News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Far, Far From Home

Date: April 26, 2001

"War & Ambivalence
Captured U-boat captain Werner Henke was branded a war criminal and shot like a dog. So why is someone putting flowers on his grave?

Fort Meade was a German POW camp for enlisted men only. But German U-boat captain Werner Henke was buried there too. (Marvin Joseph - The Washington Post)

By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer

A LITTLE BEFORE 7 P.M. on the warm humid evening of June 15, 1944, Mary Scheeler was in her home adjacent to what is now the Fort Hunt picnic area south of Alexandria when she heard gunshots. Looking out the window she saw a man's body hanging on the barbed wire of a fenced compound at Fort Hunt. It took guards 10 minutes to remove it.

Scheeler had no idea what was going on and knew better than to ask. Fort Hunt, a long-obsolete artillery site designed to help guard the Potomac River approaches to Washington, had been hurriedly transformed in World War II's earliest years into a small, tightly guarded compound so secret that officially it didn't exist. Mail bound for it was sent to a post office box: 1142. Windowless buses shuttled to and fro at odd hours. Seventeen miles south of the District of Columbia in a heavily wooded area once owned and farmed by George Washington, Fort Hunt was one of Washington's many wartime enigmas. Some said it had to do with prisoners of war.

When she died four years ago at the age of 92, Mary Scheeler had still never learned the identity of the man on the fence or what led to his death. She had, however, peered briefly into one of the most fascinating stories of that treasure trove of history and mystery the world buried between 1939 and 1945: a near-operatic example of the moral ambiguities of war, ambiguities at which judgmental generations since can only guess.

She had witnessed the death of a German U-boat captain named Werner Henke.

For most of the war, Fort Hunt functioned primarily as an interrogation center where captive Third Reich survivors of the Battle of the Atlantic were coaxed and threatened to unburden themselves of tactical and technological secrets. It was a covert operation on the shadowy margins of the Geneva Convention governing treatment of prisoners of war. Technically no prisoner could be forced to give more than his name, rank and serial number, but Navy and Army intelligence experts had found that youthful U-boat crews often talked freely once removed from the danger and privations of submarine life to the relative comfort of a prison cell with abundant food and drink.

Werner Henke, however, was a special case. He had been labeled "War Criminal No. 1" in an Allied radio broadcast and had thrown himself against the barbed wire -- and into the guard tower's bullets -- believing himself about to be handed over to the British and hanged.

Few Americans then would have questioned the war-criminal designation. Books, movies and cartoons almost universally depicted U-boaters as coldblooded Nazi killers: goose-stepping fanatics who stalked the Atlantic convoys by night, torpedoing ships without warning, machine-gunning lifeboats and consigning their victims to a hell of flaming oil and icy sea.

It was a caricature whose seeds were planted in World War I propaganda with the sinking of the Lusitania, and it bloomed anew a generation later as coastal residents witnessed tankers exploding in flame within sight of Atlantic beaches, and discovered charred bodies washing ashore.

As one of Germany's top U-boat aces of World War II -- his U-515 sank 26 ships carrying 142,636 tons of cargo in only 20 months of operation -- Werner Henke played his part in all that carnage.

So why today is someone placing flowers several times a year on his grave at Fort Meade?
The Underwater Underground


If the invasion of Russia lost World War II for Adolf Hitler, it was the Battle of the Atlantic with which he almost won it. Even with the Allies reading their most secret codes, German U-boats all but severed the lifeline of supplies with which the United States kept Great Britain and the Soviet Union fighting in the war's darkest hours.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote that the only thing that really frightened him during the war was the steadily mounting tonnage lost to "the U-boat peril."

But to maintain the threat of his submarine force, Hitler had to tolerate a quality at odds with the reality of Nazism: nonconformity. Skilled officers and men able to toil for weeks at a time in the cramped and smelly confines of their deadly iron coffins tended toward the maverick. They were the rock stars of the Wehrmacht: swaggering, unwashed, exhibitionist and congenitally insubordinate. For example, listening to "degenerate" swing music in Germany could get you sent to a concentration camp. Werner Henke, a fan of Cole Porter and other American composers, routinely piped jazz throughout U-515.

U-boatmen were also probably the least political cadre in Germany's armed forces. Relatively few were hard-core Nazis. Listening devices in the cells of Fort Hunt routinely caught prisoners joking that anyone vomiting from drunkenness or seasickness was just repeatedly shouting "Heil!"

