What the US Navy Learned from the Crew of U-128 - Not Much (Part 1 of 2)

Below are excerpts, with my comments, from the declassified summary report of all interrogations of all crew members of U-128. You can find the complete document here.

On the whole, the crew of U-128 was both more friendly and more polite than some of those that had proceeded her. The majority of ratings and enlisted men "had been drafted" into the U-boat arm, and, although many of the enlisted men had only recently entered the service, the crew as such could not be called inexperienced. This fact seems due mainly to the group of petty officers, "13 of whom had been in the German Navy previous to the outbreak of the war," one of them having entered in 1928 and two in 1933.

The German U-Bootwaffe and many surviving veterans vigorously maintained the myth that all U-Boat men were volunteers. This has been dis-proven many times in memoirs and in reports such as this. The other key fact in the above paragraph is the large number of experienced Petty Officers, 13 of whom were regular German Navy sailors who had enlisted long before the war. Men such as these would have proved vital in keeping this U-Boat and any U-Boat operating.

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No doubt, however, the good treatment they had received played its part in unlimbering some of the prisoners most of whom were happy that for them the war was over. They were, in the words of some prisoners, “very lucky”.

They certainly were. German U-Boat losses had become so catastrophic in May of 1943 that the submarines were withdrawn from the North Atlantic and sent to less dangerous areas such as the waters off Brazil where U-128 was sunk. The US maintained substantial anti-submarine forces of ships and aircraft in Brazil which declared war on Germany and Italy on August 22nd, 1942.

The US Interrogator's report on Oblt. Steinert

Except for my comments, this is the verbatim report on the what I believe was the first interrogation of Oblt. Steinert.

Interrogated on 18 June 1943

(Interview by Captain Hansen)

Not recorded

Veracity: rated good because P/W will refuse to answer a question but not attempt false or evasive replies. Moreover, he has an honest look about him. Is very security conscious as befits an officer.

He answered all the usual processing questions willingly and intelligently. As a professional officer he has no political affiliations but volunteered the information that he had been in the Hitler Jugend and in the arbeitsdienst. He knows both admirals von Doenitz and Raeder.

One wonders if this were translated correctly since it seems impossible that he would have known those two men in our sense of the word although it is certainly probable that he met them. Further, membership in the Hitler Youth would have been mandatory. Additionally, all German males were required to serve six months in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD - the State Labor Service. This program, like many other social welfare programs in the Third Reich, was actually started during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis just took credit for it.

I.O. suggests this man be approached in a friendly manner in future interrogations. He is tense, as the navy characterized him, and enters the interrogation room in a nervous frame of mind. He will respond to a conversational approach and might give us some of the information wanted by Army Anti-Submarine command. But hardly anything technical; for instance, he would not answer the I.O.’s question on extra towers on U-boots.

Not Much To Brag About: the U-Boat career of Oblt. Hermann Steinert, Kommandant of U-128

U-128 was a Type IX C, a larger boat than the more prevalent Type VII. Prior to Steinert, the boat had been on a number of successful war patrols so the crew was experienced. In March 1943 the existing Kommandant was promoted out of the boat to a training assignment and Steinert was then assigned as Kommandant of U-128.

He made one war patrol, which ended after 42 days with the destruction of the U-Boat. During his first and only war patrol, Oblt. Steinert, like the majority of U-Boat commanders, never sank an Allied ship nor was he ever decorated for anything.

U-128 left Lorient on 6 April 1943. On 17 May 1943 in the South Atlantic, the boat was attacked by American aircraft and heavily damaged.

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Two destroyers, USS Moffett (below-left) and USS Jouett (below-right), were directed to the scene. As soon as the Germans identified the ships as American destroyers, Steinert gave the order to abandon ship. 47 German crewmen survived, 7 were killed in action during the attack of the American planes.

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Although Hermann Steinert was interrogated on 18 June 1943, he is listed as an Oberleutnant, although he was promoted to Kapitänleutnant on1 May 1943. Perhaps he did not know he had been promoted although this would have been very unusual since U-Boat Command promptly communicated that type of news. Because of this discrepancy, I'm not convinced he was promoted to KptLt, the rank he is listed under on U-Boat.net.

He became a dentist after the war. According to my sources in the German Navy, Steinert is alive and well in Germany.

[Images courtesy of U-Boat Archive.]

What Did They Ask German U-Boat POWs at Ft. Hunt?

When first taken to Ft. Hunt, each German U-Boat officer was asked a standard set of questions. I have a copy of that now declassified information for U-128 Kommandant, Oblt. Hermann Steinert. I received this from the US National Archives in 1981.

This is what we learn:

He was twenty-six when he was captured, single, had dark hair and blue eyes, weighed 163 lbs and stood 5'10" tall - slightly tall for a U-Boat man. Anyone above 6' could not stand upright. His parents were his next of kin.

