Paper rips from a typewriter. A stamp slams down once, twice. A radio operator stiffens. Headphones half on. Eyes fixed on a line of code that should not exist. A hand trembles over a cipher sheet. Someone whispers, “Berlin is silent.” A chair scrapes. A man swallows and reaches for the phone again because the first call was not answered.

 Outside, engines idle in darkness. Inside, the air tastes of ink and sweat. The Reich has a problem it never planned for. The Furer is gone and someone must carry the weight. Not a general, not a party boss, an admiral. Carl Dunit stands under a harsh lamp, reading a message that rewrites the chain of command.

 His jaw tightens. He signs. The room exhales until a second transmission arrives, marked urgent, and every face drains of color because it is not a surrender request. It is a warning. Plun, [clears throat] May 1945. Naval headquarters under blackout curtains. The clock ticking too loud. Grand Admiral Carl Dunits stands over a desk littered with signal slips, charts, and a folder stamped with the highest classification marking in the German military.

 Admiral Hans Gayog Fonfriedberg hovers close, face drawn, hands locked together so tightly his knuckles have gone white. Donuts’s agitant, Walter Luda Noirath, holds a sealed packet with Berlin markings, wax intact, creased from being hidden under a tunic during the dangerous journey north. A young signals officer in the corner rides the radio set, listening for a call sign that never comes, adjusting frequencies every few minutes in hope that someone in the capital might still be transmitting.

 Ludenurath breaks the seal with a careful thumb and slides out typed pages. Hitler’s political testament sits on top and beneath it a short blunt order naming Dunit as successor dated signed final. Fonfriedberg exhales like he has been struck in the chest. Donit reads without blinking then reaches for the stamp and says quiet and absolute prepare the announcement. The stamp comes down.

 The first orders begin to form and then the signals officer turns pale holding a fresh decoded intercept, one line underlined in pencil, stating who is already seizing authority in Berlin’s ruins and what they intend to do with the new head of state. How did a submarine commander become the last leader of Nazi Germany? And why did Hitler in his final hours bypass every general, every party official, every fanatic who had sworn blood oaths to his vision, and instead choose a sailor who spent most of the war beneath the

Atlantic waves? The answer lies not in ideology, but in something far simpler, trust. Or what passed for trust? In a regime built on paranoia, backstabbing, and betrayal at every level. Carl Dunits was born on September 16th, 1891 in Grunau, a small district near Berlin where the Spree River widened enough for rowing regatas.

 His father Emile was an engineer with the Zeiss Optical Company, a practical man who valued precision and technical competence above romantic notions. His mother, Anna, died when Carl was only 3 years old, leaving his father to raise him and his older brother Friedrich alone. Amil Donuts remarried eventually, but Carl grew up understanding that the world could take things away without warning and that survival depended on discipline and self-reliance.

These were lessons that would shape everything that followed. At 18, Carl Dunitz entered the Imperial German Navy’s cadet training program at Keel. He was not driven by political conviction or nationalist fervor. He simply loved the sea. He loved the order of naval life, the clarity of rank and command, the tangible challenge of mastering machines and weather and human crews.

 By 1912, he was a commissioned officer serving on the light cruiser Brezlau in the Mediterranean. When the First World War erupted in August 1914, Donitz found himself aboard a ship that would become famous for one of the most audacious early actions of the conflict. The Brelau and her companion battle cruiser Gerban were trapped in the Mediterranean as war began.

 Cut off from German home waters by the British Navy’s control of Gibraltar. Rather than accept internment in a neutral port or destruction in battle, the two ships made a daring run for Constantinople. They arrived safely and were transferred to the Ottoman Navy, helping bring Turkey into the war on Germany’s side. This single act changed the strategic balance in the eastern Mediterranean and opened new fronts that would consume hundreds of thousands of lives.

 Donit served on the Brelau until 1916, gaining experience in the Eastern Mediterranean that few German officers would ever match. He learned that bold action, even when seemingly hopeless, could change strategic realities in ways that timid caution never could. But here is where the story takes its first decisive turn.

In 1916, Dunits transferred to the submarine service. Germany’s yubot campaign was intensifying and the navy needed experienced officers to commandthe growing fleet of undersea vessels. He was assigned to U39 where he learned the basics of submarine warfare. Then he was given command of UC25, a mine laying submarine operating in the Mediterranean.

 The cramped, oil soaked world of the Yubot suited him perfectly. He discovered something about himself in those dark, pressurized hulls that he had never known on surface ships. He was meticulous in ways that mattered when a single mistake could kill everyone aboard. He was cold under pressure when seconds separated success from catastrophe.

 He understood that survival underwater depended on absolute discipline, precise calculation, and the willingness to make life or death decisions without hesitation. The margin for error was zero. A moment’s indecision during a crash dive could mean death for the entire crew. Donuts thrived in this environment as few men could.

