The following article is from our January 2010 issue.

Homage to a very decent foe US sailor: "It's impossible for me to hate Germans ever since a U-boat captain saved my life." - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

The Germans' war guilt is indisputable. Many were part of the system and conspired in commiting crimes. But there were also those who didn't just resign themselves to the regime and its demands without question.

In Café Mozart, a cozy German restaurant in downtown Washington DC, Robert Morrison unwraps one of the most treasured items he had inherited from his father, Leslie, who died in 1998. It is a bronze plaque showing the stylized outline of a U-boat. "German prisoners of war gave this to Pop when he served as an officer on a merchant vessel carrying them to the United States," says Morrison, a senior fellow with the Family Research Council, a Washington think tank. "This was their way of thanking him for treating them so well. A non-smoker, he gave them all his cigarette rations."

As always in wartime episodes, there is a "story behind the story." Why did Leslie Morrison who lost a brother in a German submarine attack on his ship tell his children over and over again that he could never hate Germans? Why has this become part of the Morrison family lore? It was because of the decency of one unsung hero of World War II, Lieutenant Commander Gerhard Wiebe, who acted against the explicit order of his admiralty not to rescue sailors of vessels sunk by German submarines.

Little is known about Wiebe. "His file is astonishingly thin," reports Horst Bredow, founding director of Traditionsarchiv Unterseeboote (U-boat archive) in Cuxhaven, which holds the records of most of Germany's 41,500 World War II submariners. "We know that he was born in 1907. There is nothing in his folder about any decorations he might have been awarded, even though U-516 sank nine vessels while under his command from May 12, 1942 until June 23, 1943."

One of these ships was SS Deer Lodge, an American freighter on which Leslie Morrison served as able-bodied seaman when it was torpedoed in the middle of the night 39 nautical miles off Port Elizabeth, South Africa. "We were carrying military trucks in the hold and four narrow-gauge locomotives with their tenders on our deck; the brand-new locomotives, built in Baltimore, were destined for British-ruled Palestine," recalls Manuel Dias, 88, of Milford, Mass., adding that Morrison, 10 years his senior, was his mentor on board.

On Feb. 17, 1943, Dias had just finished his watch and was about to climb into his bunk when the alarm sounded. "I rushed up to the deck. It was pitch dark but I could spot the silhouette of a U-boat 300 to 400 yards across our bow," says Dias. "Then the torpedo hit us portside. We had a crew of 55. Two were killed but the Germans gave the rest of us plenty of time to leave our listing ship, even though we had some initial problems with our life boats."

What happened next is a little hazy. According to Morrison's son, the German skipper and his crew provided the Americans with food, water and charts. Dias can't recall this detail but agrees with Morrison that Wiebe deliberately held off firing a second torpedo for a quarter of an hour to make sure that all survivors were safe. The second torpedo sank the doomed SS Deer Lodge.

The seas were heavy. "I was in the water, certain that the Germans would shoot all of us," Dias says. "But when I caught up with our captain, Irving Jenson, he said that Wiebe had asked him in English, 'Are any of you injured? Do you need first aid?' I could hear the two officers' voices. Jenson told me that before leaving the scene, Wiebe had directed him to safety; he advised us to head for Bird Island or Cape Recife. I thought that this was pretty decent of him. Six hours later, a South African warship rescued us."

Reached in Cuxhaven by telephone, Bredow, a former watch officer on a German surface ship in World War II, insisted that many German submarine commandants acted in this manner. This violated an order from Berlin not to concern themselves with survivors but "only with the safety or your own boat and with efforts to achieve additional successes as soon as possible."

"Unrestricted submarine warfare" practiced by the "Kriegsmarine" (German Navy) became a major issue in Grand Admiral Dönitz' war crimes trial in Nuremberg but his sentence did not reflect this particular violation of international accords because of similar actions by the Allies.

Before the Nuremberg tribunal, Dönitz's defense attorney, Otto Kranzbühler, presented an interrogatory of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, the former commander-in-chief of US naval forces in the Pacific. Nimitz confirmed that on orders of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington he himself had conducted unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan.

Dönitz spent 10 years in Spandau Prison in Berlin. Manuel Dias and Leslie Morrison concluded from their wartime experience that Germans "are wonderful people, although Hitler was of course a different matter," according to Dias. Fort Elizabeth is now part of a metropolitan municipality named after Nelson Mandela and home to a huge Volkswagen assembly plant.

Wiebe was ultimately promoted to full commander. He left the submarine force soon after his encounter with the SS Deer Lodge for medical reasons and spent the rest of World War II training junior officers and then more than two years in a British prisoner of war camp.

While not celebrated as an ace by his superiors, Wiebe was a champion in the eyes of Dias, Leslie Morrison and now Morrison's son Robert. When Wiebe died in 1985, few of his fellow countrymen had even heard of this extraordinary representative of Germany's small band of submariners whom American historian Timothy P. Mulligan acclaimed as an elite corps of World War II, which killed most of them.