U-boat Commander Oskar Kusch: Anatomy of a Nazi-Era Betrayal and Judicial Murder

CHAPTER 1

LORIENT

STRETCHING IN A GENEROUS arc from the western tip of Brittany to the littoral of ancient Aquitaine, Germany’s submarine bases in World War II along the Atlantic’s Bay of Biscay found themselves embedded in a country representing the finest French nature and culture had to offer. Its very names suggested romance and mystique, promising delightful adventures and endless summers by the sea: Brest, Lorient, Saint Nazaire, La Rochelle, La Pallice, Bordeaux. These ports had fallen to the Germans easily enough in the spring of 1940 when things had gone so terribly wrong for the Allies, when Hitler’s armored columns and superior air force had wiped out France as a military power on the European continent in less than six short weeks and chased the British expeditionary forces back across the English Channel in humiliating flight.

Gaining the Atlantic bases, typically with their installations intact or quickly refitted to meet German needs, constituted arguably the most valuable windfall of the entire campaign against France. Along with the takeover of Denmark and Norway earlier that year, and the quick acquisition of the Low Countries synchronized with the attack on France, their capture meant nothing less than a quantum leap in strategic opportunities for Germany’s submarines and to a lesser extent for its capital ships and aircraft. Before the summer of 1940, U-boats operating against the Allies had to traverse the shallow North Sea from their bases at Kiel or Wilhelmshaven and round the tip of Scotland before they could begin to prowl the waters west of the British Isles where most of the action was then taking place—a tiresome and dangerous detour of some five hundred nautical miles each way. This arrangement brought exposure to enemy countermeasures while the boats were in transit and reduced their presence in their areas of operation considerably. However, once Germany’s U-boat flotillas had transferred to their new bases on the Bay of Biscay with their increasingly sophisticated repair and maintenance yards as well as their impregnable bombproof shelters, they could begin to challenge enemy shipping within days, sometimes within hours, of leaving port. No wonder that U-boat crews would fondly remember these first Happy Times from the middle of 1940 to the summer of 1941, when successes reached unprecedented levels while their own losses remained astonishingly light.

Among the units making the move from Germany to France was the Second U-Boat Flotilla, originally stationed at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea and named the "Saltzwedel" Flotilla after a World War I ace who had undertaken no fewer than twenty-two combat missions and sunk a total of 111 ships before going down with his last boat, UB-81, when it struck a mine in the English Channel in December 1917.¹ The flotilla’s new homeport would be Lorient in southwestern Brittany to the north and west of the ancient city of Vannes, not far from the mysterious menhirs (prehistoric stone monuments) of Carnac and the majestic Quiberon Peninsula, right where the rivers Blavet and Scorff merge to meet the Atlantic Ocean, an area that still strikes visitors as one of the most breathtakingly beautiful regions in Europe, if not the world.

Founded in 1664 under a charter from the Sun King Louis XIV in the mercantilist era, the city’s unusual name derives from the circumstance that it once housed the headquarters of the French East India Company. But as France’s fortunes in India and elsewhere in the East declined after the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), so did the fame and prosperity of Lorient, reducing it to a sleepy backwater hugging the edge of the European continent. By the nineteenth century, commercial activity had revived somewhat around an expanding fishing industry and with the establishment of a small naval arsenal. Still, for yet another century little would change for this picturesque place along the rugged, tide-swept Breton coast with its countless offshore islets, rocky cliffs and promontories, treacherous inlets, and sandy beaches that separate the open sea from the lush countryside of western France.²

When German army units occupied Lorient on June 21, 1940, advance navy teams were not far behind to assess the port’s potential for accommodating as soon as possible a lair for Germany’s gray wolves of the sea. What they found was highly encouraging: most facilities remained undamaged and in working order along the sprawling waterfront north of the suburbs of Kernevel and Port Louis in the inner harbor, with the sophisticated slipway and drydock for oceangoing fishing craft proving especially valuable. While the difference between high and low tide averages some ten feet at Lorient and can, with its reversing currents, make passage of the winding estuary a challenge, all navigational buoys and markers remained in place so that vessels could reach deep and open water with little delay. Even more promising, the protected Kéroman Peninsula at the southern tip of the city seemed well suited for a major U-boat base with state-of-the-art amenities and, above all, huge reinforced concrete pens, since Lorient lay within easy flying distance of British airfields and practically invited Allied bombardment of any German installations there.