Combing the POW records in the National Archives shows something of the intriguing context in which Henke worked and fought. By the end of the war some 400,000 German prisoners of war had been brought to the United States. They were housed in more than 500 camps throughout the country -- picking apples in Virginia or cotton in Mississippi or hoeing potatoes in Maine.

They were a long way from a monolithic force. For every super-race martinet, painting swastikas on bath towel flags or glorifying the Fuehrer, the records show, there were hundreds of other soldiers and sailors obviously swept up in a war about which their feelings were far less certain. There are records of Nazis who feared for their lives in a camp dominated by anti-Nazi prisoners, and anti-Hitler activists who pleaded for transfers from camps terrorized by former Gestapo goons. There are passive anti-Nazis who asked to stay with the Nazis because an anti-Nazi camp address on their letters might endanger their families at home.

There are non-German conscripts from Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg, glad to be out of the war, and Austrians like Robert Wirth, who considers himself "not so much a prisoner of the U.S. as of National Socialism" and wants to join his brother, who has a bar and bowling alley in New York.

And what can you say about one Werner Henniger, the son of a Jewish lawyer, who spent a year in Dachau but somehow got out and was later drafted into the German army, lost an eye on the Russian front and was captured in 1944 outside Paris? Henniger, like most of those in the POW records, is trying to be a good German, even as a prisoner. But he's more than a little uncertain, in 1944, just what being a good German means.

How certain was Werner Henke?
A Sympathetic Wolf


Timothy P. Mulligan, an expert on German military records at the National Archives in College Park, spent six years on that question. Asked in 1982 to fill in for an ailing archivist in the German naval section, Mulligan turned away from his work with Wehrmacht records of the Russian front and soon found himself intrigued by U-boats in general and Werner Henke in particular. "Lone Wolf," his meticulously documented biography of Henke, was published in 1993.

Most Americans, he says, are "incredibly naive" in the way they tend to caricature if not demonize all those who fought for the Third Reich, particularly submariners. However loathsome the ideology that exploited their loyalty to their country, he discovered, most U-boatmen went to great lengths to minimize the loss of Allied lives on the ships they sank. Rescue was rarely possible in the fierce convoy battles of the stormy north Atlantic, but when out of reach of sub-killing escort vessels or planes, records show, U-boats repeatedly furnished Allied lifeboats with food and water, directed them to the nearest land and even summoned rescue vessels to their aid.

The most dramatic example occurred Sept. 12, 1942, when U-156, captained by Werner Hartenstein, sank the British liner Laconia, homebound from Africa. Aboard were more than 1,000 Allied men, women and children and 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. Promising not to harm any ship that aided the rescue, Hartenstein crowded his decks with survivors, broadcast a distress call in English and stood by helping them for three days. Two other U-boats assisted in the effort.

The morning of Sept. 16, while he had 110 survivors aboard, half of them British including five women, an American B-24 from a secret base on nearby Ascension Island flew over. The pilot, Lt. James D. Harden, reported seeing a U-boat surrounded by lifeboats full of people with a Red Cross flag draped over its deck guns. On orders from his superiors he returned and dropped his bombs, missing the vessel but overturning a lifeboat and killing many in the water.

Hartenstein ordered the survivors off and submerged. With the assistance of the other two U-boats and two Vichy French warships, however, more than 1,000 survivors were ultimately brought safely ashore, most of them with high praise for the treatment by their captors.

Numerous such survivor accounts so contradict the malevolent image of German submariners that Francis Biddle, senior American member of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, was moved to proclaim after hearing the evidence that "Germany waged a cleaner naval war than we did."

Hitler himself is alleged to have fumed that he was forced to make war using "a reactionary army, a National Socialist air force and a Christian navy."

"Unrestricted submarine warfare is not a humane business," says Fred Michel of the Mount Vernon area, who interrogated captured U-boatmen at Fort Hunt as a soldier in the final days of the war. "But the German Navy on the whole did what they could to mitigate it. They had some standards, even if Hitler didn't."


The Fatal Lie


Into that tangled context sailed Werner Henke, a handsome, vain forester's son whose life was a microcosm of German history in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in 1909 in East Prussia, where his middle-class family had roots since the 1770s, he had been turned into a refugee after World War I when the Treaty of Versailles gave his village to Poland. Uprooted to an area south of Hamburg, he lost his dream of following his father's occupation when young professionals with better connections flooded government forestry jobs during the runaway inflation of the 1920s. He took to the sea as a merchant sailor instead, only to see that promising career wither along with all German shipping during the Great Depression.

