CHAPTER 10

WAKES

ALTHOUGH OSKAR KUSCH could not have known it, by the time ten bullets ripped into his chest on May 12, 1944, his former second-in-command on U-154 and chief accuser at his court-martial, Lieutenant Dr. Ulrich Abel, had been dead for three weeks. Upon completing the required training courses for new commanding officers, he had transferred back to Lorient and on March 31 taken charge of U-193. This boat, also of the Type IX design, had been shifted recently from the Second to the Tenth U-Boat Flotilla likewise stationed at that base. In its brief life since being commissioned in Bremen in December 1942, it had accumulated a rather dismal record. Under its first skipper, Lieutenant Commander Hans Pauckstadt of Crew 26, the boat had undertaken two extended patrols into the Central Atlantic without sinking a single vessel. During an air attack at the end of its second mission in February 1944, U-193 had accidentally or inadvertently dived into the ocean floor off the Iberian Peninsula and received such severe damage that it had to seek refuge in the neutral Spanish port of El Ferrol for emergency repairs. Overstaying his internationally sanctioned stay of twenty-four hours by ten days thanks to a Spanish regime friendly to Hitler’s, Pauckstadt finally managed to get his boat out to sea again, made it to the German base at La Pallice in France, and from there up the coast to Lorient by February 24. The boat underwent a major two-month refit thereafter.1

By the time Abel reached Lorient, accounts and rumors of his role in the Kusch case were circulating widely. If he showed up in the officer’s quarters of the base, he could be certain of encountering his comrades’ silent scorn, while his men on U-193 likewise felt apprehensive about serving under a skipper with a tainted reputation. On April 23, 1944, Abel took his boat out into the Bay of Biscay off the mouth of the Loire River, his first patrol as commanding officer and with orders to head for the Central and South Atlantic. By the next day all radio and other contacts were lost. The boat, with its entire crew of fifty-nine officers and men, has been missing ever since. For a long time, it was thought U-193 had become the victim of Allied aircraft. But painstaking research by noted U-boat historian Dr. Axel Niestlé and others has determined that a reported air attack in the area at the time was actually directed against a different boat, U-802.2 Whether Abel’s boat went down as a result of a diving accident, structural failure, an internal explosion, hitting a mine, or some other cause remains speculation.

For Abel’s wife Herta weeks and months of uncertainty followed. There was always the possibility that the mishap had not been lethal, that there had been survivors, that the International Red Cross might report her husband to be safe and sound in an Allied POW camp. Perhaps the time had not yet come to bury all their plans for the future:

Naturally my husband and I had talked about our life together after the war…. As soon as we could afford it, we desired to have a house of our own. My husband wanted it to be in [the fashionable Hamburg suburb of] Blankenese along the Elbe River. We also wanted to be more mobile than had been possible on our bicycles, and the children would come with us wherever we went. I had a car in mind, my husband a boat—of course. We spun out our dreams and allowed them to take off, and the war was never a part of them. I think that was our way of trying to forget it….³

It was not to be. Abel’s widow never remarried or moved far from the coastal region on the Baltic Sea to where her husband had evacuated her and the children from burning Hamburg in 1943. There, in what became the German Democratic Republic of East Germany during the Cold War before German reunification in 1990, she brought up their three children, two sons and a daughter, all of whom would earn doctorates in their respective fields just as their father had. For half a century they remembered Ulrich Abel only as a loving husband, a devoted family man, an accomplished jurist, and as a brave U-boat commander who had sacrificed his life for his country. They thus reacted with absolute shock, disbelief, and anger when they learned for the first time from Dr. Heinrich Walle’s 1995 publication about Oskar Kusch that their beloved husband and father had been viewed in naval circles for the past fifty years not as a highly decorated war hero, but as a doctrinaire Nazi and heartless denouncer responsible for delivering a worthy and innocent man to the death machinery of the Kriegsmarine’s naval justice system. The resulting correspondence and other exchanges between the Abels and Walle, who in a major shortfall in his research efforts had never bothered to inquire whether Abel was married and had a family, has been acrimonious and hardly flattering for the historian from both a professional and humane point of view.4

A widow for more than sixty-eight years, Herta Abel died on May 13, 2012, in Heringsdorf on the island of Usedom on the Baltic Sea, just nine days short of her ninety-fifth birthday, leaving behind her three children, six grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren. Her ashes were entrusted to the sea. In the obituary her children also honored “the memory of our father Dr. Ulrich Abel whom we lost already in 1944 as a U-boat commander in the war.”⁵

Under its new skipper, Lieutenant Gerth Gemeiner, U-154 undertook a long but fruitless patrol to the Caribbean and the Nicaraguan coast lasting from January 31 to April 28, 1944. Arno Funke served as I.W.O. and Kurt Druschel as chief engineer. Following a two-month refit in Lorient and Funke’s departure for another command, Kusch’s former boat set out again on June 20, still under Gemeiner and with Druschel continuing to supervise the engine department and diving maneuvers. This time their intended operational area was the Eastern Seaboard of the United States after a swing through the Central Atlantic. By then the Normandy Invasion of June 6, 1944, had rendered future German operations from French bases highly problematic, and Dönitz had begun recalling his remaining boats from France to safer havens in Norway and home waters.

After passing through the Bay of Biscay undetected despite the long daylight hours, U-154 had reached a position about halfway between Madeira and the Azores when its previously charmed life ended abruptly. Already alerted to its presence by radio intercepts, on July 3 a sonar search of the destroyer escort USS Inch (DE 144) located the German boat. Inch belonged to the hunter-killer Task Group 22.5 built around the escort carrier USS Croatan (CVE 25) that had recently left Casablanca after refueling there. While the carrier’s planes were of no help because of a malfunctioning catapult, Inch received valuable assistance from USS Frost (DE 146). Gemeiner must have lurked at periscope depth because he managed to launch two torpedoes that narrowly missed his American pursuers before ordering Druschel to take the boat deep. Inch and Frost delivered a series of attacks with depth charges until “a single explosion was heard. Almost immediately a stream of oil and debris rose to the surface. Among this debris were found German uniforms, pieces of wood, and human body parts. This stream of oil, one hundred and forty miles northwest of Funchal, marked U-154’s final resting place.”6 All fifty-seven officers and sailors in the submarine perished, presumably instantly, including Kurt Druschel and so many others who had once sailed under Oskar Kusch.

All other individuals prominently connected to the Kusch drama survived World War II. The further fates of Kusch’s parents, friends, and other personae dramatis are summarized below, mostly in connection with the two postwar trials against Karl-Heinrich Hagemann and efforts to rehabilitate Oskar Kusch’s name and secure his legacy.