There are two unusual things on this form: Oblt. Steinert is from Bavaria which would have made him stand out. The officer corps of the German Navy was largely drawn from Northern Germany, particularly the port cities. Second, Oblt. Steinert is a Roman Catholic. An informal rule in the German Navy limited Catholics

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to less than one in seven members of the officer corps.

Oblt. Steinert had graduated from gymnasium, passed his exams, and received his arbiter, one of the many requirements to be an officer in the Kriegsmarine. He was a member of the Crew of IV/1936 (that he is entered the naval academy in 1936) and spoke some English - which would have been required of an officer in the Kriegsmarine.

U-128
Ordered: 7 August 1939
Builder: AG Weser in Bremen
Laid down: 10 July 1940
Launched: 20 February 1941
Commissioned: 12 May 1941 by Ulrich Heyse
Fate: Sunk, 17 May 1943

Training, Flotillas and Duties
05.41 - 05.43 2.U-Flottille, Wilhelmshaven & Lorient
Ausbildungsboot (under training)
Frontboot (operational)
Commanders
05.41 - 02.43 KL Ulrich Heyse
03.43 - 05.43 OL Hermann Steinert

06.04.1943 - 17.05.1943
Seventh Sailing
U-128 left Lorient under the command of Hermann Steinert on 6th Apr 1943 and arrived at return on 17th May 1943 after nearly six weeks.
On 16th May 1943 U-128 came under attack from an aircraft of USN VP-74 Squadron.
On 17th May 1943 in square FJ 67, U-128 came under attack from an aircraft of USN VP-74 Squadron. U-128 was heavily damaged in the attack.
On 17th May 1943 in square FJ 67, U-128 came under attack from an aircraft of USN VP-74 Squadron. U-128 was heavily damaged in the attack.

The Secret of Ft. Hunt Revealed: Again

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German U-Boat POWs were interrogated at a secret facility simply known as P.O. Box 1142. In actuality, the location was Ft. Hunt outside of Washington, DC in Northern Virginia. The over one hundred buildings erected during the war are gone now, the land now a national park run by the US Park Service.

In 2006, a Washington Post reporter wrote two very fine stories on the history of Ft. Hunt, the efforts of a young Park Serivce Ranger, Brandon Bies, to gather the history, and a re-union organized by Bies and the Park Service of the very frail men, who, as robust youngsters, once interrogated U-Boat POWs there. When discharged, these men were told never to speak of what they had done and

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they kept their silence into the 21st Century.

This is sad. Why? Unknown to the men who had interrogated German U-Boat crews, documents from Ft. Hunt about those interrogations were declassified in the mid-1970s.

These are the links to the two stories: First, Second.

Ft. Hunt was first mentioned by historian John Hammond Moore in his fascinating book, The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and Their Great Escape. I learned about Ft. Hunt when I interviewed Dr. Moore in 1980.

[Image of Ft. Hunt courtesy of Wikipedia.]

“Another Beautiful Day Comes To A Close”

The title of this post is the sign-off song played after the German Armed Forces High Command Communique was broadcast at midnight German time. German speaking stenographers working for the New York Times took down the communique and it was printed in the morning paper along with the communiques from all the other belligerent powers. If you have a subscription to the Times you can go online to their archives and type in "communique" and a whole lot of them will turn up.

Below is a brief excerpt from my novel, An Honorable German. The phrasing from communiques in the interior monologue of the main character (Max) comes directly from actual German armed forces communiques during WW II. Max is on a train packed with young German soldiers on their way to Russia. In the time line of the novel, it is approximately 23 January 1943 and Max is thinking about the German 6th Army which has been trapped in Stalingrad since November of 1942.

"How would it end? Not well. Most alarming, a few days after Christmas, in his evening radio address, General Dittmar, the voice of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, had begun to speak of "heroic resistance" by Six Armee's brave troops--never an encouraging sign. Everyone in Germany had learned to decipher the High Command's euphemisms: "grim and sanguinary fighting increasing in violence" meant the line had collapsed and troops were being pushed back under murderous fire with terrible casualties; "bitter and prolonged fighting" meant you were hopelessly surrounded; "heroic resistance" meant you were already dead."

In the very early morning of 23 April 1945, Lt. General Kurt Dittmar, the Voice of the German High Command, along with his sixteen year old son, Eberhard, and the much put upon Major Pluskat mentioned in a previous post, crossed the Elbe River and surrendered to the US Army.

I wrote the first drafts of An Honorable German in New Orleans in the early 1980s shortly after graduating from Tulane University. I corresponded with a publisher to whom I sent several chapters, one being a chapter which takes place in a POW camp in the United States and describes the German POWs reading the New York Times. They sent those chapters back to me including a note basically saying that was 'bullshit.' I sent them a letter they needed asbestos gloves to read and included half a dozen photocopies of German communiques from the New York Times. They didn't have the courtesy to write back and apologize.

Here are several communiques from the archives of the New York Times:

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