Soldaten полностью

When sailors talked about their own ships, there was a noticeable change in their perspective. They fought tooth and nail until their equipment no longer functioned, and under no circumstances did they want their own vessels to fall into enemy hands. Sailors also took great care to destroy top secret material. Yet none of them would have thought of voluntarily going down with their ships to avoid being captured by the enemy. And whether a ship went down with flags flying was chiefly a concern of official, stylized propaganda. Once a sailor’s ship had been sunk, he had done his duty, and he would try to save his own life, whether or not the flag was still flying. As in the army, there were limits to the willingness of German navy men to sacrifice their own lives. The fact that so many vessels were lost with all hands on deck had more to do with the nature of naval warfare than with the selflessness demanded by the German navy leadership. Even if a crew succeeded in getting off board, rescues were relatively rare. For instance, in 1944, the crew of a Canadian amphibious plane, the Sunderland, reported that it had sunk a German U-boat off the west coast of Ireland and that the crew were swimming around in the water. Someone took a photo of fifty-seven German sailors, and then the plane circled a few times and headed back to its home base. None of the submarine crew survived. U-625 was one of 543 German ships that went lost together with its entire crew. Dönitz used such horrendous losses to argue for the special morale maintained by submarine crews.⁶³⁸ But in their own words, one finds little evidence of the fanaticism and contempt for death Dönitz praised in his speeches. German sailors followed orders and tried to be brave. But more than anything they wanted to survive.

The radicalization of the German political and military leadership did not have the same sort of effect on the Luftwaffe as it did on the army and the navy. In the face of dissipating morale in 1944–45, pilots were ordered to redouble their intensity in battle. This was especially the case with fighter pilots, whom Göring increasingly accused of cowardice.⁶⁴⁰ In fall 1943, the idea of using kamikaze pilots was first broached. Luftwaffe doctor Theo Benzinger and glider pilot Heinrich Lange formulated it in a memorandum: “The military situation justifies and demands that naval targets be fought with extreme means like manned missiles whose pilot voluntarily sacrifices his life.” The authors knew that this would represent “a form of warfare that is fully new in Europe.” But the benefits of conventional attacks were disproportionate to the number of pilots getting shot down. If airmen were going to lose their lives anyway, the authors reasoned, why not take the greatest number of the enemy with them?⁶⁴¹

In September 1943, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the second most important leader in the Luftwaffe, discussed this suggestion with his subordinate officers. Plans were hatched to crash planes loaded with explosives into enemy warships or fighters packed with ammunition into enemy bomber formations. But Milch had scruples about sending pilots on “suicide missions.” It would be better, he reasoned, if pilots dove toward enemy targets and then ejected with parachutes before impact. But the general view of the Luftwaffe leadership was that kamikaze missions were unnecessary, and suggestions like Benzinger and Lange’s were never put into practice.

Hanna Reitsch, the well-known female test pilot, was friends with Benzinger and Lange and took the opportunity while visiting Hitler’s Berghof residence to tell the Führer about their idea. But Hitler was having none of it and personally intervened in July 1944 to prevent thirty-nine pilots from crashing their Fw 190 fighter bombers into an Allied armada in the Baie de la Seine.