In the wake of Kusch’s execution, his fiancée Inge von Foris, only twenty-three years old at the time, struggled to pick up the shattered pieces of her life just when the Allied invasions of continental Europe and Soviet advances in the East sealed Germany’s military defeat. Berlin became ever more a city in ruins as British and American bombs kept raining down on its hapless citizens. Emotionally drained and desperate to stabilize her life, Inge sought to renew and deepen her relationship with her old friend Heinrich on the eastern front in a long, from-the-heart letter on June 11, 1944. Only hinting at her time with Kusch and couching it in terms of a superficial episode, “a flirt,” she now offered Heinrich the key “to the secret lock that protects the innermost recesses of one’s soul and that can only be opened by one, very special hand.”7

Heinrich’s encouraging response allowed Inge to regain her bearings and concentrate on her studies. In what must have been a titanic effort, she managed to finish enough of her dissertation on the baroque architect Johann Dientzenhofer to have it accepted on April 10, 1945, under the eerie conditions prevailing in Berlin at the end of the war. The work’s oral defense and Inge’s comprehensive exams in her major fields of art history and archaeology, with a minor in history, were then scheduled for April 18, and the formal granting of the degree occurred two days later on April 20, exactly one year after her final meeting with Oskar Kusch and as Adolf Hitler celebrated his last birthday in his underground bunker a few blocks away. Both of her major professors, Wilhelm Pinder and Gerhart Rodenwaldt, rated her work summa cum laude, with Pinder commenting, “In my forty years in academia no female student has ever demonstrated such a remarkable aptitude for the history of architecture.”⁸ In retrospect it seems astonishing and almost implausible that academic activities at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität should have continued uninterrupted until and even beyond the end of the war on May 8, even as Soviet forces shelled the core of the city with artillery and infantry overran the last pockets of German resistance. Sadly, Professor Rodenwaldt and his wife committed suicide when Russian soldiers reached their home in Berlin-Lichterfelde on April 27, a mere week after Dr. von Foris had been granted her degree.⁹

The siege and later the first weeks and months after the fall of the German capital to the Russians must have been horrific for its surviving citizens. Only gradually would a semblance of order replace chaos, especially when troops of the western Allies reached the city and ended the brief Soviet monopoly on power in the soon to be divided city. Apparently, Inge von Foris and her family escaped bodily harm in those days of extreme confusion, lawlessness, and anxiety. The same could not be said about her friend Heinrich:

Heinrich, his brother Klaus, and their mutual friend Wolfgang had returned to Berlin from the war in 1945 and were arrested there by Russian soldiers who tied their arms behind their backs and ordered them to climb onto the bed of a truck. As the truck left the city, Wolfgang had a notion that they were about to be executed and whispered to his two companions, “Let’s jump off as soon as we pass a stretch of road with bushes and trees around to hide in.” When they found themselves on a rural road headed toward Brandenburg, Wolfgang suddenly shouted, “Now! Jump!” He and Klaus jumped, but Heinrich could not muster the courage to join them. The truck stopped. There was a brief search for Klaus and Wolfgang, but they were well hidden and got away. The Russians shot Heinrich to death right then and there before the truck moved on.10

Thus, Inge von Foris received the second bitter blow in her young life—senseless and arbitrary and entirely devastating—just when matters promised to improve.

Both her long opposition to the Hitler regime and her background in art history brought her soon thereafter into contact with Allied control officers. Their task was to denazify and revitalize Berlin’s formerly so brilliant cultural scene, ranging from museums, concerts, and the opera to theater and film. Supervising such efforts were typically German émigré writers, composers, musicians, actors, and film directors who had moved to the New World after 1933, had acquired American citizenship, and now served in the military occupation forces. Inge developed a particularly close friendship with one of them, Austrian-American Henry C. Alter, during his days in Berlin until he was posted to Salzburg to revive that city’s vast musical tradition. Before Alter left Berlin, he introduced Inge to the German-American film actor Peter van Eyck, a good friend of his and fellow control officer for film, with specific instructions for him to look after Inge in those dangerous and uncertain times.11

Tall, blond, handsome, and accomplished, a North German like her, and also belonging to the German nobility—he had been born as Götz von Eick in Pomerania in 1911 before emigrating in 1931—Peter van Eyck exercised an immediate hold on Inge, no doubt reminiscent of the way Oskar Kusch had swept her off her feet a few years before. It was soon abundantly evident that the attraction was mutual, and Alter had to admit he had lost her to his friend, although he and Inge remained on friendly terms, with her chiding Henry years later in good humor possibly mixed with a touch of regret, “Why didn’t you put up more of a fight for me?” Their age difference was no major obstacle, but the fact that van Eyck had married the American model and actress Ruth Ford in 1940 and had a daughter from that union, clearly was an issue.¹² However, a divorce settlement was reached before the end of the decade and Ms. Ford remarried in 1952 the American actor Zachary Scott, who also adopted her daughter Shelley from her first marriage.¹³

Peter and Inge married in 1951. As Peter’s acting carrier gathered further momentum and acclaim, the couple lived in California, Paris, and Switzerland, with Inge devoting much of her time to the upbringing of their two daughters Kristina and Claudia, while remaining interested but no longer very active in the field of art history. Kristina van Eyck has followed her father into the entertainment field and is today a well-known German actress in film, television, and on the stage. Her sister Claudia, having been brought up fluent in multiple languages, works as a certified translator and interpreter.

Inge van Eyck never once brought up the subject of Oskar Kusch with her daughters, her memories of him and of Heinrich remaining hidden in a secret compartment of her soul. Her surviving correspondence with Heinrich and others provides the sole clue to two passionate attachments cruelly extinguished before their time, first by Hitler’s henchmen and then by Stalin’s. Only from their uncle, Dr. Henning von Foris, who had come to know Kusch during the war and went on to practice law in Munich before his death in 2014, would the daughters learn of the events of 1944 and 1945 in which their mother had become so heartbreakingly entangled.14

Inge’s string of misfortunes would not abate. After only eighteen years of marriage, Peter van Eyck died in 1969 at the height of his career from complications of a misdiagnosed sepsis. Inge survived him by fourteen years in their lovely Swiss retreat overlooking Lake Constance and died in 1983, no doubt pondering to the end the long string of might-havebeens in her life.

On February 12, 1946, Mrs. Ingeborg Lämmchen, a distant niece of Oskar Kusch’s mother and acting in her name, addressed a letter to Gerhard Meyer-Grieben. She requested Kusch’s former defense attorney to “take up the case again to punish the traitors,” specifically referring to Abel, Druschel, and Hagemann.¹⁵ Her letter set in motion a complex, almost five-year-long process that would result in two trials in 1949 and 1950 against Karl-Heinrich Hagemann, the presiding judge at Kusch’s court-martial. This process would also reveal in stunning clarity several issues: the wartime-to-postwar continuity in terms of judicial personnel and attitudes in Germany; the corrupt collusion among former colleagues on the bench to avoid post-1945 prosecution; the continued failure to grasp the totalitarian character of core Nazi legislation; the efforts to destroy incriminating files and records; and, above all, a profound breakdown of denazification efforts resulting frequently in the practical or symbolic re-conviction of victims who had already been punished unjustly under the Nazi regime. This entire phenomenon, especially in Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein, has been exhaustively studied by a younger generation of historians and is competently presented by Kusch’s first biographer, Heinrich Walle, in 1995.¹⁶ Therefore, a summary will suffice.

