In mid-January 1981, a three-page handwritten document was delivered by a back channel to the West German Federal Chancellery in Bonn. Its title immediately aroused concern in the halls of power: "Political Testament." It was signed by none other than Karl Dönitz, the deceased last Grand Admiral of Germany and Reich President.
The contents were viewed as so politically sensitive that the document was hidden from the German people until 2015, 70 years after Germany's surrender. This is the story of the Dönitz testament and of the strange relationship between Adolf Hitler's successor and the West German state that followed in the 40-odd years after the war.
On the 29th of April, 1945, Hitler was in his bunker beneath the garden of the battered Reich Chancellery in central Berlin, with Soviet forces barely half a kilometer away. With him were his last faithful lieutenants, chiefly propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels and the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann.
By now, Hitler was resigned to ending his life in the bunker, as all reasonable escape options had passed. But the German armed forces continued to resist the Allies across Europe, and a continuation of leadership was necessary after Hitler's death.
Dictating both his political and personal last wills and testaments, Hitler decreed that the post of Führer would be split in two on his death. Goebbels would assume the title of Reich Chancellor, while a military officer not present in the bunker would become Reich President.
That officer was the head of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Dönitz had been appointed commander-in-chief in the north by Hitler on the 20th of April 1945, Hitler's 56th birthday, granting him full military and civil control over all German forces in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, Norway, and the western Netherlands.
Hitler trusted Dönitz, and with the likelihood that Germany would be cut in half by the advancing Allies from east and west, it was a sensible precaution to decentralize command and control. Dönitz established his initial headquarters at the town of Plön.
On the afternoon of the 30th of April 1945, Hitler died in his bunker, and Dönitz and Goebbels succeeded as per Hitler's instructions. Goebbels attempted to negotiate a ceasefire in Berlin and permission from the Soviets for himself, some of the staff, and Martin Bormann, now promoted to party minister, to fly to Plön and join the Dönitz government and negotiate a surrender from there, but the Soviets refused.
Goebbels then ended his life outside the bunker on the 1st of May, and Bormann joined the general escape of personnel from the bunker and Reich Chancellery that night, having signaled Dönitz that he was coming north to take his place in the new administration.
Also on the 1st of May, Dönitz announced to the German people in a radio address that Hitler was dead and that he was now Reich President. The war would continue to ensure the evacuation of as many German soldiers and civilians from the Baltic coast as possible, to prevent their capture by the Soviets. This was Operation Hannibal.
So Dönitz was legally Hitler's successor according to the constitution of the Third Reich, but his presidency immediately lacked international recognition. The Western Allies did not recognize Dönitz's new position, seeing him only as commander-in-chief of the German armed forces, which he also was.
Nazi Germany's few remaining allies did not recognize Dönitz as president either, primarily Japan. The Japanese knew full well the extent of the German collapse, and Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki began the process of severing ties with Nazi Germany.
When Germany formally surrendered on the 8th of May 1945, the Japanese government formally protested, severing their alliance and placing German diplomats in Tokyo under house arrest, as well as seizing German U-boats based in Asia and interning their crews as prisoners of war. Officially, the Dönitz government received no formal recognition from other Axis powers and none from the Allies either.
But Winston Churchill was reluctant to comply with the Allied line of not giving the Dönitz government any recognition. In Dönitz's victory speech to the British people on the 8th of May 1945, Churchill specified that the surrender had been authorized by "Grand Admiral Dönitz, the designated head of the German state."
The Dönitz government would last from the 1st to the 23rd of May 1945, a period of some three weeks, moving to Flensburg-Mürwik on the Danish border as the British captured Hamburg, the last major city in northern Germany, and annexed Schleswig-Holstein in early May 1945.
The government achieved very little, with Dönitz preoccupied running Operation Hannibal, which continued for several days after the formal surrender. According to the history books, the British allowed the Dönitz rump government to continue for one reason only: so that Dönitz and the remaining German military command could organize the disarming of tens of thousands of German troops in the region and their transit to British POW camps, relieving the British of this onerous task.
On the 23rd of May 1945, Winston Churchill ordered the Dönitz government extinguished, as the area of Schleswig-Holstein formed part of the British occupation zone of Germany. In a lightning operation, British forces took everyone prisoner.
