During the Blitzkrieg phase, soldiers conflated larger events in the war with their own personal experiences to produce a rosy vision of the future. A decisive factor here for both Luftwaffe and German army men was their faith in their superiority to enemies on all fronts. Setbacks and even being taken as a POW could not shake this fundamental confidence.
The situation was different for navy men. Their wartime frame of reference was formed by one not insignificant additional point: the knowledge that they were undeniably inferior to the gigantic British Royal Navy, which was six times the size of the German navy at the start of the war. Despite some successes, German sailors had to acknowledge that other branches of the German military, and not the navy, would have to prevail if final victory was to be achieved. The perspective of submarine crews who had been taken prisoner was thus more pessimistic than that of Luftwaffe pilots. For instance, the chief engineer of U-32, First Lieutenant Anton Thimm, already arrived at the conclusion in November 1940: “The English can hold out under existing conditions for years; you only need to look at the shops, and in a large city at that. The U-Boat arm will not accomplish that (break them) nor airmen either. Time is on the side of the English and we cannot afford to give them time.”426 First Lieutenant Hans Jenisch, the U-boat’s commander and a bearer of the Knight’s Cross, even opined that the U-boat was outmoded as a weapon. That drew protest from another U-boat commander, Wilfried Prelberg, who couldn’t believe he was hearing such pessimism from one of his peers. Jenisch’s outlook is all the more remarkable because he was a very successful captain whose crew had survived, almost to a man, the sinking of their vessel. And he was not alone in his views. “The U-boat arm is finished,” a first mate said with a sigh in June 1941. “Absolutely finished.”427 Others were critical of Germany’s strategy for bringing Britain to its knees: “We shall never defeat the English through the blockade.”428 And others still predicted a long war, which “will be very bad for us.”429 Radio operator Willi Dietrich of U-32 was already speculating by November 1940: “Just think of what would happen if we lost the war!”430
There was little change in these attitudes over the course of 1942, although naturally there were some optimists who felt victory was at hand in Russia and believed Germany would then launch a successful offensive against Britain. The first officer of the watch of U-32, First Lieutenant Egon Rudolph, painted the following scenario in late 1941:
RUDOLPH: German soldiers will be everywhere. GIBRALTAR will go up in smoke. Bombs and mines will be exploding everywhere. Our U-boats will lie off LONDON. They’ll get such a bellyful! There’ll be air-raids day and night! They’ll have no rest. Then they can creep away into their rabbit-holes in ENGLAND and eat grass. God punish ENGLAND and her satellite states.431
Rudolph was a fanatic Nazi, anti-Semite, and Anglophobe. The vehemence of his language was unusual, and he was in the minority of those who remained optimistic at this juncture in the war. Whereas, when cross-examined, most navy POWs claimed they were counting on German victory, they were much more cautious and skeptical when conversing with one another.432
A first mate from U-111, for instance, predicted: “If the war in the east isn’t over by the end of this year, we shall probably lose it.”433 And in March 1942, a navy man named Josef Przyklenk confessed to horror when he thought of the future:
