Bernried: Lothar Günther Buchheim’s role in World War II – Munich

Lothar-Günther Buchheim was a skilled strategist. That is known. But this insight can be deepened in the newly installed permanent exhibition “Das Boot” in the Bernried Museum of Fantasy. With this anti-war novel, published in 1973, the painter and art collector from Feldafing became world famous; Wolfgang Petersen’s film adaptation (1981) finally made the subject a legend. The new presentation now traces the historical truth, traces the biography of a man who moved easily through the Nazi era and the post-war decades and always floated on top, regardless of whether he made a career as a member of the Nazi propaganda company during the war or himself later portrayed himself as a nonconformist observer of the war.

He was no small cog in the Nazi propaganda machine, but with motivating photos, texts and drawings made sure that the submarine crews were never short of offspring until the end of the war. But he never thought much about his role in the war. At least not in public. Only a few weeks before his death in February 2007, he admitted that he had been a member of the elite unit “Staffel der Bildenden Künstler”.

Museum director Daniel J. Schreiber had the old permanent exhibition dismantled in 2018. Thanks to the meticulous research of the journalist and author Gerrit Reichert, a factual and critical picture of the museum’s founder had already been drawn in “Buchheim 100”, the exhibition for Buchheim’s 100th birthday. Reichert succeeded in demonstrating how determined and ambitious the young Buchheim was preparing for his career in the Nazi propaganda company and how well he was later networked as a war painter in the Nazi propaganda apparatus.

The new show, curated by Reichert and Schreiber, strives for a sober, neutral approach, concentrating in large picture and text panels on topics that play a major role in both Petersen’s film and Buchheim’s books. The audio guide even provides a text comparison between the “boat” and its forerunner, the propaganda pamphlet “Jäger im Weltmeer” published in early 1944. Apart from the drawings and the still impressive photos of Buchheim, Schreiber largely dispenses with exhibits, apart from two models of the submarine bridge for trick shots, Buchheim’s camera or the Enigma cipher machine.

A timeline documents Buchheim’s biography, records that he was press spokesman for the Hitler Youth in Saxony and later head of the press office of the National Socialist German Student Union. Buchheim was never a member of the NSDAP, did not like the politician Hitler, as Reichert demonstrated in his letters, and expressed his displeasure relatively unabashedly. Admittedly, the stories that he later liked to tell in talks did not stand up to scrutiny. For example, the fairy tale that as a young art student in Munich he callously tore up three presentation orders and changed apartments in order to be undetectable. He actually moved several times in quick succession, but only because he hoped to find a better place to stay in Munich, which was already in short supply at the time.

His target was the propaganda company

When it came to his use in the war, he had a precise goal in mind: he wanted to join the newly established propaganda troops. Not everyone was appointed, but Buchheim, predestined by its press activities, received the decisive call from Berlin in August 1940. A smart move because it seldom made him at the forefront. Most of the time he sat in his apartment in Feldafing, painting, writing and publishing, and earned a fair amount of money.

Open detailed view

Incidentally, the later specialist in submarine warfare only sat in a submarine twice: once in autumn 1941 on the seventh patrol of the U 96, which provided him with the material for “Das Boot”. Then again in 1944 after the Allied invasion of Normandy, when he was summoned to France to document the defensive struggle of the Germans. After Brest had been encircled, Buchheim and others were evacuated to La Rochelle by submarine. On entering the port, a mine hit a neighboring submarine, an event that he dealt with in the “boat” with heightened drama and fatal outcome.

The fact that the war correspondents worked according to precise specifications is proven by his repackaging of the seventh patrol. The failed Gibraltar breakthrough with only one single success in sinking, which the U96 had achieved on this journey, was not suitable for propaganda. Their most important topic was after the entry of the war the USA from January 1942 at the submarine war on the east coast of America. In April 1942 a large report with the title “U-Boats against the USA” filled a double page in the weekly newspaper “Das Reich”, written so lively, as if Buchheim had been there. Of course, the photos all came from the unsuccessful seventh trip.

Open detailed view

In order to unravel the tangle of fiction and reality, Reichert used the daily entries made by U 96 commander Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, usually called “the old man”, even though in autumn 1941 he was not even 30 years old. On the other hand, Reichert evaluated the secretly kept diary of the chief engineer Friedrich Grade. The notes of both relate Buchheim’s portrayals in the “Boot” to the realm of fiction, which is no reproach to Buchheim, who called his book a novel and liked to make everything a little more dramatic. So he lets the boat sink to a depth of 240 meters after the bomb hit off Gibraltar. In reality it was 140 meters, the three dives that the others noted were probably far less bad than shown in the book and film.

What made Buchheim so valuable to the Nazis was the fact that he not only wrote, but also photographed and drew. When he was summoned to the Atlantic in 1941, he had long been a well-known author who had published in all Nazi gazettes. Without a doubt, he was one of the top propagandaists in the Navy, whom Hitler hoped would capture the image of war from the Nazi perspective for the next 1,000 years. Apologizing for this role and taking responsibility was something that Buchheim never thought of.