Two men who served aboard this single submarine would leave marks on the twentieth century impossible to set side by side. One became the Grand Admiral who commanded Hitler's navy and, for three chaotic weeks after Hitler's death, the last head of the Nazi state. The other became a pastor whom that state threw in prison, remembered ever since for a few lines about the cost of staying silent. SM U-39 carried them both, in the same years, through the same war.
U-39 was one of the most destructive warships of the First World War. A German Type U 31 boat, double-hulled and built for the open ocean, she sank 149 merchant ships totalling more than 404,000 tons across her career, which made her the second most successful U-boat of the entire conflict. Her longest-serving commander, Kapitänleutnant Walther Forstmann, was awarded the Pour le Mérite, imperial Germany's highest honour, while at her wheel. She was not large by later standards, about sixty-five metres long, crewed by four officers and thirty-one men, and able to dive only fifty metres. But in the narrow, crowded shipping lanes of the Mediterranean, a boat like this could sink a merchantman a day, and behind every entry in those tonnage tables were sailors, cargoes, and families waiting ashore for ships that never came.
From January to the middle of 1917, U-39's coxswain was Martin Niemöller. A submariner then, he became a Protestant pastor afterward, grew into an outspoken enemy of the Third Reich, and was imprisoned from 1938 until 1945. He is remembered today for the confession he wrote in 1946 that begins "First they came...", a reckoning with his own early silence in the face of Nazi persecution. In 1917 and 1918 the boat's watch officer was Karl Dönitz. He rose to Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, and when Hitler killed himself in 1945, Dönitz inherited the wreckage of the regime for the last three weeks of its existence. That two such opposite lives passed through the same cramped hull, in the same war, is one of the quiet astonishments of naval history.
U-39's own war ended not in triumph but in a scramble for shelter. On 27 April 1918 she sailed from Pola under Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Metzger for the western Mediterranean, and on 17 May she sank the British steamer Sculptor north of Oran. The next afternoon two French seaplanes found her. She crash-dived, but at twelve metres two bombs burst close alongside; the after torpedo room flooded, the diving planes were wrecked, and she began to settle by the stern. Metzger blew his tanks and clawed back to the surface, though the damage was now too great to dive again, and he set course for the nearest neutral harbour, Cartagena. Toward evening the seaplanes returned. U-39 fought back with gun and machine gun and took no fresh damage, but in the chaos two of her crew, a sailor named Schulz and a stoker named Hausottl, were swept overboard and lost. Their names survive; their graves are the sea. The crippled boat reached Cartagena that night.
There her war simply stopped. Spain interned U-39 for the remainder of the fighting, and the submarine that had sunk nearly a hundred and fifty ships spent the last months of the conflict tied up in a Spanish port, going nowhere. In March 1919, under the terms of the armistice, she was surrendered to France, and in 1923 she was quietly broken up at Toulon. The boat was gone, but the men she had carried went on to shape, and to resist, the far darker war that followed.
Plotted at 36.6°N, 0.03°W, this point lies well out in the western Mediterranean, in the empty water where U-39 was hunted from the air in May 1918; the port that took her in, Cartagena, sits roughly seventy-five nautical miles to the northwest. From cruising height the sea is open and unmarked, the Spanish coast a thin line on the horizon. Nearest airfields are Región de Murcia (LEMI), San Javier on the Mar Menor (LELC), and Alicante–Elche (LEAL). Skies are typically clear here, and there is nothing on the surface to mark the spot, only the knowledge that two of her crew were lost in these waters.