl Dönitz, the last Grand Admiral of Germany and Reich President, who had died just weeks earlier. The contents were deemed so politically sensitive that they were hidden from the German people until 2015—seventy years after Germany’s surrender.
The story begins on April 29, 1945. Hitler sat in his bunker beneath the ruined Reich Chancellery in Berlin, with Soviet forces barely half a kilometer away. He was resigned to death, but he knew the German armed forces would need leadership after he was gone. Dictating his final wills, he decreed his office would be split in two.
Goebbels would become Reich Chancellor, and a military officer not present in the bunker would take the title of Reich President. That officer was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the Kriegsmarine. Dönitz had been appointed commander-in-chief in the north on April 20, 1945—Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday—giving him control over all German forces in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, Norway, and the western Netherlands. Hitler trusted him, and with Germany likely to be cut in half by advancing Allied armies, decentralizing command was a sensible precaution.
Dönitz set up his headquarters at Plön. On April 30, Hitler died. Goebbels tried to negotiate a ceasefire in Berlin and permission from the Soviets for himself, his staff, and Martin Bormann to fly to Plön and join Dönitz’s government. The Soviets refused.
Goebbels took his own life on May 1, and Bormann vanished during the mass escape from the bunker that night. On May 1, 1945, Dönitz announced Hitler’s death to the German people by radio and declared himself Reich President. The war continued for several more days, partly to evacuate as many German soldiers and civilians as possible from the Baltic coast before the Soviets could capture them—Operation Hannibal. Dönitz was legally Hitler’s successor under the Third Reich’s constitution, but his presidency received no international recognition.
The Western Allies saw him only as commander-in-chief of the German armed forces. Even Germany’s remaining allies turned away. Japan, fully aware of the collapse, began severing ties and formally protested when Germany surrendered on May 8, placing German diplomats in Tokyo under house arrest and seizing U-boats based in Asia. Winston Churchill, however, was reluctant to follow the Allied line of refusing Dönitz any recognition.
In his victory speech on May 8, 1945, Churchill referred to Dönitz as “the designated head of the German state. ”
The Dönitz government lasted from May 1 to May 23, 1945, a period of about three weeks. It moved to Flensburg-Mürwik on the Danish border as British forces captured Hamburg and annexed Schleswig-Holstein. The government achieved little, with Dönitz preoccupied running Operation Hannibal even after the formal surrender.
The British allowed the rump government to continue for one reason: so Dönitz and the remaining German command could organize the disarmament of tens of thousands of German troops and their transfer to British POW camps. On May 23, 1945, Churchill ordered the government extinguished. In a lightning operation, British forces captured everyone. Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl, and Albert Speer were arrested and later put on trial at Nuremberg.
Dönitz received a ten-year prison sentence and was sent to Spandau Prison in Berlin. Some historians argue the Dönitz government was never real. They point out that sovereignty requires recognition by other states, which Dönitz never received. After Germany’s surrender, the Allies assumed supreme authority, codified in the Berlin Declaration of June 5, 1945.
Under this view, Dönitz’s shaky authority lasted only from May 1 to May 7, 1945, when Germany signed the surrender document that came into force on May 8. The Allies worked with him only to make the disarmament process smooth and avoid further British casualties, ignoring his claims to be head of a government. By the time of his release from Spandau in 1956, Dönitz had published two autobiographies and given several television interviews. He remained unrepentant, insisting he had acted out of duty to his nation.
But something stirred him to write his political testament in 1975. That something may have been a strange character named Manfred Roeder. Born in 1929 and educated in an SS-run school, Roeder had fought in the Battle of Berlin as a teenager. After the war, he studied law, worked briefly in the court system, then dropped out to work for a Christian spiritualist organization with American roots.
He became a lawyer in 1967. In 1970, Roeder left the CDU and formed the Deutsche Bürgerinitiative, a protest group that targeted pornography and sex workers. Within a year, it shifted to anti-Semitism and racism. Roeder forged ties with far-right groups like the NPD and even the Ku Klux Klan.