 By 1918, he had risen to command UB68, a larger attack submarine capable of extended patrols. On October 4th of that year, during an attack on a British convoy in the Mediterranean, Donuts made a decision that would haunt him, but also strangely forge his future reputation. His submarine surfaced to finish off a damaged freighter with deck gun fire, conserving precious torpedoes for other targets.

 British escorts closed in with terrifying speed. Dunits ordered a crash dive, but the boat’s compressed air tanks had been damaged in the earlier approach. The submarine refused to submerge properly, wallowing on the surface while water poured through open vents. It was a death trap. Donuts had no choice but to surface fully and surrender.

 He and his crew were pulled from the water by British sailors and taken prisoner. He spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner of war camp in England. First at Fort Maron and later at Redmi’s camp near Sheffield, he watched helplessly as Germany collapsed into defeat, revolution, and chaos. The Kaiser abdicated, the fleet mutinied.

 The new VHimar government signed the armistice and accepted terms that seemed to many Germans like national humiliation. In that camp, something shifted inside Carl Dunit. He had time to think. He had time to brood. He became obsessed with the question of why Germany had lost when victory had seemed so close. The blockade, he concluded, the British naval blockade had strangled Germany’s economy, starved its people, and made continued resistance impossible.

 And he believed submarines properly organized and ruthlessly deployed could have broken that blockade, could have severed Britain’s supply lines, could have won the war. This conviction would shape the next three decades of his life. It would also eventually place him in a room in Plun holding a document that made him the most powerful man in a collapsing empire.

 The years between the wars transformed Donuts from a bitter prisoner of war into one of the most innovative naval tacticians of his generation. He feigned psychological illness to secure early repatriation in 1919. Returning to a Germany he barely recognized, he rejoined the German Navy, now called the Reichs Marine, and served in various capacities as the VHimar Republic struggled through economic chaos, hyperinflation, and political turmoil.

 The Treaty of Versailles forbad Germany from building submarines. So, Donits worked on torpedo boats and surface vessels. All the while thinking about the undersea war he believed was coming. He studied, he planned, he waited. When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Dunit was a captain commanding the cruiser Mden.

 He watched the new regime with professional detachment. He was not a Nazi by conviction, at least not in those early years. He never joined the party until it became effectively mandatory for senior officers. He did not attend rallies or give political speeches. He was a naval officer who wanted to build submarines and prove his theories about undersea warfare.

 The politics above the surface were to him distractions from the real work below it. In 1935, Hitler renounced the Treaty of Versailles and began openly rearming Germany. The Navy received permission to construct new yubot for the first time since the Great War. Donuts was given command of the first submarine flotilla, Wedigan flotilla, named after a legendary yubot commander from the previous war.

 This was his moment. Everything he had studied, everything he had planned in those bitter years of waiting could now be put into practice. He threw himself into the work with obsessive energy that alarmed his family and impressed his superiors. Dunit developed what he called the rud tactic, the wolfpack tactic.

 Traditional submarine doctrine held that yubot should operate independently, hunting alone like solitary predators prowling vast ocean spaces. Donitz rejected this completely. He argued that multiple submarines should converge on a single convoy, coordinating their attacks through radio communication, overwhelming the escorts through sheer numbers and precisetiming.

 The first boats to find a convoy would shadow it without attacking, reporting position and course back to headquarters. Other submarines would race to intercept from all directions. Then, usually at night, when sonar was less effective and surface visibility favored the low-lying submarines, they would strike simultaneously from multiple angles.

 The escorts could not be everywhere at once. The convoy would be torn apart before it could organize effective resistance. He drilled his crews relentlessly. He demanded perfection. He built a cult of loyalty around himself that would prove unshakable even in the darkest hours of the war. His men called themselves the Loven Rud, the Lion Packs.

 They respected Donuts not because he was kind, but because he was competent, because he understood their world intimately, because he had been a submarine commander himself and knew exactly what he was asking them to risk. He promoted aggressively based on results rather than connections. He visited bases constantly.

 He personally briefed commanders before major operations and personally welcomed them back. In an era when German generals often commanded from comfortable headquarters far behind the lines, Dunits maintained intimate contact with his fighting men. When war came in September 1939, Dunits had only 57 operational submarines, far fewer than he believed necessary to strangle Britain’s supply lines.

 He had argued repeatedly for 300 boats before any war began. Hitler had prioritized massive surface ships like the Bismar and Tits, battleships that would prove largely useless once hostilities actually started. But Donuts made do with what he had. His boats began sinking Allied shipping at a terrifying rate from the very first week of the war.

 The Wolfpacks prowled the Atlantic approaches to the British Isles, turning the ocean into a killing ground. Convoys that had sailed peacefully for months suddenly found themselves under attack night after night. Ship after ship went down in flames or slipped beneath cold black water. Thousands of merchant sailors died, often without even seeing the enemy that killed them.

