THE TRIAL
WHEN THE SUN ROSE over Kiel at 0818 on January 26, 1944, its intermittent rays came to rest upon a city and a bay deeply marked both by their function as Germany’s primary naval base on the Baltic Sea since the days of the Kaiser and by Allied efforts to destroy the vessels, shipyards, administrative buildings, and training facilities that helped keep the Kriegsmarine’s war effort alive. Between 1940 and 1944, British planes delivered no fewer than one hundred major air raids on Kiel and by war’s end 80 percent of the city’s public structures and private houses lay in ruins, along with much of the city’s infrastructure.1 Arrayed around the bay from its western sections to its head near the central train station and up its eastern shoreline to the suburbs of Gaarden, Heikendorf, and Laboe, the targets were obvious: the locks and bridges of the Kiel Canal at Holtenau, eastern terminal of the strategic waterway that connects the North Sea with the Baltic; the main naval base at Wik with sprawling installations ashore, including the jail where Oskar Kusch was being held; several huge shipyards across the bay in Gaarden capable of building and repairing warships ranging in size from battleships to submarines; the adjacent naval arsenal; and a sizable underground munitions depot. Not surprisingly, the Germans had concentrated much anti-aircraft weaponry and searchlight positions in and around Kiel along with fighter squadrons on bases nearby. The ferocity of the attacks and the stubbornness of the defenders remain visible to this day. For example, visitors who nowadays cross by train the high bridges spanning the Kiel Canal at Levensau, Rendsburg, or Hochdonn, can detect numerous round ponds filled with frogs and ducks in the lush green fields below them; but few of these visitors will realize that those peaceful pools of water were once craters from near-misses of Allied bombs aimed at those very bridges. For six decades another reminder was the massive U-boat bunker and former antiaircraft gun emplacement “Kilian,” whose dynamited remains disfigured the eastern shoreline of the bay until they were removed at last in 2001.
Villa Forsteck, site of Kusch’s trial and literally translating as “the villa at the edge of the forest,” had been built in 1866 by the wealthy Hamburg merchant Heinrich Adolph Meyer on land he had acquired to both sides of the Niemannsweg just to the south of Wik, with spectacular views north and east across Kiel Bay.2 He turned the imposing three-story building into a first-class cultural meeting place for visiting celebrities, including the physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, the pianist Clara Schumann, the poet and novelist Theodor Fontane, and the German-American statesman Carl Schurz who had married Meyer’s youngest sister Margarethe. Four years after Meyer’s death in 1889 his widow sold the entire estate to the prominent Kiel merchant and shipyard owner Heinrich Diederichsen, who continued Meyer’s tradition of sponsoring major scientific and cultural activities. He renovated parts of the villa, adding a covered terrace and a winter garden. When Diederichsen died in 1942, the city of Kiel acquired the property amidst a prolonged legal and political quarrel with local Nazi Party representatives and eventually leased it to the Kriegsmarine.3
The month of January regularly delivers fierce storms and icy weather to Germany’s coasts, but the day of Oskar Kusch’s trial turned out to be relatively mild with no freeze overnight and a high temperature of 6 degrees Celsius by early afternoon under largely cloudy skies.4 Soon after 0800 that morning, Kusch was driven the short distance from his cell at the Wik naval compound to Villa Forsteck as the members of the court, the witnesses, and an audience of about fifty naval personnel, primarily officers from local naval commands, and of course Kusch’s Luftwaffe friend Dieter Berger, gathered to attend the proceedings. Kusch’s defense counsel Gerhard Meyer-Grieben appears to have been the only non-uniformed person in the room. There is speculation that a good part of the audience may have been under orders to attend the trial in order to magnify the “deterrence effect” of a harsh sentence. Meyer-Grieben would remember several cases later in 1944 when up to five hundred soldiers were in attendance and that their very presence in those “show trials” guaranteed much harsher sentences than in trials in more intimate surroundings—a situation naval justice officials freely admitted.5
Meyer-Grieben knew his options were limited and that the naval justice system suffered at the very least from three major impediments: (1) procedural and sentencing instructions imposed from above that sought to guarantee conformity with the wishes of the political and military leadership; (2) collusion among justice officials who knew and covered for each other while maintaining outwardly the appearance of an independent judicial system; and (3) ideological affinity to the Nazi regime as expressed in the party membership of many officials and a tendency to equate, as in Kusch’s case, criticism of the party and its leaders with disloyalty to state and country.
The nature and extent of these corrupting influences and practices have been thoroughly illuminated since World War II and are competently covered by Heinrich Walle in his work on Kusch.6 Besides Dr. Rudolphi, and also serving on Dönitz’s staff, a major originator and transmitter of such political directives to the middle and lower ranks of naval justice officials, was Vice Admiral Walter Warzecha in his capacity as head of the General Naval Main Office (AMA) within the Naval High Command in Berlin. For instance, in February 1942 he reminded an assembly of naval justice officials of their requirement to follow instructions by the military leadership when it came to prosecutorial and sentencing decisions in “voluntary cooperation” with the political and military leaders, thus clearly exposing the illusion of an independent judicial apparatus.7 After 1942, as the historian Lothar Gruchmann has argued, conformity-inducing directives grew measurably more conspicuous as Germany’s chances of winning the war receded:
In this manner the heads of the naval justice administration transmitted the pressure downward that they themselves felt from their superiors regarding Hitler and the political leadership. The navy had to fulfill its role of boosting morale and discouraging defeatism. This development played itself out against the backdrop of the Trauma of 1918 when, as defeat loomed, the navy had become the first service branch to show signs of subversion of its will to fight. This time around any possible decline in discipline had to be met head-on from the very beginning.8
Meyer-Grieben had seen it himself in many trials and knew how limited his prospects were to protect Kusch from politically motivated harm.
By 1944, the language, interpretations, and application guidelines of the notorious “Subversion of the Military Strength and Spirit” Decree (Wehrkraftzersetzung) of August 17, 1938, had undergone several evolutions.9 As of March 31, 1943, the wording of the added Article 1, Paragraph 5a, Sections 1 and 2, served to tighten sentencing guidelines and weaken evidence requirements, reading as follows:
(1) Persons subject to military law who commit punishable acts by subverting military discipline or failing to display military courage will be assessed an augmented limited or lifelong jail sentence or the death penalty, if the maintenance of discipline or the safety of the armed forces so require.
