Death and Honor

The reply from Grand Admiral Eric Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy, came immediately: Loss of life was not a consideration when the honorof Germany and the German navy was at stake. The Führer, Adolf Hitler, ordered that the Graf Spee go down fighting.

Captain Langsdorff understood honor.

Thus, he arranged for his wounded to be taken ashore and interned so they would receive medical attention. He put his dead ashore and arranged for their burial in Montevideo. He arranged for most of his physically fit crew to board small vessels hastily sent from Buenos Aires by Argentine Axis sympathizers. On arrival, they would be interned.

When the seventy-two hours was almost up, he hoisted anchor and sailed the Graf Spee out of Montevideo’s harbor. When she was far enough into the River Plate so that her wreck would not interfere with shipping, he scuttled her. He made sure he was the last man to leave her, then took her battle ensign, boarded a small vessel, and made for Buenos Aires.

In Buenos Aires two days later, after ensuring that his officers and men would be treated well in internment, Captain Langsdorff put on his dress uniform, positioned himself so that his body would fall on the Graf Spee’s battle ensign, and shot himself in the temple. That, he believed, would prove he had scuttled his ship because he saw that as his duty as an honorable officer, not because he was afraid of losing his life.

Captain Langsdorff was buried by the Argentine military with full military honors in Buenos Aires’s North Cemetery. Most of his crew, in dress uniform, attended. His pallbearers were Graf Spee seamen. They then marched off into internment.

Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the senior German intelligence officer, who in World War I had been interned in—and escaped from—Argentina, immediately dispatched German intelligence officers to Buenos Aires to arrange for escape of the interned crew of the Graf Spee.

With the Graf Spee gone, there was no longer a chance for the Germans to shut off the supply of matériel to the British using a sea raider or other surface navy warships. German Admiral Erich Raeder turned to submarines. Because of the distance from the submarine pens in France, this was an enormously difficult task.

Neutral Uruguay was sympathetic to the British chiefly because of a large English colony and the enormously popular Brit ambassador, Sir Eugene Millington-Drake. But neutral Argentina was predominantly—though by no means entirely— pro-Axis.