Gerhard Meyer-Grieben deserves much credit for doing the right things quickly, thoroughly, and with circumspection. On March 20, 1946, he managed to locate and copy Kusch’s extensive case file in a rural depository in Schleswig-Holstein with the help of the British military government before Hagemann, Dr. Breinig, or other former naval justice officials could get ahold of it and possibly make it disappear. He thus preserved crucial evidence without which any future legal action on Kusch’s behalf would have been difficult or outright impossible to initiate.17 While Kusch’s mother thus opened one avenue to try to achieve belated justice for her son, Kusch’s father pursued another lead with almost fanatical commitment both in the courts and in the press. Knowing that Karl Dönitz was under indictment at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Oskarheinz Kusch alerted one of the chief prosecutors there, Robert Kempner, to the case against his son and to Dönitz’s failure to exercise clemency despite his promise to Gustav-Adolf Janssen to do so. Kempner requested from Meyer-Grieben a full summary of the case, including the names and addresses of key participants and witnesses, and even encouraged Kusch’s father to file murder charges in the district court in Kiel against Hagemann, Dr. Breinig, Meinert, Dittmers, Westphalen, Dr. Abel, Druschel, Dr. Nothdurft, and Dönitz. Kusch’s father did so on May 9, 1946, on the basis of the Allied Control Council Directive No. 10, which allowed prosecution for “crimes against humanity,” among others. His justification contains a father’s moving and impassioned plea to reverse the injustice done to his son:

Not my son has subverted the Wehrmacht, but rather all those criminals who today sit accused before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, and those Hitler-crazy judges, officials and denouncers who in their courtroom in Kiel on January 26, 1944, sentenced to death a completely innocent and morally far superior young man for having discerned and told the truth, even though they knew at the time he had done nothing wrong.¹⁸

Besides not knowing that Abel and Druschel were dead, Dittmers and Westphalen in captivity, and Dönitz tied up in the Nuremberg proceedings, several other impediments quickly combined to slow down and in due course arrest the momentum of these parental initiatives. Germany’s division into four occupation zones rendered the movement of persons and mail still difficult at the very time that the western Allies increasingly preferred that German authorities and courts adjudicate crimes committed by Germans against Germans during the Hitler era, rather than impose their own authority and procedures. Moreover, the impatience of Kusch’s parents and their inability to grasp the complexity of the legal situation led to an unpleasant rift between them and Meyer-Grieben. In the meantime, Hagemann’s wartime colleagues, who again held secure and prominent positions in Schleswig-Holstein’s judicial apparatus while he himself found employment for a while as a judge in the postwar German Minesweeping Administration (GMSA), were beginning to put together a defense strategy for him, just in case.

The former Kriegsmarine justice official Karl Helmut Sieber, with others in the background, took the lead because he feared any indictment and conviction of Hagemann for sentencing Kusch to death might create an undesirable precedent for other wartime cases where the verdict and sentence assessment had been grounded in political and ideological rather than in strictly military criteria and had differed markedly from the prosecutor’s recommendation. As early as July 6, 1946, Hagemann had complained in a letter to Sieber that “it looks as if they are trying to place a noose around my neck [regarding the Kusch decision]…. As you can imagine, I am worried.” Sieber confirmed ten days later that Meyer-Grieben, who had been tasked by the British occupation authorities with helping denazify the judicial system in Schleswig-Holstein, was indeed “active on behalf of Kusch’s relatives by painting him as a victim of fascism…. To put anything more in writing at this point may not be advisable.”19 Four days later, ignoring his own suggestion, Sieber wrote to Hagemann again and directly criticized the latter’s decision of 1944: “Regarding your justification for your verdict [against Kusch], opinions may very well vary. Given the excellent evaluations the condemned had received, one would have imagined you would have rather chosen the more lenient alternative.”²⁰

Not until November 21, 1946, did Directive No. 10 of the Allied Control Council with its provision about crimes against humanity take effect in the British occupation zone of which Schleswig-Holstein and the city of Kiel were a part; and not until February 3, 1947, did the public prosecutor in Kiel request indictments against Hagemann and Abel on its basis. Four days later, the district court did issue an arrest warrant for Abel, whose death in April 1944 remained unconfirmed, for his politically and personally motivated denunciation of Kusch, but refused to do so for Hagemann on the grounds that he had committed no provable or intentional perversion of justice. Chief prosecutor Dr. Paul Thamm twice appealed this assessment to the state court, on February 10 and again on March 9, 1947, arguing Hagemann had “deliberately distorted justice to follow the wishes of the state leadership” and had “interpreted the law not under legal but under political aspects.” Furthermore, the court had failed to grasp that the “subversion” decree was part of the totalitarian system of injustice and that its very application to Kusch’s situation constituted a distortion of justice. Five days later, the state court again rejected Thamm’s arguments, holding that Hagemann had acted within the bounds of discretion as allowable under the law and no intentional bending of justice had been committed.21 For the same reasons, a charge of murder was deemed inapplicable.

Further objections and appeals, twice in December 1947 and once in January 1948, were all rejected. Thamm tried to keep the court’s focus on the political dimension of Hagemann’s decision and thereby counteract a gradual tendency of the judges to stress the military nature of Kusch’s alleged transgressions, namely, those undermining the discipline and lowering the combat readiness of his boat. Here are also visible the first outlines of how Hagemann might structure his defense should the case ever come to trial. In the meantime, all charges against Dr. Abel (dead), Druschel (dead), Dr. Nothdurft (only witness), Dr. Breinig (lenient sentence recommendation), and Meinert (not involved in decision) had been dropped; however, Dittmers and Westphalen, co-responsible jurors and recently released from captivity, remained for another period of time in the prosecutors’ crosshairs as possible accessories to a judicial murder.

By late 1947 and early 1948, it looked as if Hagemann was off the hook. His former friends and colleagues on the bench had prevented his arrest and fended off all efforts to place the case on the docket. They remained wary, however, that the matter might not go away completely and, if ever tried in a court, might have Germany-wide implications for every former military judge who had sentenced a soldier to death during the Hitler regime. Siebert’s papers contain a revealing letter to Hagemann with almost fatherly advice from Kay Nieschling, one of Dr. Rudolphi’s former subordinates in the Navy High Command’s legal division. Nieschling wrote on December 22, 1947:

Colleagues in Kiel sometimes feel you are underestimating the seriousness of the matter and take it too lightly, as was noticed recently when you dared apply for a position in our present judicial system. Preventing an arrest warrant against you is about as far as they can go in terms of doing you a favor at this time. Be aware that the father of the condemned keeps pestering the authorities and in his seemingly unquenchable hatred seeks to expose the allegedly guilty parties…. In a legal sense it is important and it speaks against you that the prosecutor at the trial only requested a prison sentence. One cannot but gain the impression—notwithstanding the seriousness of [Kusch’s] transgression—that in the last analysis the verdict may have been influenced by ideological considerations. It is difficult to understand why the court showed itself more inhumane than the prosecution, especially since the naval justice system as a rule followed the letter of the law rather than totalitarian principles.22

Even before this note reached Hagemann, Gerhard Meyer-Grieben had had enough of the constant interference and occasional insulting remarks by Kusch’s father about his professional competency and resigned as the legal counsel of Kusch’s parents, pointing out that it was not up to him anymore but to the prosecutors in Kiel to bring a case against Hagemann.²³ He would, of course, be available as a witness to what happened before, during, and after Oskar’s court-martial.

If Meyer-Grieben had done his very best to preserve crucial evidence and help initiate postwar proceedings against Hagemann, Dr. Rudolf Katz (1895–1961) must be credited with providing the decisive push. Like Meyer-Grieben he was trained in law and an early member of the Social Democratic Party. Katz had been chased out of Germany by the Nazis, first to France and later the United States. Stripped of his German citizenship by his own country, he became an American citizen in 1941. Katz returned to Germany in 1946, regained his citizenship, became attorney general for the state of Schleswig-Holstein from 1947 to 1950, and then vice-chair of the West German Constitutional Court from 1951 until his death in 1961.24

