THE SURVIVOR

Gunnar Altmann, the German naval college's commandant when war ended in Europe in May 1945, was accidentally shot dead a few days later, and buried with full Nazi Party ceremonial, the last instance of its kind. In a career with the Kriegsmarine's u-boat arm from the early 1930s, he had become the highest-scoring of the wartime "aces" and the U-Bootwaffe's only holder of the Knight's Cross with oak-leaves, swords and diamonds. Yet he was haunted by the phantoms of an episode early in the war, the cold-blooded killing of the crew of a French schooner together with her passengers, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe. Omitting the incriminating details from his patrol report, he had found himself in a recurring confrontation with the ethics of his action, for which, he'd felt, the loss of friends and family had been only part-payment: as a youthful Kapitan-zur-See at the naval college he had also been a lonely widower burdened with a sense of guilt from which, perhaps, only untimely death offered escape. But was the body in the coffin his or a substitute, and where, as a flawed hero of Hitler's doomed Reich, had his wartime experiences led if not the grave?