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Originally Posted by Woof1701
Your grammar is excused, but your half knowledge isn't.  Dönitz didn't commit suicide and he wasn't sentenced to death but ten years prison for the "Laconia directive" which prohibted uboats to help survivors. |
Donitz was charged with being involved with waging aggressive war, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and crimes against the laws of war. Specifically, he was charged with waging unrestricted submarine warfare and as you rightly point out Woof1701, with issuing an order after the Laconia incident not to rescue survivors from ships attacked by submarine.
As I mentioned earlier, as one of the witnesses in his defense, Donitz produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz who testified that the US had used unrestricted warfare as a tactic in the Pacific and that American submarines did not rescue survivors in situations where their own safety was in question. Despite this he was found guilty of "crimes against peace", for which he was sentenced to, and served, 10 years in prison. Of all the defendants at Nuremberg, the verdict against Donitz was probably the most controversial. The Soviet judge actually voted for his acquittal on all charges, and Donitz always maintained that he did nothing that his Allied counterparts weren't doing.
The point I was making earlier, was that Donitz knew by 1944 that the u-boat had lost the Battle of the Atlantic and Allied ASW was sinking u-boats at an alarming rate. Despite this, Donitz continued sending u-boats and their crews out to sea to fight a battle that had already been lost, which resulted in thousands of u-boat men needlessly losing their lives. It is this that should be taken into consideration, when assessing the integrity of Donitz himself.
Nemo