(2) The same applies to punishable acts by which the perpetrator has caused an especially severe harm for the conduct of the war or diminished the security of the Reich, if the regular sentencing guidelines according to the sound judgment of the German people are considered insufficient in expiating the committed act.10
The prominent Nazi legal commentator and postwar apologist Erich Schwinge at the time defined subversion of the military fighting spirit or combat readiness simply as the “disruption or diminishment of the total mobilization of the people in pursuit of final victory in this war,”11 thereby opening the floodgates for tens of thousands of accusations and prosecutions under the provisions of the decree, especially in the later phases of the conflict. Most prominent among the expanded interpretations was the notion that now the mere intent or the existence of a motive to commit subversion, rather than any provable act or measurable consequences, sufficed to render the accused guilty. Moreover, the earlier requirement that the subversive utterances or acts had to have been made “in public” was watered down and essentially eliminated. As Schwinge wrote in 1943 and again in 1944, “the term ‘public’ for the purposes of this decree is to be understood in the broadest terms” and should not be subject to any specific definition of the number or kind of people in the audience. “That would be too narrow and would render impossible a robust intervention by the state against subversive utterances within the population.”12
To set the tone for moral considerations dictating the proper punishment frame, as early as December 29, 1939, the German Naval High Command had declared, “when the best soldiers at the front sacrifice their lives for the fatherland, no one will understand or tolerate that at the same time cowards and saboteurs are able to sit out the war in our jails.”13 No doubt, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann, Hans-Egon Breinig, and the other naval justice officials connected to Kusch’s trial were thoroughly aware of the legal cosmos in which they moved and of which they had become a part.
Regarding the extent of collusion among justice officials and the widespread practice of fixing trials ahead of any proceedings, Meyer-Grieben could not harbor the slightest illusions. He testified after the war:
Based on my experience with members of the naval justice system it is quite clear that prior consultation among officials was rampant. It went so far that once a prosecutor and a presiding judge agreed as to what sentence to propose and what sentence to assess, they even brought the defense counsel into their discussion. I regularly knew ahead of time what sentence the prosecution would seek. Once, when I expected a jail sentence for the accused, the prosecutor pulled me aside shortly before the trial and told me: “The presiding judge wants to sentence him to death, therefore I also have to demand the death penalty because otherwise my superiors will go after me.” In short, prosecutors felt badly whenever a judge went beyond their proposal for a sentence. He would try to avoid such a situation so as not to be seen as a poor team player by those above him. Therefore, I had the strong feeling that Mr. Breinig [in the Kusch case] would not want to leave himself open to a reprimand from above if he advocated a sentence at variance with what the presiding judge had in mind. I felt sure the matter had been coordinated beforehand….
[Justice officials] rotated their function in the system so blatantly that in a single session with four or five separate cases, the prosecutor and the presiding judge might quite literally get up and change places. I could not help but surmise that if a prosecutor received certain instructions and guidelines for his investigative work, such instructions would have consequences the next time he functioned as a judge. It is hard to believe that a human being can compartmentalize himself so as to say, “I am the judge today and therefore will apply very different standards tomorrow when I am the prosecutor.”14
Meyer-Grieben did credit Breinig with having undertaken a reasonably objective investigation of the case and to have shown no indication he might go for the death penalty. Indeed, the prosecutor had left the lawyer with the distinct impression he did not think Kusch’s actions were so severe as to necessitate his death.15 In all likelihood Meyer-Grieben would have classified Breinig as one of the more acceptable representatives of the naval justice system:
I knew a good number of naval justice officials who did not represent the [Nazi] perspective and therefore in political cases were eager to help the accused as much as they could without alerting their superiors to what they were doing. Based on my experiences, those judges welcomed any possible argument to ease the burden on the defendant and thus to avoid the death penalty, whereas those judges who had bought fully into the regime generally pursued every possible argument to increase the number of death sentences they assessed.16
Precious little time remained for Kusch and Meyer-Grieben to discuss and coordinate their defense strategy. The deposition Kusch had given Breinig on January 21 in Angers—without being able to consult legal counsel or having him present—clearly restricted Kusch’s maneuvering room, while Meyer-Grieben knew from bitter experience what to expect once the court convened:
It was usually the case that the defendant had made certain utterances in front of witnesses and the court had to accept them as evidence. The defense then had no real option but to admit that the utterances had occurred, but that they constituted merely a one-time hiccup or “failure.” … Next, one called character witnesses to establish that the accused had no record of taking a political stand … and could be seen as a loyal follower of the Hitler regime. In order to be successful the defense counsel also had to emphasize the defendant’s accomplishments for his country and how praiseworthy his conduct had been in the past. Nothing else made sense under the circumstances.17
In Kusch’s case, of course, it would have been implausible to sell him as a loyal follower of the Führer given the nature and weight of the evidence against him. His lawyer’s efforts had to concentrate instead on trivializing what Kusch had said, raising the possibility of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, and pointing out that Kusch had never acted on any of his political persuasions and demonstrably no actual erosion of his boat’s fighting spirit or combat readiness had ever occurred. Given the impossibility of transporting any of U-154’s enlisted personnel from France to Kiel on one day’s notice, Meyer-Grieben also did not seek to add loyalty statements from men like Lüdmann, Janker, or Isensee, who might also have been forced to admit to overhearing Kusch’s anti-Nazi remarks. However subtly, Meyer-Grieben might even attempt to suggest or sow doubts about the accusers’ true motives. At the same time, Kusch’s educational accomplishments and outstanding military record could act as a counterweight to the political accusations, reinforced by Winter’s and Janssen’s character testimony and their outstanding written assessments of their former watch officer. While not present at the trial in person, even Commander Kals as flotilla chief and Captain Rösing in their evaluations of U-154’s patrols would cast a positive light on an exemplary officer who had served his country successfully and courageously, and who stood ready to continue to do so as his fatherland sorely needed him at this crucial juncture of the war. Perhaps a reassignment within the navy or some form of probation would be more appropriate than applying the full sanctions contemplated by the “subversion” decree.
