U-BOAT TACTICS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 13, 16 January 1946, Page 5

U-BOAT TACTICS

HITLER’S INSTRUCTIONS TO COMMANDERS MURDER MERCHANT CREWS Rceil. 6 p.m. Nuremberg, Jan. 14. Hoping to make Allied shipping construction useless by creating a .shortage of seamen, Hitler ordered German submarine commanders to shoot up lifeboats carrying survivors of torpedoed ships, and to kill the crews at all

This was disclosed in the notes of a conversation between Hitler and flic Japanese Ambassador at llei-iin. Lieut.-General Hiroshi Oshima, in the presence of Ribbentrop.

The notes were produced by the British prosecutor when the ease against Doenitz opened to-day at Ihe war criminal trials in Nuremberg.

There was evidence that Doenitz directly ordered submarine commanders to abandon the survivors of merchant ships they sank, and to leave them to their late.

The prosecution said that Doenitz occasionally reprimanded submarine crews for assisting shipwrecked sailors on rafts, and told them: "We must be harsh in this war.”

Doenitz played a prominent part in the development of Germany’s U-boat fleet after the Anglo-German naval treaty of 1935. Official German archives stated that he was entrusted with the leadership of the first Üboats of the young navy, and energetically directed their building. He even donned overalls and personally instructed the first captains and crews. Doenitz in four years of untiring work, succeeded in building up the young U-boat arm in personnel and material until it was a weapon whose striking power as unexpected even by experts. The prosecutor said that Hitler told the Japanese Ambassador that he had recalled the whole of the Atlantic fleet for re-organisation and had posted elements outside United States ports. Others were assembling at Freetown, and some were going as far south as Capetown. JAPS ADOPT SAME METHODS Hitler believed a shortage of crews would counter-balance the speed with which America was building ships. He told the Ambassador how he ordered the U-boats to surface after torpedoing and shoot up lifeboats. Oshima heartily agreed with the order, and said the Japanese were a*so forced to adopt those methods. The prosecution submitted a British Admiralty report disclosing that Üboats sank 253 merchant ships in the first year of the war, most of them without warning. The report officially listed U-boat sinkings of Allied and neutral ships during the war as 2775, totalling 14,572,435 gross tons. Doenitz sat pale, but composed, as the prosecution introduced documentary evidence showing his rabid adherence to Nazi creeds and philosophy. Doenitz in September, 1939, ' instructed that the sinking of merchant ships must-be justified in a war diary as due to possible confusion with a warship or an auxiliary cruiser. German naval documents presented to the Tribunal showed that U-boat men photographed British victims in the water and left them to their fate.

A witness for the prosecution, a German naval lieutenant, Lieutenant Heisig, testified that as midshipman in 1942, he attended a course of lectures for U-boat officers, in which Doenitz drummed into the midshipmen that they must be ruthless against the enemy and deny the crews of torpedoed Allied vessels any chance of survival. SHARPLY REBUKED During cross-examination of Heisig by Doenitz's counsel, there was a sharp interlude in which the German defence counsel was reminded cuttingly of the Tribunal’s powers. Counsel, when the Bench instructed Heisig to omit unimportant parts of Doenitz’s speech to midshipmen, protested that under German law witnesses were compelled to give full accounts of this type of testimony. Lord Justice Lawrence said: "This Tribunal is not governed by German law and doesn’t desire the’whole of the speech by Doenitz. That is all.” Lord Justice Lawrence, before the Court adjourned, called on the Allied prosecutors to give a specific definition of their plans and objectives in their declared intention of charging six Nazi groups. Thousands of Germans have applied to testify against the organisations, and the Tribunal suggested that the trial of six groups, whose membership ran into hundreds of thousands, should be deferred until the present trial of the Nazi leaders is ended.