Herbert Schultze was 29 years old when he took command of U-48, a Type VIIB submarine, in September 1939. By the time he handed over command in July 1941 -- after sixteen patrols -- he had become the most successful U-boat commander in history, sinking 55 ships totaling approximately 225,000 tons of Allied shipping. He had received the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, one of the highest military honors in Nazi Germany. He was, by any professional measure, a superb submarine commander.
What happened between his sixteenth patrol and his decision to stop commanding U-boats is a story that is rarely told. Schultze was a career naval officer who had joined the German navy in 1928. He was not a Nazi party member, and he had no ideological commitment to the regime. He was a professional sailor who viewed the war at sea as a contest between professionals -- much like the submarine warfare of World War I, which he had studied as a young officer.
What changed his perspective was the character of the war he was fighting by 1941. The merchant shipping lanes of the North Atlantic, which had been his hunting ground, were increasingly carrying not just military supplies but food and medicine for a civilian population. On his fourteenth patrol, Schultze's U-48 had torpedoed and sunk a British merchant ship carrying a cargo of frozen meat, eggs, and butter -- supplies for the British civilian population. Watching through the periscope as the ship's cargo was consumed by the sea, Schultze reportedly said to his first watch officer: "What am I doing? This is not war. This is murder."
He completed two more patrols out of a sense of duty to his crew, but his heart was no longer in it. On July 1, 1941, he voluntarily transferred to the U-boat training command, where he spent the remainder of the war. He refused to take command of another combat submarine, citing what he described only as 'personal reasons.' He survived the war and was never called to account for his actions by the Allies. He died in 1982 at the age of 72.
Schultze's story -- one of a professional soldier who withdrew from a war he could no longer reconcile with his own conscience -- is unusual but not unique. Several other U-boat commanders experienced similar crises of conscience, though most continued to fight for fear of the consequences of refusal. The Kriegsmarine's officer corps was, in many respects, the most politically conservative and least ideologically compromised branch of the German armed forces -- a factor that made moral qualms about the nature of the war more common among naval officers than among their army or air force counterparts.