In mid-January 1981, a three-page handwritten document arrived at the West German Federal Chancellery in Bonn through a back channel. Its title, “Political Testament,” immediately alarmed government officials, for it bore the signature of Karl Dönitz, the last Grand Admiral of Germany and Reich President, who had died on Christmas Eve 1980 at the age of 89. The contents were deemed so politically sensitive that the document was hidden from the German public until 2015, seventy years after Germany’s surrender. The story of the Dönitz testament begins in the final days of the Third Reich.
On 29 April 1945, Adolf Hitler sat in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, with Soviet forces barely half a kilometer away. His propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, were with him. Hitler had resigned himself to death, but he understood that the German armed forces still resisting the Allies across Europe required leadership after his passing. In his political and personal wills, he decreed that the office of Führer would split in two: Goebbels would become Reich Chancellor, while a military officer not present in the bunker would assume the title of Reich President.
That officer was Karl Dönitz. Hitler had appointed Dönitz commander-in-chief in the north on 20 April 1945, granting him full military and civil control over German forces in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, Norway, and the western Netherlands. It was a sensible precaution as the Allies advanced from east and west, threatening to cut Germany in half. Dönitz established his headquarters at Plön.
On 30 April, Hitler died, and Dönitz and Goebbels succeeded him as instructed. Goebbels attempted to negotiate a ceasefire in Berlin and permission to fly to Plön with Bormann, but the Soviets refused. On 1 May, Goebbels ended his life outside the bunker, and Bormann vanished during the escape from the Chancellery. That same day, Dönitz announced to the German people over the radio that Hitler was dead and that he was now Reich President, pledging to continue the war long enough to evacuate German soldiers and civilians from the Baltic coast before the Soviets seized them.
That effort was Operation Hannibal. Dönitz was legally Hitler’s successor under the constitution of the Third Reich, but his presidency received no international recognition. The Western Allies treated him only as commander-in-chief of the German armed forces. Japan, Nazi Germany’s last major ally, formally severed its alliance upon the German surrender on 8 May 1945, placed German diplomats under house arrest, and seized German U-boats in Asia.
Winston Churchill, however, acknowledged Dönitz’s position in his speech to the British people that same day, referring to him as “the designated head of the German state. ”
The Dönitz government lasted from 1 to 23 May 1945, shifting its headquarters to Flensburg-Mürwik near the Danish border as British forces captured Hamburg and occupied Schleswig-Holstein. The government accomplished little beyond overseeing Operation Hannibal and organizing the disarmament and transit of tens of thousands of German troops into British prisoner-of-war camps. The British allowed the rump government to continue solely for that purpose.
On 23 May, Churchill ordered it extinguished, and in a lightning operation, British forces arrested Dönitz, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, and former armaments minister Albert Speer. Dönitz was convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to ten years in Spandau Prison. Arguments persist over whether the Dönitz government was ever legitimate. Under international law, sovereignty requires recognition by other states, and Dönitz received none.
After the surrender, the Allies assumed supreme authority over German territory, codified in the Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945. Dönitz was seen as the military commander in Schleswig-Holstein, not the head of a government, which could not legally exist after Germany’s capitulation. But something stirred the old Grand Admiral in his final years. In 1974, Dönitz was contacted by Manfred Roeder, a lawyer and far-right activist born in 1929.
Roeder had fought in the Battle of Berlin as a member of the Volkssturm, and after the war he drifted through the legal profession before leaving the CDU to found a protest group that eventually descended into anti-Semitism and racism. He forged ties with the NPD, the Ku Klux Klan, and other far-right organizations. Roeder believed the German Reich had not ceased to exist in 1945 and that Dönitz was still the rightful Reich President. When Roeder contacted him, Dönitz was evasive, insisting he no longer considered himself president.
Roeder replied that Dönitz had thereby resigned and declared himself the new president. Roeder later turned to terrorism and served eight years in prison, but his encounter with Dönitz appeared to have stirred something in the old admiral. Dönitz’s political testament, written in 1975, claimed that the principal Allied powers had recognized him as head of state, a largely inaccurate assertion except for Churchill’s statement. He declared he had been imprisoned by the International Military Tribunal with the express confirmation of his office as head of state.
The tribunal’s verdict did contain the phrase “Hitler’s successor head of state,” though Dönitz was not considered a major defendant compared with figures like Göring and Ribbentrop. Dönitz insisted he was the true guardian of the Reich idea. Since East Germany had abandoned the goal of reunification in its 1974 constitution, he contended that the Federal Republic of Germany was the bearer of that idea. The testament ended with an extraordinary statement: “Conscious of my never-ending responsibility towards the German people, I transfer the content and purpose of my office as the last head of state of the German Reich to the Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
” It was signed by the 84-year-old Dönitz. On his death, the document passed from his Nuremberg defense counsel Otto Kranzbühler to Richard von Weizsäcker, vice president of the Bundestag, and eventually reached German President Karl Carstens with a covering note stating it had no legal relevance. In January 1981, a copy reached Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who considered it of no current significance and recommended filing it. An official suggested placing it in Schmidt’s personal safe, and there it disappeared for eleven years.
When Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in October 1982, the testament remained buried in the Chancellor’s archive. It was not until 13 January 1992 that someone happened upon the document in the files of the Federal President’s office. Though one official suggested it should now be made available to historians, nothing was done. The public first learned of the testament’s existence in June 2005, when a senior government official involved in the 1981 case wrote a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
The document itself was not published until 2015. The Dönitz testament unsettled West German officials in the early 1980s because it raised uncomfortable questions about Hitler’s successor, whether Germany had truly ceased to exist after defeat, and the legality of the West German state created by the Western Allies in 1949. Some politicians and civil servants evidently did not wish the document to become public. Revisionists have since argued that the legal government of Germany could not be dissolved by military order of an external enemy, and that the Dönitz government was the last legitimate government of a united Germany.
They point to the contradiction that the International Military Tribunal called Dönitz Hitler’s successor head of state, while the Allies simultaneously refused to recognize his government. Whatever the merits of these theories, Dönitz in extreme old age reconsidered his short-lived presidency and his place in German history. The result was his extraordinary testament, officially suppressed for reasons that remain unclear to this day.