Naval Officers Under Hitler: The Men of Crew 34

This book was made possible through the dedication of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1945.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 1991 by Eric C. Rust

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published as Naval Officers under Hitler: The Story of Crew 34 by Praeger Publishers in 1991.

First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2017.

ISBN: 978-1-68247-252-3 (eBook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Rust, Eric C., date

Naval officers under Hitler: the story of Crew 34 / Eric C. Rust.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Germany. Kriegsmarine—Biography. 2. Germany. Kriegsmarine—Officers. 3. Germany. Kriegsmarine—History—World War, 1939–1945. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, German. 5. Soldiers—Germany—Biography. I. Title.

V64.G3R87 1991

359’.0092’243 [B]—dc2090-43918

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

252423222120191817987654321

First printing

CONTENTS

TABLES

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1 INTRODUCTION

2 AN UNEVEN HERITAGE

3 DESTINATION DÄNHOLM

4 APPRENTICESHIP

5 WAR: THE MILITARY RECORD

6 WAR: THE HUMAN RESPONSE

7 NEW BEGINNINGS, NEW HORIZONS

8 CALMER WATERS

9 CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

TABLES

1 Strength and Composition of selected Crews, 1930s

2 Crew 34 on Active Duty in Navy and Naval Air Force

3 Crew 34’s Casualties, 1939–45: Cause of Death

4 Crew 34’s Casualties, 1939–45: Year of Death

5 Crew 34’s Casualties, 1939–45: Location

6 Crew 34’s Losses, 1939–45: Analysis by Service Branch

7 Crew 34: Losses, Including Prisoners of War, 1939–44

8 Crew 34: survivors’ Place of Residence in 1954

9 Crew 34: Survivors’ Occupational Profile in 1954

10 Crew 34: Original Specialization of Reactivated Officers

11 Crew 34: Reenlistments, Analysis by Previous Civilian Career

12 Crew 34: Final Rank of Reactivated Officers

PREFACE

TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Twenty-five years have elapsed since this work first appeared in 1991. Its reception both by experts in naval history and by the wider public on both sides of the Atlantic has been gratifying. Besides being frequently quoted as a reference source of primary information and analysis in the pertinent historical literature, reviewers and commentators have stressed the unique, unusual, and pioneering nature of my undertaking. No other collective biography of this nature, grounded in personal interviews and thorough archival research, could ever be written again because the potential subjects of such a study would all be dead; and no other historian has yet endeavored to establish and evaluate the experience of a distinct cohort of naval officers, German or otherwise, over the course of their entire lives.

When the Naval Institute Press approached me about issuing a paperback version of this work, we quickly reached agreement to republish the entire original text with only this preface added to update readers on the affairs of Crew 34 in the winter of their lives. Considering the extensive feedback I have received from surviving members of the Crew, from a broad and diverse spectrum of other readers over the years, and from fellow historians, I am satisfied that this work contains no documentable errors of fact. Incorporating minor new details that have come to my attention over the past quarter century, or an occasional episode or anecdote for a pinch of spice, would have enriched this book in no essential way and possibly would have diluted and polluted its narrative.

Moreover, I am persuaded that my interpretation of the evidence I accumulated remains fundamentally sound and has been borne out by subsequent inquiries to the extent that they have touched on the issues I raised and tried to settle. For this reason I have chosen not to update the original bibliography. Still, whereas the memoir literature continues to offer mostly stale and familiar fare, readers should feel invited to consult recent publications by such experts as Keith Bird, Jost Dülffer, Michael Hadley, Holger Herwig, Timothy Mulligan, Douglas Peifer, Werner Rahn, Michael Salewski, Thomas Scheerer, Lawrence Sondhaus, Charles Thomas, Heinrich Walle, and others. Of course, these scholars have asked different questions than I did and have looked at different sources. They appear less interested in studying continuity in the lives of German naval officers in a longitudinal fashion and more in their actions and attitudes at specific junctures in their careers, in operational history, in selected branches such as the U-boat arm, and in comparative approaches. On the whole they are fascinated by the men’s political, ideological, and cultural world beyond their professional performance, and, of course, in service traditions maintained, interrupted, or abandoned over the lifespans of the different navies Germany has fielded since the nineteenth century. Their research, their findings, and their judgments are for the most part enlightening, sometimes fascinating, and even bold.

