Shadows from the past

An effort to forestall old memories--and update history

After 35 years he had become an almost forgotten person, living quietly in a small house in a suburb of Hamburg. Yet when he died at 89 of progressive heart disease, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, who commanded Hitler's navy during World War II, once more stirred up a controversy. Sensitive to both Nazi memories and controversial aspects of Doenitz's career, the West German government forbade formal or military trappings at the admiral's funeral this week.

The government made point of banning all wreaths and eulogies at the graveside. West German military personnel were ordered not to wear uniforms at the funeral. Allied NATO soldiers were discouraged from attending in military dress. In its attempt to downplay Doenitz's death, however, the government inadvertently made an issue of it. The political far right, including West Germany's small but active neo-Nazi fringe, chimed in with praise for the late admiral. Kurt Reitsch, an old navy friend of Doenitz's who is arranging the funeral, criticized Bonn for overreacting. Said Reitsch: "The only uniforms there will be those worn by the police sent to monitor a group of old men paying last respects to a colleague."

Doenitz was at best a lukewarm Nazi, but he was a tough sailor in the service of the Third Reich. As commander of Hitler's lethal submarine force, he masterminded the sinking of 14 million tons of Allied shipping during World War II. It may have been Doenitz's U-boat successes that led a desperate Hitler to designate him as his successor near the end of the war. The admiral subsequently ran the doomed country for 23 days, staving off the inevitable surrender while he operated a hasty sealift through the Baltic, enabling 2 million Germans to escape from the eastern provinces that would later be occupied by the Soviets.

Doenitz stood trial with other ranking Nazis at Nuernberg, but was not accused of any atrocities and received the lightest sentence: ten years. Released from Spandau prison in 1956, he retreated into obscurity, seeing only occasional visitors. Some West Germans felt last week that Doenitz, dying so long after the Nazi era, should have been suitably honored for his naval career. Others disagreed. Said Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an editorial: "A line should be clearly and properly drawn between today's navy and Hitler's, between today's Federal Republic and the sinking Third Reich over which Doenitz presided in its final days."

In an unrelated flashback to the Nazi past, a West Berlin court last week revived memories of one of the key stepping stones in Hitler's assumption of power: the fire that gutted the Reichstag (parliament) in 1933. The court declared a "miscarriage of justice" in the 1933 trial of Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, whom the accused of started the blaze. By blaming the fire on the Communists, the Nazis nailed down their hold on the nation. The decision last week did not specifically exonerate Van der Lubbe, who was tried by a Nazi court, found guilty and executed by beheading in 1934. Rather, the court's ruling implied that, if involved at all in the Reichstag arson, he may have been manipulated by the Nazis. qed

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