Dönitz, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the army chief of staff, and former armaments minister Albert Speer were arrested and eventually sent to stand trial at Nuremberg. Dönitz would receive a 10-year prison sentence, joining other Nazis who were not executed in Spandau Prison in Berlin.
An argument has been put forward that the Dönitz government was not real for several reasons. Firstly, sovereignty requires recognition by other states under international law, and Dönitz, according to the history books, received none.
Following the German surrender on the 8th of May 1945, the German state ceased to exist, and the victorious Allies assumed supreme authority over its territory. This was formally codified in the Berlin Declaration of the 5th of June 1945.
Under these arguments, Dönitz's shaky authority only lasted from the 1st to the 7th of May 1945, when Germany signed the actual surrender document, which came into force on the 8th of May. He was seen by the Allies as the military commander in northern Europe, and then as the military commander in Schleswig-Holstein until the 23rd of May 1945, but not as leader of a government that could not legally exist after the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Therefore, the Allies worked with Dönitz to make the task of disarming the remaining German forces in Schleswig-Holstein a smooth process that could cause no further loss of life to the British. They ignored his pretensions to be the head of a government.
But then in January 1981, the aforementioned Dönitz political testament was delivered to the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, creating a political kerfuffle. Dönitz was by this time dead. He had passed away on Christmas Eve 1980 at the age of 89, and his funeral had been a very embarrassing affair for the West German government.
The funeral was heavily attended by World War veterans, including hordes of former U-boat personnel, among them over 100 holders of the Knight's Cross, as well as foreign naval officers and even some serving West German military personnel.
Since his release from Spandau Prison in 1956, Dönitz had published two autobiographies and appeared several times on television in interviews. He had been unrepentant regarding his role in World War II, stating that he had acted at all times out of duty to his nation. But something had triggered his political testament.
Written in 1975, Dönitz had ordered that on his death it was to be passed to the president of West Germany. What appears to have triggered his reevaluation of his role as Reich President was being contacted in 1974 by a strange character called Manfred Roeder.
Born in 1929 and educated in an SS-run school, Roeder had enlisted in the Berlin Volkssturm Home Guard in January 1945, fighting in the Battle of Berlin. Post-war, Roeder studied legal sciences at the universities of Münster and Bonn, and then briefly worked in the court system in Hamm before dropping out to work for a Christian spiritualist organization with US roots.
In the 1960s, Roeder was a paralegal at US military headquarters in Berlin-Dahlem, and eventually became a lawyer in 1967. A member of the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a conservative political party, in 1970 he left the CDU and formed with six others the Deutsche Bürgerinitiative, or German Citizen Initiative, a protest group that targeted pornography and sex workers throughout Germany.
By 1970, this organization had begun to shift to anti-Semitism and racism. Roeder also forged ties with German far-right organizations such as the NPD, the National Democratic Party of Germany, and even the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.
Roeder was infamous for publicity-grabbing behavior, such as writing to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin requesting funds to help restore the Reich, Amin being a vocal admirer of Adolf Hitler. With ex-SS officer Thies Christophersen, he founded two self-proclaimed Reichstags or governments at Regensburg and Flensburg. He also acted from 1971 onwards as Rudolf Hess's lawyer, trying to get the former deputy Führer of Nazi Germany released from Spandau Prison.
Around 1974, Roeder came to the conclusion that the West German constitution was invalid, as the German Reich had, according to him, not ceased to exist on the 8th of May 1945. In Roeder's mind, Grand Admiral Dönitz was still Reich President and the true leader of the German Reich. So he contacted Dönitz.
Dönitz was surprised and evasive, and told Roeder that he no longer considered himself president of Germany. Roeder replied that therefore Dönitz had resigned and that he, Roeder, was now president, declaring himself to be Dönitz's successor.
Roeder awarded himself the grandiose title of Reichsburger and gathered about him like-minded right-wingers and neo-Nazis in his government. Roeder, however, would slip into urban terrorism and end up imprisoned for eight years. He died in 2014 at the age of 85.