 The torpedo would strike, the ship would begin to sink, and by the time survivors made it to lifeboats, the submarine was already miles away, hunting the next target. It was industrial killing on a maritime scale. Winston Churchill would later admit that the yubot threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war.

 Britain was an island nation dependent on imported food, fuel, and raw materials. Without merchant shipping, Britain would starve within months. Donuts understood this perfectly. Every ton of shipping he sank was a direct blow against Britain’s ability to continue fighting. He measured success in tonnage destroyed. And for the first years of the war, that metric climbed relentlessly in Germany’s favor.

 The period from July 1940 to December 1941 became known among yubot crews as the first happy time. France had fallen, giving German submarines direct access to the Atlantic from ports on the Bay of Bisque like Lauron and Breast. No longer did yubot have to make the dangerous passage around the British Isles to reach their hunting grounds.

British escorts were spread thin across thousands of miles of ocean. American neutrality meant the eastern seabboard of the United States was essentially undefended. its coastal cities blazing with lights that silhouetted merchant ships against the glow. Yubot operated almost with impunity, sinking hundreds of ships with minimal losses.

 Donuts’s theories were proving devastatingly effective. His star rose accordingly. But even during this period of success, Donuts demonstrated a capacity for cold calculation that would define his ultimate legacy. In September 1942, a German submarine commanded by Verer Hartinstein torpedoed the British transport ship Laconia in the South Atlantic about 800 m south of the West African coast.

 What Hartinstein did not know when he fired was that the ship was carrying not just British passengers and crew, but also nearly 1,800 Italian prisoners of war being transported to camps in Canada along with Polish refugees and British civilians, including women and children. When Hartinstein surfaced after the attack and realized the scale of the disaster, with thousands of people struggling in the water and the screams carrying across the calm sea, he made a decision that would have seemed routine in earlier wars. He radioed donuts for

instructions and began rescue operations. Over the next several days, multiple hubot surfaced to assist. They took survivors aboard, cramming their narrow hulls with desperate people. They towed lifeboats. They distributed food and water. They even broadcast on open frequencies, asking for help from any vessels in the area, identifying themselves as German submarines engaged in rescue operations.

 What happened next revealed the terrible logic of industrial warfare. American aircraftspotted the surfaced submarines and attacked. Despite the submarines being crowded with survivors and towing lifeboats under Red Cross flags, whether the pilots knew a rescue was in progress and attacked anyway or genuinely did not understand what they were seeing remains disputed. The results were catastrophic.

Submarines were damaged. Germans and survivors alike were killed. The rescue operation collapsed into chaos. Donuts faced a choice that would follow him to Nuremberg. He could continue allowing rescue operations, accepting the risk to his submarines and crews, or he could prioritize his boats and the lives of his trained sailors.

 He chose the submarines. He issued what became known as the Laconia Order. German submarines were henceforth forbidden from attempting to rescue survivors of ships they had sunk. No picking up survivors, no providing lifeboats with directions to shore, no giving water or food to men dying in the water.

 The sea would take whom it would take. Donuts justified this order as military necessity. His submarines were vulnerable when surfaced. Every minute spent on rescue operations was a minute when enemy aircraft or warships could attack. His duty was to his own men first, and he would not sacrifice trained submariners to save enemy sailors.

 This decision would be examined in excruciating detail at Nuremberg. It revealed something essential about his character. He was not sadistic. He was not ideologically driven toward cruelty in the way that some Nazi leaders reveled in suffering. He was in his own mind simply efficient. He calculated lives in terms of strategic advantage.

 He would apply this same cold calculus to the final days of the Reich. When the question was not how to win, but how to end with the least damage to those he considered worth saving. By early 1943, the tide of the submarine war began to turn against Germany. Allied codereakers at Bletchley Park had achieved what had seemed impossible.

They had cracked the German naval Enigma ciphers. For months, the British had been reading Donuts’s operational orders almost as quickly as his own commanders received them. They knew where the Wolfpacks were gathering. They could route convoys around the danger zones with uncanny precision. New radar systems mounted on aircraft and escorts made it increasingly dangerous for submarines to approach on the surface at night.

 Longrange aircraft closed the mid-atlantic gap where hubot had once hunted without fear of air attack. Escort carriers provided air cover for convoys throughout their journey. Hunter killer groups actively sought out submarines rather than simply defending convoys. The losses became staggering. In May 1943 alone, the Allies sank 41 German submarines.

 41 boats with their entire crews, roughly 1500 men, dead in a single month. The Yuboat service had always been dangerous with casualty rates exceeding those of any other branch of the German military. Now it was becoming suicidal. New boats left port knowing they had a less than even chance of returning. Experienced commanders were dying faster than they could be replaced.

