On May 13, 1944, Klaus Dönitz, a young German naval officer, persuaded friends to let him join a fast attack boat raid across the English Channel. It was his 24th birthday, and he was never supposed to be on board. The boat did not return. Klaus was the son of Karl Dönitz, the admiral who commanded Germany’s entire U-boat war.
His death marked the second time in just over a year that the family had lost a son to the conflict Karl Dönitz was directing. Peter Dönitz, the younger of the two boys, served as a watch officer aboard U-954. On May 19, 1943, that submarine was sunk in the North Atlantic with all hands lost. Peter was 21 years old.
His death came during “Black May,” a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic when German U-boat losses became so severe that Karl Dönitz briefly called off the offensive. After Peter’s death, Klaus was removed from frontline service under navy rules that protected the remaining sons of senior officers who had already lost one child. He was allowed to train as a naval doctor. But Klaus did not stay away.
On his birthday in 1944, he talked his way onto the S141, a fast attack boat heading toward the English coast near Selsey. There, it encountered the Free French destroyer La Combattante and was sunk. Six men were pulled from the water; Klaus was not among them. He was buried in France.
By some accounts, Karl Dönitz showed almost no emotion when the news arrived, attending his morning staff meeting as usual before going home to tell his wife, Ingeborg, that they had lost their second son. Ingeborg Dönitz had spent nearly 30 years as a navy wife and had trained as a nurse before that. The couple had three children: a daughter, Ursula, born in 1917, and two sons, Klaus and Peter. Both boys had followed their father into the navy.
Within a year of Klaus’s death, the war would take far more from the family. In the spring of 1945, as Germany collapsed, Karl Dönitz was named Hitler’s successor. After Hitler took his own life on April 30, 1945, Dönitz led what remained of the German government from Flensburg for about three weeks. During that brief period, he oversaw the surrender and pushed the navy to evacuate soldiers and civilians across the Baltic ahead of the advancing Red Army.
The effort, code-named Operation Hannibal, moved well over a million people in the war’s final months, one of the largest maritime evacuations in history. On May 23, 1945, Allied troops arrested Dönitz and his entire administration. The 20-day government was finished, and Dönitz became a prisoner. At Nuremberg, the submarine warfare charge against him was complicated by the fact that the Allies had used similar methods.
American Admiral Chester Nimitz submitted a statement describing U. S. submarine operations in the Pacific, and the tribunal did not base Dönitz’s sentence on that charge. He was nevertheless convicted on other counts and sentenced to 10 years at Spandau prison in Berlin.
While her husband moved from captivity to Nuremberg and then to Spandau, Ingeborg was left to rebuild an ordinary life with only one surviving child. She went back to nursing, the profession she had trained for as a young woman, and worked for most of the Spandau years as a receptionist at a doctor’s practice in Reinbek, outside Hamburg. When Dönitz was released in 1956, the couple settled in Aumühle, a small town near Hamburg. They had six years together.
Ingeborg died on May 2, 1962. One of the most unusual stories in the Dönitz family belonged not to Karl, but to his son-in-law. In November 1937, Ursula Dönitz married Günther Hessler, a career naval officer who became one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war. In command of U-107, Hessler sailed from the French port of Lorient in the spring of 1941 on a single patrol that sank more than a dozen Allied ships.
By tonnage, it was the highest-scoring war patrol any German submarine ever made. Across his career, he sank over 100,000 tons of Allied shipping. Hessler was eventually placed on the staff of U-boat Command, working directly under his father-in-law. The connection was awkward on both sides.
When Hessler’s Knight’s Cross came due, Karl Dönitz was reluctant to sign it himself for fear of favoritism, and it was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder who ultimately awarded it. After the war, Hessler spent more than a year in Allied captivity. At Nuremberg, he testified on behalf of the U-boat service and his father-in-law. Then, in 1947, the British made a remarkable decision: they hired him.
The Royal Navy wanted a full account of the U-boat war written by the men who had fought it. They commissioned Hessler, an enemy ace and Dönitz’s own son-in-law, to write it. Working with Alfred Höschat, another former U-boat commander, he produced a three-volume study called “The U-boat War in the Atlantic,” finished in 1951. It became a standard reference on the campaign, written for the navy that had beaten him about the war his father-in-law had commanded against it.
For Ursula, the U-boat war was deeply personal. Her father had commanded it, her husband had fought in it, and she was the only one of the three Dönitz children who would live a full life. Hessler died on April 4, 1968, at age 58. Ursula died in 1990.
Two of her sons were given the names Peter and Klaus. Karl Dönitz left Spandau Prison on October 1, 1956, at 65 years old, finished with the navy for good. He returned to Aumühle to find a country that had rebuilt itself without him. Neither of his sons was there to see it.
He spent his remaining years writing. His memoir, “10 Years and 20 Days,” took its title from his decade in Spandau and his 20 days as head of state. In it, he defended the U-boat service and his own conduct of the war. He never expressed regret for the cause he had served, and that refusal shaped how history judged him.
Among former submariners, Dönitz remained the commander they had followed, the man they called “Der Löwe,” the lion. To much of the wider public, he stayed the figure who had led the country through its last and worst days. Both views followed him to the end. Karl Dönitz died in Aumühle on December 24, 1980, at age 89.
He was the last surviving member of the leadership that had run Germany in the war. When he was buried at the Forest Cemetery in Aumühle, thousands of former U-boat sailors came to see off their old commander, many wearing medals they were no longer meant to display. The post-war German military gave the funeral no official honors of its own.