On March 23, 1948, Katz instructed Schleswig-Holstein’s chief prosecutor to prepare an indictment against Hagemann for having committed a crime against humanity out of political motives. The renewed preparation of the case took time and the actual indictment based on Directive No. 10 of the Allied Control Council was delayed for almost another year until March 14, 1949. Hagemann by then no longer worked for the German Minesweeping Administration (GMSA), whose important service of clearing Europe’s waters and waterways of wartime mines had ended two years earlier. Unable to undergo proper denazification procedures because of the pending case, let alone find employment in the legal field, he had worked as a day laborer for some time. Almost destitute, Hagemann was grateful for financial assistance from former colleagues, complaining to Sieber that “it is hard to take that I had to wait three years for a case finally to be heard whose origins go back to May 1946 (!). In all those years I could not work on a new career for lack of denazification papers and feel already punished in a matter in which I do not feel culpable in the least.”²⁵ His former comrades did come through as Mrs. Hagemann gratefully acknowledged the receipt of 120 deutsche marks in West Germany’s new currency.²⁶

After Hagemann’s defense counsel, Dr. Bernhard Leverenz, had attempted in vain to prevent the case from coming to trial by filing a number of pretrial motions, the court convened at last in Kiel for ten days between May 2 and May 23, 1949, with Landgerichtsdirektor Wilhelm von Starck presiding, Landsgerichtsräte Grunert and Panteleit as associate judges, and six lay jurors.²⁷ Dr. Paul Thamm was chief prosecutor, assisted by Dr. Traugott Albrecht. Every single court official had been a member of the Nazi Party and had served in either the military or civilian justice system under Hitler. Dr. Thamm built his case not primarily around the inherent inapplicability of the subversion decree to Kusch’s situation because of the decree’s totalitarian nature, but on Hagemann’s perversion of justice when he used the decree to eliminate a political opponent and by his complete dismissal of mitigating circumstances at Kusch’s trial, since Breinig had only requested ten years in jail and that no subversion of U-154’s combat spirit or readiness had actually occurred. “The attack on Kusch was meant to hit all who dared utter the same thoughts as he did.”28 Thamm also argued Hagemann’s “rejection of a less severe case can only be understood out of an exaggerated fear of a recurrence of the events of November 1918. The court only considered the objectively dangerous actions of the defendant and placed the idea of deterrence far more into the foreground than was justified by the evidence.”²⁹

Because of the ongoing Berlin Blockade, a number of witnesses were deposed there on May 7, including Kusch’s father who had not been admitted to the trial as a co-plaintiff. The trial began with the reading of the indictment and Hagemann’s response to the various points raised in it. Hagemann was supported and encouraged by a phalanx of former naval justice officials in attendance, who included Joachim Rudolphi and Otto Kranzbühler, Karl Dönitz’s defense attorney at Nuremberg. Hagemann denied any political dimension to his decision or its deterrent intention, emphasized the supposed military impact of Kusch’s actions, insisted the captain’s remarks had been made “in public,” and believed the death penalty had been fully appropriate given the severity of the infractions. Moreover, Dittmers and Westphalen had voted for it and even proposed it in the first place. There had been no pressure from superiors to follow any politically inspired or motivated guidelines.³⁰ Over long stretches of the proceedings, it seemed as if the true defendant was Oskar Kusch rather than Hagemann. The latter’s defense became a posthumous onslaught on and renewed vilification of the former.

Dr. Hans Nothdurft’s testimony played into the hands of the defense in a major and perhaps decisive way. Nothdurft had been worried in the immediate postwar period about his role in the January 1944 court martial and also about obtaining a clean denazification record so he could resume his career at Heidelberg University. In 1946 he had submitted an affidavit to Allied officials in which he went far beyond his 1944 testimony in terms of condemning Kusch’s actions. Now, in 1949 and 1950, he repeated and enhanced these statements, and as late as 1993 he deposited in the U-Boat Archives a lengthy document on his “fateful encounter” with Oskar Kusch.31 Nothdurft caused the prosecution great harm by continuing to submit Kusch to his amateurish psychiatric analyses and by spreading entirely irresponsible myths about Kusch’s alleged intention of deserting to the enemy. According to Nothdurft, Kusch

invited the question whether he suffered from a pathological inability to detect and assess dangerous threats. As symptoms one could cite the intensity and stubbornness with which he displayed a missionary or savior complex when it came to the re-education of his officers in a patently hopeless situation as there was no chance they would change their minds. Especially in private conversations his imagined missionary role as a teacher and educator of others took on the form of a delusional obsession…. Without any doubt the “re-education lessons” Kusch imparted to us officers implied the possibility of going over to the enemy with the entire boat. Kusch never proposed any concrete steps in this direction. He never used words like “desertion,” “surrender” or “joining the other side,” or anything like it. But did he think of it?

[Druschel and Abel] were convinced Kusch was planning outright desertion with his boat. I spoke with the chief engineer several times about this subject. From him I know that we had a good number of handguns on board that were supposed to be distributed in crisis situations. There was an actual list as to who was to be armed in this manner. The chief engineer manipulated this list in such a way that among our enlisted men only those would receive a gun who like himself had been leaders in the Hitler Youth and would have followed Druschel’s orders rather than Kusch’s in a desertion scenario. In reality the guns were never distributed.32

For reasons never explained and unfathomable even today, Nothdurft also volunteered his appraisal of Kusch’s sexual preferences in a phase of the trial during which the public and the press were excluded. The only written allusion to this episode can be found in a letter the presiding judge Wilhelm von Starck wrote months after the trial to the president of the state court to justify his choices as to who had been allowed to testify and who had not:

References to the so-called “legends” of the witness Dr. Nothdurft apparently center on the statements this witness made at the trial in his capacity as a medical doctor about the character and the sexual orientation of Lieutenant Kusch. For this part of the testimony I arranged for the public to be excluded for reasons of protecting public morality. I did not ask other crewmembers about this matter because they were medical laymen. As far as I remember, other crewmembers as witnesses did not make contradictory but rather complementary observations when it came to describing the conditions on the submarine.³³

Hagemann’s take on Nothdurft’s theories and other suggestions about Kusch’s physical and psychological makeup will be discussed below.

In all their written statements, depositions, and oral testimony of 1944, Abel, Druschel, and Funke, and also Captain Rösing in 1949, never once brought up the subject of Kusch’s possible desertion or plans to entrust the boat’s small arms to Druschel loyalists, even though such observations, if true, would have been absolutely central to their report. Nor did they ever hint at problems with Kusch’s mental state.³⁴ Once again Nothdurft’s recollections suggest an overactive imagination on part of the medical doctor, genuine confusion, falsely remembered or improperly interpreted events and conversations, or worse. For example, Nothdurft believed Kusch’s mere Anglophile disposition and fondness for the English language were in themselves harbingers of his impending desertion to the United Kingdom.35

Regarding desertion, there exists to the contrary a remarkable statement from Oskar Kusch’s father in which he recounted the last meeting he ever had with his son between Christmas and New Year 1943:

At Christmas 1943/44 my son visited me during his leave and we had a long conversation in my parlor about the hopelessly messed-up political situation in Germany. We agreed it was pointless for Germany to continue the war. Oskar thought it made no sense to keep sending human beings and materiel to the bottom of the sea. I thereupon advised him to drop everything, take his passport, and move across the border to Switzerland to wait out the end of this accursed war. I could have easily arranged for him to stay with friends of mine there. My son rejected my proposal with these words: “Dad, I could not possibly do such a thing to my men, my boat, my people, or to myself.”³⁶

Still, Nothdurft’s outrageous and unverifiable suggestions no doubt allowed the judges at Hagemann’s trial to assume that Kusch’s military transgressions had been far greater than previously suspected and to consider them prominently when justifying their eventual verdict.

