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REMEMBERING THE GRAF SPEE

By George de Lama
Chicago Tribune • Dec 10, 1989 at 12:00 am

It was Dec. 13, 1939, and all German sailor Freiderich ''Fritz'' Adolf could think of was going home

to Frankfurt for Christmas. The 20-year-old had been at sea for four months in his first long

voyage, a trip that would change the course of his life-and history.

Adolf was manning his 90 mm. antiaircraft gun atop the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf

Spee off the coast of Punta del Este, Uruguay, when trouble first appeared in the form of three
British warships. Shortly afterward the big guns of the warships began to roar. Fifteen minutes

into the first combat he had ever seen, Adolf`s world was turned inside out. ''We didn`t see a

thing,'' he says. ''All of a sudden there was a big explosion.'' The two crewmen standing beside him

a moment before, Max Schafroff and a lieutenant named Edgar Griegart, were dead, shards of hot

shrapnel embedded in their flesh. Adolf lay in agony with a shattered left leg. ''That`s when my

war ended,'' he says.

Fifty years later, a gray-haired but still-trim Adolf sits in a hotel coffeeshop in Montevideo,

Uruguay, shaking his head as he recounts how that fateful southern summer day brought him to
an unlikely life in South America. He and the rest of his fellow young German sailors had no way

of knowing it then, but they were caught in the middle of one of the most famous naval battles of
World War II.

For three desperate hours, the Graf Spee, the pride of Nazi Germany`s rebuilt fleet, exchanged
heavy fire with the three lighter warships from Her Majesty`s Royal Navy. After several direct hits

that killed 36 of his 1,150-man crew, the captain, Hans Langsdorff, took the swift battleship into
the wide mouth of the River Plate and steamed for port in Montevideo.

The HMS Exeter, Ajax and Achilles trailed the Graf Spee for a full day, exchanging fire and

torpedoes in a pell-mell chase down the giant South American estuary until the German ship
made port. The British kept a watchful eye outside the harbor while German, French and British

diplomats in the capital engaged in a tug-of-war with Uruguayan officials to decide whether the
ship would be allowed time to repair and rearm itself.

Uruguay, still years away from symbolically entering the war on the side of the Allies, delivered an
ultimatum: The Graf Spee would have to leave within 72 hours, after unloading its wounded and

burying its dead, or be detained for the remainder of the war.

As tens of thousands of Montevideans gathered along the stately old city`s waterfront to watch
what everyone expected to be the climactic battle, the Graf Spee limped out of port. Only four
miles out, before coming near the waiting British ships, the ship blew up and began to sink.

Out on the river, Hermann Alfred Tetzner, a 27-year-old master gunnery subofficer, was among
the hundreds of crewmen huddled aboard two tugboats that had been used to secretly ferry the
sailors from the battleship down the river to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Believing his ship was doomed and determined to save his men, Langsdorff had taken his crew off

the Graf Spee and then ordered a demolition team to blow it up, scuttling the ship just southwest
of Montevideo harbor before the British could pounce on it.

There the ship has sat for 50 years, the top of its mast sometimes barely visible above the waves

when the water is low. One of the ship`s small anchors stands at the entrance to the port, a grim
relic of the conflict that tore the world apart when old men like Adolf and Tetzner were young.

The engagement would become immortalized in books and movies such as

''The Battle of the River Plate,'' the first major sea action of World War II and the only serious
combat that took place in South America. It was also the Allies` first victory in the dark early days
of the war, when the German juggernaut appeared invincible. British historian Dudley Pope
described the episode as a major factor in later Allied shipping successes that helped turn the tide

of the war.

But the battle was only the beginning of an incredible adventure that saw the ship`s officers and
crewmen imprisoned in Argentina and Uruguay. From there, many escaped and set out on a
dangerous trek across South America and the Andes to the Pacific. From ports in Chile and Peru

they then caught ships and made their way back to Hitler`s Third Reich via Japan and the Soviet
Union. For some it meant a chance to fight again.

For Langsdorff, by all accounts an outstanding captain and compassionate man who is still
regarded as a major hero by today`s West German naval officers, the sense of failure was

apparently too much. Shortly after reaching Buenos Aires, he shot himself in the head with his
service revolver.

But many of his men simply stayed on in South America, half a world away from home. Sitting in

his modest little house on Mariano Moreno Street in the northern outskirts of Montevideo, Hans
Jahn, 70, brings out an old scrapbook and fingers the photographs that show him as a square-
jawed young man, looking proud and fit in his sailor uniform.

At 18, Jahn left his little Bavarian town near the Czech border on Sept. 1, 1938, to join the navy

and see the world. ''If I didn`t enter the navy, I would`ve been drafted into the army,'' he says
with a laugh. ''We all thought it would be a lot more interesting to go to sea than to be in the
army.''

The carefully preserved photos show Jahn and his close friend Adolf in the various stages of

military life: in boot camp firing rifles, wearing the trademark German army helmets; working on
a ship; then in exotic ports on their first voyage: Algiers in early 1939, Lisbon and Vigo, a port in

Spain`s Galicia province.

