International: Finale at Flensburg

The ripples on Flensburger Forde glittered in the bright sunlight as Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, last Führer of the Third Reich, marched stiffly up the gangplank of the Patria, an old German liner housing a SHAEF mission. His long blue coat whipped at his knees, and his aides followed him in single file.

Doenitz was calm, his tight features unchanging. Turning to Colonel General Alfred Jodl he said in a loud whisper: “It is now quite clear what is going to happen.” Jodl did not answer. He was nervous. His nose reddened and purple blotches appeared on his cheeks. Doenitz and his companions entered the first-class bar.

Government’s End. A group of Allied officers strode in and both parties took seats at a long table. U.S. Major General Lowell Rooks, representing General Eisenhower, glanced at the papers in his hand. Major General Nikolai Trusov of the Red Army General Staff stared stonily at the Germans.

“I am in receipt of instructions,” said General Rooks, “. . . the Acting German Government and the German High Command shall be taken into custody . . . as prisoners of war. Thereby the Acting German Government is dissolved.”

Asked if he had any comment, Doenitz replied: “Any word would be superfluous.”

Then the newly made prisoners were told to prepare for the plane trip to captivity. General Trusov raised his only question of the meeting: had precautions been taken against suicide? General Rooks said that they had.

Minutes later Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeberg, who had sat hollow-eyed and aloof during his fourth surrender of World War II, excused himself from his personal guard, locked a toilet door behind him, and killed himself with poison. Later, his body was photographed where it lay under a picture of Doenitz (see cut).

The Grand Admiral complained bitterly when told that he could take only one piece of luggage. He had packed twelve. Later he was found to have worn six suits of silk underwear.

Party’s End. British tanks and infantry rounded up smaller fry, seizing arrogant Wehrmacht officers’ sidearms, ending the gay parties that had been held in the Admiral’s schoolhouse compound. Soldiers from Norway and Denmark strode about Flensburg, boasting: “We were never beaten.” A British sergeant knocked one of them down, and said: “Well, you’ve been beaten now.” Disarmed marines were marched through the streets, still singing We Sail against England.

The strange show at Flensburg was over. SHAEF’s earlier indications that the Flensburg regime was not recognized as a pro tem government and that it was under control had been contradicted by the action and words of SHAEF’s General Rooks. Military necessity may have required General Eisenhower and his field commanders to use the interim services of Admiral Doenitz and his motley crew in bringing the huge German machine under control. If so, circumstances had given “the German High Command” at Flensburg a fateful opportunity, and Doenitz & Co. had made the most of it. The world had not heard the last of that peculiarly German institution, the General Staff Corps.

Hardy Perennial. For more than a century the General Staff Corps had survived victory and defeat, forever studying the last war, forever planning the next. As perfected by the Germans, the modern Corps represented and served all arms—the ground armies, the air force, the navy.

G.S.C.’s spiritual father was Frederick the Great, who began its tradition of endurance in adversity and gave the Corps its Prussian base. Napoleon and his defeat of the Prussians at Jena gave the G.S.C. its first great strategic concepts—the wielding of massive armies and the conscription needed to provide the uniformed mass. Two non-Prussians, calm, scholarly General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, a Hanoverian, and impetuous, dashing August Wilhelm Anton von Gneisenau, coalesced these concepts. Scharnhorst founded the War Academy, from which Staff officers were chosen, and Gneisenau, as chief of staff of the Prussian army, put the new ideas to work. In Bismarck’s time, non-Prussian Helmuth Karl von Moltke made the study of past wars a prime function of the Corps.

G.S.C. survived World War I with scarcely a bobble. The Allies considerately allowed a small (100,000) German army to guard Germany against internal disorder. G.S.C. smoothly converted this “police force” into a miniature Wehrmacht, complete with all the old organizational ideas and hospitable to new ones.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, he used the professional High Command, and its members used him. They had the same aim—war—and the story of their mutual enmity was largely a myth.

So was the idea, popular just now, that merely by imprisoning the ranking German commanders the Allies could kill the German High Command. Fundamentally, it would live as long as the German military spirit lived—and that spirit was far from dead last week.

Officers held by the Allies would probably be encouraged to review World War II, impart their experience and wisdom to their professional captors. In time, their studies would probably be available to the next generation of the G.S.C.