What Happened to Karl Dönitz’s Family After WW2? JJ
On 13 May 1944, a young officer talked his way onto a fast attack boat leaving the French coast. He was not supposed to be aboard. It was Klaus Dönitz’s twenty-fourth birthday, and the boat never came back. His father was Karl Dönitz, the admiral who ran Germany’s entire U-boat war, and within a single year that war had taken both his sons.
But the story of the Dönitz family did not end with Germany’s defeat in 1945. Karl Dönitz built his life around the sea and the men who fought on it. In 1916 he married Ingeborg Weber, the daughter of a German general, and between the wars they raised three children: a daughter, Ursula, born in 1917, and two sons, Klaus in 1920 and Peter a couple of years later.
Both boys followed their father into the navy. By the time the Second World War reached its peak, the man commanding Germany’s U-boats had two sons serving in the same fleet. Peter, the younger son, served as a watch officer aboard U-954. On 19 May 1943, while operating in the North Atlantic, U-954 was sunk and everyone on board was killed.
Peter was twenty-one years old. His death came during what became known as Black May, a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boat losses had become so heavy that just days later Dönitz called off the offensive in the North Atlantic. After Peter’s death, Klaus was taken out of frontline service.
Under navy rules, a senior officer who had already lost one son could have his remaining sons removed from combat. Klaus was allowed to begin training as a naval doctor. He had come through the most dangerous branch of the German war effort alive, and his family had reason to believe he would see the end of it. He did not stay away.
On 13 May 1944, his twenty-fourth birthday, Klaus persuaded friends still serving in the fast attack boats to let him ride along on a raid across the Channel. His boat, S-141, pushed out toward the English coast near Selsey. There it met the Free French destroyer La Combattante, which sank it. Six men were pulled from the water. Klaus was not among them.
He was buried in France, and Karl Dönitz had now lost both of his sons to the war he was directing. By some accounts he showed almost nothing when the news came. He sat through his morning staff meeting and carried on with the day, only a little less exact than usual. Then he went home and told Ingeborg, for the second time in the space of a year, that they had lost a son.
Dönitz kept his command. Within a year the war would take far more than his two sons. The state he served would disappear, and the rest of his family would have to live with what followed. Ingeborg Dönitz had spent nearly thirty years as a navy wife, and had trained as a nurse before that.
In the spring of 1945, as Germany collapsed, her husband was named Hitler’s successor. On 30 April 1945, Hitler took his own life. For about three weeks Dönitz led what was left of the German government from the northern town of Flensburg. He oversaw the surrender and pushed the navy to carry as many soldiers and civilians as it could across the Baltic, away from the advancing Red Army.
The effort, code-named Operation Hannibal, moved well over a million people in the war’s final months, one of the largest maritime evacuations in history. On 23 May 1945, Allied troops arrested Dönitz and his entire administration. The twenty-day government was finished, and the man who had led it was now a prisoner. Then came Nuremberg.
The submarine-war charge against Dönitz was complicated by the fact that the Allies had used similar methods themselves. The American admiral Chester Nimitz submitted a statement describing American submarine warfare in the Pacific, and the tribunal did not base Dönitz’s sentence on that aspect of the case. He was nevertheless convicted on two counts and sent to Spandau prison in Berlin for ten years.
After the surrender, Ingeborg was left with one surviving child, two dead sons, and a husband facing trial. While Dönitz went from captivity to Nuremberg and then Spandau, she had to rebuild an ordinary life. She went back to the profession she had trained for as a young woman and worked as a nurse, and for most of the Spandau years she held a steady job as a receptionist at a doctor’s practice in Reinbek, outside Hamburg.
She supported the household through the decade her husband was in prison. When Dönitz was released in 1956, the couple settled in Aumühle, a small town near Hamburg. They had six years together. Ingeborg Dönitz died on 2 May 1962. She had watched her husband command an entire navy, lead a nation for three weeks, and come home from prison an old man.