 Dunit faced a terrible decision. He pulled his boats back from the North Atlantic, conceding temporary defeat in the Tonnage War. It was the first major strategic setback of his career, and it changed everything about his relationship with Hitler. Any other commander might have been blamed for the failure.

 The German military tradition was harsh on generals who lost battles, but Hitler did not blame Dunits. If anything, his trust in the admiral grew stronger as other commanders failed him. The generals had disappointed him in Russia, promising quick victory and delivering endless grinding stalemate. The Luftvafer had failed to protect the Reich cities from devastating bombing raids that were turning German industry and German homes to rubble.

 The army had tried to kill him on July 20th, 1944 when Klaus von Stafenberg’s bomb exploded in the Wolf’s Lair headquarters. That assassination attempt shook Hitler’s faith in his military leadership to its foundations. He began to see conspirators everywhere. He questioned the loyalty of men who had served him for years.

 But the Navy, Donitz’s navy remained loyal. Not a single senior naval officer joined the July 20th conspiracy. When news of the assassination attempt reached the fleet, Dernitz immediately broadcast a message of support for Hitler and condemnation of the plotters. He denounced them as traitors and criminals with what appeared to be genuine fury.

 Whether this was sincere conviction or calculated survival remains debated by historians to this day. Some argue Dunits truly believed in Hitler by this point, having been gradually seduced by proximity to power and the magnetic intensity of the Furer’s personality. Others contend he was simply playing the game that every survivor in that toxic court had to play.

 Disagree openly and you would be removed from command,possibly arrested, possibly executed. Agree publicly while working privately to salvage what you could. Either way, the demonstration of loyalty cemented Dunit’s position in Hitler’s shrinking circle of trusted subordinates. In January 1943, he had been appointed commander and chief of the entire German Navy, replacing the aging Grand Admiral Eric Rder after Raider clashed with Hitler over surface ship strategy.

 Now, after July 1944, Donitz was increasingly drawn into strategic discussions far beyond his maritime expertise. He attended briefings at the Wolf’s Lair. He listened as Hitler ranted about holding impossible positions, about wonder weapons that would reverse the war’s outcome, about the coming split between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union that would supposedly save Germany. He nodded. He agreed.

 He never pushed back in. Any recorded instance, the army generals who argued received Hitler’s fury. Duritz who agreed or remained silent received Hitler’s trust. Now we approach the final act. Spring 1945. The Reich is collapsing from both east and west with catastrophic speed. Soviet armies under marshals Zhukov and Kv are closing on Berlin from the Oda River less than 50 mi from the capital.

American and British forces have crossed the Rine and are racing into central Germany against opposition that grows weaker every day. The Luftvafa barely exists as a fighting force with aviation fuel nearly exhausted and trained pilots almost extinct. The army is shattered, its best divisions destroyed in futile offensives or ground to dust, defending positions that Hitler refused to abandon.

 And in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, 50 ft underground in a concrete tomb of his own making, Adolf Hitler is making his final decisions. The bunker had become a surreal world by late April 1945. Above ground, Berlin was being systematically demolished by Soviet artillery and aircraft. The great buildings of the Nazi state were burning, or already reduced to rubble.

Refugees clogged the streets, desperate to flee westward before the Soviets arrived. SS execution squads roamed the ruins, hanging soldiers accused of desertion and civilians suspected of defeatism from lamp posts with signs around their necks warning others of the cost of cowardice. But below ground, in the flickering artificial light of the bunker, Hitler continued to issue orders to armies that no longer existed, to plan counteroffensives with divisions reduced to a few hundred exhausted men, to rage at the treachery of subordinates

who had merely tried to tell him the truth. Hitler’s will and political testament dictated in those final days to his secretary Troutel Junger while Soviet shells shook dust from the bunker ceiling is a remarkable document. It is full of blame and self-justification. It accuses international jury of starting the war and condemns the German people for proving unworthy of his genius.

 It specifically denounces two men whom Hitler had once considered his closest subordinates, men he had trusted above almost everyone else. Herman Guring, the Reichkes Marshal who had commanded the Luftvafa and been designated Hitler’s successor for years, was accused of treachery for sending a telegram on April 23rd. From his refuge in Bavaria, Guring had asked whether given the isolation of the bunker from the outside world, he should assume leadership of the Reich.

 He phrased it carefully as a question rather than a demand, invoking a 1941 decree that had named him successor if Hitler ever became incapacitated. But Hitler, fed poisonous interpretations by Martin Borman, who hated Guring, saw it as a premature power grab, an attempt to push him aside while he still lived. Guring was stripped of all his offices, expelled from the party, and ordered arrested by SS troops.