To the very end Kusch considered himself innocent of the charges, something his lawyer knew, respected, and admired, but also found awkward to reconcile with a defense plan aimed at ensuring a lenient verdict rather than one of “not guilty.” As Meyer-Grieben stated several years later, Kusch’s claims of being innocent put him as a lawyer into a potentially “embarrassing situation” where the judge might insinuate, “Counsel, what you are trying to tell the court, you cannot possibly believe yourself.”18 In short, Kusch’s native quest for truth and honesty and his loathing for manipulation and obfuscation as practiced by Nazi propaganda, for example, clashed with his lawyer’s desire to shield his client from as much harm as possible. Certainly, Kusch knew that any idea of throwing himself on the mercy of the court and of currying favor with the three judges by submitting a full but false “confession” to alleged crimes he knew in his heart he had not committed, was no option. At the same time Kusch never fully denied his opposition to the regime but instead maintained, correctly, that his words and actions were aimed at educating and enlightening his officers, never to harm the war effort.
The trial lasted from 0900 in the morning until 1800 in the evening with a break for lunch and another between the end of the evidence phase and the announcement of the sentence. All witnesses stayed in a separate room until called and after their testimony were allowed to remain in the courtroom. By all accounts the proceedings took place in an outwardly dignified atmosphere with proper courtroom decorum, and observers have described Kusch as calm and composed throughout, neither visibly nervous nor concerned.19 No exact word-for-word transcript of the trial exists, but the official protocol as prepared by Inspector Koops is detailed enough to gain a solid impression of how the trial went.20 Additionally, numerous participants and attendees have left first-hand accounts in letters and postwar personal and legal testimonies.
Hagemann followed standard procedure by first introducing the members of the court, reacquainting Kusch with the provisions of Paragraph 5 of the “subversion” decree and placing the two military jurors under oath. He reminded the witnesses, before dismissing them for the time being, to tell the truth in accordance with the oath they too would take upon delivering their testimonies. Since Arno Funke as U-154’s new I.W.O. was unable to make the trip from Lorient to Kiel, his deposition of January 20 would be entered into the record instead.
Kusch would be the first to be questioned. Upon confirming his personal and career data, he listened as his service evaluations were being read out loud and Breinig presented the indictment he had completed the night before. Kusch was then asked to comment on the charges. For the most part, he reiterated the comments, diminutions, deflections, and denials he had already employed in his deposition in Angers, typically claiming that he could not remember certain remarks or particular word choices, that most allegations ran counter to his innermost persuasions or that had been distorted or misunderstood, with the witnesses simply “concentrating on everything negative in our discussions” and therefore “getting everything wrong.” As for calling Hitler a mad megalomaniac who occasionally pulled down curtains and rolled around on the floor, that must have been based on something Kusch had heard from someone else, a mere rumor repeated in “a general discussion over the borderline between madness and genius.” He had never declared Germany’s defeat or Hitler’s fall a desirable certainty. To the contrary, he “always hoped it would not come to pass” and “never used [his] position as the commanding officer to impose my views on others.” The following excerpt captures Kusch’s defense approach well:
Regarding the global Jewish conspiracy, I never made the remarks attributed to me. I only said the Jews are not our only enemy, that other forces are also involved, for example the Catholic Church. I further stated that it was an exaggeration of our propaganda. I did notice that my officers did not share my view. I simply wanted to talk about it. Our conversation about the terror attacks was a result of the air attacks on Hamburg. I stated that the enemy was only aiming at our industries. I do not know Hamburg from personal experience.
As for “Rose,” we received messages that were meant to boost our morale in those days when things were not going well for us. I cannot imagine having said what I am accused of. I may have said something about “whipping up enthusiasm,” but that is all. I only listened to foreign radio stations when reception of ours was poor. I wanted to hear something about Berlin. For the most part I only listened to music. If there happened to be news items, I discussed them with my officers. That was done for their information. I am familiar with the regulations regarding foreign broadcasts.
As for neglecting to mention or failing to try to engage the reported convoy when U-154 was heading west out of the Bay of Biscay the previous March, Kusch stated the convoy was 240 nautical miles away according to his calculations, that he would have had to turn around and away from his designated destination, so that nothing could have been accomplished. “Something like that does not belong in a war diary.”
While Kusch remained in the courtroom and was occasionally asked to respond to their testimony, the witnesses made their appearance one after another, Ulrich Abel first. It remains difficult to assess whether the fact that Kusch’s second-in-command held a doctorate in law and had drawn up the original report made his charges more believable or weighty in the eyes of Hagemann and the two lay judges than the often equally damning statements of Druschel and others. Again, little additional information emerged compared to what had already been set down in the depositions, be it with regard to the Führer portrait, Kusch’s characterizations of Hitler and his entourage, Nazi propaganda, or Dönitz’s messages at the time of the Stalingrad disaster to spur his U-boat crews to take unreasonable risks. Abel added a few details not previously revealed, for instance Kusch’s alleged claim that a British and American victory would keep communism from engulfing Europe and that transnational forces such as a global Jewish plot or Free Masonry simply did not exist and were mere products of propaganda.
Since Arno Funke could not be present in Kiel but had been properly placed under oath at the time, his deposition of January 20 in Lorient was read aloud and entered into evidence instead. Kusch declined to comment. Then the court adjourned until 1400 for lunch. Apparently, there was a dining facility at the Villa Forsteck sufficiently equipped to feed the court and the spectators with everyone but the witnesses mingling freely. When Hagemann reconvened the court, Druschel was next to take the stand. He fully backed Abel’s testimony, emphasizing Kusch’s expressed desire to have Hitler and the party replaced by a military dictatorship and that, according to Kusch, Grand Admiral Dönitz “is chasing us out into the Atlantic without giving us adequate means to defend ourselves.” As for propaganda efforts, Druschel said Kusch rejected them and believed instead the German people wanted facts, not lies, to know what was going on. After overhearing from his bunk a conversation between Kusch and Nothdurft during which Kusch had made disparaging remarks about the regime, Druschel became so agitated that he had got up and climbed up to the bridge to tell Abel about it. He told the I.W.O. that he “was almost ready to punch Kusch in the face.”
Lieutenant Heinrich Meyer, who had been U-154’s II.W.O. during the first patrol, was personally appalled over Abel’s report and evidently attempted in his recollections to minimize harm to his former commanding officer: “We talked a few times about the political situation. The accused always had an opinion different from everyone else’s.” Otherwise Meyer confirmed that “there used to hang a Führer picture above the wash basin. It was later gone and now there was one with a sailing ship.”