Hitler's military buildup saved him. The fast-expanding German navy unexpectedly opened its elite ranks to ambitious and competitive merchant seamen, and Henke was one. But he had little use for Nazis. Having acquired a taste for high living and independence on his shipboard travels, he twice got in brawls with Gestapo bullies and at one point in his training was kicked out of the navy temporarily, for stopping off to see a girlfriend while under orders to report immediately to Berlin.

Older, less educated and less well connected socially than most of his fellow officers, he nonetheless proved a daring and resourceful U-boat captain, sinking 10 ships on his first patrol and the following July, in 1943, winning a personal decoration from Hitler for claiming 100,000 tons of shipping as a U-boat ace.

Like other U-boat captains, Henke assisted survivors of his sinkings when he could, and his career record is remarkable for the number of ships sunk with minimal loss of Allied lives. According to captured German documents and Allied shipping records, Henke sank seven of his 26 ships without killing more than one or two of the scores of people aboard, and five without killing anyone.

But his fate was cast the night of Dec. 7, 1942, when U-515 torpedoed the armed British liner and troopship Ceramic northwest of the Azores. The ship carried 656 passengers and crew members, including 80 women and 12 children. Fearing the ship was accompanied by a sub-hunting escort, Henke left the scene after seeing lifeboats safely lowered but was ordered back the next day through a major storm to see if he could discover from survivors where the Ceramic had been bound.

All he found was a heaving seascape covered with wreckage and corpses until an errant wave deposited a near-dead survivor on the deck. The Germans rushed him below and pumped him out. He was a 20-year-old sapper in the Royal Engineers named Eric Munday.

Munday exaggerated the number of troops aboard and disclaimed knowledge of the Ceramic's destination. The Germans kept him aboard the rest of their cruise, shared their Christmas celebration and caroling with him and presented him a gift of chocolate.

When U-515 arrived at its base in German-occupied France, Henke and Munday were interviewed by a broadcaster for Radio Berlin. When the interview was aired on Feb. 23, 1943, it was presented as proof that "several thousand" troops had been lost in a single sinking, despite Allied claims of low casualties among troop transports to North Africa.

Henke made no such claim and Munday said little, but the U-boat captain did describe, in low-key fashion, a "gruesome picture" of wrecked lifeboats and "many" soldiers' bodies battered by the storm. "I tried to save some individuals, but in the heavy seas . . . no real rescue was possible" other than that of Munday, and "ultimately my mission was not to rescue survivors but to wage war."

Adm. Karl Doenitz, the overseer of Germany's U-boat operations, had actually forbidden U-boats to aid or rescue survivors after the Laconia incident, but captains continued to do so when they could. The Allies knew this and worried that Henke's Radio Berlin interview would confuse and dilute their propaganda stereotype of a savage, inhuman enemy stalking their Europe-bound troop transports with deadly effect.

Therefore U.S. naval intelligence countered it with a propaganda broadcast of its own in which the fictional "Cmdr. Robert Lee Norden," a German-speaking archetype, thundered: "I accuse! I accuse Lieutenant Werner Henke of murder!" "Norden," in repeated broadcasts, claimed that 85 passengers of the Ceramic had actually been rescued by the Allies and had reported seeing Henke order his crew to machine-gun the liner's lifeboats before the storm, slaughtering 264 survivors including women and children -- a claim the authors of the broadcast would later admit making up.

This "War Criminal Number 1," Norden vowed, would eventually "have to answer for his crime . . . before the German people and before humanity."

However Henke learned of the Norden broadcast, he somehow got the impression that it was a British effort. A year later, when U-515 was forced to the surface and sunk by gunfire from a U.S Navy hunter-killer task force, Henke was captured.

He made a costly error in letting his American captors know of his fear that the British wanted him as a war criminal.

Rather than be a prisoner of the British, he said, he would dispose of himself.

Ironically, the British would eventually air before his death a broadcast praising Henke for not killing shipwrecked survivors. But for the time being, his interrogators decided to use his fear of British injustice to mess with his mind.

If he would sign a statement promising to answer questions truthfully when interrogated, he was told as the task force approached Norfolk, he and his crew would be imprisoned in the United States. If not, they would be handed to the British. After some hesitation, Henke signed.

But even before that, he had startled his captors by his candor. As he was brought aboard the American ship, now a prisoner, he was asked in German who would win the war. In perfect English he replied, "You have already won."


The Final Steps




Henke and his men reached Fort Hunt on May 3, 1944. Most were sent to other prison camps within 10 days after providing little more information than any other U-boat crew.

