I read that Admiral Doenitz was one of the few German commanders to openly argue with Hitler and did not cooperate in turning in Jews. How did he get away with it?
He got away with it because it was easy for him to.
It’s true that Dƶnitz argued openly with Hitler more than once, and he wasn’t exactly turning in Jews to the machinery of the Final Solution either. But unlike what that might sound like, neither were things that he had to ‘get away with’.
It’s a myth that arguing with Hitler was a dangerous action
- never in the entire history of the Reich did any military officer get punished for arguing with Hitler. Indeed, fevered and harsh arguments were old custom of the Prussian officer corps, and Hitler didn’t take any severe measures towards someone arguing against him. If you made an impression on him as an obstructive, unreasonable person, it might have harmed your career prospects, but that’s far as it went.
On the other hand, being able to argue with Hitler required one critical quality not everyone had- an unbending willpower. Hitler had an inexorable will, great talent in speaking, and a ferocious temper: the end result was when an argument roused his anger, he could and would utterly grind to pulp anyone arguing with him that did not have an ironclad will of his own. Arguing with Hitler successfully took a certain temperament- akin to a Manstein or a Reichenau, rather than a Kluge.
Dƶnitz had that temperament. A veteran submariner from the Great War, a man of strong convictions and strong will, Dƶnitz was entirely willing to hold his ground and argue a point with Hitler- though it’s false that he was one of the few German commanders to do it. Such characters willing to argue with the FĆ¼hrer were aplenty in the German officer corps.
General der Panzertruppe Dietrich von Saucken pictured- famous for, among other things, slapping the table and announcing ‘I have no intention, Herr Hitler, of placing myself under the orders of a Gauleiter’ when Hitler attempted to place him under the command of the Gauleiter of Danzig in 1945. Saucken’s story is certainly the most famous- but he was far from being the only German officer with the will to stand straight.
As of turning in Jews… alright. It’s true that Dƶnitz had no real contribution to the Holocaust, and did not hand over any Jews to its machinery. But… let’s stop and think for a second here. What Jews was Dƶnitz going to hand over?
The man was head of the Kriegsmarine. The one branch of the German military with no ground presence(except in the tail end of the war with the several naval infantry formations hastily formed from surplus navy personnel), no occupational duties, and thus no access to any Jews. What Jews could Dƶnitz turn over, even if he wanted? The only Jews within Dƶnitz’s ‘power’, so to speak, were the captured Allied naval personnel who happened to be Jewish, but almost all personnel held by the Kriegsmarine were Western Allied personnel and Western Allied prisoners of war who happened to be Jewish were held to the exact same standards as other Western Allied prisoners of war and by and large treated according to the Geneva Conventions- meaning that the only Jews Dƶnitz could send to the machinery of the Holocaust, he wasn’t required to send anyway.
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