The official record of the proceedings falls considerably short of capturing the impression Dr. Hans Nothdurft left on the court as the next witness and the more differentiated picture he tried to paint of Kusch on the second patrol. Given his persistent but ultimately futile labors to keep Abel and Druschel from filing a report, Nothdurft now had to maneuver between a desire to shield Kusch from further trouble and apprehension over not having reported the situation aboard U-154 himself. Dieter Berger remembered how the staff surgeon “wiggled like a worm on a hook because Nothdurft himself had often taken Kusch’s side in his criticism of National Socialism, as Kusch told me himself. He must have been afraid of self-incrimination.”21 Nothdurft himself left this account in his 1946 affidavit:
Initially I restricted my testimony to the military state of affairs on board and the tensions that existed between Kusch and his officers. Then I was asked whether I thought Kusch was opposed to National Socialism. In response I chose these or similar words: “Yes, I could not help but come to that conclusion.” … I did not dare characterize Kusch as a loyal National Socialist—something he himself chose not to do. The prosecution could draw on such an overwhelming amount of incriminating testimony—easily augmentable by deposing enlisted personnel—that no declaration of mine was going to rescue Kusch in that respect. My very cautious remarks drew a reprimand from the presiding judge. He said verbatim: “You appear to want to tell us as little as possible.” … I also dropped Kusch a hint on how best to defend himself. I assumed, as was customary under such circumstances, that he would claim to have suffered some form of a nervous breakdown, some illness, etc., to account for his behavior. Therefore, I stated that I believed his remarks grew from having been exposed to the tropics for too long and that his nerves must have taken a beating. This suggestion resulted from having contemplated my own situation at some length, as I would have defended myself exactly like that if I had been accused of not reporting the incidents myself. But Kusch did not take me up on my suggestion. He did not deny his anti-Nazi sentiments and tried to explain and defend them exclusively on the basis of his family’s values and his experiences when growing up.22
One may well wonder what Kusch and Meyer-Grieben thought of Nothdurft’s timidity and patronizing attitude when it came to their defense strategy. Meyer-Grieben has commented at some length on this point:
Dr. Nothdurft was quite hesitant to testify. When confronted with the central questions, he seemed embarrassed and highly uncomfortable. One saw clearly how he struggled over whether or not to incriminate the defendant by telling the truth. Not only did I notice his embarrassment, but also Hagemann, the presiding judge. Hagemann reminded him that as an officer and German man … he had to tell the truth and would be placed under oath later on. Only as a result of this mental pressure was Nothdurft willing to share his knowledge of the subversive utterances the accused had made. I had the feeling he was engaged in a gigantic inner battle.23
Meyer-Grieben obviously appreciated Nothdurft’s dilemma and characterized it in a different context as a “conflict between his sympathy for the accused and his antipathy for the regime on the one hand, and his obligations when testifying under oath on the other.”24 The official summary of Nothdurft’s testimony runs as follows:
The accused is a pessimist when it comes to the end of the war and the role of the U-boat service. He opposes National Socialism. He believed the U-boat war was lost and the war as well. For him establishing a military dictatorship appears to be a solution. The other officers disagreed strongly with their commanding officer’s views. The accused rejected the Führer. He once said we are only at war because a megalomaniac wants to gobble up Europe. I know the defendant listened to English news. I was personally present in the radio room when he did so. He also opposed the persecution of the Jews. He left no doubt that a military dictatorship must eliminate the party.
For once Kusch agreed he may have expressed himself in the manner Nothdurft indicated, probably realizing what an effort it was for the medical doctor to make his statements against someone with whose political persuasions he largely agreed.
The last two witnesses for the prosecution were the two Passed Midshipmen Hellmuth Kirchammer and Horst Fröhlich, who had been on board during Kusch’s first mission. Even now only nineteen years old, they had a keen understanding of what was at stake for their former commanding officer and only confirmed the one incident Kusch had urged them to form their own opinions and not to rely blindly on Nazi propaganda. Abel had then admonished them to pay no attention to what Kusch had said. Fröhlich in particular found a smart way to avoid further complications for Kusch:
I did not overhear any conversations where the commanding officer mentioned the Führer. On one occasion when I was the helmsman I heard the commanding officer having an argument with the chief engineer. I cannot remember what it was all about because I had to pay attention to my duties as helmsman.
By general agreement both young men were not required to be placed under oath and were dismissed from the proceedings.
Before the witnesses for the defense could take the stand, Hagemann permitted the prosecutor to read to the court a telegram that had arrived at 1120 that day at the Kiel office of the state police and been rushed to Villa Forsteck. It came from the Berlin state police and was the answer to Breinig’s inquiry of the day before about Kusch’s police record in Berlin and that of his parents. It had been delayed because Breinig had forgotten to include Kusch’s date of birth. While the document showed nothing negative or noteworthy about his parents, it demonstrated Kusch’s criticism of the regime and its institutions went back many years:
Based on our records Kusch was a member of the bündisch youth movement in 1937. On several occasions he acted as the leader of a group named “Oskar.” The regular group leader was the medical doctor Rudi Pallas, born on November 3, 1907, in Posen, who was then attached to the Wehrmacht. While a member of the RAD [Reich Labor Service] Kusch wrote several letters to Pallas in which he criticized the RAD in the strongest terms. No further political or criminal activities are on record here.25
If nothing else, the telegram proved Kusch had not acted on the spur of the moment, that there was a pattern of activities and utterances against the regime reaching back many years, and thus added an element of credibility to Abel’s charges. Had it been delivered just a few hours later, it would not have found its way into the evidence against Kusch.
Next and last came the only two witnesses for the defense, since the former chief engineer of U-103, Otto Strelow, was unable to attend the trial for undisclosed reasons. Lieutenant Commander Werner Winter had been Kusch’s first captain on U-103 and remained a genuine and trusted friend. Perhaps more than anyone, Winter as chief of the First U-Boat Flotilla in Brest was incensed that Abel had circumvented the usual chain of command by submitting his report not to Commander Kals in Lorient but instead to Captain Schmidt, who was in charge of a unit to which Abel had been only loosely and temporarily attached. As a result, the case gained a momentum of its own before Kals and Rösing in France knew of the report and before they could have intervened to stop its march into the naval justice bureaucracy. In addition, as he stated after the war, Winter knew of no precedent in the history of the U-boat service in which subordinate officers had stabbed their own captain in the back in such a “perfidious and impudent manner” and “surrendered an impeccable frontline officer to the death machinery of the wartime naval justice system.”26 Now on the witness stand and not familiar with what had transpired on U-154, all Winter could do was to accord Kusch “in every way the highest praise. [On U-103] we also talked about political topics. Kusch always maintained a positive attitude just as everyone else.” No doubt Winter also expected Lieutenant Commander Wolfgang Dittmers as one of the three judges determining Kusch’s fate to be impressed by the defendant’s outstanding credentials, especially when verified by a member of Crew 30 and thus by someone only one year junior to Dittmers himself, and to prevent the worst. Lieutenant Gustav-Adolf Janssen, Winter’s successor as skipper of U-103, likewise characterized his former second-in-command as “excellent. I can only report good things about him.”