She did not live to see what became of her daughter’s husband, a U-boat commander who was about to do something almost no one on either side of the war expected. One of the most unusual postwar stories in the Dönitz family belonged not to Karl, but to his son-in-law. In November 1937 Ursula Dönitz married Günther Hessler, a career naval officer.
Hessler became one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war. In command of U-107 he sailed from the French port of Lorient in the spring of 1941 on a single patrol that sank more than a dozen Allied ships. By tonnage it was the highest-scoring war patrol any German submarine ever made. Across his career Hessler sank more than twenty ships, over a hundred thousand tons of Allied shipping.
Before long he was given a place on the staff of U-boat command, working directly under his father-in-law. That connection was awkward on both sides. Being the son-in-law of the U-boat chief meant every honour Hessler earned was watched for any hint of favouritism. When his Knight’s Cross came due, Dönitz was reluctant to sign it off himself, and in the end it was the navy’s commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who put his name to the award.
But the family tie was real, and it placed Hessler close to the heart of the campaign itself. When the war ended, Hessler spent more than a year in Allied captivity. At Nuremberg he testified on behalf of the U-boat service and of his father-in-law. And then, in 1947, the British made a remarkable decision. They hired him.
The Royal Navy wanted a full account of the U-boat war written by the men who had actually fought it. They commissioned Günther Hessler, an enemy ace and Dönitz’s own son-in-law, to write it. Working alongside Alfred Hoschatt, another former U-boat commander, Hessler produced a three-volume study called The U-Boat War in the Atlantic, finished in 1951.
It became a standard reference on the whole campaign: written for the navy that had beaten him, about the war his father-in-law had commanded against it. For Ursula, the U-boat war was deeply personal: her father had commanded it, and her husband had fought in it. She was also the only one of the three Dönitz children who would live a full life. Hessler himself lived another seventeen years. He died on 4 April 1968, at the age of fifty-eight.
By the time his three volumes were finished, his father-in-law was still behind the walls of Spandau. And when Karl Dönitz finally walked out, he would spend his own last years doing a version of what his son-in-law had already done: going back over the war he had run, and defending his part in it.
Karl Dönitz left Spandau prison on 1 October 1956, sixty-five years old and finished with the navy for good. He returned to Aumühle, to Ingeborg, and to a country that had rebuilt itself without him. Neither of his sons was there to see it. He spent his remaining years writing. His memoir, Ten Years and Twenty Days, took its title from his decade in Spandau and his twenty days as head of state.
In it he defended the U-boat service and his own conduct of the war, and he stayed loyal to the navy he had led for the rest of his life. A second book followed. He never expressed regret for the cause he had served, and that refusal shaped how history judged him. The memoir became a standard source on the U-boat war, precisely because it came from the man in charge of it. By now Ingeborg was gone.
Günther Hessler, his son-in-law, died in 1968, and his daughter Ursula, the last of his three children, outlived them all and died in 1990. It was the grandchildren who carried the family on: Ursula and Günther Hessler had three children, a daughter, Ute, and two sons. Among former submariners Dönitz remained the commander they had followed, the man they still called der Löwe, the Lion.
To much of the wider public he stayed the figure who had led the country through its last and worst days. Both views followed him to the end. Karl Dönitz died in Aumühle on 24 December 1980, at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last surviving member of the leadership that had run Germany in the war, and the last man to have held its highest office.
When he was buried at the forest cemetery in Aumühle, thousands of former U-boat sailors came to see off their old commander. Many wore the medals they were no longer meant to display, and the postwar German military gave the funeral no official honours of its own. The admiral who had commanded the U-boat war, lost both his sons to it, led Germany for twenty days, and served ten years in prison, was gone.
But the war remained part of the family’s story long after 1945. His son-in-law helped write its history for the Royal Navy and Dönitz defended his own record in his memoirs, and two of his grandsons were given the names Peter and Klaus. Karl Dönitz served Hitler’s Germany to its final day.
Another German officer is remembered for the opposite, for trying to bring the regime down from within. To see what happened to the family of the man behind the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, watch What Happened to Claus von Stauffenberg’s Family After WW2? next. Thanks for watching. Like this video, subscribe, and hit the bell for more History Inside.