Henke, however, was interrogated five times by the Navy. Despite the coerced promise to cooperate, he refused to reveal anything of practical importance. The sole surviving record of interrogation comes from a May 14, 1944, session with Army questioners ("Lt. Tyson, Capt. Brown") in which he answered general questions about politics and conditions in Germany.

P/W does not favor Hitler . . . Naziism is not the right solution of the German problem, says the transcript in the archives. But Henke had developed rationalizations -- based on the harsh conditions that had been imposed on Germany after World War I -- that allowed him to remain loyal to his country. His thinking, as recorded in the interrogators' report: Revolution always brings bad people to the front. Think of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. . . . Absolute government . . . occurs only through unemployment, hunger and a lost war, as it was in Germany. . . . Professional German soldier attitude; sold on German superiority and the justice of Germany's cause.

But what now, with another war lost?

Confronted by inevitable defeat by the Allies, German Grand Adm. Erich Raeder had said Germany's navy could "do no more than show they know how to die gallantly." Henke apparently made the same decision.

Originally he was to be transferred to Papago Park, Ariz., the POW camp for uncooperative U-boat prisoners. But Fort Hunt officials decided that would reunite him with his old crew, to whom he could relate his defiance of his captors. Some appearance of punishment was needed. Therefore they decided to turn him over to the British as they had threatened, knowing there was no real threat to Henke's life.

In writing to his Canadian counterpart to make the request, Cdmr. John L. Riheldaffer of U.S. naval intelligence said Henke has "conducted himself perfectly and is, apparently, a strong character and a good officer."

On June 15, the evening before his scheduled transfer to British jurisdiction in Canada, Henke stepped from his quarters for his scheduled hour of exercise in the adjacent courtyard. After 55 minutes of pacing he stopped, turned and sprinted for the fence.
A Fort Meade Mystery


After Mary Scheeler heard the shooting and saw the body hanging on the fence that day 57 years ago, Fort Hunt authorities hustled the body out of sight. Out of state in fact -- all the way to a hole in the ground in Maryland, at Fort Meade. It wouldn't have done to bury him at Fort Hunt, since officially, Fort Hunt didn't exist.

As it turned out, Henke was the first of 33 German prisoners of war buried in the Fort Meade cemetery. Of all those interred there, Henke was the only member of the German navy, and the only officer.

Fort Meade was a POW camp for enlisted men.

Curious.

At least that's how it struck archivist Mulligan when he came across the burial records. The mystery of Henke's headstone is what got Mulligan started on his six-year inquiry into Henke's life and death.

That stone, despite its silence, seems to speak to people who see it. Mulligan's National Archives colleague, Don Singer, volunteers that his wife recently visited the grave site and came across something odd. She'd read a book about Henke, and was moved enough to make the trip to Fort Meade. There on Henke's grave she saw . . . flowers.


The Good German


Mary Scheeler gave her eyewitness account of Henke's death to the Mount Vernon Gazette in 1992. She died five years later, so anyone curious about his life these days eventually ends up talking to her daughter, Frances Pearre.

Pearre can't add much to her mother's tale, but she does have one piece of intriguing news: She's had calls recently from two Germans asking for information on Henke. She has none. What could they want?

Eventually, this leads to Ron Kosmahl, a 42-year-old Lufthansa employee in Maryland, who wanted to learn as much about Henke as possible for reasons of his own.

He is, he says, a very distant relative of Henke's, so distant the family in Germany hardly knows he exists. "But that's how I came to know his story," he says, "and I've been haunted by it ever since."

He's the one who left flowers on the grave. He says he leaves flowers "three or four times a year." But he worries the gesture will be misunderstood.

"All my family's German. I'm the only one born in this country, and it's very difficult -- maybe understandable but very difficult -- the one-dimensional way Americans understand Germany and World War II. My mother spent two years in a concentration camp, not because she was Jewish but because she was Catholic. Americans don't believe things like that ever happened."

His attachment to the Henke story, he says, is "an emotional thing," and he struggles haltingly to explain.

"Here was a man who, like many Germans, was caught up in the war. He was not a perfect man, but he separated duty and honor from politics and he tried to be a good German and do his duty without losing his humanity and killing needlessly. That ended up, in a strange way, costing his life.

"If in this country we remember and condemn, as we should remember and condemn, Germans who used war to do such evil as the Holocaust, shouldn't we also remember a German who tried to honor duty and do less evil?"

The question hangs in the air, rather like Henke's body on the fence."