While an improvised U-boat resupply facility began operating at Lorient as early as July 7, 1940, with U-30 and U-37 among the first boats to benefit from its services, just three months later a combined force of six hundred and fifty German and twenty-five hundred French dockyard personnel could repair and refit up to ten submarines simultaneously.³ Before long, as in other ports along the Bay of Biscay such as Brest and Saint Nazaire, Germany’s semiofficial general contractor "Organisation Todt (O.T.) went to work on one of humankind’s most colossal and complex building projects—creating bombproof U-boat bunkers on France’s west coast, with nineteen fully serviceable and perfectly safe wet and dry berths for simultaneous use in Lorient alone, neatly arranged in three separate structures named K1, K2, and K3, respectively, for their location on the Kéroman Peninsula. From early 1941 well into 1944, some fifteen thousand workers conscripted from countries as distant as the Netherlands, Portugal, and Morocco, but also drawn from the local French population eager for employment in an otherwise depressed economy, labored around the clock, pouring concrete, stringing electrical wires, installing fuel and water lines, and designing workshops, ammunition depots, and torpedo-storage areas, in addition to setting up the huge array of machinery and equipment needed to overhaul tired U-boats after their missions. The reinforced concrete roofs of the pens, up to twenty-five feet thick, could withstand even the deadliest multiton bombs the Allies had at their disposal. In fact, they have withstood the teeth of time to this very day, servicing among other functions France’s postwar nuclear submarine fleet. As one recent visitor mused, six decades later, the enormous, monolithic structures still hulk over the town centers from which they were gouged—horrifying in their intent, incredible in their accomplishment, and still among the greatest construction feats of all time."⁴

In the meantime, the boats’ weary crews recovered from their missions and prepared for their next one either with their families and friends back in Germany or, if service duties granted too little time for the train trip home, at nearby seaside resort areas lovingly dubbed U-boat pastures. With typical German thoroughness, even the bordellos in Lorient’s Rue de Sully were tightly regulated, distinguishing neatly between Wehrmacht and O.T. visitors and closing at 10:30 p.m. sharp. In addition, every female service provider was required to hand her customers printed cards bearing her name as well as the date and hour of the transaction. Soldiers and sailors had to keep these cards for at least a month in case the base’s health staff needed to trace the source of medical complications resulting from such encounters.⁵

Given the very real menace the U-boats posed to Allied shipping, it remains somewhat implausible that the British and later the Americans as well failed to mount a heartier effort than they did to prevent or hinder construction of the bunkers, even in the face of concentrated German antiaircraft artillery and Luftwaffe fighter units stationed in the region. For, once completed, the shelters would be virtually unassailable bastions. Indeed, the U-boats’ primary moments of exposure to mines or airborne attack came while they were approaching and moving up the estuaries to the ports, and during the hour or so it took at Lorient to lift them out of the water and into their berths by means of a sophisticated cradle mechanism. The same vulnerability existed of course when the boats put out to sea—a good reason why they usually left in groups of two or three with surface escorts and air cover before carefully dispersing once they had gained the open ocean and waters deep enough to dive. Over the course of the war, the Germans would record some three hundred air raids against the Lorient installations, yet not a single U-boat came to grief because of the raids, while the yard personnel serviced inbound boats and restored them to frontline readiness on no fewer than 492 occasions, more than at any other Atlantic base.⁶ Meanwhile, Allied bombs reduced the once lovely city center and adjacent suburbs to dust and rubble. While the U-boat pens remained fully operational and additional bunkers protected the labor force in the yards from most harm, Allied bombs had destroyed fully 80 percent of the dwellings in Lorient by early 1943, whereupon both the French and the German authorities agreed to evacuate the rest of the population not employed at the base.⁷ One may well wonder whether the hapless French civilians who called ports like Lorient their home grew to blame the Allies or the Germans more for their misfortune—provided they did not hold their own leaders accountable after the inglorious calamity of 1940 when France fell to German military might.

