uneventful trip tied up in Danzig-Neufahrwasser, across from the Westerplatte, recently die scene of fierce fighting. Immediately several hundred wounded Poles were brought on board, as well as ten wounded crew members from the German minesweeper
And how did news of the beginning of the war reach the prisoner David Frankfurter, incarcerated on neutral Swiss ground, the man whose well-aimed shots had involuntarily given his victims name to a vessel that was now a hospital ship? It can be assumed that in the daily routine of 1 September in Sennhof Prison no special events were taken note of; but from then on the behavior
And what was Captain Marinesko doing when first German troops marched into Poland, but then Russian soldiers as well, on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin pact? He was still commander of the 250-metric-ton M-96, and since he had received no orders for deployment, continued to practice rapid submersion in the eastern Baltic with his crew of eighteen. With undiminished thirst, he remained the dry-land boozer he had always been, also got involved with several women, but had not yet been subject to any disciplinary action and may well have been dreaming of a larger U-boat, equipped with more than two torpedo tubes.
Hindsight, they say, is always 20–20. In the meantime I've learned that my son did have casual contact with skinheads. Molln had some of these types. Because of the local incident that resulted in several deaths, they were probably under surveillance, and chose other venues for opening their big mouths, such as Wismar or the sites of larger gatherings in the state of Brandenburg. In Molln, Konny probably kept his distance, but he gave a speech in Schwerin, where he spent not only weekends but also part of his school holidays with his grandmother. The good-sized horde of skinheads, which included groups from the surrounding area in Mecklenburg, must have found his speech long-winded, for he was obliged to shorten it as he was speaking. The written text was devoted to the martyr and heroic son of Schwerin.
Yet Konny must have succeeded in winning friends for his topic among some of the local young Nazis, fixated — as usual — on hate slogans and harassing foreigners, for there was a brief period during which a local gang called itself the Wilhelm Gustloff Comrades. As I was able to ascertain later, the gathering took place in the back room of a restaurant on Schweriner Strasse.
The audience of about fifty included members of a right-wing radical party as well as interested middle- class citizens. Mother was not among them.
I am trying to picture my son, tall and spindly, with glasses and curly hair, standing there in his Norwegian sweater among those bald-headed brutes. He, the fruit juice drinker, surrounded by big bruisers armed with beer bottles. He, with his soft adolescent voice, which kept breaking, drowned out by those braggarts. He, the loner, with sweat-drenched stale air wafting around him.
No, he did not try to adapt, remained an anomaly in the midst of a crowd that normally rejected any foreign body. Hatred of Turks, beating up foreigners for fun, hurling insults at anyone not from around here — these things could not be expected of him. His speech contained no call to violent action. When he described the murder in Davos, proceeding to analyze every detail soberly, like a detective tracking down possible motives, he did allude, as on his Web site, to the murderers presumed backers, referring to the “world Jewish conspiracy” and the Jewish-controlled plutocracy, but his manuscript did not contain abusive terms like “filthy Jew” or the exclamation “Death to the Jews!” Even his demand for a commemorative stone on the southern bank of Lake Schwerin, “in the very place where the mighty granite boulder honoring the martyr stood after 1937,” was worded politely in the form of an appeal, drawing on customary democratic practice. Yet when he proposed to the audience that a citizens' petition to that effect be submitted to the Mecklenburg legislature, the response, I am told, was derisive guffaws. A pity Mother wasn't there.
Konny swallowed the rebuff and went on at once to describe the launching of the ship. He dwelt too long on the meaning and purpose of the Strength through Joy organization. On the other hand, his account of the deployment of the reoutfitted hospital ship during the occupation of Norway and Denmark by units of the Wehrmacht and navy commanded some attention among the beer drinkers, especially because several “heroes of Narvik” were among the wounded brought aboard. But then, when after the victorious campaign against France the planned invasion of England, Operation Seal, failed to come off, and instead of being deployed as a troop transport the
My son found it impossible to finish his speech. Shouts of “Knock it off!” and “Cut the crap!” as well as the noise of beer bottles being banged on tables caused him to abridge his version of the ship's fateful progress toward disaster; he got only as far as the torpedoes. Konny bore this development with composure. What a good thing Mother wasn't there. The almost-sixteen-year-old probably consoled himself with the thought that he always had access to the Internet. No further contacts with skinheads are documented.
He didn't fit in with the baldies. Soon after that, Konny began to work on a report that he wanted to present orally to the teachers and students at his school in Molln. But before he reaches that point and is refused permission to make his presentation, I need to stay on track and first give an account of the
The ship was gutted. At the end of November '40 the X-ray machines disappeared. The operating rooms and the outpatient clinic were dismantled. No more nurses bustled around, no hospital beds stood in neat rows. Along with most of the civilian crew, the doctors and medics were discharged or reassigned to other ships. Of the engine-room operators, only those who serviced the engines remained. In place of the head doctor, a U-boat officer at the rank of lieutenant commander was now in charge; as commander of the Second Submarine Training Division he oversaw the functions of the “floating barracks,” where sailors lived while they underwent training. Captain Bertram remained on board, but there was no course for him to plot. On the photographs at my disposal he certainly looks impressive, but he was a captain subject to recall, a second-in-command. This experienced captain from the merchant marine had a hard time adhering to military instructions, the more so since now everything on board changed. The portraits of Robert Ley were replaced by photos of the admiral of the fleet. The smoking parlor on the lower promenade deck became the officers' mess. The large dining rooms were turned into troughs for the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. In the forecastle, dining rooms and lounges were set up for the remaining civilian crew. No longer classless, the
Four training-division companies were billeted on board. In the papers at my disposal — which, by the way, were quoted verbatim on the Internet and disseminated with the added ingredient of visual material; my son had access to a source that is now mine — assurances are offered that as an experienced submarine commander Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn provided rigorous training for the volunteers. The U-boat sailors, younger and younger as the war progressed — toward the end seventeen-year-olds were being taken — spent four months on board. After that many of them faced certain death, whether in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or, later, along the northernmost route to Murmansk, where they were sent to hunt down American convoys loaded with armaments destined for the Soviet Union.
The years 1940, 1941, and 1942 came and went, producing victories tailor-made for special bulletins. While to the east whole armies were encircled, and in the Libyan desert the Africa Corps took Tobruk, nothing much happened on board, aside from the uninterrupted production of cannon fodder and the relatively safe and comfortable rear-echelon service in which the training personnel and the rest of the crew engaged (in the ship's cinema they showed Ufa's older and newer films), unless one counts the appearance of Admiral of the Fleet Donitz during his visit to the Gotenhafen-Oxhoft docks as an event; to be sure, only official photos have been preserved.
His visit took place in March of '43. By then Stalingrad had fallen. All the front lines were receding. Since control of the skies over the Reich had been lost long since, here, too, the war was edging closer; but instead of the nearby city of Danzig, it was Gotenhafen that the American 8th Awbof «e-Division chose as its target. The hospital ship
