On May 13, 1944, a young officer talked his way onto a fast attack boat leaving the French coast. He was not supposed to be on board. It was Klaus Dönitz’s 24th birthday, and the boat never came back. Within a single year, that war had taken both of his sons.
But the story of the Dönitz family did not end with Germany’s defeat in 1945. Karl Dönitz built his life around the sea and the men who fought on it. In 1916, he married Ingeborg Weber, the daughter of a German general, and between the wars they raised three children. A daughter, Ursula, was born in 1917, followed by two sons, Klaus in 1920 and Peter a couple of years later.
Both boys followed their father into the navy. By the time the Second World War reached its peak, the man commanding Germany’s U-boats had two sons serving in the same fleet. On May 19, 1943, while operating in the North Atlantic, U-954 was sunk and everyone on board was killed. His death came during what became known as Black May, a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.
After Peter’s death, Klaus was taken out of frontline service. He had come through the most dangerous branch of the German war effort alive, and his family had reason to believe he would see the end of it. He did not stay away. On May 13, 1944, his 24th birthday, Klaus persuaded friends still serving in the fast attack boats to let him ride along on a raid across the channel.
His boat, S141, pushed out toward the English coast near Selsey. Klaus was not among them. He was buried in France, and Karl Dönitz had now lost both of his sons to the war he was directing. By some accounts, he showed almost no emotion when the news came.
He sat through his morning staff meeting and carried on with the day, only a little less exact than usual. Then he went home and told Ingeborg for the second time in the space of a year that they had lost a son. Within a year, the war would take far more than his two sons. Ingeborg Dönitz had spent nearly 30 years as a navy wife and had trained as a nurse before that.
On April 30, 1945, Hitler took his own life. On May 23, 1945, Allied troops arrested Dönitz and his entire administration. Then came Nuremberg. The American Admiral Chester Nimitz submitted a statement describing American submarine warfare in the Pacific, and the tribunal did not base Dönitz’s sentence on that aspect of the case.
He was nevertheless convicted on two counts and sent to Spandau prison in Berlin for 10 years. After the surrender, Ingeborg was left with one surviving child, two dead sons, and a husband facing trial. While Dönitz went from captivity to Nuremberg and then to Spandau, she had to rebuild an ordinary life. She went back to the profession she had trained for as a young woman and worked as a nurse, and for most of the Spandau years, held a steady job as a receptionist at a doctor’s practice in Reinbek, outside Hamburg.
Ingeborg Dönitz died on May 2, 1962. She did not live to see what became of her daughter’s husband, a U-boat commander who was about to do something almost no one on either side of the war expected. One of the most unusual post-war stories in the Dönitz family belonged not to Karl, but to his son-in-law. Hessler had become one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war.
In command of U-107, he sailed from the French port of Lorient in the spring of 1951 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. Before long, he was given a place on the staff of U-boat Command, working directly under his father-in-law. That connection was awkward on both sides.
Being the son-in-law of the U-boat chief meant every honor Hessler earned was watched for any hint of favoritism. But the family tie was real, and it placed Hessler close to the heart of the campaign itself. Then, in 1947, the British made a remarkable decision. The Royal Navy wanted a full account of the U-boat war written by the men who had actually fought it.
It became a standard reference on the whole campaign, written for the Navy that had beaten him about the war his father-in-law had commanded against it. She was also only one of the three Dönitz children who would live a full life. By the time his three volumes were finished, his father-in-law was still behind the walls of Spandau. 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, and he stayed loyal to the Navy he had led for the rest of his life. He never expressed regret for the cause he had served, and that refusal shaped how history judged him. The memoir became a standard source on the U-boat war, precisely because it came from the man in charge of it. Günther Hessler, his son-in-law, died in 1968, and his daughter, Ursula, the last of the three children, outlived them all and died in 1990.
Ursula and Günther Hessler had three children, a daughter, Uta, and two sons. 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. He was the last surviving member of the leadership that had run Germany in the war, and the last man to have held its highest office.
The admiral who had commanded the U-boat war, lost both his sons to it, led Germany for 20 days, and served 10 years in prison, was gone. But the war remained part of the family’s story long after 1945. His son-in-law helped write its history for the Royal Navy, and Dönitz defended his own record in his memoirs, and two of his grandsons were given the names Peter and Klaus.