After the war, Dr. Nothdurft would criticize Winter and Janssen for not having done enough for Kusch, especially in failing to weaken the politically based charges:
Winter really said little that provided relief for Kusch. He could have characterized Kusch’s utterances as not to be taken seriously or due to some illness, as I had tried to do. When Winter suggested the boat’s officers should have warned Kusch in good time, I raised my hand and told the court that I had warned Kusch on several occasions. These warnings later became part of the prosecutor’s argumentation. I thought it was necessary for me to mention them because as an outsider in the Kriegsmarine I wanted it to be known that I had done everything that could be expected of me as a good comrade.27
By contrast, Gerhard Meyer-Grieben thought Winter and Jannsen supplied an “excellent portrait of the character and abilities of the accused and thereby tried everything possible to bring about a more favorable and lenient verdict.”28 They conveyed the impression that Kusch was simply not capable of having made the remarks ascribed to him because they stood in such a stark contrast to his character and personality:
Winter’s and Janssen’s statements were very impressive and showed great sympathy for the accused as a human being. It would be appropriate to say they spoke as true comrades. One also noticed how they went through all sorts of contortions and had to be very careful as both were opposed to the regime themselves. That was always the same story with character witnesses for the defense: you emphasized again and again that the whole thing had to be a misunderstanding.29
From his perspective as a spectator, Dieter Berger was less impressed than Meyer-Grieben with what he had seen and heard, including his friend’s own defense. To him the defense counsel had acted in too “timid” a fashion and Kusch’s own statements had come across as “awkward and clumsy.” Of course, the ones most responsible for aiming at the death penalty were Hagemann, Abel, and Druschel. “All other witnesses for the prosecution were insignificant and acted in a cowardly manner by trying to protect themselves, especially staff surgeon Dr. Nothdurft.”30 Berger would add later:
The proceedings were conducted in a one-sided way inasmuch as the incriminating evidence was strongly emphasized while the witnesses for the defense, Winter and Janssen, and also the defense counsel, were urged to keep their remarks short. Whenever the defense lawyer wanted to interject or make a point, he was told to save his comments for his concluding remarks. As I remember, the defense counsel tried to cross-examine the witnesses. But almost immediately the presiding judge would cut him off. After the evidence phase was over I had a chance to talk to Janssen and Winter and both indicated they planned to complain about the way their testimony had been cut short…. My impression of Abel and Druschel as witnesses was that they only testified bad things about Kusch and hated him with a vengeance.31
The testimony of Kusch’s former commanding officers ended the evidence-gathering part of the trial. Hagemann placed all witnesses under oath except Druschel who had already sworn to tell the truth in his deposition in Lorient on January 20 and remained covered. Meyer-Grieben had been given the opportunity to cross-examine each witness very briefly, just as Kusch on several occasions had denied, deflected, or belittled specific accusations. Still, even Meyer-Grieben thought his client could have left a stronger mark on the court:
I don’t know how to put it best, but [Kusch] sometimes chose very unfortunate expressions in his defense. After all, so much hinges on making a good impression. This impression suffers greatly if the word choice is poor or seemingly insecure because then the judge will not be convinced that the defendant is telling the truth. Testimony should always be such that the personal impression does not suffer. If it does, it becomes an embarrassment, also for the defense counsel.32
There was little Meyer-Grieben could have done about this and now had to see what the prosecution was up to:
I was handicapped by still having to acquaint myself with the case as the trial unfolded. One had to be on one’s guard. In a way one had to feel one’s way into the case…. From a defense counsel’s point of view, it looks like this: the evidence-presenting phase is over, you try to sort in your mind what has been placed on the table. Professionally speaking, then comes the moment of greatest suspense: what will the prosecutor make of it all? Perhaps one has a notion that it might be the death penalty, but you never know until the prosecutor makes his recommendation. From then on, the defense’s strategy is predicated on what the prosecutor has requested.33
Late that afternoon came the first of two crucial moments for Kusch as Dr. Hans-Egon Breinig rose to announce what sentence the prosecution would seek. As silence settled over the court, Breinig requested for Kusch ten years in a penitentiary for subverting the fighting strength of the military, exclusion from future service in the armed forces, loss of basic civil and political rights, plus one additional year in a penitentiary for unauthorized monitoring of foreign radio stations. In combination the proposed sentence would run for ten years and six months.
Kusch, Berger, and the two defense witnesses must have felt the same sense of “relief and optimism” that Meyer-Grieben embraced over this midrange recommendation, knowing full well that a “not guilty” would have been illusory on the radio-monitoring charge alone and that the assumed pretrial arrangements between judge and prosecutor apparently contemplated a sentence for Kusch short of life in prison or the death penalty.34 Then it was Meyer-Grieben’s turn to offer concluding arguments for the defense. Picking up where Winter and Janssen had left off, he presented Kusch as an exemplary officer of the highest professional and moral qualities with an outstanding and unblemished military record as acknowledged by all evaluators from his former commanding officers, to his flotilla commander in Lorient, to Rear Admiral Eberhard Godt on Dönitz’s staff at the Naval High Command in Berlin. Kusch’s comments on the regime, if true as alleged, must have emanated from his upbringing in a liberal and democratic family and from his experiences in his youth groups whose thrust may have been different from that of the Hitler Youth. On no occasion had his attitude and actions been unpatriotic or detrimental to his boat’s combat readiness or combat performance, just as his acknowledgment of the enemy’s superior resources had not in the least hampered his willingness to continue to fight for his country or his desire to win the war.
