Original subtitles

History is not an exact science. It is never set in stone.

As time passes,

knowledge of the past is refined and evolves.

But by definition,

received ideas have thick skins and are hard to shift.

To understand the realities of the world, you sometimes have

to shake them up and decipher

the facts by looking at them another way.

Posterity has it that German U-boats were fearsome fighting

machines which ruled the

Atlantic Ocean throughout World War II. But were they?

In February 1939, Hitler personally presented to the world the

new flagship of the German fleet,

the battleship Bismarck.

A fine show of strength to intimidate potential enemies

because, since the dismantling of its fleet after World War I,

Germany had lost its standing as a naval power.

The Fuhrer had clearly broken the Treaty of Versailles,

but rebuilding a Kriegsmarine takes years.

The Bismarck looked impressive, but

could it rule the waves?

Among the Nazi chiefs of staff, a handful of admirals doubted it.

Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in -chief of the

Kriegsmarine, congratulated himself on

having two giants like the Bismarck and its twin, the Tirpitz,

launched two months later.

Hitler was eager to attack, but the Admiral had to admit

to his subordinates.

"At this moment in time, the Kriegsmarine is clearly

insufficiently armed for the great

combat against Britain."

An opinion shared by his second-in -command, Rear Admiral Karl Donitz.

But Donitz suggested an alternative to a surface conflict.

A plan B, using inexpensive craft which were discreet,

easy to mass-produce, and able to

patrol furtively through the Seven Seas, the Unterseeboots, or U-boats.

This phantom menace strategy wasn't unanimously agreed

upon in the Nazi camp.

Raeder opposed it, and a rivalry was instilled between the two admirals.

On September 1st 1939, Hitler's troops invaded Poland without warning.

The attack was mainly by land, with some backup from a battleship

which decimated the garrisons

in the port of Danzig.

The Kriegsmarine had to prove its strength.

Following the attack on their ally, Poland, Britain and

France declared war on Germany.

That very day, the U -boats made their entrance.

Their orders were to destroy all enemy ships without distinction.

- The biggest war news of these early days has been the

criminal sinking of the Athenia.

The liner, with about 1,400 people on board, was outward bound

across the Atlantic when

without any warning whatsoever, she was torpedoed by a

Nazi submarine 200 miles west of the Hebrides.

These survivors, landing at Greenock en route for Glasgow,

are victims of Hitler's first

crime by submarine.

- Submarines that methodically hunted for victims.

One woman survived to tell the tale.

- About 2 o'clock the next morning, we were drifting around

and spotted the submarine,

it was one of the destroyers come to our rescue.

And we turned around and tried to drift away from it, which we did.

And we drifted for about four more hours

when we were finally picked up by the destroyer.

- The death toll, 112.

The affair caused uproar.

It revealed the true face of Nazi Germany,

which disregarded the rules of war

and sent 112 innocent civilians to their death.

The U-boats were already under battle orders, while their

opponents were still unfit for combat.

And on dry land in Europe, there had yet to be any clashes.

The British and French were taking their time to mobilise their

armies when the unthinkable happened.

In mid-October, the British battleship HMS Royal Oak was

torpedoed and sunk in Scapa Flow,

the chief naval base in the Orkneys north of Scotland.

A symbolic place, because it was here that the German fleet

had been scuttled twenty years earlier.

The time for revenge had come.

At the helm of U-47, bearing its emblem of a snorting bull,

the instigator of the sinking

entered into legend.

Described as arrogant and a fanatic Nazi, Captain Gunther Prien was given

a hero's welcome on his return to Germany.

He was decorated with the Iron Cross by Hitler himself.

Submariners became and the new heroes of the Third Reich,

proud to have struck behind enemy lines.

For a long time looked down upon, German submariners

had earned a new status.

Otto Kretschmer, another renowned captain, stated,

"After four years of training, we suddenly felt like

the elite of the Navy."

In a handful of operations, submarines proved they were far

more effective than surface vessels.

Moreover, one of the Kriegsmarine's flagships, the battleship

Graf Spee, was sunk by the Royal Navy.

A slap in the face for Admiral Raeder.

Hitler ordered the construction of an armada of U-boats.

The cost of one Bismarck or Tirpitz could pay for 50

submarines to compose a fleet much

more capable of hassling Allied ships.