While individual German submarines entered the captured French ports as early as the summer of 1940 for improvised repairs, overhauls, and other services, the permanent transfer of entire squadrons and their staffs to France was not concluded until well into 1941 and 1942 as more and more bomb-proof bunkers became available. The first boat of the Second Flotilla to benefit from the protective cover of the pens at Lorient was U-123 on August 25, 1941. Besides the Second, eventually another squadron, the Tenth, would be established at Lorient by early 1942. Typically, a newly commissioned boat would perform its shakedown and training exercises in the Baltic Sea before being sent out on its first combat patrol from Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, or Norway. At the end of the mission, assuming it had not been sunk, the boat would enter its designated French base and join its regular squadron mates there, usually never to ply home waters again.

The composition of the squadrons at any given instant was one of extreme fluidity. As boats were lost at sea, others would arrive to take their place. Only a third of the boats attached to a particular flotilla tended to be in port at any given moment while the remainder would be in transit to or from their assigned operational areas or actually engaging the enemy. Occasionally an older and exhausted boat, perhaps no longer fully seaworthy after extended and meritorious duty at the front, would be relocated to the Baltic to join the training commands there or would be decommissioned and cannibalized for parts. For example, while ninety-one different boats belonged to the Second U-Boat Flotilla at one time or another over the span of the war, it is doubtful if ever more than a dozen of them were in port together at the same moment under the watchful eye of their overall commander, Admiral Karl Dönitz, who temporarily transferred his headquarters to a chateau in the Lorient suburb of Kernevel from November 1940 to March 1942 before relocating to Paris and eventually back to Berlin because of the increased Allied air threat.⁸

The Second Flotilla amassed an outstanding record during World War II, particularly in the first three-and-a-half years of the conflict. In fact, Lorient became informally known as the home of the aces inasmuch as no fewer than seven of the top ten most successful German submarines of the war sported the stylized runic emblem of the squadron on their conning towers. Those seven boats alone sank a total of 298 enemy vessels between them, an almost unbelievable average of 42 ships per submarine, for a combined toll of 1.5 million tons of enemy shipping. They also damaged 22 additional vessels displacing some 150,000 tons.⁹ Little wonder, there would be many ceremonies in Lorient after which proud skippers and crews could show off brand-new Iron and Knight’s Crosses for everyone to admire.

Did all of this imply that the personnel of the Second U-Boat Flotilla possessed professional know-how, courage, a fighting spirit, and perhaps even luck to a degree that was missing or retarded in other units operating from French homeports? Hardly so. What distinguished the Second, and its sister squadron the Tenth, or for that matter the Twelfth Flotilla down the coast at Bordeaux, from other German squadrons? The difference had much less to do with the training of its officers and crews, or the leadership provided by their flotilla commanders, or the particular circumstances of their bases, than with the kinds of boats that made up the squadrons and the operational zones and tasks assigned to them.

Beginning in the 1930s, Germany designed, built, and commissioned in huge numbers essentially three different types of submarines, besides specialty boats for purposes of mine-laying and mid-ocean refueling and resupply, not to mention the revolutionary but never truly deployed Electro-boats of the Type XXI and XXIII designs late in the war. The smallest class of these mass-produced boats, designated Type II, consisted of forty-eight coastal boats with limited range, endurance, and weaponry. They participated in operations around the British Isles, in the Baltic Sea and, after transfer by way of the Danube, also in the Black Sea. Few were built after 1940, and most ended up in various training commands as the war grew old.