With some of the weightiest accusations against Kusch growing out of conversations and discussions conducted in the boat’s wardroom with only fellow officers present, Meyer-Grieben questioned whether the decree against “subverting the military strength” was even applicable to Kusch’s situation inasmuch as any incriminating remarks had to have been made “in public.” After all, none of the remarks in question had been deliberately directed at enlisted personnel on board even if some of the men may have overheard them on occasion. In fact, a published legal opinion of 1943 by Dr. Bernhard Leverenz—himself since 1942 an official in the German naval justice system, a future defense counsel for his colleague Karl-Heinrich Hagemann in postwar trials, and attorney general of the state of Schleswig-Holstein after 1954—had provided a useful hint on how to play down and trivialize “subversion” charges:
How many of us can claim never to have made occasional utterances of a negative nature as a result of feeling temporarily distraught in the present war? No law can possibly forbid people to engage in thoughts about the ups and downs in our lives. Whenever one is at one’s wits end, when one’s thoughts circle around and around without a way out, is it not so that a frank discussion with one’s spouse or a friend offers a reasonable way to resolve this inner conflict?
Leverenz had further argued that too narrow an interpretation of the term “public” stood to encourage denunciations and would actually “undermine and destroy comradely solidarity among soldiers.”35 While in theory Leverenz’s suggestions might have given helpful guidance for the defense, the very frequency and persistency of Kusch’s remarks, their unquestionable sincerity, and the proven circumstance that he had opposed and resisted the regime at least since 1936 when he led an illegal underground youth group as a teenager, induced Meyer-Grieben not to pursue this line of argument. Probably even Kusch would have agreed it would have presented him as someone he was not.
That left the question of what sentence to propose, if any, as an alternative to the prosecutor’s recommended ten-and-a-half years in a penitentiary. Here, too, Meyer-Grieben could fall back on legal commentary and precedent, even though his experience in “subversion” cases may have served him as a better and more practical guide. So-called less severe cases presumed that no actual intent to do harm had existed or that the remarks had not been grounded in a mindset principally opposed to the military or the state. In short, they may have been expressed in the context of someone being angry, in a bad mood or temper, boastful, pretentious, obstinate, disputatious, or prone to impulsive gossip. A milder case could even be assumed when the “inflammatory remarks had bounced off their recipients because of the latter’s national steadfastness and no actual injury had been inflicted.” In such circumstances the utterances could have been meant as serious, but may not have been taken as such by those on the receiving end.36
Meyer-Grieben could have found some fodder for an argument here, as Kusch from time to time had indeed come across as pushy and confrontational, and all his political remarks had ricocheted off Abel and Druschel as if they had hit an armored turret. But any such concessions and admissions in pursuit of a lenient sentence would also have served to reinforce the testimony for the prosecution and weakened the defense’s case built upon and around Kusch’s upbringing, moral character, professional excellence, and military successes. Moreover, the prosecutor likely had already embraced such factors when he went for a sentence in the medium range. In the end, Meyer-Grieben decided not to scare up the presumed pretrial arrangements between Breinig and Hagemann and entered no plea or suggested sentence for his client. Kusch likewise chose to remain silent when offered the chance for a final statement. Hagemann then retreated with Dittmers and Westphalen to his chambers to deliberate and to settle on a verdict.
By this time the sun had set over the city of Kiel. Dieter Berger had a chance to exchange a few words with Kusch before the judges returned from their deliberations some three-quarters of an hour later:
I felt quite reassured and Kusch also was very calm because the prosecutor had only requested a long jail sentence and we were sure the court would not exceed the recommended sentence except under the rarest of circumstances. We both agreed the length of the sentence did not matter because it would be lifted at the end of the war anyway. I, and most likely Kusch as well, considered Germany’s defeat inevitable. I personally had expected it since 1939.37
Meyer-Grieben, Winter, Janssen, and others on the side of the defense felt equally confident that the worst-case scenario had been averted. Thus, when the judges returned and Hagemann declared the court had unanimously assessed the death sentence for Kusch for “continuously subverting the military strength,” plus one year of penitentiary for violating the radio broadcast act, the announcement hit most observers like lightning from a blue sky. Kusch’s immediate reaction is not recorded, but his friend Berger was “completely surprised.” Winter’s “inner turmoil” resulted in a major jaundice attack the next day, and a court orderly with experience in hundreds of cases was dumbfounded and unable to explain how the proceedings could have possibly ended with the maximally applicable sanction. Naturally, prosecutor Breinig was also taken aback having proposed and expected a much more limited sentence.38 It helped little when Hagemann informed Kusch the verdict would not take effect until the Führer had confirmed it.
There can be no doubt that Karl-Heinrich Hagemann as presiding judge, from whatever legal persuasions, personal motives and prejudices, and possible instructions or suggestions from his judicial and military superiors, was principally responsible for the verdict. It would be he who drew up the formal reasons for the decision three days later on January 29, 1944, in a document that will be discussed below. Still, two active-duty naval officers sitting next to him on the bench had agreed with him and consented to condemn a comrade and worthy fellow human being to die when they could have easily prevented such a fate. Why did they do it?
Both Lieutenant Commander Wolfgang Dittmers and Lieutenant Otto Westphalen survived the conflict and testified in legal depositions and as witnesses at two postwar trials against Hagemann in which the latter was accused of having committed crimes against humanity in the Kusch case and with regard to another wartime verdict. They themselves were never charged as accessories to a judicial murder, but of course they had a decided self-interest in upholding and defending the legality of their wartime actions. From their statements it becomes quite clear they never grasped the fundamental character of the “subversion” decree as an instrument of totalitarian injustice to be wielded against critics of the regime. Instead they became convinced or allowed themselves to become persuaded in a way reminiscent of Ulrich Abel’s argumentation in his report that opposition to the Nazi regime and verbal criticism of questionable military directives automatically and in themselves constituted an endangerment of military discipline and patriotic loyalty no matter whether a specific breach of discipline or manifestation of disloyalty had actually occurred. Moreover, while Kusch’s initial conviction rested entirely on supposed transgressions of a political nature, in the Hagemann trial the focus shifted markedly to alleged military failures and misdeeds on Kusch’s part, not least driven at the time by a series of irresponsible, exaggerated, unverifiable, and largely disproved statements by staff surgeon Dr. Hans Nothdurft.
Korvettenkapitän Wolfgang Dittmers’ conclusion on the day of the court-martial appears to have been that Kusch’s mere utterances had endangered the combat readiness of his boat and thus placed the lives of his men in danger:
At the time of the trial I was profoundly impressed by the fact that such a weighty accusation could have been leveled against an officer, especially because he had by his action stabbed his fighting men in the back. In my view, if such a thing were tolerated, it then made not the least sense for others to contribute the slightest sacrifice in this war.
