“Do not rescue any men; do not take them along; and do not take care of any boats of the ship. Weather conditions and proximity of land are of no consequence. Concern yourself only with the safety of your own boat and with efforts to achieve additional successes as soon as possible. We must be hard in this war. The enemy started the war in order to destroy us, and thus nothing else matters.”
The Prosecution has stated that this order went out, according to their records, before May 1940. Can you from your knowledge fix the date a little more exactly?
DÖNITZ: According to my recollection, I issued this order at the end of November or the beginning of December 1939, for the following reasons:
I had only a handful of U-boats a month at my disposal. In order that this small force might prove effective at all, I had to send the boats close to the English coast, in front of the ports. In addition, the magnetic mine showed itself to be a very valuable weapon of war. Therefore, I equipped these boats both with mines and torpedoes and directed them, after laying the mines, to operate in waters close to the coast, immediately outside the ports. There they fought in constant and close combat and under the surveillance of naval and air patrols. Each U-boat which was sighted or reported there was hunted by U-boat-chasing units and by air patrols ordered to the scene.
The U-boats themselves, almost without exception or entirely, had as their objectives only ships which were protected or accompanied by some form of protection. Therefore, it would have been suicide for the U-boat, in a position of that sort, to come to the surface and to rescue.
The commanders were all very young; I was the only one who had service experience from the first World War. And I had to tell them this very forcibly and drastically because it was hard for a young commander to judge a situation as well as I could.
FLOTTENRICHTER KRANZBÜHLER: Did experience with rescue measures already play a part here?
DÖNITZ: Yes. In the first months of the war I had very bitter experiences. I suffered very great losses in sea areas far removed from any coast; and as very soon I had information through the Geneva Red Cross that many members of crews had been rescued, it was clear that these U-boats had been lost above the water. If they had been lost below the water the survival of so many members of the crews would have been impossible. I also had reports that there had been very unselfish deeds of rescue, quite justifiable from a humane angle, but militarily very dangerous for the U-boat. So now, of course, since I did not want to fight on the open sea but close to the harbors or in the coastal approaches to the harbors, I had to warn the U-boats of the great dangers, in fact of suicide.
And, to state a parallel, English U-boats in the Jutland waters, areas which we dominated, showed, as a matter of course and quite correctly, no concern at all for those who were shipwrecked, even though, without a doubt, our defense was only a fraction of the British.
FLOTTENRICHTER KRANZBÜHLER: You say that this order applied to U-boats which operated in the immediate presence of the enemy’s defense. Can you, from the order itself, demonstrate the truth of that?