FULL FEATURE: The Man Who Didn’t Rescue Hitler

Can you imaging picking up a newspaper one day to find out that a book had been written detailing how you picked up the Führer in early summer 1945 and transported him to Argentina in your submarine? When you absolutely didn’t?

Fake news is not a product of the digital age. This is precisely what happened to Heinz Schaeffer. At the end of the war he was in command of U-977, but he’d had a nondescript career as a member of various wolf packs plying the Atlantic. He happened to be back in Germany when this ‘news’ once again reared its head, and this headline was not news to him. The accusation it levelled had already inflicted no small amount of drama on the young sailor, but he picked up a copy of the paper, took it to a Düsseldorf café, past the skeletal remains of buildings and the malnourished, down-at-heel people trying to rebuild their lives after the fall of the Third Reich, ‘and over a glass of watery post-war beer… assessed this latest “bombshell.”’

Someone named Ladislas Szabo had published a book in Buenos Aires, ‘claiming that U-530… and U-977 …formed part of a ghost convoy which had carried Hitler and other "big shots" of the Third Reich first to the Argentine, and then to the Antarctic.’ I can already feel Luke Daly-Groves twitching somewhere, so if you want to read about how Hilter absolutely did not get out of Berlin alive, you can buy his meticulously researched book here.

But let’s stick with Schaeffer. This newspaper even published the complete itinerary for what it referred to as the phantom convoy, ‘including the point at which the two submarines had separated from it. It also stated that the two Commanders concerned were ready to vouch for the truth of the story.’ This was news to at least one of said commanders. But funny as he found all of this, there was a more sinister side to this silliness, ‘for since the 17th August 1945 the accusation had been constantly levelled at me: “You, Schaeffer, are the man who took Hitler to the Argentine!” Whether I had to deal with the special Allied Commission which had landed at Buenos Aires, or with the American intelligence officers who sent me off by air to Washington to undergo interrogation by British Admiralty experts, I had to fight for all I was worth to exculpate myself.’

Schaeffer knew he was nobody special, and he hadn’t planned on writing a book. But as the 1950s dawned he said: ‘Few Germans who survived the Second World War have broken their silence yet, and the reason apparently is that their ordeal seems to have been futile and their future, in a swiftly changing world over-shadowed by the threat of yet another war, uncertain to say the least.’ But now how could he not? ‘The mystery of U 977 has already been the subject of so much comment that I feel impelled to tell my story.’

We’ll get to how, by the time U-977 arrived in Argentina, the authorities had been led to believe that Hitler was on board, but, just because he wasn’t, doesn’t mean that the story of how Schaeffer and his crew ran away to South America in a terrifying, epic three and a half month voyage isn’t a cracking, unique yarn of its own…

Heinz Schäffer (uboat.net)

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