In this broader context, the story of Crew 34 remains in a genre all its own and should continue to grant readers, pars pro toto, insights into the collective experience of German naval officers in the twentieth century not to be found in other works.

When this book was first published, the surviving members of Crew 34 were about to welcome two events they probably had not anticipated witnessing in their remaining lifetimes: German reunification and the end of the Cold War. While none of them had elected to live in former East Germany, their commitment to a united fatherland had been profound and unquestioned since 1945, not least among those who had been born east of the Iron Curtain or in formerly German territories now absorbed into Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and other neighboring countries. By the same measure, those who had resumed their former careers in the West German Navy after the postwar hiatus, even if long retired from active duty, must have felt relief and satisfaction at the notion that their service to Germany and NATO had paid tangible dividends. In short, if they had for some decades entered calmer waters professionally and privately, for these survivors, life at age seventy-five and beyond took on at last a placidity that few phases of their experiences had offered earlier.

In 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with an average age of eighty, no fewer than twenty-six couples, seven widowers, and eleven widows of Crew 34 members came together for four days in May at a luxury hotel between Hamburg and Hannover to celebrate their sixtieth service anniversary.¹ Four other former officers could not attend for health or family reasons but transmitted greetings, as did the Inspector-General of the German Navy and the president of the Naval Officers’ Association (MOV). The program adopted a routine familiar from previous reunions: welcoming remarks by the meeting’s organizer, Captain (ret.) Kurt Diggins, followed by some organizational business such as designating a new Crew secretary and specifying the amount to be donated annually in the name of the Crew to two naval memorials on Kiel Bay; several festive dinners with the opportunity to enjoy a turn on the dance floor afterward; an emotional wreath-laying ceremony at the nearby military cemetery at Essel where Josef Gördes, a former Crew comrade, had been laid to rest after losing his life as a battalion commander in ground combat at the very close of World War II; excursions to local natural attractions and historical sites, including an organ concert at a famous Cistercian monastery; and, of course, occasions for renewing and extending old friendships over lunches and afternoon refreshments and remembering those who had fallen in World War II or had died since.

Two formal speeches, given at the reunion and subsequently distributed to the attendees, are especially revealing in capturing the mindsets of these former officers and their families as they reflected on eighty years of German history and their individual and collective places in it. The first was presented at the cemetery in Essel by retired Rear Admiral Erich Topp, the Crew’s most highly decorated wartime U-boat ace. While dwelling on his comrade Gördes’ leadership and deliberate sacrifice that enabled thousands of German refugees to escape from the clutches of murdering and raping Red Army troops in the eastern territories at the end of the war and thus repeating the standard naval version originally enshrined by Grand Admiral Dönitz of why Germany had to fight to the bitter end, Topp also elaborated on the eternal conflict between one’s soldierly duty and the moral obligation of a military leader not to sacrifice his men in hopeless situations. Straddling that borderline between life and death, he stated, our dead gave their lives for the fatherland, whatever that may have meant for them individually. Liberally quoting poetry from Aeschylus to Gottfried Benn and German World War II naval propaganda, Topp bemoaned his inability to detect an overriding purpose to human existence and noted that one can ultimately only ask questions, but one should not expect answers. Life boils down to an interplay of hidden forces, a web of moving parts impossible to disentangle. All human beings can do is to meditate upon their significance and to allow our dreams to ride their thread. Reflecting the West’s experience since the ancient Greeks, our fallen comrades still lived in an epoch that worshipped the myth of power and glorified the warrior. In retrospect that notion is comforting for us who live in times of changing values.

In contrast to the metaphysical musings of his comrade, retired Vice Admiral Heinz Kühnle, a former Inspector-General of the West German Navy, delivered the other major speech at the close of the meeting by seeking to place the experiences of the Crew within the broader contours of German history since the 1930s. In contrast to certain findings of the current study, he claimed that, we joined up to preserve peace in freedom for our people. We were selected for our leadership potential and trained to embrace a code of ethics grounded in the classical virtues of the West first enumerated by Plato: wisdom, courage and level-headedness, reinforced by the Prussian soldierly qualities of duty, loyalty, responsibility, obedience, and camaraderie. While becoming members of a sworn community of mutual trust and respect, Kühnle emphasized that every individual member still retained his independence of thought, judgment and action.