By far, the most numerous class of submarines Germany built and deployed in World War II, some 612 boats altogether, belonged to the Type VII design in its several variations, with its sleek lines and salient characteristics made famous in Wolfgang Petersen’s motion picture Das Boot based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel of the same title. Sometimes called Atlantic boats of about 850 tons displacement when submerged, these boats featured up to fourteen torpedoes along with ship-ship and antiaircraft artillery, a range of sixty-five hundred to ninety-five hundred nautical miles, a top surface speed of seventeen knots, and a crew of some forty-four officers and men.¹⁰ They were the U-Boat Command’s true workhorses: dependable, resilient, maneuverable, quick divers, and overall well suited for independent or wolfpack warfare west and north of the British Isles, along the great-circle convoy routes from the New World to the Old, in the Arctic Ocean, and in the Mediterranean. Refueled and reprovisioned at sea, or economically handled, they could and did even operate against shipping along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Canada. Men such as Günther Prien, Otto Kretschmer, Jochen Schepke, and Erich Topp, besides dozens of other aces, grew to master this weapon to perfection. Their principal forward bases were Brest (First and Ninth Flotilla), La Pallice/La Rochelle (Third), and Saint Nazaire (Sixth and Seventh), all in France; Bergen (Eleventh), Trondheim (Thirteenth), and Narvik (Fourteenth), all in Norway; as well as Salamis (Twenty-Third) and La Spezia and Toulon (Twenty-Ninth) in the Mediterranean.

This leaves submarines of the Type IX class, the third group of mass-produced German boats and the ones exclusively allocated to the Second, Tenth, and Twelfth Flotillas in Lorient and Bordeaux. These vessels were conceived and designed from the outset for independent long-distance operations that called for endurance rather than the kind of agility and close teamwork so crucial in convoy battles. Considerably bigger and bulkier than their Type VII counterparts, they were the ones that would decimate American shipping along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Caribbean in 1942, threaten Allied ship traffic in the Central and South Atlantic throughout the war, and a handful of them even operated with remarkable success alongside Japanese submarines in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Little surprise, then, that these boats often headed the statistics of enemy tonnage destroyed as they would encounter juicier targets and scantier enemy opposition in their theaters of operation compared with the fierce convoy struggles in the waters north and west of the British Isles or the altogether disappointing performance of Germany’s sixty-four Type VII boats dispatched to the Mediterranean after the fall of 1941.

Depending on individual features in their four different design variations labeled IX-A through IX-D, Type IX boats were some 235 feet long, 20 feet wide, drew a little over 14 feet of water, and displaced between twelve hundred and eighteen hundred tons when submerged. They carried up to twenty-five torpedoes that could be launched from six separate tubes, four forward and two aft. A 10.5-centimeter (cm) gun just forward of the conning tower on the main deck could take on surface targets, while a 3.7-cm gun and up to four 2-cm automatic weapons arrayed on platforms on and behind the conning tower provided moderate protection against aircraft. Two 4,400-horsepower diesels allowed for up to nineteen knots on the surface while battery-powered electric motors could move the boat at speeds of up to eight knots when submerged. An extended range of some 10,000 nautical miles (up to 23,700 miles for Type IX-D boats operating in the Indian Ocean and the Far East) at an economical speed of ten to twelve knots allowed Type IX boats to roam the oceans for months at a time—a range that could be extended even farther by mid-ocean refueling and reprovisioning from German surface vessels early in the war, from specially designed U-boat tankers (Type XIV boats), or from captured Allied merchantmen.

While four officers and forty-four enlisted men made up the standard crew strength, typically additional personnel embarked on these extended missions, such as a medical officer, midshipmen-in-training, war correspondents, and so-called confirmands—officers slated to command a boat of their own but in need of acquiring additional hands-on experience. The boat’s captain typically held the rank of Lieutenant Commander (Korvettenkapitän), Lieutenant (Kapitänleutnant) or Lieutenant (jg) (Oberleutnant),¹¹ with more junior officers functioning as the First Watch Officer (I.W.O.), Second Watch Officer (II.W.O.), and Chief Engineer (L.I.). During routine operations the watch personnel and lookouts on the bridge might also be entrusted to the most senior and therefore most experienced and respected petty officer of the nautical branch on board, invariably designated as the navigator and functioning as a Third Watch Officer. In German practice during World War II, an officer who had trained on a particular boat design, usually Type VII or Type IX, would remain assigned to that kind of boat throughout his career, with a few Type VII captains upgrading to become Type IX or Type XXI skippers late in the conflict.

