In the history of the German submarine fleet, there is only one submarine commander (U-852) who was court-martialed for his military crimes during World War II. This is Lieutenant Commander Heinz-Wilhelm Eck.
By mid-January 1943, the Anglo-American naval blockade of Germany was gradually reducing the stocks of those strategic materials that Germany no longer had enough (namely rubber, tungsten, molybdenum, copper, plant substances, quinine and some types of oils) and which were absolutely necessary for the conduct of the war. All these goods, which were quite difficult to manufacture, were mainly available in the Asian regions conquered by the Japanese during the war. The Indonesian archipelago, a large and wealthy Dutch colony captured by the Japanese in the spring of 1942 after a rapid air-sea offensive, could provide Germany and the Axis countries with the strategic materials they needed.
In February 1943, the commander-in-chief of the German naval forces, Grand Admiral Dönitz, proposed the use of submarines for the transport of goods.
U-852 left Keele on January 18, 1944, bypassed Scotland from the north, entered the North Atlantic and, turning south, headed for the shores of West Africa. After 2 months, observing radio silence and surfacing only at night to charge the batteries, the submarine reached the equator.
On the afternoon of March 13, 1944, U-852 was located about 300 miles east of the Freetown-Ascension Island line. At 17:00 pm, an observer noticed a cargo ship ahead from the starboard side. It turned out to be the ship "Peleus" with 35 crew members, registered in Greece, built by William Gray & Company in 1928. Peleus had left Freetown five days earlier under a charter contract with the British War Department of Transportation, heading for South America.
Eck decided to overtake the ship and attack. The chase lasted two and a half hours. In 1944, Eck launched a night surface attack, firing two torpedoes from bow torpedo tubes. The torpedoes hit the Peleus just a few meters apart. Lieutenant Commander Eck observed from the bridge of U-852: "The explosion was very impressive."
Peleus was doomed.
It is impossible to know how many crew members survived after the sinking of the ship. First Mate Antonios Liosis temporarily lost consciousness and fell off the bridge into the water. Rocco Said, the fireman, was on deck when the torpedoes exploded. Said, who had been at sea since childhood, "it was clear that the ship would sink." The cargo ship sank so quickly that almost none of the survivors had time to put on life jackets. Those who jumped overboard clung to manhole covers, lumber and any other debris. The liferafts, which were on the deck, swayed in the water after the sinking of the ship, and some of the survivors swam towards them. U-852 moved slowly through the rubble. After the submarine sailed, Lyosis climbed onto the raft.
Eck, his first officer, Lieutenant Gerhard Colditz, and two sailors were on the bridge of U-852 at that time. As the submarine circled slowly through the wreckage, Eck and his crew on the bridge heard the screams of the drowning. They also saw lights on some of the rafts. At about the same time the ship's doctor Walter Weispfening arrived on the bridge.
Whenever possible, submarine captains should ask survivors questions about the ship, its cargo and destination. Eck summoned the English-speaking chief engineer Hans Lenz to the deck. He sent an engineer to the bow to interrogate the survivors. Lenz was joined by a second officer, August Hoffmann.
Hoffman took off duty at 4:00 pm, an hour before the Peleus was sighted. Hoffman also spoke some English and was ordered to accompany Lenz.
When the two officers reached the bow, Eck maneuvered U-852 alongside one of the life rafts. On the raft he chose were the third officer of the "Peleus" Agis Kefalas, the fireman Stavros Sogias, a Russian sailor named Pierre Neumann. Lenz and Hoffman interrogated Kefalas. They learned that the ship was sailing from Freetown and was heading for River Plate. The third officer, Kefalas, also told them that another, slower ship followed them to the same destination. At the end of the interrogation, the officer was returned to the liferaft.
U-852 moved slowly as Eck listened to Lenz's report.
At this point, there were five officers on the bridge: Eck, his first officer (Colditz), second officer (Hoffman), chief engineer (Lenz), and doctor (Weispfening). The doctor stood apart from the others and did not participate in the ensuing conversation. Hoffman also stayed far enough from the group to clearly understand what the three officers were discussing.
The conversation took an ominous turn. Eck told Kolditz and Lenz that he was concerned about the amount and size of the wreckage. Morning aerial patrols from Freetown or Ascension Island will find debris and trigger an immediate search for the sub.
He could leave the area on the surface at maximum speed until dawn, but by the time the sun rises, U-852 will still be less than 200 miles from the site of the Peleus's sinking. Eck decided that in order to protect his boat and crew, he needed to destroy all traces of the Peleus.
Eck ordered to raise two machine guns to the bridge. While the weapons were being raised, Colditz and Lenz protested against the captain's decision. Eck listened to both officers but dismissed their objections. All traces had to be destroyed, Eck said.
When the submarine turned back towards the rafts, Lenz went downstairs, leaving four officers on the bridge. The machine guns were delivered to the deck.
What exactly was said and what happened next is not entirely clear. The following events could not be fully explained at a later trial. Eck apparently informed the officers on the bridge that he wanted to sink the rafts. There was no direct order to shoot at the survivors in the water or at the survivors on the rafts. However, it was clear that the survivors would lose hope of salvation. Eck assumed that the rafts were hollow and, damaged by machine gun fire, would sink.