Kühnle’s take on World War II remained thoroughly traditional and surprisingly uncritical. In their very language his remarks seemed taken from the familiar apologetic literature on the subject. The war simply broke out; neither he nor his comrades were enthusiastic about it; all of us fought faithfully to the bitter end bound to our soldierly oath until, after a struggle of titanic dimensions and disproportionally enormous sacrifices, we could no longer match the overwhelming superiority of the enemy. Only when returning from captivity afterward, at a time of misery and hunger, faced with utter nothingness, bitter and disappointed, would he and his comrades come to realize how badly we had been misused by our ideologically blinded political leadership. As one of Kühnle’s Crew comrades put it in those times, all one could do was to have faith, work hard, and remain silent. In the end, we can look back on the past sixty years with satisfaction and a modicum of pride as we have remained true to our convictions through the ups and downs of changing times and have stood our man even in the dark years of German history.

An octogenarian may be forgiven for seeking out the brighter aspects of his life’s trajectory and for not offending the memory or questioning the sacrifice of fallen comrades while sharing a table with their widows. Still, it remains remarkable and disturbing that the central trauma in their past has remained the war—the lost war, the comrades who would never come back, and the painful years of reconstruction—rather than the Crew’s decade-long association with the world’s perhaps most evil and criminal regime ever. True soul-searching and coming to grips with the darker angels of our nature sounds and looks different. Perhaps Erich Topp was hinting at this inadequacy and at his comrades’ deeper entanglements with the temptations and forces of fate when he reminded his audience, There is unbearably much that we do not know, and we have many reasons to contemplate who and what we are, where we are coming from and where we are headed. Effort and success cannot be placed into a clear and simple relationship to one another, nor can life and death.

After this memorable reunion in 1994, the survivors of Crew 34 kept meeting annually, but predictably attendance declined steadily. Kühnle and Topp would live to greet the new millennium, but both were dead by 2005. Funerals and obituaries increasingly outpaced and outweighed formal and informal reunions.

Remarkably, as of this writing, one veteran of Crew 34 is still alive in picturesque Ingelheim on the Rhine River. As the town’s news service reported on August 18, 2016, former U-boat commander Horst Wilhelm Kessler (U 704, U 985), a leading figure in Germany’s pharmaceutical industry after World War II, had observed his 102nd birthday the day before in the company of his family, neighbors, and friends.² In decent health, enjoying full mental agility, and just back from a cruise to the Canary Islands, Kessler still reports to his favorite wine shop at least once a week and is described as charming, happy and always good for a joke. Only the year before, at age 101, he had traveled to Bavaria to attend as its oldest member present a reunion of former U-boat personnel organized by VDU, the umbrella organization for German U-boat veterans.³ Still answering the call of the sea while reminiscing in the company of comrades on the central drama of his life may well bestow on Kessler the sense of peace and closure so many others were denied.

—Eric C. Rust

November 2016

NOTES

1.Information about the reunion from 60 Jahre Crew 34: Bericht über das Treffen im Silence-Hotel Heide-Kröpke vom 08. – 11. Mai 1994, typed and bound manuscript, 19 pp., n.p., n.d. Copy in author’s files, courtesy of Crew secretary Heinz Gahl.

2.Der älteste Ingelheimer wird 102 Jahre alt, Ingelheim am Rhein News, August 18, 2016, pp. 1–2. Accessible at www.ingelheim.de/service/news/news/?tx_news_pi1[news]=341&tx_news_pi1[controller]=News&tx_news_pi1[action]=detail&cHash=84aea5920fe0d99d624aeec60a4f2c09.

3.See Die letzten der ‘Grauen Wölfe,’ Chiemgau-Zeitung (Oberbayerisches Volksblatt), May 7, 2015, p. 1.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have written this collective biography of the 318 men who joined Germany’s Navy in 1934 to become professional officers without the generous cooperation of the survivors of Crew 34. After conquering initial skepticism about the scope and purpose of this project, no fewer than 78 of them chose to share their views and experiences with me. Their names are listed in the bibliography, and I thank them all. They represent every subgroup of the Crew, including many widows, and have supported this study through interviews, questionnaires, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other personal records. Their recollections were supplemented by a complete set of Crew newsletters (Crew-Briefe) since 1937, several yearbooks, and other materials mainly relevant to the pre-war years. Highly valuable proved the Crewbuch of 1954. It contains a biographical sketch and career information about every single Crew member up to that time.

