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Returning to post-war Germany, he was persuaded by Grand Admiral (then Captain) Erich Raeder to stick with the Navy—the crumb of a fleet left the Reich by the Versailles Treaty. He finally cast his lot with the Nazi Party solely because of his conviction that the upstart Brown Shirts would break down Versailles restrictions against recreation of his fleet. He gained powerful supporters in the German Inner Circle: Admiral Otto Schniewind, former director of naval education, now Chief of Staff of the German Navy High Command, is his close friend. The Luftwaffe's Hermann Göring supports Doenitz' frequent demands for materials and money, though he is often said to oppose similar demands from Admiral Raeder. Gossip is that the porcine Marshal likes Doenitz because of quick-witted sympathy expressed one day when Herr Göring got his fat stomach caught in the hatch of a U-boat he was about to inspect.
But gimpy little Paul Joseph Goebbels, though he publicly blamed the Athenia disaster on Britain, reportedly assailed Doenitz in a Cabinet meeting for "the ruthless sinking of the Athenia which has prejudiced neutrals." Propaganda Minister Goebbels is said to be coldly suspicious of the U-boat Admiral's close friendship for the daring onetime U-boat commander Pastor Martin Niemöller, whose services in Berlin Karl Doenitz attended right up to the time when Pastor Niemöller was jailed for preaching against the Nazis.
Because he spends so much time in personal investigation, Karl Doenitz' followers call him Chief Mussel Sniffer. One day two years before the war, dissatisfied with British Admiralty official reports on currents around the Portland naval base, he boarded U-37 and went to see for himself. The destroyer Wolfhound spotted the strange sub, dropped a couple of practice detonators, scared the German visitor to the surface. While Doenitz fumed in the torpedo room, the U-boat commander made proper apologies. Then the U-boat went home. Doenitz reportedly confided to a fellow officer that, on hearing the depth charges, he thought the "raving idiot in Berlin" had started shooting without notifying his Naval High Command.
But for his Nazi master Doenitz gladly practices the thing his life has been devoted to: ruthlessness at sea. In the last war there was not enough of it to suit him. In the campaign off the U.S. coast he will have a chance to find whether it pays—or whether he has been wrong all his life.
*Named for Britain's Anti-Submarine Defense Investigation Committee.
*British unofficial estimates: "Several thousand" U-boat prisoners, a "minimum of 250" German and Italian submarines sunk.