wounded, like any warrior… like all of you.” Hitler’s voice had gone to an uncharacteristic whisper behind the microphone that still hid his blunt features. Erwin wondered how the man could say such things without hearing a single grumble from the men aboard ship, when Hitler ended with, “I pray for der Reich, der Vaterland!”
Cheers drowned out Hitler’s last words, but Erwin, an expert in communications, read lips, so he heard Hitler say: “And so should you, my lovely seamen! Pray not for yourselves or Bismarck—all a means to an end. Pray for der Third Reich!”
This winding down of the speech sent a cheer up among the men so loud that it must have frightened seagulls a mile away.
Bismarck had been named for the dead Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a man whose memory had been extraordinarily twisted to fit Hitler’s war propaganda ends. Bismarck the man had somehow become a mythological symbol of moral correctness, flag-waving patriotism, religious righteousness, race purity, along with pure power in the Third Reich. Did it make sense? Not as far as Hulsing could see but then again, what did made sense anymore? After all, they’d already gone down the ‘rabbit hole’ so whether this use of Bismarck’s name—originally christened and launched amid a crowd of thousands of patriots—was right or proper, who but the fanatics cared? The fanatics and the Nazi Party had swarmed into the Hamburg shipyards February 14, 1939 and among the crowds stood huge numbers of boys and girls of the Hitler Youth Camps who had been bused in to celebrate the launch of Germany’s grandest battleship—the new power of the seas. Back in ’39 when Bismarck was first launched, cheers had filled the air, and Erwin had been on hand, in his uniform, under orders to be among the onlookers, giving the Nazi salute as the ceremony came to a close, while the giant warship groaned and moaned on her slow slide from her gantry, down the ramp, and into the water for her launching. At the time, Erwin Hulsing, an armaments and communications man, hadn’t a clue that he would be enlisted to be among Bismarck’s crew as a Lieutenant in charge of engineering and munitions—hardly a perfect choice some felt. Erwin had been a police detective in Berlin before the call for all able-bodied men to join the Party and now the military.
Still why now, two years later, with almost the entire continent of Europe save Russia, France, and Spain under Nazi control, was Hitler here, aboard, carting oranges to Admiral Lutjens’ quarters?
Erwin had been born curious and was raised on the cynicism, and he respected the cynical nature of his father, grandfather, and uncles, all of whom held a healthy distrust of any form of government; they were all in agreement and especially distrusted the new government formed by Herr Hitler.
As for Hitler, A-dolt as Erwin’s deceased grandfather had privately called him, Erwin could hardly believe the events that had led a failed soldier, a failed artist, a failed family man to become this—the leader of the Third Reich. It must have been destined, fated, or be the result of a higher power, one that allowed this little man so much influence. It must be a power to which, one day, Adolf Hitler himself might well be bowing his head and providing burnt offerings to. Erwin could only hope this would come to pass, but it wouldn’t be today that Hitler would supplicate himself, not with an ego so inflated as his had become. As for the battleship Bismarck, her guns the most enormous ever devised, had Hitler smiling even wider now, no doubt at the thought of the power beneath his feet; Erwin imagined the man, rumored to have some Jewish blood in his veins, preening at the adoration of the mariners, and at Admiral Gunther Lutjens’ previous introduction. The Fuhrer didn’t need any introduction for his war-prayer rhetoric; after all, every card shop and cigar store in Germany sold postcards depicting the man feeding and petting animals at a petting zoo, meeting with children at their schoolyards, kissing infants, rallying famous athletic heroes to his side, shaking hands with the Chancellor of England and in parades with the British leader.
Proceeds from the Hitler postcards went into the ‘general fund’ to support the Nazi Party government which had taken hold of the land like a choking weed.
With these thoughts going through his mind alongside the thought that he could be executed for his thoughts, Hulsing remained at attention as Hitler watched the kind of distress he kept Lutjens’and Lindemann’s mariners in—no doubt a test.
The speech went on at length, followed by a thank you from the admiral, and a belated welcome aboard from Captain Johan Lindemann, who kept it mercifully short. In fact, Erwin thought he detected a smirk disappearing even as it was appearing on Lindemann’s face. It made Erwin curious, leaving him to wonder if the captain, unlike the admiral, was not so enthralled by this man Hitler after all, or maybe the smirk was a result of something else, perhaps something the admiral had said. By now, exhausted from standing at attention for so long, Erwin, a man of action, could not be sure of anything beyond his own pure hatred of Hitler.
Still with Hitler basking in the long-winded speech-making, filled as it was with praise for his leadership and vision for the Fatherland, finally closed, Adolf, no doubt feeling a twinge of his childhood fantasies bubbling up, raised his hand to the two thousand men aboard Bismarck and again shouted, “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.” To which the men responded in one voice: “Sieg Heil,”—to Victory—and “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!”
And so it went on. Every proud young seaman in der Deutschen Krietgsmarine stood on the decks, arms raised in the now well-known Nazi salute, and when the two thousand plus men raised their voices, shouting Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, the Bismarck shook with the reverberation.
May 5, 2012 at Bismarck’s wreck site in the Denmark Straits The black undersea cosmos at these depths—three miles down—could not be calculated for its sheer impact on the human psyche. Ryne Mannheim slid into the seat behind Horst Fellhauer as they closed in on the wreck of the sunken Bismarck and the treasures that lay within her. They felt safe, secure in fact, encased as they were in the underwater marvel of a mini-sub, the Blitzmariner, of modern German design.
Both Mannheim and Fellhauer could trace their ancestry back to the men on the shipwreck they were racing toward—the infamous German destroyer, The Bismarck.
The mini-submarine moved through the deep like an underwater wave, hardly noticeable even on the radar screens manned by people who expected to see them, the captain and crew of Victory, the seagoing scientific and salvage vessel above. The expedition meant to take what it could from the bowels of the sunken WWII battleship. They had little interest in anything else such as precisely how or why she sank as history had thoroughly taken note of her demise, although some scholars questioned the odds of a direct hit on her rudder by a single torpedo fired from a Swordfish plane. Such an occurrence had seemed like a gift from the gods handed to the British fleet. Ample vengeance for the sinking of The Hood, the Lusitania, and the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic—each and all having been sent to the bottom by German engineering in the form of U-boats and battleships like the Bismarck.
Ryne and Horst watched out the portals, marveling at the silence, the abyss, and the sheer blackness outside their small circle of light whenever the exterior lights began to flicker off and on. The little sub itself left no wake, no bubbles, nothing to mark its path in the water. They traveled much as a lone shark or dolphin might, with absolute silence in what amounted to a high-tech titanium shark. The sub was a sleek, space-age-design, an undersea craft created specifically for this job, the most ambitious salvage of a ghost ship at such depths in all of history. Their dive was even deeper than the ill-fated dive to the infamous Titanic a year before, an expedition put together by the Americans out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute—one named Titanic 2012. While all the young men and women involved with Titanic 2012 met a terrible end, the expedition Ryne and Horst spearheaded meant to make their reputations, fortunes, and history all in one fell swoop.
The Bismarck sat on the ocean bed hundreds of nautical miles from Ireland near where the Straits of Denmark open onto the North Atlantic. The ship sat on a deep valley floor surrounded by mountains and more than one underwater volcano. It would be 4,570 meters or 15,000 feet to the surface should they encounter any problem. In other words, three miles to the surface once they exited the sub and dared enter Bismarck. Definitely, there was no room for error, and the risks were enormous. All the
