Gross-Admiral Dönitz Grave - Grab Aumühle
His grave site in
Northern Germany.
from wikipedia:
Karl Dönitz (
16 September 1891 --
24 December 1980) was a
German naval commander during
World War II. He started his career in the
German Navy (
Kaiserliche Marine, or "
Imperial Navy") before
World War I. In
1918, while he was in command of
UB-68, the submarine was sunk by
British forces and Dönitz was taken prisoner. While in a prisoner of war camp, he formulated what he later called Rudeltaktik[2] ("pack tactic", commonly called "wolfpack"). At the start of World War II, he was the senior submarine officer in the German Navy. In
January 1943, Dönitz achieved the rank of Großadmiral (
Grand Admiral) and replaced Grand Admiral
Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine). On 30
April 1945, after the death of
Adolf Hitler and in accordance with
Hitler's last will and testament, Dönitz was named
Hitler's successor as Staatsoberhaupt (
Head of State), with the title of
Reichspräsident (
President) and
Supreme Commander of the
Armed Forces. On 7 May
1945, he ordered
Alfred Jodl to
sign the
German instruments of surrender in
Rheims, France.[3] Dönitz remained as head of the
Flensburg Government, as it became known, until it was dissolved by the
Allied powers on 23 May. On
30 January 1943, Dönitz replaced Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the
Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine) and Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) of the Naval
High Command (
Oberkommando der Marine). His deputy,
Eberhard Godt, took over the operational command of the U-boat force[12] It was Dönitz who was able to convince
Hitler not to scrap the remaining ships of the surface fleet.
Despite hoping to continue to use them as a fleet in being, the Kriegsmarine continued to lose what few capital ships it had.
In September, the battleship
Tirpitz was put out of action for months by a
British midget submarine, and was sunk two months later by
RAF bombers. In December, he ordered the battleship
Scharnhorst (under Konteradmiral
Erich Bey) to attack Soviet-bound convoys, after reconsidering her success in the early years of the war with sister ship
Gneisenau, but she was sunk in the resulting encounter with superior British forces led by the battleship
HMS Duke of York. Dönitz was released on 1
October 1956, and retired to the small village of Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein in northern
West Germany. There he worked on two books. His memoirs,
Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage (
Memoirs:
Ten Years and Twenty
Days), appeared in
Germany in
1958 and became available in an
English translation the following year. This book recounted Dönitz's experiences as U-boat commander (10 years) and
President of Germany (20 days). In it, Dönitz explains the
Nazi regime as a product of its time, but argues he was not a politician and thus not morally responsible for much of the regime's crimes. He likewise criticizes dictatorship as a fundamentally flawed form of government and blames it for much of the
Nazi era's failings. Dönitz's second book,
Mein wechselvolles
Leben (My Ever-Changing
Life) is less known, perhaps because it deals with the events of his life before 1934. This book was first published in
1968, and a new edition was released in
1998 with the revised title Mein soldatisches Leben.
Late in his life, Dönitz made every attempt to answer correspondence and autograph postcards for others. Dönitz was unrepentant regarding his role in World War II[32][33] since he firmly believed no one will respect anyone who compromises with his belief or duty towards his nation in any way, whether his betrayal was small or big. Of this conviction, Dönitz: The betrayer of military secrets is a pariah, despised by every man and every nation. Even the enemy whom he serves has no respect for him, but merely uses him. Any nation which is not uncompromisingly unanimous in its condemnation of this type of treachery is undermining the very foundations of its own state, whatever its form of government may be. Dönitz lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity in Aumühle, occasionally corresponding with
American collectors of German
Naval history, and died there of a heart attack on 24 December 1980. As the last German officer with the rank of Grand Admiral, he was honoured by many former servicemen and foreign naval officers who came to pay their respects at his funeral on 6
January 1981. However, he had received only the pension pay of a captain because the
West German government ruled all of his advances in rank after that had been because of Hitler. He was buried in
Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Aumühle without military honours, and soldiers were not allowed to wear uniforms to the funeral.[35] However a number of German naval officers disobeyed this order and were joined by members of the
Royal Navy, such as the senior chaplain the
Rev Dr John Cameron, in full dress uniform. Also in attendance were over one hundred holders of the
Knight's Cross of the
Iron Cross.