 Hinrich Himmler, the Reichfura SS who had commanded the concentration camps, the Gestapo, and the vast security apparatus that terrorized occupied Europe, had committed an even greater betrayal in Hitler’s eyes. Through intermediaries, Himmler had approached the Swedish diplomat Count Fulkar Bernadot, offering to surrender German forces on the Western front while continuing to fight the Soviets.

 He apparently believed the Western Allies would welcome such an offer, would see him as a reasonable man they could work with to prevent Europe from falling completely to communism. The Allies rejected his approach immediately and publicized it, ensuring that Hitler would learn of the betrayal from foreign radio broadcasts. Himmler too was stripped of all offices and expelled from the party.

 That left the question of succession. Hitler needed to name someone to carry on after his death. The army generals were either dead, captured, or under suspicion since July 1944. Gerbles, the propaganda minister, would remain in the bunker with his family, determined to die with his furer and even to poison his own children rather than let them live in a world withoutnational socialism.

 Borman, the party secretary, was too closely tied to party machinery to command military obedience and was despised by virtually everyone outside Hitler’s immediate circle. And then there was Dunitz, the loyal admiral, the professional who had never joined the party until it was unavoidable. The man whose service remained disciplined even in defeat.

 The man who had never questioned orders, never plotted against the regime, never sought to negotiate behind Hitler’s back. Hitler named Carl Dunitz as president of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. It was in some ways a deliberate insult to the army and party officials who had failed him.

 A naval officer with no political experience, no territorial ambitions, no following among the party faithful, just a sailor who knew how to follow orders and maintain discipline. The message naming donuts as successor was transmitted from the bunker on April 30th, 1945. That same afternoon, after a lunch that no one really ate and conversations that accomplished nothing, Hitler retreated to his private quarters with Ava Brawn, whom he had married in a brief ceremony the day before.

 He shot himself through the head with his personal pistol. Brawn took poison. Their bodies were carried up the emergency stairway to the chancellory garden, dowsted with the last available gasoline and burned while Soviet shells fell around the building and the distant sounds of street fighting echoed through the ruins. The flames were never hot enough to fully consume the corpses and Soviet soldiers would find charred remains within days.

The new head of state did not learn of Hitler’s death until the following day, May 1st. Communications between Berlin and Plur had become unreliable in the extreme. Telephone lines were cut by bombing and shellfire. Radio transmissions were intermittent, jammed or intercepted. Couriers had to move through territory swarming with Soviet troops.

 Allied aircraft and the general chaos of a nation in its death throws. The message that finally reached Dunit was garbled and confusing. It took hours to confirm that Hitler was actually dead and that the succession had taken effect. When Dunit received confirmation, he addressed the German people by radio that evening from Plur.

 His speech was notable for what it did not say. He did not mention Hitler’s suicide. He claimed the Furer had fallen fighting against Bulcheism in the capital, dying heroically at his post. The truth was too shameful to admit. He did not announce immediate surrender. Instead, he promised to continue fighting until German soldiers and civilians could be saved from Soviet captivity.

 He did not grapple with the regime’s crimes or acknowledge any responsibility for the catastrophe that had befallen Europe. He simply stated that the war would continue for now and that his sacred duty was to the German people. But Dunits faced an immediate problem beyond the mere fact of military defeat. Multiple power centers existed within the collapsing Reich, each with its own agenda and its own armed forces.

 In Berlin, the remnants of the government were either dead, captured by the Soviets, or scattering in all directions. In the south, SS units maintained some cohesion and loyalty to commanders who had not yet accepted defeat. In Czechoslovakia and Austria, Army Group Center stilled substantial forces.

 In the north, where Donuts established his headquarters, the army and navy operated under his nominal command, but were exhausted and increasingly unable to execute any orders that required actual combat. And lurking in the shadows was Hinrich Himmler, who apparently did not understand that his dismissal from office was final and absolute.

 He arrived in Plone expecting to be given a senior position in the new government. He brought SS guards with their black uniforms and death’s head insignia. He brought his own staff officers and agitants. He clearly believed that dunits would need him, would want him, would have to accommodate him. After all, Himmler still commanded the loyalty of SS units throughout what remained of the Reich. He had connections.

 He had information. He had been the second most powerful man in Germany for years. The architect of the terror that had held the nation in its grip. Dunit met with him in a brief tense conference at the naval headquarters. According to multiple witnesses, including Donuts’s own agitant, the meeting lasted only a few minutes.

Donuts told him plainly that there was no place for him in the new administration. Hitler’s order was clear. Himmler had been expelled from the party and removed from all his offices. There would be no reprieve, no rehabilitation, no quiet return to power. Himmler was stunned. He had expected negotiation.

 He had expected accommodation. He had commanded millions. He had run the concentration camps where millions more had died. He had controlled the secret police that knew everyone’s secrets. And now asubmarine admiral was dismissing him like a minor functionary whose services were no longer required. Himmler left Plur a broken man.