The naming and numbering system of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat program defies easy classification and remains baffling for anyone but experts in the field, for the numbers were allocated on the basis of the shipyards that constructed the boats in various subseries rather than in any chronological fashion or strictly according to design type. They also included boats that were ordered but never built, completed, delivered, or commissioned. For example, the Type IX boats Oskar Kusch served on carried the following numbers (builder in parentheses): U-37–44, 64–8, 103–11, 122–31, 153–60, 171–200, 841–81, 889 (AG Weser, Bremen); U-161–70, 801–6 (Deschimag, Bremen); and U-501–50 (Deutsche Werft AG, Hamburg). Any numbers before, between, or after these belonged to other designs, mostly Types II, VII, XXI, and XXIII, with boats coming from a total of nineteen different yards.¹²

Among the earliest boats attached to the Second U-Boat Flotilla first in Wilhelmshaven and then in Lorient was U-103. Placed on order by the Kriegsmarine in May 1938, construction began on September 6, 1939, at the AG Weser works at Bremen that specialized in larger boats. By the spring of 1940, just as France was being overrun by Hitler’s armored and mechanized divisions, the core of U-103’s future crew found its way to Bremen to acquaint themselves with their new command while proud yard personnel put the finishing touches on the sleek, brand-new vessel. On July 5, 1940, the boat’s first skipper, Lieutenant Commander Viktor Schütze, presided over the solemn commissioning ceremony and then took U-103 through the Kiel Canal into the Baltic where he supervised the mandatory diving drills and tactical exercises that would transform a raw crew and an untested boat into an efficient fighting machine ready to engage the enemy.

Schütze, who had entered the navy in 1925 and been recruited by the head of the U-boat Command Karl Dönitz soon after the rebirth of the submarine service in 1935, had by this time become a virtual legend in the U-boat force on account of his leadership qualities and his outward appearance of a burly but kind and considerate sea-bear of a man. After peacetime experience in Type II coastal boats, Schütze assumed command of U-25 at the outset of hostilities. Conceived as a slightly smaller precursor (Type IA) to the later Type IX series, U-25 along with its sister U-26 would operate to the west of the British Isles, in the Bay of Biscay, and off Portugal. There, on three patrols between late 1939 and May 1940, Schütze established himself as a competent, careful, and above all successful skipper, sinking seven enemy merchantmen of more than 33,000 tons.

By September 1940 Schütze’s new boat, U-103, had completed its training routine in the Baltic and officially became a front boat in the Second Flotilla. Undoubtedly the flotilla leader, Lieutenant Commander Heinz Fischer, was more than pleased to see a fresh boat under such a distinguished skipper join his command. Schütze would not disappoint him: over the next ten months, from October 1940 until July 1941, on four patrols totaling 201 days at sea, Schütze and his men would challenge and surpass many a record. During these Happy Times in the history of the German U-boat campaign, with France out of the war, Italy a new ally, and the United States still on the sidelines, all circumstances favored the stealthy hunters as Britain and its few friends struggled to keep the Allied war effort alive. Out in the Atlantic this meant convoys plodding along with minimal cover from surface escorts or from the air, and many vessels simply sailed all by themselves from port to port with little more than a prayer for protection. U-103 made the most of it by dispatching no fewer than twenty-seven vessels worth 142,000 tons of shipping to the bottom of the sea—an average of one vessel for every week at sea.¹³ Viktor Schütze himself—his last name, appropriately, translates as marksman or hunter into English—received first the Knight’s Cross and later the Oak Leaves for his brilliant exploits, with other suitable decorations going to the members of his crew.