After Dr. Thamm had requested a jail sentence of two years for Hagemann for abusing his discretion as a judge by imposing a politically motivated sentence disguised as military necessity, and heard Dr. Leverenz’s plea that the defendant should go free because the “crimes against humanity” directive of the Allied Control Council was too vague and ran counter to the German legal tradition of nulla poena sine lege (“no penalty without a law”), the court announced its decision on May 23, 1949, to an overflow crowd—“not guilty.” The subsequent written justification of the verdict ran to some forty-four pages and culminated in the following statement:

The court did not absolve the defendant of wrongdoing because it agrees with his verdict [against Kusch] or because it regards as just what the defendant has done. Rather the court believes that in assessing the death sentence the defendant exceeded the sentencing standard that would have been appropriate based on the available evidence. As is evident in his poorly argued justifi-cation for his verdict, the defendant failed to weigh carefully all circumstances of the case, as one would expect from a true and impartial judge. Still, and even after the lengthy proceedings just concluded, the court does not see as sufficiently fulfilled the evidence requirement for a crime against humanity committed by a duly installed and qualified judge. For that reason, the court had to find the accused not guilty.37

And thus, for all practical purposes, pending a possible appeal by the prosecution, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann walked out of the courtroom in Kiel a free man, while those who had hoped to see Oskar Kusch avenged and rehabilitated found him, in effect, convicted for a second time.

Reactions to the course of the trial and to the verdict differed markedly. One witness, a teacher from Bremen named Karl-Hans Seemann who had been a prisoner alongside Kusch at the naval detention center and knew Hagemann, Meinert, and other former naval officials well, sent this note to Kusch’s father immediately after the trial:

Whenever there was a break in the proceedings, I was profoundly disturbed to discover how matter-of-factly and with complete assurance Hagemann circulated among the countless fellow jurists who had come to support him and chatted with them as if the whole matter was hardly worthy of his attention. Meinert—he was only present as a witness—strutted about as if he had made the court his home. He is now—believe it or not—a county judge in Elmshorn near Hamburg!! While this sorry crowd formed the bulk of those present, Hagemann at his height of 1.90 meters … towered over everyone, all the while grinning cynically. Mr. Isensee from Munich [U-154’s chief radio operator on the second patrol] and I were put on the defensive from the beginning. It was extraordinarily unfortunate that you could not come to Kiel or engage a lawyer as an observer. Only after we had testified did we learn that two other gentlemen (an art historian and a former leader in the bündisch youth movement) [Wolfgang Kühns-Bernsau and Kurt Wiemer] had likewise testified in favor of your son [as did Werner Winter and a few others]…. Others told me afterwards that Nothdurft had leveled very serious accusations against your son and again claimed that the combat readiness of the crew had suffered and that handguns had been distributed to prevent any desertion…. Since no one told us, we of course did not know about Nothdurft’s charges. Isensee described your son as a superb and popular commanding officer but had no idea he was supposed to refute that legend about the handguns. No one even asked him about it!! In any appeal it will be crucial to have Isensee testify again. He is the only survivor of the crew and only he can know what happened…. Our testimony … was the only one during all the days of the trial that addressed your son as a U-boat commander, as a human being, as a soldier, and specified what had happened at the court martial…. Hagemann is triumphant today—the luck of the devil—and pretty soon we may have to store away our ideals again. As a teacher I find the experience more than bitter.38

By contrast, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann could barely conceal his glee when he wrote confidentially to his former colleague Karl Helmut Sieber four days after the “not guilty” verdict:

Now that the battle has been fought and won, allow me to thank you once more for your assistance from the bottom of my heart.… Rudolphi provided very good insights into how the naval justice system had torpedoed any efforts by the state to exert political influence on our decisions. That made a big impression on the court, even though he [Rudolphi] painted himself as a poor, uninformed underling. When he claimed he had nothing to do with the confirmation of the [Kusch] verdict in Berlin, even I was mightily surprised, to say the least. During the war we had a very different impression of the role he played. The poor guy even stated he had never seen the assessment of the case by his own subordinates. As you can imagine, he was sweating bullets the entire time he testified during my trial. It was clearly not easy for him to pretend to be innocent…. The prosecution’s witnesses for Kusch were very much spineless softies [ganz müde Knaben] whose closeness to homosexual circles [known as the 175ers] we could establish during the proceedings…. By the way, we never shared the “Red Folder” with anyone. Leverenz will return it to you.39

Besides revealing the extent of Rudolphi’s perjury and the almost conspiratorial manner in which former naval judges closed ranks to support any comrade in trouble over controversial verdicts rendered before 1945, Hagemann’s letter inadvertently shines a spotlight on two issues not previously much discussed but potentially of considerable significance. The “Red Folder”—or “Red Donkey” [Roter Esel] as it was usually disguised in the nomenclature of former naval justice officials with reference to its cover color and to a similar work of instructions for general staff officers⁴⁰—referred to a set of internal, confidential, procedural, and sentencing guidelines that the Kriegsmarine’s legal department in Berlin had distributed to naval judges during the war and that was not to be shared with anyone outside that circle. No copy of it has ever surfaced in public, but the gist of its instructions must have been to ensure the alignment of legal decisions with the political and ideological agenda of the state, especially in a country at war. Just how revealing the existence of these guidelines could have helped Hagemann in his defense remains unclear, inasmuch as they would have undermined any pretense that judges acted independently in accordance with the letter of the law and made their decisions without guidance from legal, military, or political superiors.

A second issue was Hagemann’s blatant homophobia and disparaging reference to homosexuals in Oskar Kusch’s social and intellectual circle—the term “175er” refers derisively to persons in violation of Section 175 of the German penal code that outlawed homosexual acts between adult males until 1994. Hagemann’s display of homophobia illuminates a dimension of his character and worldview that may well have played a role in his original verdict, just as much as it colored the former judge’s perception five years later of witnesses testifying on Kusch’s behalf. Hagemann—who grew up in Nazi party organizations thoroughly opposed to the ideas and ideals of the bündisch youth movement such as the Südlegion with its emphasis on individualism, tolerance, dignity, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetics in artistic and literary pursuits—had clearly not abandoned by 1944 or by 1949 his preference for “manly” conformity and uniformity under an authoritarian figure. Kusch’s friendship and intercepted correspondence with Dr. Rudi Pallas, who had spent time in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp because of his sexual orientation and had espoused decidedly left-wing sympathies since his release from Soviet captivity, could not have been a mystery to Hagemann in either January 1944 or in May 1949. In a similar fashion Hagemann must have viewed witnesses for the prosecution, such as Kusch’s father, a prominent and hated Free Mason, or the future art historian and collector Wolfgang Kühns-Bernsau as representing that soft but pretentious aesthetic elitism Kusch himself had sported on U-154. Could Hagemann have chosen the death penalty for Oskar Kusch to eliminate in him not only a dangerous political opponent but also an intellectual and cultural deviant guilty by association with a group of people inherently suspicious and un-German?