He was infamous for publicity stunts, like writing to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin—a vocal Hitler admirer—requesting funds to help restore the Reich. He co-founded two self-proclaimed Reich governments and acted as Rudolf Hess’s lawyer, trying to secure the former deputy Führer’s release from Spandau. Around 1974, Roeder concluded that the West German constitution was invalid because the German Reich had never ceased to exist in 1945. In his mind, Dönitz was still Reich President.
So he contacted the old Grand Admiral. Dönitz was surprised and evasive, telling Roeder he no longer considered himself president of Germany. Roeder replied that Dönitz had therefore resigned—and that Roeder himself was now president. He declared himself Dönitz’s successor and gathered like-minded right-wingers around him.
Roeder eventually slid into urban terrorism, was imprisoned for eight years, and died in 2014 at the age of eighty-five. But his meeting with Dönitz seems to have stirred something inside the old admiral. Dönitz’s political testament claimed that the principal Allied powers had recognized him as head of state—largely inaccurate, except for Churchill’s reference to him as “the designated head of the German state. ” It said he had been thrown into Spandau by the International Military Tribunal, supposedly with the express confirmation of his office as head of state.
The tribunal’s verdict did contain the phrase “Hitler’s successor head of state,” although Dönitz was never considered a major figure compared to Göring or Ribbentrop. Dönitz wrote that he was the true guardian of the Reich idea. On his release from prison in 1956, he said he had found two German states on the unannexed territory of the Reich, both of which had originally set the goal of reunification. Since East Germany had abandoned that claim in its 1974 constitution, he argued, West Germany had become the bearer of the Reich idea.
The testament ended with an extraordinary statement: “Conscious of my never-ending responsibility towards the German people, I transfer the content and purpose of my office as the last head of state of the German Reich to the Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany. ”
Below it was the signature of the eighty-four-year-old Dönitz. He gave the document to his Nuremberg defense counsel, Otto Kranzbühler, who passed it after Dönitz’s death on Christmas Eve 1980 to Richard von Weizsäcker, vice president of the Bundestag. It eventually reached German President Karl Carstens with a covering note: “The political testament has no legal relevance.
”
In January 1981, a copy landed in the hands of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who wrote that he considered the document of no current significance and recommended it be placed on file. Then it vanished for eleven years. An official had suggested placing it in Schmidt’s personal safe, and that is where it went. When Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in October 1982, the testament remained buried in the Chancellor’s archive, out of sight and out of discussion—until someone found it on January 13, 1992, in the files of the Federal President’s office.
The official who discovered it offered the opinion that it should be made available to historians, but did almost nothing to ensure that happened. The public only learned of the document’s existence in June 2005, when one of the senior officials involved in the 1981 case wrote a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. The testament itself was not published until 2015. The document clearly unsettled German officials in the early 1980s.
It raised uncomfortable questions about Hitler’s successor, whether Germany had truly ceased to exist after defeat, and the legality of the West German government created by the Western Allies in 1949. Evidently, many politicians and civil servants at the time did not want it to become public. Some revisionists have questioned Churchill’s motives in dissolving the Dönitz government. They suggest his decision to let Dönitz remain in power had less to do with disarming German forces and more with keeping intact a sizable German army that could fight alongside the Western Allies against the Soviet Union.
Stalin had come very close to invading Denmark in May 1945 and was only stopped by Canadian paratroopers placed in the Red Army’s path. Revisionists point out that a legal government cannot be dissolved by the military order of an external enemy—especially since the Allies themselves called Dönitz Hitler’s successor and head of state. Churchill called him “the designated head of the German state. ” The International Military Tribunal did the same.
Under such theories, the West German and East German states were essentially Allied puppets, and the Dönitz government was the last legitimate government of a united Germany. These were not doctrines held by mainstream historians, but they may help explain why the Dönitz testament was filed away for decades. In extreme old age, Dönitz had clearly begun to reconsider his short-lived government and his place at its head. The result was an extraordinary document that was officially suppressed for reasons that remain unclear to this day.
The debate it inspired continues.