Germany’s military archives in Freiburg furnished important data about Crew 34’s activities in World War II as well as details on the early phase of its life. The holdings of the Marineschule Mürwik, Germany’s naval academy, surprised the author with Crew memorabilia long thought lost in the war. Secondary literature helped trace the men’s fate between 1939 and 1945. Few books on the war at sea fail to mention representatives of the Crew, as they fought and died literally on all seven seas from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean. Only one published work deals exclusively with a member of the Crew. It covers the trial of Lieutenant Commander Heinz Eck, who in 1944, as skipper of the submarine U 852 in the South Atlantic, became entangled in an incident for which he was tried and shot after the war.¹ In other works members of the Crew figure prominently, while they themselves have published in a number of fields over the years.

A special note of gratitude must go to Captain (ret.) Siegfried Ammo Jürgens, the Crewbetreuer, or Crew secretary, for his unfailing support, advice, and encouragement over the years. Other Crew members, among them Rear Admiral (ret.) Erich Topp, Vice Admiral (ret.) Heinz Kühnle, Captain (ret.), Hermann Bärner, and Herr Götz von Hartmann, read portions of the manuscript, supplied additional information, and offered commentary from their respective vantage points.

Elsewhere in Germany Dr. Hans-Joseph Maierhöfer, Herr Jamans, and Herr Wenzel helped broaden the documentary basis of this study when I perused the holdings of Germany’s Military Archives in 1983. So did the staff of the Historical Collection and Library and the Marineschule Mürwik, above all Herr Franz Hahn, Frau Kossack, and Frau Wenzel. My good friend Commander Heinz Siedentopf of the West German Navy later tracked down a crucial source I had overlooked during my visit to Flensburg. In Stuttgart, Dr. Jürgen Rohwer’s Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte made available many unique sources, including photographs, mainly relevant to World War II.

In this country Dr. Gaines Post, Jr., of Claremont-McKenna College, and Dr. Carolyn P. Boyd of the University of Texas at Austin have enriched this study in ways only I can know but all readers will appreciate. Dr. Holger H. Herwig of Vanderbilt University, Dr. Charles S. Thomas III of Georgia Southern College, and Dr. Frederick S. Harrod of the U.S. Naval Academy provided information, advice, and encouragement. My colleagues at Baylor University’s History Department, especially those who themselves spent time at sea, have helped with matters of naval technology and terminology. But no one has made greater contributions and sacrifices for the sake of this study than my wife Karen and our little Thomas. Much too long, while this project was taking shape, they had to live with what seemed a mere part-time husband and father. I trust they can look forward now, just as the survivors of Crew 34 on the last leg of their voyage, to calmer waters.

Contemporary history places historians in a special relationship to their subjects as well as to the sources on which their findings depend. I am satisfied—through personal impressions, through independent means of confirmation, and through the very freshness and frankness of the testimony itself—that this story of Crew 34 retraces the past with a minimum of distortion. But if the collection of evidence, its analysis, and the formulation of conclusions must reflect scholarly integrity, so must the treatment of oral and written information tendered under the assurance of confidentiality. For this reason a code shields Crew members against the disclosure of their identity in the reference notes. This code is known only to the author and will be made available to professional historians for the sole purpose of verifying the evidence. Such assurances could not be granted, of course, when referring to secondary literature or to official documents. Crew records not generally available to the public, but not exactly privileged materials, have been treated with appropriate discretion.

ABBREVIATIONS

1

INTRODUCTION

This study explores, in the form of a collective biography, the lives of the 318 men who joined the German Navy in 1934 to become professional officers. Together they have become known ever since as Crew 34—a term and a practice indicative of England’s role as Germany’s erstwhile model and later rival. Inasmuch as the men of Crew 34 received their commissions on April 1, 1937, Americans may think of them as the German counterpart to the U. S. Naval Academy’s Class of 1937. Such comparisons should not be carried too far, though, given the differences in the officers’ backgrounds and actual careers. In fact, some of these divergent traditions and experiences lie at the very heart of this inquiry when we ask what has characterized Crew 34 and their world to this day.