Donitz had won the battle against his superior,

but would nonetheless concede,

"In 1939, we weren't ready.

We had only 23 U-boats capable of reaching the Atlantic from Germany."

The French and British had twice as many submarines as the Germans.

But this clear advantage didn't impress the Nazis.

Karl Donitz, a veteran submariner from World War I,

promised his Fuhrer victory.

His plan was to choke the British Isles.

Britain was importing almost 50% of its meat, 70% of its

sugar and 90% of its grain and fats

-22 million tonnes a

year just in foodstuffs.

So it depended heavily on the 8,000 merchant ships that

delivered this produce.

They were prime targets for the U -boats which day by day

chipped away at this vital supply line.

As a result, in March 1940, a famished Britain was forced to

introduce meat rationing as shortages worsened.

Public parks were turned into vegetable patches.

But Germany's tonnage war strategy was beginning to pay off.

British citizens saw their daily lives suffer.

Part of public opinion began to put pressure on the government to

bring an end to the blockade.

Some politicians even suggested negotiating with the enemy.

Only First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill

categorically refused to make a pact with the Devil.

And events were soon to prove him right.

Eight months after the declaration of war,

ground combat began.

Within just six weeks, the French army was swept aside by the Wehrmacht.

With this blitzkrieg victory, Germany took over the naval bases

along the French coastline.

From Norway to France, the coasts of Europe were under Nazi control.

The gateways to the Atlantic were now wide open to the U-boats.

Great Britain stood alone in the face of the Third Reich.

In the summer of 1940, the pilots of the Royal Air Force put up

fierce resistance to repeated

attacks from the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

After three months of aerial combat, Britain inflicted a

first defeat on Germany.

Victory in the skies, but heavy losses at sea.

245 Allied ships were sent to the bottom of the ocean,

that's two wrecks a day.

The Kriegsmarine lost only seven of its submarines.

An unbeatable ratio which led the British war leader to say,

"The only thing that really

frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril."

Donitz's gamble had paid off.

He had the enemy quaking.

In the autumn of 1940, he established his base in the

strategic city of Lorient,

where the U-30 was the first submarine to report.

Docked in Brest, Lorient, and Saint-Nazaire, the U-boats

gained a weaker sea compared to

their former bases in Germany, and also avoided the North Sea

and the Channel, which were

under Royal Navy control.

After one year of war, almost 600 Allied ships had been sunk

against only 38 German submarines.

But an insufficient number to wipe out the British merchant fleet.

With only a dozen operational craft, Donitz needed

to increase pressure.

So he experimented with a tactic which had been maturing for years,

the Wolf Pack.

From then on, U-boats would attack in numbers.

At radio stations dotted along the coasts from Norway to Spain,

the Kriegsmarine decipherers

were able to localise enemy ships.

From his HQ in Lorient, Donitz would send his U-boat packs

to the pinpointed zones.

The moment a convoy was spotted on the horizon, the pack dived.

A lieutenant on the U-224 explained, "We were lurking around like wolves.

Then we attacked, fired our torpedoes, and got out again.

The best fun is to hunt."

Another submariner confessed.

"It was grand fun when we made the attack on the whole convoy.

Everybody picked out their own victim."

It was easy hunting, because when they resurfaced, the wolves were

faster than their targets.

But contrary to the legend which persisted even after the war,

U-boats didn't really

have the true capacity to carry out undersea attacks.

As derivatives of surface ships, they could only perform short dives.

Below the surface, an electric engine took over from its diesel

counterpart, which couldn't

function underwater.

Then, autonomy and speed were considerably reduced,

meaning they could only pursue the

slowest cargo ships.

So it was impossible to launch decisive underwater attacks.

And moreover, their torpedoes had an infuriating tendency

to detonate too early.

Renowned U-boat captain Otto Kretschmer admitted,

"We had the worst torpedoes in the world.

Nearly half of them were deficient."

So the U-boats merely carried out stealth approaches

and once in range of the enemy, resurfaced.

All the pack had to do then

was to pound the defenseless cargo ships.

Submariner Heinz Schaeffer gave this account.

"A tanker breaks in the middle.

Each crew member has permission to look through the periscope.

The powerful ship sinks into the waves.