Having decided that Kusch’s political remarks simply must have undercut military discipline and were a punishable transgression under the terms of the subversion act, it then became for Dittmers a mere question of how severe a sentence to impose. For him, based on the evidence produced by the witnesses, the intentional, determined, and persistent nature of Kusch’s criticism of the regime made the crucial difference between proposing time in jail and a death sentence: “On the one hand I believed it was my military duty to vote for the death penalty on the basis of the law, on the other hand I trusted in order to ease my human conscience that the case would be judged in a more lenient manner in the course of the review process.” This awkward reasoning finds confirmation in the written statement Dittmers had to produce as part of the subsequent military and legal review of the case. In it he expressed his hope that the sentence be commuted.39
In his testimony in 1948 and 1949, Dittmers veered away from defending his participation in an almost exclusively politically justified verdict to one in which Kusch’s allegedly military misdeeds had loomed large as inherently detrimental to patriotic solidarity and the demands of total war:
I concluded that it was less a political matter than one with undoubted military consequences. The war had reached a point where the harshness of daily experiences brought one logically to the conclusion that only the full and unconditional use of all our strength could bring a solution. To me it seemed outrageous and criminal to undermine the striking power of the military by such behavior. I had to think of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who daily put their lives on the line in this spirit, and here along comes an officer who lacks this willingness to fight…. I regarded Kusch as a very open-minded human being who nevertheless tended to think like an amateur. At the same time his character and way of thinking lacked a strong sense of moral and ethical responsibility.
When asked further whether only Kusch’s death could have atoned for his severe legal transgressions, Dittmers did not hesitate: “Yes. It was not supposed to be a kind of deterrence. The weight of his guilt was such that no other punishment would have been sufficient.”40
A year later, in an almost complete reversal of the justification for the original verdict, Dittmers went even further in stressing Kusch’s military culpability:
Kusch carried the full responsibility for the boat and its crew and he acted entirely irresponsibly…. The fact that Kusch’s remarks were of a political nature played absolutely no role in the court’s considerations and decision. Whether the name of the head of state happened to be Hitler, Hindenburg or Ebert [the latter two held the office of Reich President before Hitler] was entirely immaterial in our deliberations. I would have voted for the death penalty even if the Weimar Republic had conducted the war. From a human standpoint it was not easy to assess the death penalty, but based on my convictions I had no other choice.41
Listening to Dittmers’ testimony, Werner Winter must have felt terribly let down when he saw his efforts to save Oskar Kusch sadly betrayed. It may be noteworthy that no one could have accused Dittmers of failing to fight to the very end for his head of state, no matter what his name. Just four days before Hitler blew his brains out in the Führer Bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945, Dittmers and the rest of his 445 green recruits of Crews I/45 and IV/45 of the First Naval Instruction Battalion he commanded at that time in Stralsund on the Baltic, were ordered by Dönitz to be flown into beleaguered Berlin to participate in the capital’s and the Führer’s personal defense in what were dubbed “Operation Berlin” and “Operation Reich Chancellery.” Flying in at night and landing at Gatow air base under heavy Soviet artillery fire, only a few of the Junkers Ju-52 transport planes made it through with at most one hundred poorly equipped officers and sailors on board. Dittmers and all officers survived, except one navy lieutenant who was killed by a mortar grenade in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.42
Otto Westphalen’s postwar testimony resembled that of Dittmers in most respects. Prior to the trial, presumably on that Wednesday morning, Westphalen tried to speak to Abel, but Hagemann stopped him from doing so as he feared the juror might compromise himself.43 He stated after the war, “An officer and U-boat commander, no matter his qualities as a human being and his political views, cannot tolerate such actions from a military standpoint, let alone commit them himself.” Kusch should have exercised restraint because otherwise “he ran the risk the discipline on his boat might suffer and that the boat became endangered in a military sense as a result.” After all, “a frontline U-boat is no political debate club where everyone can do and say what he wants.” The men need to have trust in their commander on whom they rely for everything. “When such a man makes deprecating political remarks, how can his men follow him into combat when they do not know if he will order them the next day to make for the nearest enemy port under a white flag?”44
In defending his endorsement of the death sentence for Kusch, Westphalen now believed that “from a strictly military standpoint a mere jail sentence did not do justice” to what Kusch had done as his was clearly “not a case of diminished seriousness.” Still, claiming to feel sorry for Kusch, he “hoped the death sentence would be changed in the review process and Kusch be given the chance to serve as a simple enlisted man without responsibilities toward others and without endangering subordinates as a result of his political persuasions.” Interestingly he considered “Abel’s actions as a comrade irresponsible; after the matter had taken on momentum, its outcome was essentially pre-programmed.”45 The historian Heinrich Walle has pointed out the inherent fallacy in Westphalen’s argument here: If Kusch had indeed been guilty of committing a capital crime, no one should have felt pity for him. At the same time Westphalen castigated Abel’s actions as irresponsible. “Would the laws of logic not suggest that Abel did the right thing by delivering a criminal to face his deserved punishment?”46
There remains a further intriguing possibility when it comes to explaining the court’s decision to deal Kusch the toughest allowable sentence: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s programmatic speech to young officer recruits the day before at the Naval Academy in Mürwik, the gist of which must have quickly reached Kiel just seventy kilometers to the south. Here are key passages from Dönitz’s address of January 25, 1944:
How would Germany look today without National Socialism now that we are in the fifth year of the war? It would be full of warring parties, full of Jews, who would use every opportunity to criticize, to cause damage, to widen divisions, to pull us down, to spread weakness, and to interfere with the authorities. It would be interesting to learn how Germany would function without National Socialism in the face of enemy air raids. For everything it has the German people must be grateful to the Führer and to National Socialism. It would be dreadful to think what might have happened if we had had to cope without the Führer. Therefore every soldier must stand behind the Führer and our National Socialism with full and unshakeable dedication, and with unquestionable commitment. Any deviation from this principle means a diminishment of our strength and weakens the power, the immense power, we have as a people if we stand united.47
Could Hagemann, Dittmers, and Westphalen have found themselves inspired, encouraged, and justified and reinforced in their action by Dönitz’s remarks?
