The prosecution at Nuremberg gave Carl Dönitz one final chance to answer for the document in front of him. “I give you one more opportunity of answering my question,” the prosecutor said. “Will you answer it or won’t you? ”
Dönitz stayed defiant.
He was just a sailor, he insisted. Just a senior officer doing his job. But the men sitting in judgment alongside him included Hermann Göring and the highest ranks of the Nazi elite. If he was truly only following orders, why was he here at all?
I wanted to understand how a man like Dönitz, a naval commander who claimed to be apolitical, became one of Hitler’s most trusted figures and a convicted war criminal. So I set out to trace his path, using a pack of playing cards to rank the most notorious Nazis in history. And Dönitz, I discovered, was far more than just a submariner. My investigation began with the submarines themselves.
In the First World War, a young Carl Dönitz commanded a U-boat. He believed in the submarine as the future of naval warfare. When his own boat was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1918, he survived and spent a year in a British POW camp, fuming over Germany’s defeat and sketching out new tactics to beat the Allies if the chance ever came again. After the war, the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany from having any submarines.
But when Hitler came to power in 1933and began rebuilding the German military, Dönitz’s moment arrived. In 1935, U-boats were reintroduced. Dönitz became a committed Nazi and a fervent admirer of Hitler. He embraced Hitler’s anti-Semitism, making speeches about how Germany would be overrun by Jews without Hitler.
He said he would rather die than live in a country with a Jewish presence. And he demanded not just devotion to duty from his submariners, but devotion to Hitler and Nazism as well. When war broke out in September 1939, Dönitz was ready. He had developed what became known as the wolfpack tactic: instead of attacking Allied convoys individually, his submarines would attack in groups.
One pack would distract the escorts while the others sank the merchant vessels. By firing on unarmed civilian ships, he engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare: any ship that came within periscope range was a valid target, regardless of whether it was neutral, civilian, or loaded with vital supplies for Britain. Churchill later observed that if the Allies had lost the Battle of the Atlantic, they would have lost the war. Dönitz seemed willing to do anything to achieve victory, even if it meant killing unarmed civilians by the thousands.
The U-boat crews endured horrific conditions: up to 50 men crammed into a narrow tube for months at a time, with two toilets—one usually used as a provision store—and no showers. The casualty rate among U-boat crews reached 75%, higher than any other branch of the German military. Yet Dönitz kept demanding more submarines and sending crew after crew into what was becoming a slaughter. But his ruthlessness wasn’t limited to the high seas.
I went to Hamburg to investigate another side of his cruelty. There, I learned about how Hitler had issued guidelines for punishing deserters, allowing for mitigating circumstances such as youthful foolishness. Dönitz rejected that. He issued his own ordinance calling for the death penalty in every single case of desertion.
No exceptions. At Nuremberg, the prosecution confronted him with even more damning evidence. Dönitz had enforced Hitler’s commando order, which stipulated that any Allied commando caught behind German lines should be summarily shot, even if they had surrendered voluntarily. This was a flagrant breach of the rules of war.
Commandos were special troops, but they were still uniformed soldiers fighting under the rules of war. Hitler didn’t like them. Dönitz didn’t like them. And he was happy to have them executed.
Then came the most shocking revelation of all. Dönitz had used slave labor. Twelvethousand concentration camp prisoners were to be employed in the shipyards as additional labor. That was his document.
He couldn’t deny it. He admitted he knew about the concentration camps. I asked how many forced laborers lost their lives building his projects. The answer: about 1,600 victims.
I traveled to the Valentine submarine pens, a massive concrete bunker on Germany’s North Sea coast that Dönitz ordered built to produce the new Type 21 submarines, which he believed could still win the war. The structure was 419 meters long, covering the area of five soccer fields, with walls four and a half meters thick, designed to be bomb-proof against Allied air raids. But building it required a massive labor force, and most German men were needed for the war effort. So the Nazis shipped in concentration camp prisoners—mainly Soviets and Poles, along with Italian POWs and French conscripts—and forced them at gunpoint to work nearly 12 hours a day.