To no one’s surprise, Kusch’s father insisted, only one day after the verdict, in a sharply worded telegram to Dr. Thamm, on an immediate appeal, this time to the Supreme Court for the British Occupation Zone in Cologne whose top judges were known to be less tainted with Nazi ideological ballast. After consultation with the justice minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Dr. Katz, this was done on July 6, 1949.41 At the same time, Oskarheinz Kusch informed Dr. Thamm that Oskar’s mother, Erna Brockmann, had died suddenly of a heart attack on June 26, 1949, just weeks after Hagemann’s trial. He attributed this further tragic development “not least to the grief and bitterness about the injustice posthumously inflicted upon her son.”42

On October 18, 1949, the court in Cologne did indeed throw out the existing verdict and ordered a retrial of Hagemann before the same state court in Kiel that had found him “not guilty” on May 23. Besides chastising the jurists in Kiel for having interpreted applicable laws too narrowly, for having neither found nor demanded military justifications for Kusch’s condemnation, and pointing out the obvious discrepancy between the alleged crime and its punishment, the Cologne court justified a renewed trial as follows:

That which the Allied Control Council’s Directive No. 10 places under punishment as a crime against humanity was already a punishable crime in the eyes of all decent human beings at the time of the [Kusch trial]. It remained unpunished, however, because the National Socialist state itself committed crimes through its institutions and followers. Even then punishing such injustices was the duty of any legally constituted state. To rectify such a dereliction of duty ex post facto therefore must be a principle of justice and part of a state’s legal foundations. A German judge is in line with these principles whenever he applies the provisions of the Directive No. 10 of the Allied Control Council.⁴³

Hagemann, though invited to Cologne to attend the hearing over the appeal, had decided not to travel there or to send a legal representative because he “had absolutely no funds to spare for such extravagant excursions,” placing his hopes instead on an amnesty rumored to be on the agenda of the newly constituted federal government in Bonn.⁴⁴

It would take almost another year, until September 1950, for the case to be retried in Kiel. In the meantime, a bitter, discouraged, but always defiant Karl-Heinrich Hagemann reported to his friend Sieber in May 1950:

Currently I am eking out a living as a local reporter for the Husumer Nachrichten, as a continuing education teacher (2 hours a week), as a supervisor of bankruptcy settlements, and from time to time as a paralegal inasmuch as the justice ministry in Kiel has not dared certify me as a full legal counsel in cases where the regular lawyer had some conflict and could not show up. Well, we are really looking forward to the statewide elections in July and hope the Social Democratic regime will be fully swept away. If that were the case, things would look up for me, for Attorney-General Katz is clearly the driving force behind all this. Would anyone be surprised?!45

Insofar as Dr. Rudolf Katz was of Jewish extraction, and given Hagemann’s political and ideological provenance, it would indeed not be in the least surprising that the stymied jurist should have attributed his continuing misfortunes to a Jewish-Socialist plot.

The elections did indeed bring a conservative government into power in Schleswig-Holstein and Dr. Katz was gone, or rather promoted to the German Constitutional Court, by the time Hagemann’s second trial began on September 18, 1950. Personnel changes compared to the previous year were minimal: Dr. Paul Thamm was replaced by Dr. Trautgott Albrecht as chief prosecutor in the case and Albrecht’s seat as associate prosecutor taken by a Dr. Wolff. Dr. Wilhelm von Starck still presided and Dr. Bernhard Leverenz repeated as Hagemann’s defense counsel. During only three days of actual proceedings, a total of thirty-six witnesses testified in person or by way of depositions. This time Kusch’s sixty-eight-year-old father was allowed to take the witness stand and impressed observers both with his impassioned plea for justice for his son and with a less than perfect grasp of what had transpired on U-154, at Oskar’s court-martial, and at the first Hagemann trial.⁴⁶ Despite Mr. Seemann’s urgent demand of the year before, neither of the two surviving radio operators of the boat, Hans Janker and Kurt Isensee, were present to rebuke Dr. Nothdurft’s wild claims. Thus, the court remained convinced Kusch’s actions indeed had grave military implications and consequences, and that he must have labored under any number of mental and physical afflictions and perversions. After all invited witnesses had testified, the prosecutor in his final arguments proposed a jail sentence of eighteen months for Hagemann, whereas Leverenz suggested his client should go free due to his proven innocence.

On September 25, 1950, the court rendered its verdict—“not guilty for lack of evidence.” “In the final analyses,” the court argued, “it was impossible to prove that there was a connection between the verdict rendered by the accused and the violent and arbitrary nature of National Socialist rule. At the same time, the court found itself unable to acquit the accused based on ‘proven innocence’ because the possibility of such a connection could not be dismissed entirely.” The court again reprimanded Hagemann for his sloppy justification of the death sentence against Kusch, including the use of “National Socialist diction” in the document, and noted “the logic that led to the assessed sentence rather than to a more lenient one remains not entirely clear.”47

Initially the prosecutor did file another appeal, but on November 28, 1950, Dr. Thamm informed Kusch’s father he had decided to withdraw it because “it does not offer a reasonable chance of success,” just as any plans to go after Wolfgang Dittmers and Otto Westphalen, the two military jurors at Kusch’s trial, had now to be abandoned. And thus ended the long postwar struggle to bring Kusch’s judges to justice.

A free man at last, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann was readmitted to the bar and opened a private practice in Lauenburg on the Elbe River east of Hamburg, a short distance from Aumühle where Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz would choose to spend the last years of his life after his release from Spandau Prison in 1956. Hagemann died in Lauenburg on March 15, 1998, at age eighty-nine.⁴⁸

Both Dr. Hans-Egon Breinig and Ernst Meinert found immediate employment in the Schleswig-Holstein justice system after the war, the latter returning to his hometown of Elmshorn as a county judge. Dr. med. habil. Hans Nothdurft, whose compulsion for self-justification in the Kusch drama never abated for the rest of his life, resumed his scientific research at Heidelberg University where he eventually rose to the rank of Professor of Physiology and discovered the so-called Nothdurft Effect in his field of specialization. He died on November 25, 1997, at age eighty-six.⁴⁹

Commander Ernst Kals, Kusch’s flotilla commander at Lorient, who was so gravely upset about the irregularity of Abel’s report, ended the war as a full captain and suffered severe injuries when Allied forces surrounded the German Atlantic bases in France. He was set free after three years in French prisoner-of-war camps and died in 1979 at age seventy-four.

Hans-Rudolf Rösing, himself the son of an admiral and in charge of all German submarines in France, rejoined the West German navy after World War II and rose to the rank of rear admiral before retiring in 1965. Throughout his lifetime, he steadfastly refused to initiate or support efforts to rehabilitate the good name and legacy of Oskar Kusch. Rösing died in 2004 at age ninety-nine in Kiel, ironically in the very city whose courts had by then wiped Kusch’s legal record clean and whose political and civic leaders had erected a memorial in his memory and honor.50

As for Kusch’s friends and comrades, his Crew 37a classmates have regularly honored his memory at postwar reunions and in their newsletters. Werner Winter rejoined the West German navy after the war and retired as a full captain in 1970. He died two years later in Kiel at age sixty.⁵¹ Gustav-Adolf Janssen, who had likewise joined the Bundesmarine and served for a while—entirely appropriately, given his Scandinavian name—as naval attaché to Denmark and Sweden, survived Winter by eight years.⁵² Dieter Berger, Wolfgang Kühns-Bernsau, Kurt Wiemer, and others from Kusch’s school days and Südlegion experience rose to prominent civilian positions in postwar society, more often than not in the arts, the media, and education. Gerhard Meyer-Grieben continued his successful law practice until his death in 1972. His son Clemens then followed the family tradition in Kiel beyond his own retirement, generously allowing historians access to his father’s records and even assisting a class of gymnasium students in nearby Altenholz recently to recreate Kusch’s life and legacy in the form of an extended blog and “diary.”⁵³

Upon his release from Russian captivity, and after posting his impassioned essay on his friend Oskar Kusch in the Aachener Nachrichten on October 29, 1949,⁵⁴ Dr. Rudi Pallas chose to make a living as a radio journalist in East Berlin, although he never fully identified with the Communist regime and made frequent trips back and forth across the Iron Curtain. As one observer commented, “In the West he was under suspicion because of his contacts to the East, while both East and West Germany ostracized him because of his homosexuality.” In 1952, Pallas committed suicide when West German police were about to arrest him for maintaining improper sexual relations with a minor.55

When Kusch’s father died, his son’s papers and remaining artwork became the possession of Oskar’s Crew 37a comrade, Baron Horst von Luttitz, in the absence of any surviving relatives. Writing under the pseudonym Walter Klenck, Luttitz in 1987 published the autobiographical novel Wer das Schwert nimmt … [All Who Take the Sword], in which he reserves long passages and much of the dialogue for the plight and death of his friend, “Lieutenant Oskar Burk.”⁵⁶ While many supposed scenes are clearly and deliberately the product of the author’s imagination, as Kusch never served in Germany’s naval air force, for instance, or offered a lengthy tirade against the Nazi regime at his court-martial, Luttitz captures Kusch’s character, personality, and philosophical persuasions extremely well. He also became one of the first to publish in his book some of the artwork Kusch had created in his prison cell in Kiel.

