Karl Dönitz

Karl Dönitz commanded the German U-boat arm, nearly severed Britain's Atlantic supply line, and was Hitler's designated successor for twenty-three days. Born near Berlin in 1891, he joined the Imperial Navy in 1910 and transferred to submarines in 1916. His boat was lost off Malta in October 1918 and he spent the rest of the war as a British prisoner, part of it in a camp for the mentally disturbed after apparently feigning insanity. He remained in the small permitted navy between the wars and took command of the reconstituted submarine force in 1935. His doctrine was the wolfpack. Individual submarines patrolled a line, and on sighting a convoy a boat shadowed and reported by radio rather than attacking, while control ashore concentrated others onto it for a coordinated night surface attack. It defeated convoy escorts designed for single submerged attackers, and in 1942 Allied shipping losses ran ahead of construction. He lost. Allied countermeasures — the breaking of the Enigma naval cipher, centimetric radar, long-range aircraft closing the mid-Atlantic gap, and escort carriers — reversed the campaign within months in May 1943, and about three quarters of U-boat crews died, among the highest loss rates of any force in the war. His own two sons were killed. He replaced Raeder as commander-in-chief in 1943. Hitler named him head of state in his political testament, and Dönitz authorised the surrender in May 1945 while trying to move troops westward. At Nuremberg he was convicted of waging aggressive war and of breaching the London naval protocol, acquitted on conspiracy, and served ten years at Spandau. He died in 1980.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history