 His illusions of indispensibility shattered. He wandered for 3 weeks through the collapsing Reich, apparently hoping to reach the British and negotiate some kind of arrangement that would save him from punishment. He shaved his mustache. He removed his distinctive glasses. He adopted a false identity. On May 23rd, he was captured by British troops at a checkpoint.

 During his initial processing at a military police station when a doctor attempted to examine him, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth. The architect of the Holocaust, the man who had overseen the murder of millions in the most systematic genocide in human history, died on the floor of a British interrogation facility.

 Foam on his lips and his secrets going with him into oblivion. Donuts moved quickly to establish his authority over what remained of the German state. He appointed a cabinet, choosing men who seemed likely to be acceptable to the Allies and could manage the practicalities of surrender. He named Counterin Fon Crosk, the longtime finance minister who had served continuously since the VHimar Republic and was seen as a technocrat rather than a Nazi fanatic.

 As head of government, he retained Albert Shar, the armament’s minister, in his position. Shar had been working for months to sabotage Hitler’s orders to destroy German infrastructure, the infamous Nero decree that would have left Germany a wasteland. He was also gathering information about Nazi crimes that he hoped might buy him lenient treatment from the victors.

 Donuts issued orders to military commanders throughout the shrinking Reich. He demanded continued resistance on the Eastern front while preparing surrender approaches to the Western Allies. And he began the work that would define his brief presidency and perhaps redeem something of his legacy. surrender, but on terms that would allow as many German soldiers and civilians as possible to escape the Soviets before the final capitulation.

This is the central drama of Donuts’s 20 days in power. The war was lost. Everyone knew it. The only question was how it would end. A single unconditional surrender to all the Allied powers simultaneously would mean that German forces in the east would have to lay down their arms immediately and surrender to the Red Army.

 Dunit wanted to avoid this at all costs. He knew what Soviet captivity meant. He had heard the reports and seen the intelligence summaries. German prisoners of war being marched eastward in columns, shot if they fell behind, worked to death in labor camps if they survived the march. Women brutalized by conquering soldiers in an orgy of revenge for what Germany had done during four years of occupation and extermination in the Soviet Union.

civilians deported to camps where survival was measured in months rather than years. He believed probably correctly that an immediate surrender to the Soviets would result in the deaths of millions of Germans, not from combat, but from captivity, from brutality, from the deliberate and systematic revenge that Soviet soldiers had been encouraged to take.

 The propaganda they had received throughout the war told them that every German was guilty of unspeakable crimes. No mercy was warranted. The enemy must be crushed without restraint or pity. Donuts’s strategy was delay and partition. He would surrender to the western allies first, opening the way for German troops and refugees to stream west into British and American custody.

 He would hold the eastern front as long as possible, buying time for this evacuation. Only when there was no other choice, when continued resistance was completely impossible, would he sign a complete surrender covering all fronts. The first approach came on May 3rd, 1945. Admiral vonfriedberg flew to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters at Lunberg Heath in Northern Germany.

 He was authorized to surrender all German forces in northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The meeting was stiff and formal. Montgomery kept Friedberg waiting in a tent before receiving him. He demanded unconditional surrender and refused to discuss political matters of any kind. He made clear this was a local military surrender only.

 The broader political surrender would have to come from Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower at his headquarters in Rang France. But Montgomery agreed to accept the surrender of the Northern forces. The documents were signed on May 4th on a plane table on Lunberg Heath with news reel cameras recording the moment and the agreement opened the gates.

 German soldiers who had been fighting in the Netherlands and northern Germany began streaming toward British and American lines in massive numbers. Civilians joined them. Whole families with whatever possessions they could carry, desperate to reach the Western Allies before the Soviets arrived.

 Shipsevacuated hundreds of thousands more from Baltic ports in one of the largest seaborn evacuations in history. A maritime operation that has largely been forgotten but which saved countless lives. Fonfriedberg then traveled to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rimes to seek a broader arrangement. He was under instructions from Donuts to try to negotiate a phased surrender that would allow the evacuation from the east to continue for as long as possible.

 But Eisenhower was having none of it. He had spent years coordinating the grand alliance between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. He knew the Soviets were suspicious that the Western Allies might try to negotiate a separate peace. He had promised Stalin personally that there would be no deals that excluded the Red Army from its share of victory.

 Eisenhower demanded unconditional surrender on all fronts simultaneously. There would be no separate arrangements. Germany would surrender to the Soviet Union at the same moment it surrendered to the West. All German forces would cease fighting at the same instant, regardless of where they were located. The war would end everywhere at once, and the Germans would have no opportunity to manipulate the timing of their defeat to their advantage.

 Dunit was trapped in an impossible position. Every day of delay meant more people could escape the Soviets. Ships were still running to Baltic ports. Columns of refugees were still moving west on roads clogged with military vehicles, farm carts, and people on foot. Soldiers were still surrendering to British and American units rather than to the Red Army.