Over the quarter century that followed Karl-Heinrich Hagemann’s final acquittal, the case of Oskar Kusch moved rapidly from front-page news to virtual oblivion. Much happened in Germany and the world during that time as economic recovery and the Cold War dominated priorities and experiences west and east of the Iron Curtain. After 1955, the two German states rearmed as members of their respective alliances, including the formation of the Bundesmarine and Volksmarine. With the widening distance to the events between 1933 and 1945, there also grew, however gradually and reluctantly, a self-critical reassessment of the German military’s role in Hitler’s rise and rule as a sub-aspect of overall Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or efforts to come to grips with Germany’s Nazi past. Not least importantly, the question arose what stand the Kriegsmarine had taken between complicity and resistance during the Nazi years.

East German historiography was quick to align the Kriegsmarine and its officers with the fascist state and purged its own top cadres of men with Nazi connections.57 Not surprisingly, for example, only a single one of the 167 survivors of naval officer Crew 34 made his home in the communist state after the war.⁵⁸ By contrast, West German portrayals of the Kriegsmarine well into the 1960s followed the lines of defense adopted by Grand Admirals Raeder and Dönitz at Nuremberg. In this blinkered and sanitized version, links between the brown state and its navy had been minimal and strictly along professional lines; the Naval High Command had gone to great lengths to resist ideological infiltration by maintaining an independent judicial system and by stymying efforts to plant National Socialist Guidance Officers aboard its vessels; the war at sea, forced upon Germany by an unkind fate, had been hard but always fair and clean; especially the submarine arm, even though doomed after 1943, had fought with exemplary valor and unassailable patriotic commitment until the end; and the indelible “Trauma of 1918” allowed for nothing short of absolute loyalty to the government that happened to be in place no matter what its policies—or crimes. In addition, Dönitz’s courageous intervention in 1945 allowed millions of German soldiers and civilians to reach the West before being overrun by Soviet savages. These convenient myths and self-serving simplifications, along with a massive outbreak of collective amnesia, found their expression in a flood of romanticizing and apologetic memoirs compiled by former war correspondents, U-boat captains, and eventually the two grand admirals themselves upon their release from prison in 1956.⁵⁹ The slow return to Germany of the Kriegsmarine’s archives from Allied custody further impeded efforts to create a realistic and evidence-based picture of what had actually happened and to place the life and legacy of men like Oskar Kusch into their proper context.

Access to pertinent documents, the gradual passing from social and political prominence of the wartime generation, and a genuine passion to dig deep for the truth no matter what the findings, combined at last to move historians to revise and reverse the accustomed whitewash of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine and its personnel. The publication of Michael Salewski’s “Self-Image and Historical Consciousness of the German Kriegsmarine” (1970) and particularly Lothar Gruchmann’s “Selected Documents on German Naval Justice in World War II” (1978) in prominent historical journals, along with subsequent work by Manfred Messerschmidt, Lothar Walmrath, Wolfgang Wette, and many others, may be regarded in retrospect as the starting point for a historiographical revolution and re-education of the public in terms of the Kriegsmarine’s long-denied affinity to Nazi practices and ideology. The ensuing research, impassioned debates, and even novels and films such as Das Boot, have animated excellent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic and continue to correct deeply rooted misconceptions. One prominent victim of these investigations was Hans Filbinger, the governor of the state of Baden-Württemberg, who as a former judge in the Kriegsmarine’s judicial branch had been involved in controversial capital punishment decisions late in World War II.60 Filbinger had to resign in disgrace in 1978, and one may be forgiven for wondering what Karl-Heinrich Hagemann’s thoughts and comments may have been at the time. Dönitz’s death in late 1980 allowed younger officers and academics to offer more freely a sophisticated picture and analysis of the Kriegsmarine’s entanglements with the regime and to appreciate anew the lives and sacrifices of men like Kusch. For instance, Keith Bird’s and Dieter Hartwig’s recent critical biographies of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, respectively, strike readers as ranging light years ahead of and beyond any historiographical productions in the more immediate postwar era.⁶¹

Dieter Hartwig in particular deserves credit for exposing long-held myths and distortions about Karl Dönitz and his place in history.⁶² The picture that has emerged from his inquiries reveals Dönitz as a cold and calculating opportunist, a strategic dilettante with a limited grasp of modern technology, and above all as a man exercising a slavish subservience to Hitler and his ideology. Any admiration for Dönitz’s “people skills” vis-à-vis his U-boat men must be balanced against the grand admiral’s perfect willingness to sacrifice them after 1943 to an overpowering Allied supremacy at sea when his earlier concept of a “tonnage war” had lost every meaning or prospect for success—something Kusch’s experience richly confirmed at the time. That same disdain for human life and human suffering governed Dönitz’s directives to abandon shipwrecked enemy sailors to their fate as a desirable measure to weaken Allied manpower resources. Hartwig’s careful research stands out as particularly damning when it comes to Dönitz’s speeches—several of them formerly unknown or misplaced. The admiral’s shrill anti-Semitic rhetoric, his self-abasement with regard to the person and “genial” faculties of Adolf Hitler, and his drivel about death being preferable to honorable surrender, not only make for painful reading but belie Dönitz’s postwar assertions that he had no clue about the regime’s darker goals and practices. Were Werner Winter and Gustav-Adolf Janssen still alive, they would be stunned to realize how miserably futile and doomed their courageous interventions with Dönitz on Kusch’s behalf had been from the outset.

While the name of Oskar Kusch occasionally came up in postwar histories of the Kriegsmarine and its personnel, genuine familiarity with the details and background of his case remained limited and elusive. For example, as recently as 1997 U-boat historian Jordan Vause claimed Kusch had been “a devout Christian,” that his service in the RAD had lasted an entire year, that he had served under three different commanding officers on U-103, that he “blithely dumped the Führer’s portrait into the trash” upon taking charge of U-154, and that Abel had submitted his report to Ernst Kals rather than to Captain Schmidt.63 Even a researcher as meticulous as Timothy Mulligan has described Kusch as a “devout Catholic” and claimed his trial lasted three days.⁶⁴ U-154’s navigator Heinrich Lüdmann is likely responsible for this transformation of Kusch from a lapsed Lutheran into a devout Catholic when he likely confused Kusch’s supposed religious beliefs and practices with those of an earlier captain of the boat.⁶⁵

The first analyst to subject Oskar Kusch and his case to a renewed investigation and appraisal in the 1980s was retired rear admiral Karl H. Peter of Crew X/38, one-time commandant of Germany’s naval academy in Mürwik. Working from some of Kusch’s trial records, newspaper coverage of the Hagemann trials, and a few additional sources, in 1986 Peter authored a twenty-six-page typed manuscript titled, “Wider besseres Wissen zum Tode verurteilt. Stimmt das? Ein Bericht von Karl Peter” [Sentenced to death despite evidence to the contrary? Is that what happened? A Report by Karl Peter]. Peter’s central concern appears to have been to provide facts and context about Kusch in place of rumors and erroneous assumptions that had made their way into parts of the naval literature over the years, even though Peter himself inadvertently misrepresented some facts in the process.66 His paper was not widely distributed.