They considered themselves lucky, Jahn recalls. He and his fellow crewmen were assigned to the

Graf Spee, a 3-year-old pocket battleship considered the best vessel in the German fleet. Limited

by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to warships of no more than 10,000 tons and certain armaments-
hence the name

''pocket''-Hitler`s navy used new techniques to build three armored ships faster than any existing

battleship and more powerful than any cruiser.

Armed with six 11-inch Krupp guns that fired 670-pound shells over a range of 15 miles, eight 5.9-

inch guns and 18 smaller antiaircraft guns and torpedoes, the 10,000-ton ship had a novel range-
finding radar and advanced diesel engines capable of generating a top speed of 28 knots.

Commissioned in 1936, the ship first saw action in the Spanish Civil War when it bombarded

Republican positions off the Mediterranean coast near Seville.

The more famous and powerful 45,000-ton warships Bismarck and Tirpitz were not yet
completed, making the Graf Spee and its two sister pocket battleships, the Admiral Scheer and

Deutschland the elite vessels in the newly rearmed German navy. They could sink a cargo ship

and be 500 miles away in 24 hours time without using up excessive fuel.

On Aug. 21, 1939, while a jittery Europe agonized over growing fears of war, the Graf Spee slipped
out of its port of Wilhemshaven with a crew of 1,150 and headed for the Canary Islands. Eleven

days later, Germany invaded Poland, touching off World War II. The Graf Spee immediately went

into action sinking Allied supply ships up and down the West African coast.

Between September and December the Graf Spee sank nine cargo vessels, totaling 50,089 tons,

headed for Britain and France. Because Langsdorff took aboard the ships` captains and allowed
all their crews to abandon ship before he sank the vessels, there were no casualties, but Allied

shipping in the South Atlantic was thrown into chaos.

Meanwhile, 20 British warships were dispatched in nine hunting groups to find and sink the Graf

Spee. Aboard it, Jahn and Adolf did not know they were being stalked, only that they were
promised a trip home for Christmas. On Dec. 1 the ship was ordered to find and attack an Allied

convoy reported to be traveling off the South American coast.

''It was probably a British trap,'' Jahn says. ''They were three British warships, not a convoy of

supply ships. But when we saw they were warships, we were too close to get away.''

Like his friend Adolf, Jahn had a very short war. About 10 minutes into the battle, a shell landed a
few feet away from him. ''The man next to me, I saw him as the shell hit,'' he says. ''It blew his legs

off. I don`t want to say this, but I watched as all his intestines came out. I tried to get up, but I

couldn`t walk.'' Two pieces of steel shrapnel are still in Jahn`s left leg. Badly damaged and
pursued by the British warships, the Graf Spee entered Montevideo port around midnight. Thirty-

six crewmen had been killed in the battle, and another 34 wounded.

While the diplomatic negotiations about the ship`s fate were going on, the wounded were taken

off it for medical treatment. Jahn and Adolf were taken to a Uruguayan military hospital, where
four of their fellow seamen died later. The rest of the crew were allowed ashore to bury their dead.

Jahn has a photograph of this, too, showing the young sailors raising their right arms in the Nazi

salute as the caskets were being lowered into the ground in a small cemetery on the outskirts of
Montevideo. Langsdorff is in the picture, but he was giving a standard-not the Nazi-military

salute.

Along the faded, once-elegant streets of Montevideo, a capital seemingly caught in a 1940s time

warp, many older people still talk about the tension and excitement that gripped the city when
news came that the Graf Spee had been ordered to leave port. Up and down the Costanera, the

picturesque seaside drive that starts near the port, tens of thousands of residents gathered for
front-row seats to view the renewal of the biggest naval battle of the war until then. Journalists

transmitted live radio reports via telephone hookups to the U.S., Europe and Latin America.

As the ship began to head west, toward Buenos Aires, no one, especially the waiting British

warships under the command of Commodore Robert Harwood, expected what happened next-the
stunning explosions that rocked the Graf Spee and sent it to the bottom at sunset on Dec. 17,

1939. When they reached Buenos Aires the next day, the Graf Spee`s crew were arrested and

interned in a military base. The officers were also put under arrest but allowed to remain in hotels
in the Argentine capital.

Langsdorff arrived on a separate small boat from the Graf Spee and found, to his shock, that
Argentine newspapers villified him as a coward and traitor to the tradition of the sea because he

had not gone down with his ship. After trying in vain to get his men released, Langsdorff bade his
officers farewell, wrote a letter to his crew that made no mention of Hitler and the Nazi regime

and retired to his hotel room. The next morning, on Dec. 19, his body was found lying atop a

banner of the old Imperial German Navy.

''To this day, Capt. Langsdorff is seen as a great hero, a great naval officer, by the officers of the
German navy,'' says Vito Huselle, a West German navy captain and military attache in Buenos

Aires. ''After 50 years, he is still admired and respected by German navy officers for being a great

commander and a man of tremendous honor. It was a decision he took very much alone and with
great difficulty. For a commander to sink his own ship and not fight was very difficult. But he did

it to save his men.''

For Langsdorff`s men, the odyssey was just beginning. In the next few years, they would be

shuttled between military bases, house arrest in private homes and prisoner-of-war camps as the
conflict raged across the world.