News of the verdict against Kusch spread quickly through the navy’s grapevine. One U-boat officer felt “stunned that a fellow U-boat man could have been charged with something like that…. Who could have possibly benefited from it?” Another commented, “the ‘crime’ with which he [Kusch] was charged we more or less were all guilty of: listening to foreign broadcasts and making fun of our political leadership. I recall vividly a discussion at the Mürwik naval academy in 1944 … during which we company and group officers absolutely refused to believe our new commandant, Captain Wolfgang Lüth, when he tried to convince us that [SS Leader] Heinrich Himmler was a decent and capable man.”48
While Dittmers and Westphalen made their comments many years after the events of January 1944 in an atmosphere of aggressive self-defense, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann as presiding judge at the court-martial composed the required explanation and justification of the verdict within three days of the proceedings. This ten-page document remains impressive and incontrovertible proof that Kusch’s political convictions and the resulting dissonances with his fellow officers doomed him and not any military shortfalls of his that might have diminished U-154’s effectiveness as an instrument of war.49 After reiterating and acknowledging Kusch’s outstanding career record, Hagemann picked up item after item of Abel’s report. Declaring the testimony of the witnesses fully trustworthy and Kusch’s criticism of the regime, its leaders, and its propaganda “unmistakable and beyond misunderstandings,” Hagemann made a special point of stressing Kusch’s pessimism and defeatism when it came to winning the war:
All witnesses gained the impression that the accused no longer believed in a German military victory and that he opposed the current form of government. For example, at one point the accused stated he intended to emigrate after a lost war. Without exception the witnesses tried again and again to change the defendant’s opinion. This was not possible, in part because he quickly cut off any criticism with such words as “nonsense” or “rubbish.” When the witness Nothdurft once asked the accused what inspired him to continue to command a U-boat despite his defeatist convictions, he replied more or less verbatim, “A certain sense of duty.”
Hagemann then rejected as “in error and incompatible with military concerns” Meyer-Grieben’s suggestion that Kusch had committed no punishable act under the “subversion” decree because his remarks had not been made “in public”:
The premise that a submarine due to its nature and purpose is automatically removed from constituting a public place is wrong. Most utterances of the accused were made in the officers’ mess where they were meant for officers only. The mess is not identical with the boat in terms of defining what is public and what is not. The remarks made in the mess were audible to the cook, the steward, and the radio and hydrophone operators whose room extends partially into the officers’ mess, as well as other sailors who had to pass through the passageway. These facts suffice to prove the public nature of his remarks without a need to expand the definition of what constitutes “the public” as previously laid down in peacetime regulations.
Apparently, the court had a difficult time reconciling Kusch’s personality and military record with the gravity of the offense he allegedly committed:
Based on how the accused conducted himself at the proceedings and on other evidence, the court is convinced he did not intend to subvert the military strength and spirit of the German people when he disparaged the Führer and spoke out against the political and military leadership. The defendant is a proven U-boat officer who as a watch officer under several captains has demonstrated excellent leadership and exemplary military performance. As a commanding officer on two patrols he has achieved good successes and has been decorated with the Iron Cross, first class. His superiors describe him as an intellectual with an aesthetic bent who likes to retire when possible to read a good book and to expand his mind. Based on his character and personality it is difficult to believe the accused had it in him to act subversively in a deliberate manner. For this reason, the court struggled to reconstruct the developments that led to the defendant’s deed, especially since he did not say much about this at the trial.
The defendant’s suggestion he made his remarks solely to animate the discussions with his officers and to offer an opposing viewpoint for rhetorical purposes, is to be rejected out of hand. Rather the court believes the accused lost his faith in a final victory early in 1943 due to the military setbacks in several theatres of the war. Under the impact of Stalingrad and the events in North Africa he grew faint-hearted and weak. His liberal tendencies, which already had led him to withdraw from the Hitler Youth in 1935 when his bündisch youth group was dissolved, regained the upper hand. In this emotionally challenging situation, and given the opposition of his officers, he allowed his rejection of National Socialism, its institutions and its leader to grow more pronounced and in its form more confrontational than it really was. Given the nature of the reported utterances, and considering the defendant’s intelligence and education, the court could not doubt the accused was fully aware his statements had a potentially subverting effect. This in itself is sufficient to find the accused guilty under the current interpretation of the law. For, as the Reich Supreme Court has established, not only are those deeds punishable that are directly undercutting the fighting spirit of the military and were undertaken for that very end. The law applies no less to actions where the perpetrators do not intend to bring about such subversion through their behavior but realize clearly that their actions have such an effect and do not desist from continuing their activities. On this basis it is established that the accused acted with the necessary and required premeditation to be in violation of the law.50
In addition to this twisted application and interpretation of the “subversion” decree, Hagemann found Kusch guilty of monitoring foreign broadcasts “beyond operational needs.” In particular, Kusch’s intentional juxtaposition of enemy news and German propaganda in front of his officers was deemed to subvert Germany’s will to resist, the more so since Kusch routinely granted more credence to the veracity of enemy broadcasts than to products of Nazi propaganda.
Lastly, Hagemann defended the court’s assessment of the death penalty in place of a more lenient one on three separate grounds. First, Kusch had committed his “subversive” activities in a repeated, sometimes daily pattern over months and years. Therefore, his crime was not excusable as a one-time derailment, but constituted a habitual, deliberate, and premeditated activity. Second, his subversive utterances had not even stopped short of the person of the Führer and carried in part connotations of high treason. Third, subversive activities were deemed particularly dangerous and harmful when perpetrated by popular individuals who had good evaluations and were otherwise judged competent and responsible.
Hagemann’s tortured explanations reveal in remarkable clarity and chilling starkness the extent to which the naval justice system had succumbed to the entirely political and ideological mandate of creating a monolithic “people’s community” and of lining it up to boost and prolong a failing war effort while at the same time doing everything possible to eliminate its critics and opponents. He followed in spirit and deed the head of the Wehrmacht’s central legal department, Rudolf Lehmann, who had advised high military officials as early as 1939:
It is not the court’s responsibility to search for the truth as such, as it may be elusive or even non-existent. Rather, it is the court’s task to use the means of the law to protect and maintain this community, of which it itself is a central part. Those who violate the spirit of this community and rise up against it as individuals are to be punished especially severely.51
Accordingly, Hagemann never questioned Abel’s or Druschel’s motives, never inquired into what really went on aboard U-154, never saw in Kusch much more than someone who failed to elevate the community over the individual and whose pessimism over the outcome of the war and insults to the Führer had to be silenced. The most Hagemann and the chief witnesses were willing to grant Kusch was that he displayed “a certain sense of duty.”