When U-103 returned to Lorient from its fourth mission in July 12, 1941, Schütze may have had a notion that his days as a U-boat skipper were numbered. Seven demanding patrols since the outbreak of the war, with additional service in peacetime prior to that, must have taken their toll even on someone as tough and resilient as he. Moreover, Dönitz may well have felt, after losing his top aces Otto Kretschmer, Günther Prien, and Jochen Schepke earlier that spring, and with the Russian campaign reducing prospects for an early cessation of hostilities, that good men of Schütze’s caliber should be retained safely ashore to teach and inspire the next generation of U-boat officers. In Schütze’s case, a special reward awaited him as he now assumed overall command of the squadron in which he had served since becoming skipper of U-25 back in 1939. The Second U-Boat Flotilla could hardly have found a more competent leader.

Thus Schütze settled into his new role of squadron commander in the flotilla’s comfortable quarters ashore in those heady days when the Atlantic campaign seemed virtually won and Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, under way since June 22, promised to extend German hegemony deep into the Eurasian continent. About this time, two officers reported for duty aboard U-103 to replace those moving on to other assignments. One of them was Kapitänleutnant Werner Winter, to whom Schütze handed over command of the now famous boat on July 15, 1941.¹⁴ Winter, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old native of Hamburg with deeply set, expressive eyes that suggested a well of inner strength and determination along with a sense of human compassion, was no newcomer to Lorient. In fact, all he had to do on that day was to move from his staff position at U-Boat Command headquarters in the suburb of Kerneval to the bustling naval base on the Kéroman Peninsula. He had seen U-103 depart for and return from its patrols on several occasions and closely followed its exploits at sea, perhaps wishing he were out there with it rather than being tied to his important but unspectacular responsibilities on Admiral Dönitz’s operational staff. A member of Crew 30 and thus five years junior to Viktor Schütze in terms of his naval career, Winter, too, was a veteran of the U-boat service since its rebirth in 1935. By 1937 he had risen to command U-22, a Type II boat. In the opening weeks of the war he and his crew had twice surprised and attacked Allied submarines on the surface, only to be frustrated and dismayed when their torpedoes malfunctioned due to faulty fuses and detonated short of their intended targets.¹⁵ Still, Dönitz knew a good man when he met one, and in November 1939 put Winter on his staff to help direct the ever-growing packs of gray wolves sailing against the enemy. Now the time had come for Winter to demonstrate anew his mettle as a leader in a frontline capacity. Dönitz was certainly justified in assuming that Winter and his men would make and remain a winning team.

The other officer reporting for duty aboard U-103 in that pregnant summer of 1941 was its new second watch officer, a handsome, lanky, boyish-looking Leutnant zur See recently turned twenty-three, who had never been to Lorient before. His name was Oskar Kusch.

CHAPTER 2

LIEUTENANT KUSCH

ONE CAN ONLY SPECULATE about the range of thoughts, impressions, feelings, hopes, and apprehensions that pressed in on Oskar Kusch as he wrapped up his previous assignment as a company officer with the Second U-Boat Training Division at sleepy Gotenhafen on the Baltic Sea, today’s Gdynia in Poland. From there he proceeded by train, with stops in his native Berlin and the French capital, through the lush, deceptively peaceful, sun-swept countryside of western Europe to his destination in southern Brittany. Since U-103 was still at sea when Kusch received his transfer orders effective June 25, 1941, and would have to undergo an extended overhaul once safely returned to Lorient, Kusch was able to insert a brief stayover in Berlin. There were of course his mother and his father who, to their son’s profound distress, had divorced three years before, with his mother remarrying, but who still lived in the upscale southwestern city sections of Schöneberg and Steglitz, respectively. He could link up with childhood friends, classmates from his school days, and others whom he had met as an active member and group leader in the youth movement. Some of them could be expected to be in Berlin or visiting family between frontline assignments as most of them, too, were now serving in various branches of Germany’s armed forces. Kusch would also begin to devote no small attention to Inge von Foris, a young, bright, and stunningly attractive student of art history at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, today’s Humboldt University, who would in due course agree to become his fiancée.¹