Born in or around 1914 in Germany’s Second Empire, the men of Crew 34 grew up in the ill-fated Weimar Republic, received their military training in the turbulent years after Hitler’s takeover, and later fought with distinction in World War II. Their personal sacrifice, especially as submarine officers, was impressive: by 1945 more than 40 percent of the original Crew members were dead. The end of Hitler’s Navy, the Kriegsmarine, forced the survivors into civilian occupations. In the mid-1950s a third of them chose to resume their former careers in the newly established West German Navy, the Bundesmarine. Whether in uniform or as civilians, the men of Crew 34 achieved considerable success in their post-war endeavors. Today, as septuagenarians, those still alive enjoy secure retirement and recently celebrated their fiftieth service anniversary with festivities in Kiel and at the Marineschule Mürwik, Germany’s naval academy.

Surprisingly, neither a narrative history nor a comprehensive scholarly analysis of Germany’s naval officer corps since 1918 exists, certainly nothing comparable to Holger Herwig’s work about the Imperial Navy.¹ Most historiographical efforts have aimed at the German officer corps at large, often in connection with the study of militarism, or to fathom the relationship between Germany’s armed forces and National Socialism. Naval historians have concentrated on combat in World War II, on personalities such as Admirals Raeder, Dönitz, or Canaris, and on the development, organization, equipment, and deployment of the Weimar Reichsmarine until 1935 and Hitler’s Kriegsmarine through 1945.² Others have examined naval policy, strategy, and tactics or, like Jost Dülffer and Keith Bird, have tried to assess how the naval leadership viewed the state and its relationship to it.³ Finally, there are some studies on West Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, few of them penetrating and many not free from political bias. In short, while the organization, performance, and leading representatives of the German Navy have received much attention, we know little about the human qualities, psychological make-up, self-image, and personal experience of the thousands of officers who have served Germany at sea in our century.

To begin to fill this void is the purpose of this inquiry. Group biography as a historiographical format appears well suited to portray development, conflict, and continuity in the lives of men who passed through years of great disruption and upheaval as observers, witnesses, participants, victims and, in some instances, beneficiaries. At the same time, as a reasonably representative case study, the life story of Crew 34 must transcend strictly military, political and social considerations in order to recapture the past as it was lived—as plain, continuous, irreversible human drama.

No discussion of German naval officers in our century can proceed far without reference to the debate over what is usually called the German problem. Many diagnose it as a sad but simple deficiency, namely, as Germany’s refusal to follow the path travelled by other European nations into modernity. Instead of adapting their society and political institutions to the industrial age, instead of embracing liberalism and democracy, Germans have favored, so runs the verdict, a peculiar and explosive fusion of the new and the old, the real and the ideal, the rational and the irrational. Authoritarianism and militarism, the supremacy of the state over the individual, and an odd idea of freedom coupled with a passion for order are often held responsible for this divergent course of events in the heart of Europe. Fear of pluralism and feelings of ethnic and cultural superiority further estranged Germans from the experience of their neighbors and prompted them to postulate a separate vision of life in the industrial era. A final breakthrough into the modern world, involving most segments of society and dedicated to a reassessment of traditional values and past prejudices, has only begun to take hold in Germany in the wake of World War II after the latest of these peculiarly German alternatives to the western model had utterly and irrevocably collapsed.

Not all observers have seen Germany as the sick patient in an otherwise tolerably healthy family of European nations, as a patient who is at last recovering from his afflictions after a shock treatment of military humiliation, geographic amputation, and massive infusion of foreign ideas and practices. Many, while deploring excesses of national hubris, have been sympathetic to Germany’s search for its own national and cultural identity. For them a powerful state is not evil by definition, industrial society should not preclude strong notions of community, and human happiness and greatness are not necessarily assured by granting unlimited individual liberty. Rather, such observers would point out, Germans have been Europe’s most adept Machiavellians, harnessing the resources of their state for such legitimate ends as national power, prestige, prosperity, security, and solidification. In their view the aims, say, of the pan-Germans, or the sinister sides of Hitler’s regime were ugly perversions of an ideal that appears otherwise quite defensible. At any rate, if Germans have been guilty of chauvinism, intolerance, aggression and immodesty, their share of these unpleasant traits may not seem so excessive when fairly compared with other peoples thrust into the limelight of history from time to time.