A poignant vision.

The demon of destruction is at work."

Simultaneous attack by the Wolf Pack meant that several

Allied ships could be sunk in one go.

Ambushes were all the more effective when

carried out after nightfall.

Then the attackers would slip silently away through the dark

waters of the Atlantic.

From Newfoundland to the tip of Ireland, the merchant ships

had to navigate between the wolves.

In convoys of ten to twenty ships, a huge floating target ten

kilometres long by three

kilometers wide, took to sea.

Their orders were, keep your distance, 500 meters between each ship,

never stop, even if another ship is sinking.

On board, life went on, thanks to His Majesty's rum ration,

which kept the sailors' spirits up.

##

But fear haunted daily life.

Merchant Navy officer John Harvey,

who made 12 Atlantic crossings, recalled:

"We were hopeful rather than scared.

With a cargo of minerals, we slept fully dressed, in the hope

of escaping, because it would

only take three minutes for the ship to sink.

If it was a cargo of explosives, then we slept in pyjamas,

and we were happy if we woke up in the morning."

The Royal Navy dealt with the threat phlegmatically, banking on

ASDIC, the ancestor of sonar, which

could detect a submarine 900 metres away.

The Admiralty believed that corvettes, light, fast destroyers

equipped with depth charges,

were enough to protect the vast convoys.

Churchill called them 'the cheap and nasties'.

Officer John Harvey continued, "My worst memory was sailing by

the survivors of a sinking

corvette and being unable to help, because in a convoy you cannot stop."

The Royal Navy thought that the bigger the convoy, the less

chance of a U-boat attack,

since the ships guaranteed mutual defence.

But the sailors of the Merchant Navy disagreed.

They constantly felt under threat because they were too easy to spot.

Sailing at the speed of the slowest vessel, each cargo

ship became vulnerable.

At 13 km/h it was like crossing the Atlantic on a bicycle.

And the risk increased halfway across, when the naval escort about

turned to provide protection for the next convoy.

A weakness that the Germans had spotted.

On October 5, 1940, Convoy SC-7 left Nova Scotia with 35

ships heading to Liverpool.

A wolf pack of eight U-boats commanded by the ruthless Otto

Kretschmer patiently waited

for the naval escort to leave the convoy before pouncing on their prey.

Only 15 ships made it to England, 20 had been sunk,

including an oil tanker.

A record.

This came on top of another convoy on the same route, also

losing 12 of its ships.

The sinking of 32 ships in 48 hours gave the Wolves their

most impressive victory yet.

Donitz, who commanded the operation in person, was triumphant,

especially as his eight U -boats all made it home intact.

Here, the submariners gloat with a collection of lifebelts

filched from their victims as war trophies.

On the mast of the periscopes, pennants display the

amounts of tonnage sunk.

Rankings were even established between the different crews to

motivate the men based

on who sank the biggest ship.

At this point in the war, Allied convoys had lost 20% of their fleet.

In 1940, 563 ships were sunk against only 23 U-boats.

This striking result, however, didn't have the hoped-for impact.

Despite the tonnage sunk, 80% of cargo ships made it to port,

and the British had been

able to adapt their farming techniques.

Shortages were a thing of the past.

The first lieutenant of the U-32 stated, "The English can hold

out under existing conditions

for years.

You only need to look at the shops."

The U-boat's arms will not break them.

The blockade didn't seem to dampen British spirits.

It was impossible for Admiral Donitz to step up a gear.

He could only send out 35 units at any one time, which wasn't enough.

The U-boats leaving the shipyards only replaced the losses,

and military command refused to

provide extra means.

The Kriegsmarine's requests generally played second fiddle to

those of the Wehrmacht, which

was better represented in the Nazi hierarchy.

And now the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring,

was asking for even more.

In early 1941, however, Goring agreed to supply a handful of

reconnaissance planes,

which became the U-Boat's eyes.

With their first collaborations, the U-Boats notched up new successes.

It was the era of the aces.

Victory after victory, new heroes added to the ranks

of legendary captains.

After Gunther Prien, the Bull of Scapa Flow, it was the turn

of Joachim Schepke to shine.

He was even invited to Berlin to tell of his exploits at

the helm of the U-100.

