Naval Officers Under Hitler

This book is the collective biography of 318 men who joined the German Navy in 1934 to become professional officers. Eric C.Rust traces the lives and mentality of these men from their upbringing in the Weimar Republic through their post-war careers. It provides a professional, political and psychological group portrait based largely on personal interviews and correspondence as well as archival material. "Naval Officers Under Hitler" stresses the collective drama, continuity and transformation in the lives and thinking of the 318 men who joined Germany's Reichsmarine in 1934 to become professional officers. Individually and collectively, they were observers, witnesses, participants, victims, and sometimes, beneficiaries. The book argues that the vast majority of junior naval officers under Hitler, while well trained and prepared to defend "Volk and Vaterland" as good patriots, felt no profound or lasting attachment to Nazi ideology. Instead their ideological preferences remained with patriotic, conservative groups such as the German National People's Party and its successor organizations after World War II. Otherwise love of the sea and of the naval professional lay at the centre of their overall mentality and priorities.