Pastor Martin Niemöller, Admiral Karl Dönitz, and the German Experience of the 20th Century

This book traces the remarkable lifelong friendship of Martin Niemöller, the Evangelical minister who defied Hitler, and Karl Dönitz, the mastermind of Germany's submarine campaigns in World War II who ultimately succeeded Hitler. From their days as cadets at the German naval academy in the years 1910-1913 to their deaths in the early 1980s, their story is full of ironies and unexpected twists. After World War I, Dönitz served the Weimar Republic and shunned the far right, while Niemöller briefly left his seminary studies to command a battalion in the right-wing Freikorps. Then, after World War II, when Niemöller was hailed for his principled Christian resistance to Hitler and Dönitz indicted for war crimes, Niemöller volunteered to help with his old friend’s defense at the Nuremberg Trials. Finally, late in life, Dönitz, a hero for unrepentant Nazis, and Niemöller, a world renowned pacifist, frequently shared a table at navy class reunions throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the end, they and their friends and classmates learned to love their country in ways that differed from the chauvinistic nationalism of their youth. In this manner, their lives were emblematic of the transformation of their generation, and of Germany as a whole.

Lawrence Sondhaus is Gerald and Marjorie Morgan Professor of European History at the University of Indianapolis, USA.