 But every day of delay also meant more combat deaths, more bombing of German cities, more destruction. German troops in Czechoslovakia and Austria were still fighting and dying. The Soviets were still advancing. Each hour cost lives on both sides of the diminishing front. Dunit played for time with the only tool he had left, negotiation by delay.

 He sent General Alfred Yodel, the chief of operation staff, to Rams with instructions to extend the discussions as long as possible without appearing to negotiate in bad faith. Yodel was a skilled staff officer who understood military protocol and procedure intimately. He raised technical objections. He asked for clarifications on points of detail.

 He pointed out practical difficulties in communicating surrender orders to scattered German units spread across half a continent. He did everything possible to stretch the negotiations without triggering an allied ultimatum. Eventually, after intense pressure from General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Jodel managed to extract one critical concession.

 There would be a 45-hour gap between the signing of the surrender document and its implementation. Hostilities would not cease at the moment of signature. They would cease at 11:01 p.m. Central European time on May 8th. This gave German forces almost two more days to continue their westward movement, to reach Allied lines, to escape Soviet captivity.

 It was not much, but it was something. The surrender was signed at RAZ in a modest school room that had been converted to a war room in the early hours of May 7th, 1945. Yodel signed for Germany. French General Francois Seves signed for France. American general Walter Bedell Smith signed for the Supreme Allied Command.

Soviet General Ivan Suslaparov signed for the USSR, though he later claimed he had exceeded his authority in doing so. and Stalin agreed, demanding a doover ceremony in Berlin. Stalin was furious when he learned the details. He had not been consulted about the ceremony in advance. He had not sent an appropriately senior representative.

 He felt the Soviet Union, which had borne the overwhelming brunt of fighting against Nazi Germany and lost more than 20 million citizens to the war, was being marginalized in the moment of final victory. He demanded that the ceremony be repeated in Berlin in Soviet controlled territory with senior Soviet commanders present and properly recognized as principal participants rather than witnesses.

 A second surrender ceremony was staged at Carl’s host, a suburb of Berlin on May 8th. Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle signed for Germany this time, the highest ranking German officer still available and not under arrest. Marshall Gorgi Zhukov presided for the Soviet Union. American, British, and French officers attended as witnesses.

 The documents were essentially identical to those signed at Rams, but the symbolism was important. The Soviets had their ceremony in the capital they had conquered at such tremendous cost in blood. The war in Europe was officially over. But Donuts’s government continued to exist for another 2 weeks. The Fensburg Cabinet, as it became known because of its location near the Danish border, maintained the fiction of German sovereignty until the Allies decided to end it.

 Dunit moved his headquarters to the naval academy at Murvik, overlookingthe Flynnburg fjord with its cold northern waters. He issued decrees that no one outside his immediate circle read. He held cabinet meetings that discussed matters no one had authority to implement. He appointed and dismissed officials whose positions no longer meant anything.

 He attempted to manage the demobilization of German forces and the provision of food to a shattered population whose infrastructure had been bombed to rubble. He acted in short like the head of a functioning government rather than the administrator of a defeated and occupied territory. The allies watched with growing impatience and some beusement.

 What exactly did this rump government think it was doing? Churchill called the situation absurd in messages to his generals. The Americans viewed it with suspicion and wondered about German intentions. Some Allied officials worried that Donits was trying to preserve a core of German authority that could later be used to revive nationalist ideology or provide cover for Nazi officials trying to escape justice.

 Others simply wanted the charade to end so the real work of occupation and denatification could begin. There were practical reasons for tolerating the Fensburg government temporarily. The machinery of German administration, however, tattered, still functioned in some areas. German officers could communicate with German units more easily than Allied officers who did not speak the language or understand the Byzantine organization of the Vermacht.

 Allowing Dunits to issue demobilization orders and coordinate surrenders of scattered units was simply easier than trying to do it all through occupation forces that were still being organized. But the tolerance was always temporary, always conditional, always understood to be coming to an end. On May 23rd, 1945, British troops arrived at the Fensburg headquarters.

 They came with specific orders from the combined chiefs of staff that had been coordinated among all the Allied powers. The Donuts government was to be dissolved immediately and finally. Its members were to be arrested as prisoners of war, pending determination of their status. There would be no more pretense of German sovereignty.

 Germany as a state had ceased to exist. What remained was occupied territory under Allied military control divided into zones administered by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Donitz received the British officers with characteristic stiffness and formality. He did not resist. He did not protest dramatically.

 He did not claim immunity or argue legal technicalities. He simply accepted what was happening with the same cold efficiency he had brought to everything else in his long career. He was taken into custody along with Yodel Spear and the other ministers. The government that had ruled Germany for 20 days ceased to exist. The era of Nazi Germany was finally completely irreversibly over.

