Brendan McNally | Twenty-five random things about GERMANIA and the Flensburg Reich

GERMANIA

1. In the entire history of Nazi Germany, the only time its government actually met was during the three-week “Flensburg Reich.”

2. When Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz became head of state, the Third Reich territories consisted of all of Denmark and Norway, as well as pieces of Holland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Russia, Czechoslovakia and Crete.

3. When Doenitz’s government was arrested by the British twenty three days later, its sovereign territorial holdings consisted of the grounds of the Marineschule (Naval Academy) in Flensburg

4. Admiral von Friedeburg, the avowedly Nazi admiral who was present at all three surrenders had a Jewish grandmother.

5. At the time of the first surrender to British Field Marshal Montgomery, Doenitz issued orders to his U-Boat crews specifically directing them not to scuttle or blow up their boats. But many believed he wasn’t serious and scuttled them anyway

6. The revolutionary Type XXI U-boats with which Doenitz believed he might turn the war around, never actually engaged in combat operations, they became the basis for all post-war submarines. British, American, French, Swedish, and Russian submarines are all based on the Type XXI.

6. The last German aircraft to fly out of Berlin was flown by a woman pilot named Beate Uhse. She landed in Flensburg and founded a sex toy industry which is still based there. She died in 1999.

7. In 1946, Peter Cremer, the U-boat ace who commanded Admiral Doenitz’ guard battalion, founded a food commodities trading firm which now proudly hails having Kosher certification.

8. General Ivan Suslaparov, Eisenhower’s Russian liaison officer flew to Berlin with a group of American and British staff officers to witness the final official surrender to the Russians. But upon landing he was forcibly removed from the delegation, by NKVD officers, put into an automobile and never heard from again.

9. At the moment, Karl Doenitz became the new Fuhrer of Nazi Germany he was at the point of committing suicide, but he ended up outliving John Lennon by two weeks.

10. Albert Speer died shortly after appearing on Good Morning America.

11. The only British intelligence officer who had an actual conversation with Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler before his suicide was an Irish Jew named Chaim Herzog who later became President of Israel

12. Though the term ‘Iron Curtain’ is usually credited to Winston Churchill, it was actually invented during the Flensburg Reich by Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz’ foreign minister and chancellor

13. On May 3, 1945, while the cease fire was in effect, British aircraft attacked and sunk the Cap Arkona, a civilian ship filled with thousands of refugees including a large number of Jewish concentration camp prisoners. All but a few drowned.

14. The only place in the US which Grand Admiral Doenitz ever visited was Fells Point in Baltimore, home of screwball movie director John Waters.

15. Five days after the surrender, the Canadian commandant of a Prisoner of War enclosure in Holland supplies his German prisoners with a number of loaded rifles each with a single bullet in them in order for the Germans to execute two fellow prisoners whom they had judged guilty of desertion. The action was considered a reward for the German Army orderly behavior.

16. In addition to being home of Germany’s sex toy industry, Flensburg is where the German government keeps its registry of driver’s licenses, particularly those with points against them. Therefore if you ask a German if he’s been to Flensburg, they will invariably treat it as a trick question and answer “No, but my driver’s license has!”

17. If you Google “Speer & Galbraith” you will get the lyrics to a song by The Who.

18. John Kenneth Galbraith described Albert Speer as the “head of the theoretical Ministry of Economics and Production in the equally theoretical government of Admiral Doenitz.”

19. Hermann Rasch, the disgruntled midget submarine commander is credited with single-handedly causing Mexico to declare war on Germany after he sank a Mexican cargo ship.

20. Germania was the name of the retro-futuristic capital city which Hitler and Albert Speer jointly designed to build onto old Berlin. Early in the war, whenever the British would bomb Berlin, Hitler would tell Speer, “Don’t worry, Speer, they’re only doing the work for us!”

21. Germania was largely forgotten until the advent of the internet and cheap computer animation. Now YouTube is filled with videos of Germania made by twelve year old boys living in Spain, Singapore and Plano, Texas.

22. If you want to go to find traces of what old Berlin had been like, don’t waste your money going to Berlin. It’s all gone. You can find something very much like it in Prague, which along with Dallas, Texas, author Brendan McNally counts as his hometown.

23. While Germans are generally unaware that Flensburg had ever been one of its capital cities, in German pop culture it is the home of “Otto” a character from a popular German situation comedy, whose trademark greeting is “Moin Moin,” which is Flensburg-slang for “Good Morning.”

24. If you go to YouTube and type in “Flensburg” you will end up with a lot of skateboarding videos made by kids from there. You may also find tourist videos from Brits, but mostly its skateboard videos.

25. Brendan McNally spent half his life researching the Flensburg Reich. Other than Germania, only a couple of books have ever been written on the subject and none are particularly readable. Having finally completed this task, Brendan McNally is now writing a novel set in 1930s Texas featuring a white jazz musician fleeing to the Mexican border where he hopes to get a job as a singing cowboy on XER the million watt “Border Blaster” radio station owned by the famous “Goat Gland” doctor J. R. Brinkley. Along the way he runs into Bonnie and Clyde, Lyndon Johnson, Bob Wills and the Devil, though not necessarily in that order.