But the king of tonnage was Otto Kretschmer, or 'Silent Otto'.

Responsible for 46 sinkings, the captain of the U-99

was never dethroned.

The Nazi propaganda machine was quick to flaunt its hero's feats.

Omnipresent in the field, the Third Reich's film cameras

magnified each action and gesture.

Unrelentingly, the wolves were portrayed as demigods.

Footage that fuelled a legend which would last for years to come.

In truth, there was little heroism in the U-boat attacks.

The victims were essentially defenceless merchant ships.

One submariner on the U-55 admitted as much, "We sink everything

without previous warning.

But the British must not know that.

We always allow the crew to drown.

What else can you do?"

An order that broke the rules of war.

Most of the victims were civilians left to their sad fate.

The Nazi submariners were pitiless.

At best, they threw some bread and a compass to the wrecked

survivors and wished them good

Nobody was spared. One submariner revealed,

"The BDU sent through -there's a convoy, a children's transport.

The children's transport is so big.

We sank a children's transport.

All are dead."

After 18 months of war, British technology had progressed.

ASDIC could now detect a U-boat two kilometres away, making

counterattacks more effective.

The days of impunity were over.

In March 1941, the U-boat aces were caught unawares.

On March 7th, Gunther Prien, with his record of 30 ships sunk,

disappeared with his U-47.

On the 17th, it was the turn of Joachim Schebke, author of 37

sinkings, to go down with his

U-100.

On the 22nd, Otto Kretschmer was captured southeast of

Iceland having scuttled his U-99.

The Ace of Aces was a prize capture.

In two weeks, the Wolf Pack was decimated.

And for Donitz, the trouble was only just beginning.

In May 1941, one of the Nazi's cipher machines, the famous Enigma,

was delivered to MI6 headquarters

at Bletchley Park.

The machine, along with its instruction manual, came from a

U-boat captured by a British destroyer.

By a twist of fate, it was the man who sank the passenger ship Athenia,

Captain Fritz Julius Lemp, who,

failing to scuttle his U-110,

allowed the British to take the equipment left on board.

Lemp was killed, his crew captured, and his U-boat finally sunk.

The Nazis, unaware of what had happened, didn't change their code.

This event marked a turning point in the intelligence war.

The Nazis' most complex code was broken.

The machine, designed by the British computer scientist Alan Turing,

could decipher the

enemy's messages within 36 hours.

The most important transatlantic convoys were diverted to

protect them from attack.

But sparing all transport would arouse German suspicion.

So the Admiralty sacrificed a number of its ships to maintain

its precious advantage.

But Nazi tactics went unchanged.

The fall of the aces didn't stop the methodical killings.

U-boats sank five times as many cargo ships as German battleships did.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine,

Admiral Raeder, remained convinced that his

giants still had a role to play.

In May 1941, he deployed his fleet's flagship,

the fearsome Bismarck, for its first Atlantic sortie.

Reputed to be unsinkable, even Churchill called it "the

world's most powerful battleship."

Just one week after setting sail, chased down by the Royal Navy,

it was pounded with almost

3,000 shells and sank, taking down more than 2,000 crewmen with it.

The Bismarck had not survived its first mission.

Hitler ordered all surface vessels back to Germany.

The Third Reich could not rule the waves in regular fashion.

Only the underhand tactics of the U -boats could keep the illusion going.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union,

once again with no prior warning.

German divisions ploughed through Soviet defences at lightning speed.

The Red Army was staring at defeat.

Donitz received orders to deprive the Soviets of all kinds of support.

He dispatched his squadrons towards the Arctic Circle,

where Allied convoys were supplying

the port of Murmansk.

The wolf packs now prowled the Arctic Ocean, one of the most

dangerous and inhospitable

zones on the planet.

On board, the conditions were deplorable.

The extreme cold put sailors' bodies to a severe test.

At this point in the war, U-boats held sway in the seas from

the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

They sank more ships than the Allies could produce.

But American industry was ready to step in.

- Of all over America's contributions to Allied victory

a vast shipbuilding program is perhaps the most vital at the moment.

Shall we beat the Axis effort to torpedoe our plans for attack?

The answer is, yes!

In late 1941, the United States became the

arsenal for democracy.

Tanks, planes and munitions were produced at a dizzying

pace to rescue Europe.

