Was Hans Langsdorff a coward?

Was Hans Langsdorff a coward?



No. Hans Langsdorff was one of those very rare things: a reasonably okay Nazi.

Hans Langsdorff, centre, saluting. Note that the guys around him are giving the Nazi salute, but he isn’t.

For those who’ve never heard of him, Hans Langsdorff was a captain in the Kriegsmarine, the navy of the Third Reich.

He commanded the pocket battleship Graf Spee, and shortly before the outbreak of WW2 he was commanded to take the Graf Spee to the south Atlantic, wait there, and get ready to start sinking allied shipping.

On 20 September 1939, he was given the order to go ahead and attack.

For the next several weeks, the Graf Spee was extremely successful, sinking nine British merchant ships. Langsdorff did his best to observe the Hague Conventions: he tried to avoid killing people, he picked up the crews of the ships he sank and treated them well, and he earned the respect of the ships’ officers.

On 13 December 1939, the Graf Spee spotted what it thought was a cruiser and two destroyers. The Graf Spee had engine trouble and couldn’t outrun them, so it moved to attack.

Only then did they realise they were in fact attacking a heavy cruiser, HMS Exeter, and two light cruisers, HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles.

In the ensuing battle (the Battle of the River Plate), Exeter got heavily damaged but so did Graf Spee, suffering from hits to its fuel-cleaning capacity and stores. Both sides broke off the combat and Langsdorff made for the nearest port, Montevideo in neutral Uruguay.

The Uruguayan authorities had no interest in taking sides, and gave Langsdorff only three days to make major repairs or be interned for the rest of the war.

Langsdorff sought instruction from Berlin, and was told that he couldn’t let the ship be interned, and neither could he let it fall into enemy hands.

The unspoken implication was that Langsdorff should try to fight his way out. But the British were making every effort to make it look like a larger British force was on the way.

On 17 December, the Graf Spee left the port, sailed out to the edge of Uruguayan waters and stopped. The crew left the ship and were ferried away on barges.

Then, pre-laid charges went off and the Graf Spee blew up. She sank, and still lies there, in shallow water.

Langsdorff was taken to Buenos Aires, where he wrote a few letters home.Three days later, he shot himself.

In my view, Langsdorff acted in the best interests of everyone involved, except himself and, arguably, the Third Reich.

He saved both his own crew and the British Navy from what would have been a battle to the death. The Nazis placed no value on human life: Langsdorff did.

To anyone who would call him a coward, I invite them to place themselves in his position and ask what would be the most humane course of action.

If, after that, they would still call him a coward, I invite them to consider their position.

His last days are sympathetically dramatised in one of the best and most gorgeously colourful of 50s British war movies, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Battle of the River Plate, where he’s played with understated charm and panache by the great Australian actor Peter Finch:

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