But his meeting with Dönitz in 1974 seemed to have stirred something inside the old Grand Admiral. His political testament stated that the principal Allied powers had recognized him, Dönitz, as head of state. This was largely inaccurate, with the exception of Prime Minister Churchill, who had called Dönitz "the designated head of the German state."
Dönitz wrote in his testament that he had been thrown into Spandau prison by the International Military Tribunal, supposedly, he said, with the express confirmation of his office as head of state. The International Military Tribunal's verdict on Dönitz does contain the phrase "Hitler's successor head of state." But during the trial, Dönitz was not considered a very important figure in comparison with characters such as former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring or former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Dönitz said that he was the true guardian of the Reich idea. On his release from prison in 1956, he said he had found two German states on the unannexed territory of the Reich, which according to their constitutions both had set the goal of the reunification of the Germans into one state. He contended that since East Germany had abandoned this claim in its 1974 constitution, the Federal Republic, that is West Germany, had been the "bearer of the Reich idea."
The political testament ended with this 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." There followed the 84-year-old Dönitz's signature.
Dönitz gave the document to his Nuremberg defense counsel, Otto Kranzbühler, who on the Grand Admiral's death in 1980 passed it to Richard von Weizsäcker, vice president of the Bundestag, or German parliament, who passed it on until it reached the German president, Karl Carstens, with a covering note attached that stated, "The political testament has no legal relevance."
However, officials asked at the time whether the document could be made available to German historians to help round out the life of Dönitz. Later, in January 1981, a copy of the Dönitz testament was placed in the hands of Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who wrote that he did not consider the document to be of any current significance, and recommended that it be placed on file.
But then it disappeared for 11 years. An official had suggested to Schmidt that the document should in fact be placed in his personal safe, and that is where it went to be hidden. When Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in October 1982, the Dönitz testament remained buried in the Chancellor's archive.
It remained out of sight, and importantly, out of discussion until someone happened upon it on the 13th of January 1992 in the files of the Federal President's office. Though this official gave the opinion that the Dönitz testament should now be made available to historical scholarship, he also did almost nothing to ensure that this was done.
The public only heard of the existence of the Dönitz testament when one of the senior government officials involved in the case in 1981 wrote a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in June 2005, but the document itself wasn't published until 2015.
The Dönitz testament certainly unsettled German government officials in the early 1980s, throwing up a whole can of worms concerning Hitler's successor, the question of whether Germany had indeed ceased to exist after defeat, and the legality of the West German government created by the Western Allies in 1949. There were evidently quite a number of politicians and civil servants at the time who did not wish this document to become public.
The manner of Winston Churchill's action to dissolve the Dönitz government on the 23rd of May 1945 has drawn some criticism from revisionists. Some have suggested that Churchill's intention in allowing Dönitz to continue in power had less to do with disarming forces in Schleswig-Holstein and more with keeping in place a sizeable chunk of the German army still under arms that could be used alongside the Western Allies in a war with the Soviet Union if Stalin continued to push west into Europe.
Stalin certainly came very close to invading Denmark in May 1945 and was only stopped by the insertion of Canadian paratroopers in the path of the Red Army. However, Stalin did not go too far beyond the agreed post-war demarcation lines, and Churchill then decided to get rid of Dönitz and the forces at his disposal.
Revisionists have pointed out that a legal government cannot be dissolved by the military order of an external enemy, particularly as it appears, despite post-war statements to the contrary, that the Dönitz government was seen as the legal government of Germany at that time, succeeding the Hitler regime.
After all, the International Military Tribunal set up by the Allies called Dönitz Hitler's successor, head of state. And Winston Churchill, one of the leaders of the three primary Allied powers, called him Grand Admiral Dönitz, the designated head of the German state, a rather contradictory position.
Under such revisionist theories, the West German and East German states were essentially puppets set up by the Allies, who then continued to militarily occupy both countries for over 40 years after the war. Some in the 1980s, and even today, have argued that these two German states were illegitimate, and suggested that the Dönitz government was the last de jure and de facto government of a united Germany.
Perhaps these legal theories were the reason for the Dönitz testament being filed away until 2015. But clearly, Dönitz, in extreme old age, began to reconsider the history of his short-lived government and his place at the head of it. The result was his extraordinary testament, which was, to all intents and purposes, officially suppressed for reasons that are still unclear today.