By the time Admiral Peter “rediscovered” Oskar Kusch and Baron von Luttitz (a.k.a. Walter Klenck) created the figure of Lieutenant Oskar Burk in his autobiographical novel in 1987, a far more ambitious project had gotten under way thanks to Dr. Heinrich Walle. An active-duty officer in the Bundesmarine (Crew 63) until his retirement in 1994, Walle earned a doctorate in 1979 under noted naval historian Michael Salewski and then worked at the Research Office for Military History in Freiburg. There he set out to tell Kusch’s story in a 510-page documentation, eventually published in 1995. It remains the standard work on Oskar Kusch and the postwar trials against Hagemann in the German language; and this writer has relied on Walle’s research in major ways, especially when covering the trials against Hagemann. In addition, one of Walle’s goals was to achieve a full legal, public, and historical rehabilitation for U-154’s former captain.

Even before Walle’s work reached a wider readership, he featured his findings in a series of lectures, exhibitions, and articles that started a spirited debate between 1992 and 1996 in the Marineforum, the periodical publication of the German Naval Officers Association (MOV). In letters to the editor and in several online blogs ever since, Oskar Kusch’s life, actions, and legacy have remained a frequently discussed topic. Even Dr. Nothdurft became involved in these exchanges as he felt his views had been at first largely omitted and later misrepresented in Walle’ documentation. Far from bringing closure to the memory of Kusch’s sacrifice and civil courage, Walle’s book, and especially his readiness to lift Kusch into the ranks of active resistance fighters, has fueled a bitter debate whose full resolution remains elusive. One side, mainly veteran officers, believes Kusch was essentially guilty of the accusations against him; that U-boat commanders in the midst of a war should not turn their wardrooms into political debate clubs even if they spoke out against an evil regime; and that Abel did the proper thing in reporting his superior if Kusch’s opposition to Hitler seemed to him to endanger harmony and discipline among his officers and had the potential of diminishing the combat readiness of his boat, no matter what the consequences might entail for his captain. For adherents of this camp, questions of honor, duty, loyalty, patriotism, and military discipline remain central when judging Oskar Kusch.

His supporters, mostly younger officers and historians, insist that Kusch, as an exemplary and patriotic soldier, was the target of a personal vendetta by his disaffected officers and victim of an unprecedented breakdown in U-boat camaraderie; that his activities, far from criminal, aimed at the enlightenment of his officers rather than at treason, desertion, or sedition; that his superiors abandoned him even though they knew he was being offered up to an ideologically corrupt legal system; and that quiet removal from command and inconspicuous reassignment should have been the appropriate way of resolving the matter once it had been reported. The only thing both sides seem to agree on is that Kusch should never have lost his life.67

As the surviving German naval officers of Kusch’s generation first retired and then gradually went to their graves, the tone and acrimony of the debate over Walle’s work have softened and its thrust redirected to what Kusch’s proper legacy should become in German naval and general history. An indicator of this shifting emphasis can be found in the more than one hundred entries in the online blog of the Marine-Archiv marking the seventieth anniversary of Kusch’s execution in 2014.⁶⁸ Virtually gone are references to his supposedly unpatriotic, endangering, traitorous, elitist, naïve, and self-destructive behavior. Instead, contributors are wondering how best to remember Kusch, to what extent he can serve as a model for young officers in the armed forces of a free and democratic society, if the German navy should perhaps name a vessel after him, whether the now empty naval detention center in Kiel should be turned into some kind of museum, and how appropriate it is that the military range at Holtenau continues to be used for target practice by Germans in uniform.⁶⁹ Indeed, some Germans even raise the question how and to what extent the memory even of deserters and saboteurs might be incorporated into a fair-minded assessment of their military past.70

Most recently, since February 2017, a portrait of Oskar Kusch painted by Rolf Osker Michelmann greets visitors to the fireplace lounge of the officers’ mess at the German naval academy in Mürwik.⁷¹ Perhaps the feelings Kusch stirred in his admirers and in his detractors are giving way at last to a more measured appreciation of the man who would not allow his conscience, his common sense, and his commitment to human dignity and individualism to atrophy while remaining true to his patriotic and professional duties as an officer.

A primary purpose of Walle’s documentation had been to bring about the legal rehabilitation of Oskar Kusch through renewed publicity of his case. Within a year of the publication of his book, an envelope was added to Kusch’s case folder. Carrying the file number 591 AR 217/96 and duly signed by District Attorney Thomas-Michael Hoffmann, on September 16, 1996, the document issued by the District Court at Kiel formally rescinded and made void the court-martial decision against Oskar Kusch of January 26, 1944. It did so based on legal authority first granted by the British occupation administration on June 3, 1947, and extended by the German parliament in its “Law Annulling Verdicts Based on National Socialist Injustice” of May 25, 1990.⁷² It had thus taken more than half a century to wipe out Hagemann’s verdict and to restore Kusch’s legal status as an innocent and exemplary officer from that of a convicted and executed felon.

One of the unresolved mysteries surrounding Oskar Kusch concerns his final resting place. Once his bloodied and lifeless body had been placed into a coffin at the range in Holtenau and taken back across the canal bridge into Kiel, all inquiries into verifiable vestiges of what happened to his corpse have run into a void. As the two most likely places, neither the sizable North Cemetery (Nordfriedhof) on the Westring in Kiel, where indeed many victims of Kriegsmarine executions were laid to rest in those days, nor the Old and New Urn Cemeteries down the road, possess any record of Kusch’s body or ashes ever being delivered to them, even temporarily, or of him being buried on their premises. In this sense, Peter C. Hansen’s contention in his novel on Kusch that the urn with the U-boat commander’s cremated remains was buried in Field 14, Plot 631, of the Old Urn Cemetery, is exactly that—pure fiction. Field 14 demonstrably has only 149 plots and Kusch’s is not one of them.73

It is known that Gerhard Meyer-Grieben communicated with Kusch’s parents about the disposition of their son’s body, but unfortunately his copies of that correspondence fell victim to one of the many bombing raids on Kiel in 1944 and the parents’ inquiries were lost to the attacks on Berlin. It seems logical and likely that Kusch’s parents should have wanted the remains of their only child in a place close to them, but again despite numerous inquiries no trace of a transfer of Kusch’s urn to the capital or its interment in one of Berlin’s many cemeteries could be ascertained, particularly not in the city sections of Steglitz, Dahlem, and Schöneberg where the parents lived at the time.⁷⁴

Still, there exists today a quiet place where mourners will find Oskar Kusch appropriately commemorated. On May 12, 1998, the fifty-fourth anniversary of Kusch’s execution, the City of Kiel and the community of Altenholz renamed a street adjacent to the shooting range in Holtenau, just north of the Kiel Canal, the Oskar-Kusch-Strasse.⁷⁵ At the same time, officials unveiled at this site a large granite boulder with a bronze plaque that reads:

OSKAR KUSCH

*6. 4. 1918 +12. 5. 1944

His name stands for the many victims of the National Socialist
system of injustice who died here and in other places.

Their death is our legacy.

Community of Altenholz—City of Kiel

12 May 1998