From the archive: The silence of Karl Doenitz

The last years of the last president of the Third ReichIn Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Hitler’s architect tried to charm his biographer Gitta Sereny and convince her that he knew nothing of the Final Solution. But for Karl Doenitz, the U-boat captain who for a few days became president of the Third Reich after Hitler’s suicide, there was seemingly no need for such wasteful dialogue, and he stuck to his own deluded monologue until his death in 1980.Barry Pree’s interview with Doenitz (‘The nine-day Fuehrer’, 4 May 1975) begins by saying that after his release from Spandau in 1956, he told reporters: ‘It is my duty to remain silent.’ Two years later he published Ten Years and Twenty Days, ‘a dutifully detailed, but remarkably impersonal book about his war-time career and experiences as Head of State’. But because he had not elaborated any further, Pree concluded that, ‘In his own way, this proud old man has kept his word, he has remained silent.’ He didn’t want to face the reality. Continue reading…
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