The shipyards of Baltimore launched the first Liberty ships,

which inaugurated the longest

production line of ships ever established.

Almost 3,000 ships were mass-produced in record time,

thanks to the ingenuity of American

industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who introduced Fordism into his shipyards.

This new type of cargo ship symbolized the strength of the

American war industry.

Extremely fast to construct, it could carry up to 10,000 tons of

equipment, jeeps, locomotives,

tanks, and planes, and be transformed into an

oil tanker or troop ship.

It sailed at 20 kilometres an hour, sufficiently fast to

escape from the U-boats.

On board, 35 gunners kept a constant lookout.

Nazi military command didn't expect to see such

an armada spring up.

And another event would soon change the balance of power.

On December the 7th, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl

Harbor brought the United States into the war.

Hitler could finally have a stab at Uncle Sam.

Donitz dispatched his U-boats to attack the

United States in Operation Drumbeat.

The objective?

To cut off the supply of Texan oil to Europe.

The wolf packs were put under increased strain.

The American coast lay 5,500km from Lorient,

a distressing voyage for the submariners.

In the spring of 1942, American waters were infested with Nazi

U-boats, so close to shore

that at night time, the crewmen could admire the nearby city lights.

Donitz noted, "Our boats soon discovered the best way to proceed.

During the day, they rested between 50 and 150 meters deep on

the bottom, a few nautical

miles from the cargo route.

At dusk, they approached the coast and surfaced once night had fallen."

The American coasts became akin to a fairground turkey shoot, made

all the easier by the incompetence

of US naval command.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Ernest J. King,

obsessed with the war against

Japan didn't take the U -boat threat seriously.

Despite warnings from the British, King stubbornly refused to

form convoys, which he considered pointless

A stance which infuriated his highest-placed peers.

In his journal, an exasperated General Eisenhower wrote

"One thing that might help win this

war is to get someone to shoot King."

The outcome?

The 30 or so U-boats lying off the U.S. coasts sank more

than 500 ships in six months.

One ship's captain recounted, "I fished out wreck survivors

choking on fuel spillage.

Once I fished out a woman whose torso was cut in two."

And Canada wasn't spared.

U-boats sneaked into the mouth of the St Lawrence River, the

departure point for many convoys.

Cargo ships were sunk under the very noses of the Royal Canadian Navy.

Citizens were ordered to caulk their windows and cover their

car headlamps with opaque plaster.

Contrary to what we think, Americans were also

victims on home soil.

1942 would be the year of the greatest U-boat successes,

1,322 sinkings for the loss of

just 84 U-boats.

For each submarine lost, the Kriegsmarine sent 16 Allied

ships to the bottom of the ocean.

And every month, 20 new vessels joined the Wolf Pack.

Donitz finally had more than a hundred U-boats on active duty.

In January 1943, Hitler appointed Donitz

Admiral-in -Chief of the Kriegsmarine.

Raeder was forced to give up his position to the

indefatigable promoter of U-boats.

This savoured his triumph, but he took command at the very worst moment.

Early in 1943 came the turning point of the war.

The Nazis were retreating on every front.

In the Atlantic, the Allies now had 800 warships escorting the convoys,

the means to foil the

Phantom Menace, a strike force equipped with the latest

scientific advances, providing

decisive assets in anti-submarine warfare.

Since 1942, the US Navy had been perfecting a system

invented by the British.

Radar, a crucial technological advance.

The new compact models, fitted into the noses of reconnaissance

aircraft, covered a radius

of 300 kilometres compared to the previous 35.

German submariner Heinz Schaeffer regretfully admitted,

"They now have the ability to detect us in any kind of

weather, in the rain, the fog

or at night, when we're at the surface.

Our means of attack have diminished, our losses are increasing.

Maybe our command underestimated the

capabilities of radar."

Detection which made surfacing an act of suicide.

U-boats could no longer hide or communicate.

The conversations were picked up by a new system called huff-duff,

which could locate

the origin of a radio wave.

With huff-duff, any ship within a range of 30 kilometres was

immediately spotted.

Without communication, the wolves could no longer coordinate,

bringing an end to hunting

as a pack.

An officer at Donitz's headquarters admitted,

"The enemy has every asset in hand.