 But Carl Donitz still had one more role to play on the world stage. He would stand trial at Nuremberg alongside the surviving Nazi leadership. facing judgment not just for his 20 days as head of state but for his entire career in service to the third Reich. The Nuremberg trial presented Dunit with a peculiar challenge.

 He was not accused of crimes against humanity in the same sense as Guring or Cultton Bruner or the other major defendants. He had not run concentration camps. He had not ordered mass executions of civilians. He had not directed the Holocaust or the systematic murder of prisoners of war on the Eastern Front. His crimes were military in nature, specifically the conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Laconia order that forbarred rescue of survivors.

 Donitz defended himself with the same cold logic he had applied throughout his career. He hired competent lawyers and engaged fully with the legal proceedings. He argued that his submarine tactics were no different from American submarine warfare in the Pacific. American submarines had sunk Japanese merchant ships without warning from the first day of that war.

 They had left survivors to drown when rescue was impractical. They had waged exactly the kind of unrestricted commerce warfare that Dunitz was accused of conducting criminally. He noted that American Admiral Chester Nimttz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, had submitted an affidavit confirming that the US Navy had conducted unrestricted submarine operations against Japanese shipping throughout the war.

 The tribunal found this argument partially persuasive. They acknowledged that the Laconia order and unrestricted submarine warfare were not unique to Germany and they struggled with convicting Dunits for actions the allies themselves had taken or would have taken in similar circumstances. They concluded that Dunit could not be convicted of crimes for submarine warfare alone.

 But they found him guilty of other charges. He had waged aggressive war by preparing and conducting submarine operations thatviolated the London Naval Treaty of 1936, an international agreement Germany had signed, promising to observe rules of submarine warfare that Dunit had systematically ignored. He had committed war crimes by ordering German forces to continue fighting beyond the point when defeat was certain, resulting in unnecessary deaths on both sides.

 He had been complicit in Hitler’s regime by his close association with the dictator and his failure to resist criminal orders. He was sentenced to 10 years in Spandow prison in Berlin. It was the lightest sentence given to any major defendant who was not acquitted entirely. He served every day of that sentence without apparent complaint.

 Released in 1956 at the age of 65, Donitz retired to a small village in Schlesvig Holstein, the far north of Germany, where the sea was always close. He wrote his memoirs in two volumes, defending his conduct and portraying himself as a professional naval officer who had simply done his duty in difficult circumstances.

 He gave occasional interviews to historians and journalists, always maintaining the same narrative of professional service divorced from political responsibility. He never expressed remorse for his actions. He never acknowledged the full horror of the regime he had served. He maintained until his death in 1980, that he had known nothing of the Holocaust, until after the war, that the concentration camps were not his concern, that his responsibility extended only to his submarines and his sailors. When confronted with evidence

that senior Nazi leaders had discussed the extermination of the Jews in his presence, he claimed he had not paid attention, that such matters were outside his professional interest. The moral implications of serving a genocidal dictatorship seemed to slide past him like water off a periscope. What are we to make of Carl Dunits? He was not a monster in the mold of Himmler or Hydrich, men who designed and implemented genocide with bureaucratic precision and evident satisfaction.

He was something perhaps more troubling. He was a professional. He was a man who compartmentalized so effectively that he could serve the most criminal regime in modern history while telling himself he was simply doing his job. He could issue orders that sent thousands of men to their deaths in freezing Atlantic waters and sleep soundly because those orders were tactically sound.

 Dunits did not hate Jews with Himmler’s pathological intensity. He simply did not care about them one way or another. They were irrelevant to his submarines and his tactics and his professional advancement. This indifference, this ability to serve horror while focusing on spreadsheets and tonnage reports and supply chains may be more common and more dangerous than outright villain.

 It is the mindset that allows atrocities to function at scale. Not everyone pulling the levers of a killing machine is a true believer. Many are just professionals doing their jobs, and that is precisely what makes large-scale evil possible. The 20 days of the Dunits government also raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of endings.

The war was lost long before Hitler died. Every day of continued fighting after January 1945 at the latest cost lives that could have been saved by immediate surrender. Donuts knew this. He extended the war not out of hope for victory but to allow westward evacuation. From a humanitarian perspective, his delay saved hundreds of thousands of people from Soviet captivity.

 The ships that evacuated Baltic ports, the soldiers who surrendered to British and American forces instead of the Red Army, the civilians who reached Western zones before the final collapse. They owed their escape to Donut’s strategy of partial surrender. An admiral stood under a harsh lamp and read a message that made him the last leader of Nazi Germany.

 He signed, he stamped, he governed for 20 days while everything collapsed around him. Then British soldiers came and it was over. That is the story. What you do with it is yours to decide. Your support helps us continue the deep research behind every episode. Buy us a coffee and fuel the next documentary. link is in the description.

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