Friedrich Grade risked execution by keeping a diary of his years in a German U-boat. In truth he was never a fervent Nazi, but did take pride in his work as chief engineer of U-96, the last survivor of the vessel that featured in the bestselling novel and Oscar-nominated film, Das Boot.
Grade was the second most important person on board after the captain, responsible for the performance of the engine and weapons systems, overseeing diving operations and feverishly repairing damaged components when U-96 had been attacked — as it often was from 1942 when the British began intercepting German naval codes.
Luckily for Grade his secret diary was never found and he avoided the fate of 30,000 other German submariners who died on the 784 U-boats that were destroyed, out of an original fleet of 863. He lived to see himself brilliantly portrayed by Klaus Wennemann in the original 1981 film that was nominated for six Oscars. Grade, who would outlive Wennemann by 23 years, finally emerged as a celebrity in his own right when he published the war diaries that had been gathering dust in his attic for more than 70 years.
In them he described the acute discomforts of sharing such a confined space with 44 other men. “The air stinks of diesel and is alternately hot, cold and humid,” he wrote. “The clothes almost always stick to the body. One of the two toilets has been converted into a storage room. There aren’t enough bunks either, you take turns sleeping in each other’s sweat.”
Yet it was worth it when the U-boat succeeded in sinking Allied ships. “An indescribably beautiful feeling, from a distance three torpedoes = three hits,” Grade wrote on April 28, 1941.
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A few months later on August 17, 1941, he wrote of a moment of relaxation on board. “Schmut baked a cake with buttercream for everyone. Splendid! Afterwards we play rummy as a foursome. You don’t even know any more that there is war. Radio reception today excellent. America dazzlingly. Great dance music.” Indeed, the atmosphere in the U-boat was informal compared with the Wehrmacht because there was not even space to salute. “It wasn’t military at all on submarines. Folding the heels and putting my hand on the cap. There was a completely casual tone.”
Grade, one of life’s natural engineers who could fix practically anything by tinkering with it, published his diaries because he wanted to correct mistakes in the original novel that had been written by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a war correspondent who had joined the crew of U-96 in 1941 to take photographs and whom Grade, he later admitted, had never liked much. He particularly disparaged the depiction of the crew’s vulgarity, which he said was untrue, and also claimed that scenes showing the crew’s panic when Allied ships were dropping depth charges on the U-boat were similarly unrealistic. The men were afraid but they kept their discipline as the boat rocked and leaked because they were exceptionally well trained, he said.
However, Grade generally approved of the 1981 film, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (obituary, August 17, 2022) which was groundbreaking in that it played well to British and American audiences but depicted Second World War events from the perspective of the Germans.
Grade also praised the technical aspects of the film and the remarkable camerawork that could pan the full length of the U-96 in a split second. Above all, he was very happy with Wennemann’s faithful portrayal of him as the quiet, smartly dressed and well-respected man he was, who feels tormented about the fate of his wife and two young children at the hands of Allied air raids.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Grade was born in 1916 in a small village near Eckernförde in northern Germany. At the age of 18 he enlisted in the German navy, the Kriegsmarine as a regular, serving first in the cruiser Emden, a training ship, as an engineering cadet until 1936.
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Grade joined U-96 as chief engineer in December 1940, three months after the boat had been commissioned. By then Hitler’s fleet of submarines, the Nazi wolf packs, had already proved their worth in undermining the Allied war effort. Operating from huge submarine bunkers off the coast of France and Norway, U-boats would go on to sink millions of tonnes of Allied shipping that took military equipment, food and raw materials down to the bottom of the ocean with them. Thousands of sailors died in the attacks.
U-boats were still wreaking havoc on Allied shipping in 1942 when the British succeeded in cracking codes from the Germans’ Enigma encryption machine and could now read their radio commands. By the end of the war, with the help of high-resolution radar and sophisticated sonar devices, the British were able to track down almost every German submarine.
U-96 undertook 11 enemy patrols, sinking at least 28 ships and killing about 1,300 people before it was retired in January 1943 to become a training vessel. Ironically, having evaded Allied attacks during active service the submarine was destroyed during a bombing raid on the port of Wilhelmshaven in February 1945.
Grade was redeployed as chief engineer on U-183 for two patrols and then trained U-boat crews until the end of the war. After demobilisation he worked for his father-in-law’s shipping company in Eckernförde and later as an export merchant. With the founding of the armed forces in West Germany (the Bundeswehr) in 1955, Grade returned to uniform in the rank of corvette captain to work on the development of submarines. He retired in 1974.
The widower repaired household appliances for fellow residents at his retirement home in Bornheim. As the oldest resident, he organised a sports festival with what he called “age-appropriate games suitable for the disabled”.
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After publication of his diary at the age of 101 Grade acted as a consultant on the Sky reboot of Das Boot as a TV series in 2018. He enjoyed his newfound celebrity and was a fine advert for the centenarian good life, photographed in the residential home relishing a cigarillo and a whisky.
Friedrich Grade, naval officer and engineer, was born on March 29, 1916. He died on October 13, 2023, aged 107