Read Online Dönitz: The Last Führer by Peter Padfield - Free Book Online

spread throughout the German Navy. It concerned a dinner aboard the German cruiser to which the officers of the other navies had been invited. A British Admiral sat next to the German Captain and at one point raised his glass and gazing directly into the blue eyes of the German, as the glasses clicked, whispered a private toast, ‘The two white nations!’
    This story so impressed one German officer, von Hase, that when he came to write a book after the war, he called it
The Two White Nations
. To leave no doubt about the moral, he described the French, Italians and Slavs as ‘intellectually, physically and morally inferior’; the British and German officers, however, gazing at each other ‘with flashing eyes’, recognized themselves as ‘representatives of the two greatest seafaring Germanic peoples. They felt they were of the same stock, originally members of one and the same noble family’. 49
    Racial ideas, whether calmly assumed by Anglo-Saxons who had halfthe world to prove it, or worked at earnestly by Teutons who wanted—as much in psychological as material terms—what the Anglo-Saxons had, were a part of the contemporary mind. Everything known about Dönitz suggests he would have shared them to the full. But when he came to write his memoirs one war and a holocaust after von Hase, they had, of course, become unfashionable, and he wrote in a very different vein. He did not mention the private toast aboard his cruiser, and adopted the viewpoint that every nationality has its particular strengths and weaknesses; he contrasted, for instance, the ‘somewhat indolent’ character of the Austrians to ‘the duty-obsessed, correct, but stiffer and perhaps also narrower Prussian nature’. 50
    In the autumn of 1913 the
Breslau
was relieved by one of the regular battalions of naval infantry from home and the cruiser left the international force. By this time Dönitz had completed the prescribed three and a half years since entering as a Cadet, and he was formally elected an officer by the officers of the cruiser. This was another custom adopted almost unchanged from the Prussian Army; it was designed as the final bar to any dilution of the social and spiritual homogeneity of the officer corps; one objection was sufficient to prevent anyone being elected and there was no appeal.
    Having passed this court, Dönitz swore an oath on the Imperial flag—or perhaps an officer’s drawn sword:
    ‘I, Karl Dönitz, swear a personal oath to God the Almighty and All-knowing that I will loyally and honourably serve His Majesty the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, my supreme war lord, in all and any circumstances on land and at sea, in peace and in war … and will act in a correct and suitable manner for a righteous, brave, honourable and duty-loving soldier.’
    He was gazetted
Leutnant zur See
(Ensign USN or sub-lieutenant RN) from September 27th and placed 20th in the rank-order for his year. This meant that he had acquired sufficient points in the practical courses in the summer of 1912 before his posting to the
Breslau
to move him up nineteen places from the 39th position he had obtained in the final exams at the Navy School—an obvious indication of practical talent, which was confirmed by the glowing report of the Captain of the
Breslau
. 51
    *     *     *
    The
Goeben
and
Breslau
continued to spend most of their time in the eastern Mediterranean, for the Balkans remained an area of dangerous friction and were, besides, the axis of a German diplomatic and commercial drive towards Turkey and the Middle East; the warships were symbols of German power. For the 22-year-old
Leutnant
Dönitz it was a delightful period, rich in a variety of exotic experiences. From Port Said, where the cruiser coaled, he made journeys to Cairo to visit the Egyptian museum, the mosques, the pyramids and the other monuments to that timeless civilization; in the Syrian and Turkish harbours where they showed the flag he acquired a taste for