In mid-January 1981, a three-page handwritten document was delivered through a back channel to the West German Federal Chancellery in Bonn. The title immediately caused concern among government officials: “Political Testament. ” It was signed by the deceased last Grand Admiral of Germany and Reich President Karl Dönitz, and its contents were considered so politically sensitive that they were kept hidden from the German public until 2015, seven decades after Germany’s surrender. Dönitz, who had been Adolf Hitler’s designated successor, had died on Christmas Eve 1980 at age 89.
His funeral had already proven deeply embarrassing for the West German government, drawing large crowds of World War II veterans, including more than 100 holders of the Knight’s Cross, along with foreign naval officers and even some serving West German military personnel. The old admiral had remained unrepentant about his wartime role, insisting he had always acted out of duty to his nation. The document now arriving in Bonn had been written in 1975, when Dönitz was 84 years old, with instructions that it be passed to the president of West Germany upon his death. In it, Dönitz made an extraordinary claim: that the principal Allied powers had recognized him as head of state following Hitler’s death.
He asserted that he had been thrown into Spandau Prison by the International Military Tribunal with the “express confirmation” of his office as head of state, and declared himself the true guardian of the “Reich idea. ”
The will ended with a remarkable 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. ” The document was signed, and its legal and political implications were explosive. Hitler had appointed Dönitz as Reich President in his own last will and testament, dictated in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on April 29, 1945, with Soviet forces barely half a kilometer away.
Hitler split his offices on his death: propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would become Reich Chancellor, while Dönitz, a naval officer not present in the bunker, would assume the presidency. Dönitz was already in command of all German forces in the north following a Hitler decree on April 20, 1945, covering Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, Norway, and the western Netherlands. When Hitler died on April 30, 1945, Dönitz succeeded him. Goebbels, who attempted to negotiate with the Soviets, took his own life on May 1, and Dönitz announced Hitler’s death to the German people in a radio address that same day.
Dönitz’s government lasted from May 1 to May 23, 1945, and was never internationally recognized as a legitimate state. The Western allies viewed him only as commander-in-chief of German forces. Japan, Germany’s principal remaining ally, formally protested the surrender, severed ties, placed German diplomats in Tokyo under house arrest, and seized German U-boats in Asia. Winston Churchill, however, acknowledged Dönitz as “the designated head of the German state” in a victory speech on May 8, 1945, a phrase that would later feature prominently in Dönitz’s claims.
The rump government relocated to Flensburg-Mürwik near the Danish border as British forces advanced. Its practical function, according to historical accounts, was limited to overseeing the disarmament of tens of thousands of German troops in the region and arranging their transit to British prisoner-of-war camps. On May 23, 1945, Churchill ordered the government dissolved, and in a rapid operation, British forces arrested Dönitz, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, and former armaments minister Albert Speer. Dönitz was later convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to ten years in Spandau Prison.
What triggered Dönitz’s reconsideration of his role as Reich President appears to have been a 1974 encounter with Manfred Roeder, a lawyer and former paralegal at US military headquarters in Berlin. Born in 1929 and educated in an SS-run school, Roeder had fought in the Battle of Berlin as a member of the Volkssturm. After the war, he became a lawyer and joined the conservative CDU, but left in 1970 to found a protest group targeting pornography and sex workers. Roeder’s organization quickly shifted toward anti-Semitism and racism.
He forged ties with far-right German groups, the NPD, and even the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. He wrote to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, a vocal admirer of Hitler, requesting funds to help restore the Reich. He also acted as Rudolf Hess’s lawyer from 1971 onward, trying to secure the former deputy Führer’s release from Spandau. Around 1974, Roeder concluded that the German Reich had not ceased to exist in May 1945 and that the West German constitution was therefore invalid.
In his view, Dönitz remained the legal Reich President. He contacted the old admiral, who was surprised and evasive, telling Roeder he no longer considered himself president. Roeder replied that Dönitz had therefore resigned, and declared himself Dönitz’s successor, adopting the grand title of Reichsburger. Roeder later slid into urban terrorism, was imprisoned for eight years, and died in 2014.
The meeting nevertheless appears to have stirred something in Dönitz. His political testament claimed the Allied powers had recognized him as head of state, citing the International Military Tribunal’s verdict, which did contain the phrase “Hitler’s successor head of state,” though Dönitz was never considered a principal defendant compared to figures like Hermann Göring or Joachim von Ribbentrop. Dönitz also argued that upon his release from prison in 1956, he found two German states on the unannexed territory of the Reich, both of which had set reunification as their constitutional goal. Since East Germany abandoned that claim in its 1974 constitution, Dönitz contended, West Germany had become the “bearer of the Reich idea.
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The document was delivered by Dönitz’s Nuremberg defense counsel, Otto Kranzbühler, to Richard von Weizsäcker, vice president of the Bundestag, who passed it on until it reached President Karl Carstens with a covering note stating it had “no legal relevance. ” In late January 1981, a copy reached Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who wrote that he did not consider the document to have any current significance and recommended it be placed on file. But the document then vanished for eleven years. An official had suggested it be placed in Schmidt’s personal safe, and there it stayed.
When Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in October 1982, the testament remained buried in the Chancellor’s archive, out of sight and out of discussion. It was only rediscovered on January 13, 1992, in the files of the Federal President’s office, when an official opined it should be made available to historians—but took no action to ensure that happened. The German 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.
Its suppression raised troubling questions about why officials in the early 1980s so badly wanted it kept secret, given that it touched on the legality of the West German government created by the Western Allies in 1949. Some revisionist historians have also questioned Churchill’s decision to dissolve the Dönitz government by military order, noting that this reflected contradictions in Allied policy. Churchill had allowed Dönitz to continue running the disarmament process, and revisionists have suggested his real motive may have been keeping a sizable German army under arms for use against the Soviet Union. Stalin came close to invading Denmark in May 1945 and was only stopped by the insertion of Canadian paratroopers in the Red Army’s path, though he did not cross the agreed post-war demarcation lines.
Revisionists argue a legal government cannot simply be dissolved by the military order of an external enemy, particularly when the International Military Tribunal itself called Dönitz Hitler’s successor as head of state, and Churchill described him as the designated head of the German state. Under this view, the West German and East German states were essentially Allied creations, militarily occupied for over four decades after the war, and the Dönitz government was the last de jure and de facto government of a united Germany. Whether such theories explain why the testament was filed away until 2015 remains unclear.
What is certain is that Dönitz, in extreme old age, reconsidered the history of his short-lived government and his place at its head, producing an extraordinary document that was officially suppressed for reasons still not fully explained today.