Even though serious air raids against the German capital would not commence until two years later, Berlin in that summer of 1941 was anything but a calm and peaceful oasis compared to the busy but boring schedule Kusch had just escaped in provincial Gotenhafen. The campaign against the Soviet Union, so very recently unleashed and seemingly so promising with its initial triumphs for Germany’s armies and air force, dominated the talk of the city everywhere and ruled activities at its hectic train stations, airfields, and turnpikes. While groups of individuals, soldiers, and entire units kept moving to the eastern front day and night, along with trainloads full of munitions, rations, and a thousand other items necessary for an army to fight what would become the fiercest land campaign ever waged in military combat, Kusch must have wondered and worried how the unprovoked onslaught on the Soviet Union would affect Germany’s military fortunes, and especially the naval war against Britain, until then Germany’s only, but uncompromisingly committed, adversary in the West.

All indications suggest that Kusch went through those midsummer weeks of 1941 in a state of deeply conflicting emotions and mental anguish. While undoubtedly cherishing and looking forward to the challenge of frontline duty in the glamorous U-boat service as a matter of personal ambition, professional fulfillment, and patriotic responsibility, he had also grown to loathe the ruling Nazi regime from the bottom of his heart, not least the imbecility of Nazi ideology, the mindless squashing of individual freedoms and liberties, the hateful anti-Jewish myths and measures, and the mediocrity of its leaders. Now the assault on the Soviet Union only confirmed for Kusch that Adolf Hitler was indeed an irresponsible madman beyond the reach of reason. Kusch had become convinced that, if history was any guide, far from assuring German leadership and hegemony over Europe, the newly unleashed Crusade against Bolshevism stood to envelop his country in the end in nothing but death, destruction, despair, and defeat.

Only his closest friends knew of Kusch’s implacable aversion to the National Socialist regime. To most observers he seemed like any other young naval officer—bright, eager, and well qualified for any assignment ashore or afloat. Indeed, he fit in most respects the characteristics of the average German naval officer recruit in the 1930s: born and raised in a sizable Prussian city not far from the sea; his parents Protestants and commoners, members of the middle class. In addition, the young cadet was well educated, highly motivated, and physically fit; aware and supportive of the traditions of the naval officer corps; a supporter of Hitler’s takeover on conservative grounds of order, normalcy and national revival, but with some misgivings over Nazi methods and the more radical aspects of the party program; and eager to serve the fatherland in a prestigious position that offered early responsibilities and adventures in a ‘romantic’ setting.² This composite picture appears remarkably applicable to the young man who moved into U-103’s officer quarters that summer, except that misgivings would have been an understatement when it came to Kusch’s assessment of Nazi leadership, society, and ideological pretensions. How did Kusch arrive at this outlook on life?

Oskar-Heinz August Wilhelm Kusch was born on April 6, 1918, in Berlin, one month after Russia’s withdrawal from World War I and just as the Kaiser’s armies prepared to open their last offensives on the western front in a desperate gamble to gain the decisive victory that had eluded them since the debacle of the Schlieffen Plan four years before.³ His father, somewhat confusingly listed in the records as Oskar Heinz Kusch, Oskarheinz Kusch, Heinz Kusch, or simply Direktor Kusch, was born on May 5, 1882, and provided well for the family as an insurance company executive.⁴ His mother, Erna Auguste Kusch, née Kohls, was twelve years younger than her husband and apparently pursued no separate professional career of her own besides looking after their comfortable apartment at Berchtesgadener Strasse 26 in fashionable Berlin-Schöneberg.⁵

