Adolf Hitler was the man who led the Nazi party to power in Germany and created the Third Reich. He was Germany’s first Nazi dictator, but he was not its last. That ignominious distinction belongs to Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s handpicked successor. Karl Dönitz was an unusual choice to succeed Hitler. He was a gifted naval officer and a devoted Nazi, but he had come up through the ranks of the military, not the Nazi party, unlike other prominent leaders of the Third Reich.
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Dönitz was born in 1891 in Grünau, Germany. The son of middle class parents, Dönitz began his military career in 1910 when he enlisted in the German Imperial Navy. He received a commission in 1913 and requested a transfer to the burgeoning German submarine force in 1916. Dönitz took command of U-boat UB-68 in 1918. His time as a submarine captain did not last long, however. While operating in the Mediterranean, his submarine suffered technical malfunctions that forced it to the surface. Rather than let the U-boat fall into enemy hands, Dönitz scuttled the vessel and surrendered to the British. He spent the rest of the war in a British POW camp.
After Dönitz returned to Germany, he chose to remain in the greatly reduced German navy. Under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forbidden to possess any submarines. Accordingly, Dönitz spent the next 15 years traveling the world aboard various German warships. Then in 1935, Admiral Erich Raeder chose Dönitz to reconstitute Germany’s submarine force in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. As the wartime commander of Germany’s U-boats, Dönitz achieved enormous success destroying allied ships in the Atlantic. His command sank more than 3,500 allied vessels in the protracted Battle of the Atlantic during the course of World War II. The German Navy lost approximately 784 submarines in the process, and Dönitz suffered personally when his two sons were killed while serving in the German navy.
Although Dönitz’s submarines were a serious threat to Britain’s survival, the German navy always rated behind the army and air force in German armament priorities. In 1943, just as the tide of the war turned decisively against Germany, Dönitz assumed command of the German Navy when Admiral Raeder retired. As German forces retreated on land, German U-Boats continued to menace allied ships through the end of the war.
Dönitz had only occasional contact with Hitler prior to 1943, but Dönitz met with the Führer twice a month after being named commander of the German navy. Even though Dönitz joined the Nazi party only in 1944, Hitler appreciated how Dönitz initiated a program of Nazi indoctrination for German sailors and Dönitz’s confidence that U-boats could still bring Britain to its knees. After July 1944, Hitler held Dönitz in even higher esteem when it was discovered that no German naval officers took part in the failed attempt to assassinate the Führer orchestrated by high-ranking Germany army officers. As Germany’s fortunes deteriorated, Dönitz remained steadfastly loyal to Hitler. The two men met with increasing frequency during the final months of the war, as Hitler became more and more isolated in his Berlin bunker. On the eve of the Soviet attack on the city, Dönitz ordered thousands of German sailors to take up arms and help defend the capital. On April 20, 1945, as Hitler celebrated his 56 birthday in his Führerbunker, more than a million Soviet soldiers began their assault on Berlin.