He knows all our secrets, while we know none of his."

As well as detection tools, weapons had also evolved.

Fully fitted with radar, reconnaissance planes were also

equipped with Mark 24 mines, highly

accurate acoustic anti-ship torpedoes.

And thanks to new powerful spotlights, U-boats were visible at

night as if it was day.

Hunting now took place 24 hours a day.

Submariner Heinz Schaeffer conceded.

"The submarine doesn't have time to activate its anti-aircraft defences.

The gunners are caught in the thick of the action.

The U-boat is lost.

It's rare for a single man to escape death."

Another lethal weapon was the hedgehog.

This device fired 24 spigot mortars ahead of the ship.

This increased the chances of making a hit with newly developed

shells that only exploded

on contact.

Here, pools of spilled fuel form on the surface, as if

they were funeral wreaths.

In 1942 the life expectancy of a U-boat was more than 12 months.

One year later it was no more than 12 weeks.

The Allies had found the riposte and took full advantage.

It was Donitz's turn to taste the bitterness of defeat.

His dream of sinking more ships than the Allies could produce evaporated.

Altogether, the 16 American shipyards were launching one

Liberty ship every day.

The Admiral accepted the obvious conclusion.

On May 24, 1943, he ordered his units to withdraw from the North Atlantic.

But Donitz wasn't one to throw in the towel.

He informed his Wolves of his new strategy.

"We know that the presence alone of our U-boats will occupy two

million of our enemies.

So we must, in spite of everything, dispatch our boats to

distract the enemy, even if they

never sink another ship."

15 U-boats entered the North Atlantic to simulate the

presence of several wolf packs.

Donitz staked everything on his most experienced captains.

It was a wasted effort.

The last wolves were sunk one by one.

The crewmen weren't unaware of the fate awaiting them.

They lamented, "All of these U -boat sorties are now suicidal."

In 1943, 238 U-boats were lost.

First Lieutenant Heinz Schaeffer bemoaned,

"We feel bitter, a curse on this war,

on mankind, on the inventors of submarines, on ourselves."

After four years of war, half of the U -boats had been sent to

the bottom of the ocean.

The surviving units were transformed into life rafts.

The wolves' fangs were well and truly blunted.

Since the Normandy landings, Germany was in its death throes.

Early in 1945, Berlin fell to the Red Army.

On April 30, Hitler committed suicide.

In his last will and testament, he named Donitz as his

successor as head of state.

Donitz announced the news in a nationwide radio address.

The admiral stubbornly refused peace.

To save the Kriegsmarine's honour, he ordered the scuttling of all ships.

232 U-boats were sunk, never to surface again.

A handful of rebel wolves disobeyed and helped themselves to

the last cargo ships of the war.

On May the 4th, Donitz accepted the facts and announced the

capitulation of Germany.

The Wolves surrendered to the victors, but not all of them.

One new type of U-boat was on a secret mission.

Capable of crossing the entire Atlantic underwater, it

patrolled freely, undetectable by radar.

It could easily sink any ships it came across, then

flee in stealth mode.

But the war was over.

This sole prototype was unable to change the course of history.

But it did pave the way for the design of modern submarines.

Of the 40,000 German submariners called to duty, 30,000 of

them remained in the ocean

depths alongside their victims.

A pointless sacrifice, because the destruction of the Allied

merchant fleet was but a pipe dream.

They hadn't banked on the US being able to produce more

ships than the U-boats could destroy.

Faced with the industrial power of Uncle Sam, Donitz was always a loser.

The 153 surviving U-boats were moored in Allied ports or on the

banks of the River Thames.

Churchill had one brought to London, so that the British

people could at last approach

one of the terrifying wolves which had sunk more than 3,500 Allied ships.

In November 1945, the hour of judgment came for

the Nazi war criminals.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Admiral Karl Donitz was at the head of

the list, just behind Hermann Goering.

He was indicted on counts of crimes against peace and war crimes.

With a solid defense, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

As the instigator of criminal warfare that accounted for

72,000 Allied deaths, half of

which were civilians, Donitz was able to save his image and

convince the tribunal that

he wasn't a Nazi.

A little white lie?

After all, Hitler did name him as his successor.

Whatever the case, he preserved his reputation as an honest

soldier until his death in December, 1980.