Oskar would remain an only child, a fact that might account for a certain aloofness vis-à-vis others later in life and a tendency to enjoy his own company, even though he did have numerous friends and never became overly shy or a loner. He grew up a handsome child and young adult, lanky and above medium height, with an athletic build. His face was even and friendly, with alert eyes, a well-proportioned nose, slightly fleshy lips, chubby cheeks, and somewhat large and protruding ears. He kept his full, blond hair neatly parted on the left side and longer than seems to have been the fashion in the 1930s and 1940s. In pictures snapped when he was a student in school he dressed with care, even wearing a tie on occasion, and later looked fit and smart in a naval officer’s uniform. It was clear his parents loved and cared for him very much. He in turn did everything to reciprocate their affection and justify their expectations.⁶

Obviously Oskar would not remember personally and only learn later the bewildering circumstances under which World War I had come to a close in revolutionary Berlin and elsewhere, including the military defeat on the western front and the ignominious armistice that followed; the Kaiser’s abdication and departure into Dutch exile; the tumultuous days in the capital as the Second Reich gave way to the Weimar Republic amid unfamiliar violence and intense anxiety over Germany’s destiny; the fear that the red revolution might spill from Russia westward and grip the nation in a terrible civil war; the universally abhorred limitations and humiliations imposed by the Versailles Treaty; and the uprooting and dislocation of vast groups of people that accompany all great national catastrophes before normalcy and stability can return.

For the Kusch family, the transition from the conservative and in some respects even reactionary political, social, and cultural system under the Kaiser to the yet untried democratic and liberal republican arrangements after 1918 does not appear to have caused the kind of traumatic apprehensions so many other Germans expressed and endured at the time—and this despite the fact that Herr Kusch had been severely wounded in the war and would never fully recover his health. True, as good patriots they sensed their country had received a terrible blow and that it would take time and patience to repair the damage inflicted on its dignity and sovereignty. Common sense, if nothing else, required the restoration of the rule of law as soon as practicable, and no government in Germany after 1919 could expect popular support if it failed to express outrage over the amputation of so much territory, over the reduction of the German military to virtual impotence, and over the painful strain the reparations placed on economic recovery.

Still, for the Kusch family, few of these transformations were likely to translate into gloom and misery. The family would be able to enjoy their lives, their personal possessions and property, their social position, and the continued assurance of economic comfort. As members of the upper middle class they stood poised to play a formative role in the young republic now that the pillars of the old regime—the monarchy, the nobility, big business, and the military establishment—had come under a cloud. Above all, the new realities promised increased opportunities for personal growth, individual liberties, social elasticity, and exciting cultural experiments hardly imaginable under the old. Not least, as an active and ranking member of the Masonic movement in Berlin and as revealed in his postwar testimony, Herr Kusch greeted the new intellectual and cultural environment with relief and enthusiasm.⁷ In short, the Kusches, by temperament and by persuasion, found themselves in harmony with the unaccustomed openness of Weimar society, welcomed its atmosphere of liberality, and resolved to raise their son in the newfound spirit of freedom, individualism, generosity, and toleration so pervasive in postwar Berlin, as long as such values did not conflict with basic human decency, dignity, or love of country. As his mother once stated, as parents they brought up their son in a liberal and democratic sense because we ourselves embraced those values.⁸

When young Oskar entered his neighborhood elementary school in 1924, the Weimar Republic had just weathered the tough period of hyperinflation of the previous year and embarked on five years of economic expansion and relative political stability under its inspired leader, Gustav Stresemann. Extremism, both from the right and the left, seemed under control, and the future for the young boy and his family looked increasingly bright and heartening. For his part, Oskar displayed high intellectual and academic promise already in his first years at school, anticipating that mixture of curiosity, thirst for learning, pursuit of truth, and independence of judgment that would mark him for the remainder of his life. In addition, he began to lay the foundations for his excellence as an amateur artist, particularly in drawing and painting, no doubt encouraged by his parents who were unlikely to stifle their son’s creative urges given the family’s shared values and Berlin’s stimulating ambiance as one the world’s avant-garde cultural centers during the fifteen years of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, Oskar’s sketches and drawings that have survived from his navy years, invariably powerful in their expression, inspiration, and attention to detail, imply an artistic talent and