Many naval officers, stung by careless accusations and propelled by an untroubled conscience, have entered this debate after 1945 to defend themselves against charges of political naiveté, opportunism, militarism, and an esprit de corps out of touch with modern times. Loyalty to the state and its legitimate government, they would argue, clean performance in peace and war, as well as political abstinence and professional expertise—if these characteristics mark any fine navy anywhere, who is to claim that Germany’s Reichsmarine, Kriegsmarine and Bundesmarine have not been up to par? For these men, faithful obedience to their civilian superiors ranked above critical reflection, let alone notions of insurrection, in the book of soldierly virtues. This attitude became especially pronounced after the Navy’s excursion into politics between 1917 and 1920—the mutinies, the revolution, the Free Corps, and the Kapp putsch. Never since has the Navy ventured far from purely military tasks, unless Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s notorious flirtation with National Socialism and brief tenure as Hitler’s nominal successor are taken to imply a broader political commitment on part of his service. This is not to say that Germany’s naval officers could ever be or have been impartial in thought as well as in action, to borrow President Wilson’s celebrated wish, any more than the American people could in its reaction to World War I. Crew 34 was and is no exception. There was little in their family background, their education, their service traditions, or their position in society before and after 1945 that would induce them to espouse any political guideline but conservatism. Here they differed little from their counterparts in other countries and represented, consciously and proudly, a distinctive sociological species.⁴

Several historians have speculated to what extent the Crew as an idea and as an institution contributed to the organization and self-image of Germany’s corps of naval officers.⁵ In a tradition unbroken since the middle of the nineteenth century, except for a few years after 1945, the Crew has certainly reinforced the horizontal strength of a structure otherwise supported by a vertical hierarchy of rank and responsibility and by a psychological cement of service customs, professional pride, an exclusive honor code, and high social standing. Beyond this safe assumption, though, caution is advised. For what exactly is a Crew, and how does it function?

In its most elementary sense a Crew is the aggregate of all officer recruits who enter the German Navy in a certain year, plus any officers attached at a later point and in turn accepted as equals by the original members. Crew 34, our example, consisted of 318 men, of whom 277 began their basic military training on the Dänholm, an island in the Baltic Sea off Stralsund, in April 1934. Thirty-nine former merchant marine officers (so-called HSOs with a one-year bonus) were added in 1935 and two more replacements in 1936.⁶ Once membership in a Crew is established it becomes a lifelong bond not to be severed and membership is generously extended to the members’ families. Crew statistics invariably account for every single member, no matter how short or infrequent his actual association with his classmates, how poor his career performance, or how questionable his private habits. Members refer to each other as Crewkameraden and, when introduced to another officer, would identify themselves as, say, Schmidt, Crew 28.

Over time more social and emotional ties will grow around this formal attachment of the officers and their families to their Crew. How strong such bonds will eventually become depends on the Crew’s size, on its composition, on its history in peace and war, and on its leading personalities. Crew 34 has preserved remarkable cohesion among its members, as exemplified by frequent and well-attended get-togethers, by regular newsletters, and by the respect paid to their dead at funerals and in memorial services. Clearly, any friendship that survives more than 50 eventful years and widely differing experiences must rest on deep foundations.

For Crew 34 and other Crews prior to 1945, such cohesion is by no means self-explanatory through their common wartime service or a spirit of comradeship that somehow expired with the old Navy and could not be rekindled in post-war Crews. If the Crew as an institution acted as a stabilizing element in the structure of the German naval officer corps, it was also an ingenious device to soften the consequences of an anachronism, namely, the division of the corps into privileged Seeoffiziere (executive officers) and aviators on the one hand, and relatively underprivileged specialists (engineers, weapons officers, naval surgeons, administrative officers, and shipbuilding experts) on the other. Most importantly, only executive officers could command ships and fleets. They alone had realistic prospects of attaining flag rank, and they enjoyed many perquisites in daily Navy routine, such as a distinctive uniform and the right to preside over the officer’s mess even in the presence of higher-ranking specialists. At least in theory the Crew became the great emancipator and equalizer in whose fold differences among the various branches of the corps, be they real or imagined, were to be absorbed and forgotten. Only here, under the protective shield and banner of his Crew, could an engineer or a weapons officer feel for once as high in standing