Tetzner`s case was typical. After a few months of relative freedom, he was taken by Argentine

authorities to a military installation on Isla Martin Garcia, an island prison in the River Plate

outside Buenos Aires. It was a jail that would someday house dictator Juan Peron.

''The rest of the crew were sent to prisons around Argentina,'' says Tetzner, still vigorous and

military in his bearing at 77. ''We didn`t have much say in what happened to us.''

Some time after their arrival at their island prison, Tetzner and five others escaped from their

island prison by digging a tunnel out to the woods, then swimming 11 hours across the River Plate
to Uruguay. There, accomplices helped spirit them to the Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro,

where sympathetic Germans gave them shelter and clothes.

After three months around the capital, Tetzner was recaptured while trying to flee South America

aboard a Spanish cargo ship bound for the Canary Islands. ''We were lucky,'' he says with a laugh.

''That ship was sunk in the Atlantic.'' Tetzner was transferred to Sierra de la Ventana, a small

northern Argentine town, where he was interned in a military hotel for the rest of the war. After

Argentina entered the war on the side of the Allies in March, 1945, just one month before V-E
Day, he was taken to Germany as a prisoner of the British.

Released after two years in a prison camp in Munsterlagen, he returned to Argentina and spent
the next three decades managing a cattle ranch in the Pampas. ''I`m retired now, and I had one

son born here. I have always liked Argentina,'' he says. ''But I have remained and will remain a

German.''

In Montevideo, meanwhile, Adolf and Jahn and the rest of the Graf Spee`s wounded shuttled

between military bases and house arrest in the countryside for the remainder of the war. After

Uruguay broke relations with Germany in 1942, Spain took control of the prisoners, who were
allowed one night out each week to take in a movie or go out to dinner.

Both men met their wives then, daughters of German families who had come to Uruguay before
the war. Today both their daughters work in the West German embassy in Montevideo.

Jahn returned to Germany briefly after the war, only to find it in ruins. ''There was nothing left of

Frankfurt,'' he says. ''When we came into port in Hamburg, we couldn`t believe the destruction.

You could not hear a hammer.'' In 1949 he returned to his wife in Uruguay.

Adolf, meanwhile, remained in Uruguay after the war, not returning to see his family in Germany

until 1963. Until 1942 he and his fellow crewmen were still confident Germany would win the war.

''No one goes in and fights a war thinking he is going to lose,'' he says. But then Hitler`s invasion

of the Soviet Union met with disaster, and the Allies began to score gains in North Africa. ''Then
we could see this was not working well. But in Uruguay, the war was very far away. At the end, we

felt nothing.''

For 50 years the men of the Graf Spee-some 150 of them in Argentina and about 8 in Uruguay-

have maintained close ties among themselves. Every week many of them gather at the Club de

Remo Aleman, a German rowing club in Montevideo, for drinks and dinner and, invariably, a

toast to Capt. Langsdorff. Joining them from England each year for more than 20 years until he

died was Edward Millington-Drake, who served as the British ambassador in Montevideo at the
time of the battle.

In the last few months the gatherings have been dominated by talk of an attempt to raise the Graf

Spee, which, to the aging crew members may well be a huge scam. For one thing, Adolf says, the

heavy equipment that would be needed to raise the ship is not available in Uruguay or Argentina.

The vessel lies in about 80 feet of water and in tricky currents. ''You would need to bring the

equipment from the U.S., Europe or Japan,'' he says.

Also, the company that signed a contract with the Uruguayan navy to undertake the salvage

project, Acindar, S.A., is a little-known firm with no known experience or financial resources to
do the job. The company has been unable so far to meet a $50,000 payment to the Uruguayan

government stipulated by the contract.

As the West German military attache in Buenos Aires for both Argentina and Uruguay, Capt.

Huselle has been monitoring the salvage project. ''The crewmen of the Graf Spee do not want the

ship raised, and we respect their wishes,'' he says. ''Frankly, the entire matter is suspicious. It

does not appear to be a serious effort.''

In the meantime, amid continuing worries over the salvage venture, the old crewmen are

planning a 50th-anniversary celebration this week in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. A large
contingent of other crewmen is flying in from West Germany, and the West German embassy in

Montevideo here has helped organize the bash.

Ten years ago, in 1979, several dozen former British and New Zealand navy crewmen came to

South America to join in a week of festivities, drinking with their old German counterparts,

singing songs and swapping stories of the battle and of the war and their life afterward. ''They

sang songs and cried when they left,'' Adolf recalls. ''It was a beautiful reunion.''

The British, however, won`t be coming to this year`s party. Despite recent moves toward

reconciliation, Britain and Argentina have never formally ended hostilities since their 1982 war

over the Falkland Islands.

Shortly before his recent death, Helmut Grunow, one of the former Graf Spree crewmen in
Argentina, told a Buenos Aires newspaper: ''If the Graf Spee is raised, I would wish that it stand

as a testimony to an era of the past, to what was. At the same time, it should serve as a reminder

for generations still to come that they must avoid similar catastrophes.''

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