They had almost nothing to eat. The average prisoner weighed about 45 kilograms, yet they were forced to carry cement sacks weighing about 50 kilograms. There was nearly no possibility to take a break, nearly no hygiene standards, nearly no hope. Around 1,600 of them died during the two years of construction.
By early 1943, the tide of war had turned. The Allies had cracked the Enigma code, developed ASDIC to detect submarines underwater, and the United States had entered the war. The U-boats went from being the hunters to being the hunted. But Dönitz kept fighting to the bitter end.
Then came the moment that shocked even Germany. On May 1st, 1945, millions of war-weary Germans heard an unfamiliar voice announce Hitler’s death. Dönitz, Hitler’s handpicked successor, would now lead the Reich as president. Why Dönitz?
Why not Himmler or Göring, the big political names? Because, as historians explained to me, Dönitz had been Hitler’s truest follower. He had no connection to politics. He had never betrayed Hitler.
While others had discredited themselves, Dönitz had remained unfailingly loyal. When he announced Hitler’s death, he told the German people that Hitler had died fighting at the head of his troops in Berlin. He did not reveal that Hitler had committed suicide. For a few fleeting weeks in May 1945, Dönitz ran the final Nazi government from the Naval Academy in Flensburg, with some ministries operating from ships in the harbor.
It was a strange 21 days in German history. Dönitz, detached from reality, called upon the Western Allies to team up with the remnants of the Nazi forces to fight the Soviet Union. The Allies refused. They demanded unconditional surrender.
On May 7th, 1945, Dönitz announced Germany’s unconditional surrender. The war in Europe was over. Then came his arrest. He walked through a tunnel inthe Flensburg compound to imprisonment.
I stood where he had stood when it all ended. His time as leader of Germany was over. Soon, he would stand trial at Nuremberg. On October 15th, 1946, the verdicts were read.
Dönitz was indicted on three counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, waging a war of aggression, and crimes against the laws of war. He was found not guilty of conspiracy, but guilty of the other two. He was convicted of committing heinous war crimes. But while many of his fellow Nazis were sentenced to hang, he received just 10 years imprisonment.
I believe his sentence was far too short. He got lucky because he had a decent lawyer. The problem for the prosecution was that if you accuse a man of waging unrestricted submarine warfare, you had better be sure your own side hasn’t done the same. Dönitz’s lawyer obtained an affidavit from US naval commander Nimitz, who confirmed that he too had engaged in similar tactics.
Dönitz’s defense was simple: “Yeah, maybe I did something bad, but so did you. So why are you prosecuting just me? ”
After the war, did Dönitz feel regret or remorse? He never showed any.
He was released in 1956, the first of the major Nazis serving time to be set free. He died in 1980 at age 89. He spent his later years writing his memoirs and peddling his own narrative: that he was just a sailor following orders. Standing there, I felt the weight of what he had done.
His submarines operated with utmost ruthlessness against merchant shipping, sending countless innocent men, women, and children to their deaths on his orders. He used slave labor to build a bunker when the war was already unwinnable. He was up to his neck in crimes against humanity. The Valentine bunker showed me something crucial.
You can’t separate the military from the atrocities of the Nazi state. It was a U-boat bunker, built with slave labor. Dönitz had unclean hands in the crimes of the Third Reich. One advantage Dönitz had as a sailor was that the Navy wasn’t directly involved in the Holocaust in the same way as the Army or the SS.
That distance, or perceived distance, made him look a little cleaner than other Nazis. But it didn’t make him clean. In the end, my panel of experts weighed in. Anthony ranked him number 26.
Guy put him at 24, noting that in a normal war, for a normal regime, his actions would make him a major war criminal. Matt agreed at 25, citing his fanatical commitment to Nazism and his willingness to prolong the war. I agreed with them. Carl Dönitz ranks 25th among Hitler’s most wanted.
He was the Eight of Spades. A fanatical Nazi whose tactics and orders claimed thousands of innocent lives. As Hitler’s successor, he tried to prolong the war.
For that, he ranks 25th among Hitler’s most wanted.