It was about 20:00 pm, the night was very dark and moonless. The rafts on the water looked like dark shapes, their lights extinguished by the Peleus crew as the submarine approached. Eck turned to Weispfening, who was standing near the right machine gun, and ordered him to fire at the wreckage. The doctor complied with the order, directing fire on the raft, which he estimated was about 200 yards away.
Weispfening's machine gun jammed after firing just a few rounds. Hoffman corrected the problem and continued firing at the raft. The Doctor no longer took part in the attempt to destroy the rafts, although he remained on the bridge. Despite the machine-gun fire, the raft refused to sink. Eck ordered a searchlight to be turned on to inspect the raft and determine why it was still afloat. Inspection, carried out at a considerable distance and in poor lighting, turned out to be ineffective. The submarine continued to move slowly through the wreckage, periodically firing at the rafts. All shelling was conducted from the starboard side, and at that moment only Hoffman was firing.
The rafts did not sink, and Eck's goal of removing the wreckage was not achieved.
Hoffman proposed the use of a 105mm cannon (10.5cm SKC / 32), but Eck rejected this proposal out of concern for use at such close range. However, he told Hoffman to try dual 20mm anti-aircraft guns.
An attempt to sink the rafts with 20mm guns was also unsuccessful, with Eck ordering hand grenades to be raised and U-852 maneuvering thirty yards from the raft.
The grenades were also found to be useless for flooding the rafts. Throughout the gruesome operation, Eck believed that whoever was on the rafts would jump into the water when the shooting began. His assumption was wrong.
When the shooting began, Officer Antonios Lyoss threw himself on the floor of the raft and hid his head under the bench. From behind, he heard Dimitrios Costantinidis scream in pain as bullets hit him. The sailor collapsed to the floor of the raft, dead. Later, when the submarine made another pass and threw grenades, Lyossis was wounded in the back and shoulder by shrapnel.
On board the other raft were a third officer, Agis Kefalas, and two sailors. Both of the latter were killed, and Kefalas was badly wounded in the arm. It is unclear whether these people were killed by shrapnel from a grenade or from a machine gun. Despite his injury, Kefalas got off the raft and swam to the boat occupied by Lyoss.
Sailor Rocco Said dived from the raft when the shooting began and was in the water. Sailors were drowning around him when they were fired upon from machine guns.
Chief Engineer Lenz, who was reloading the front torpedo tubes, heard intermittent fire and hand grenade explosions. At the time, he was the only person below deck who knew for sure what the sounds meant.
At midnight Colditz took over from Hofmann. Together with him, Lenz and the sailor Wolfgang Schwender climbed onto the bridge, who was ordered to shoot the rafts. After the first round, the machine gun jammed, after which Lenz, having eliminated the malfunction, continued the shooting himself.
By 01:00 the submarine had been conducting its "difficult and strange battle" for 5 hours. Neither ramming nor the use of machine guns, coaxial anti-aircraft machine guns and grenades had the expected result. The rafts were riddled, but they stayed afloat. Without eliminating traces, Eck left the area of the sinking of the ship and 4 survivors and at maximum speed headed south, to the western coast of Africa.
After the sinking of a Greek steamer and the shooting of the survivors on one of the rafts, 4 people remained wounded. They stayed on the raft for 39 days. On April 20, 1944, they were discovered by the Portuguese steamer Alexander Silva. Three were still alive (Antonios Liosis, Dimitrios Argyros and Rocco Said). Agis Kefalas died 25 days after the sinking of the ship.
As U-852 moved, news of the shooting spread throughout the boat and seriously affected morale.
“I got the impression that the mood on board was rather depressing,” Eck later said. "I myself was in the same mood." Due to the crew's sullen attitude, he addressed his men over the boat's acoustic system, telling them that he had made the decision "with a heavy heart" and regretted that some of the survivors might have been killed while trying to sink the rafts. He acknowledged that in any case, without the rafts, the survivors would surely die. He warned his team about the "too strong influence of compassion", citing that "we also need to think about our wives and children who die at home in air attacks."
Eck was forced to run aground on a coral reef on 1944-05-03 in the Arab Sea, off the eastern coast of Somalia, after the boat was damaged by a British Wellington-class attack.
Submarine commander Heinz Eck, ship's doctor Walter Weispfening, and first mate August Hoffmann were sentenced to death and shot on November 30, 1945.
Marine engineer Hans Lenz confessed and wrote a petition for pardon, so he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sailor Wolfgang Schwender was sentenced to seven years in prison. It has been proven that he was forced to carry out the execution order.
Lenz and Schwender were released a few years later, one in 1951 and the other in 1952.
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Other submariners also committed war crimes.
The commander of the American submarine, Commander Dudley Morton, after the sinking of two transports, the Buyo Maru and the Fukuei Maru, ordered all lifeboats to be fired from a machine gun and small-caliber cannon. The boat was sunk in the La Perouse Strait by the Japanese anti-submarine defense forces on 1943-11-10.
The commander of the U-247 submarine, Ober-Lieutenant Gerhard Matshulat, on July 5, 1943, west of Scotland, sank the fishing trawler "Noreen Mary" with artillery fire, and then ordered the fishermen fleeing the boats to be machine-gunned. The submarine was sunk on 1.09.1944 by depth charges from the Canadian frigates Saint John and Swansea in the western part of the English Channel.
