A surviving WWII U-boat seaman captured off the coast of Maine, now a U.S. resident, comes out of the dark to share his story.

By Colin W. Sargent

July/August 2019 | view story as a .pdf

During World War II, Maine went dark. Amid whispers that U-boat wolf packs were sinking freighters off our coast, my family installed blackout shades on the windows of our cottage at Kennebunk Beach to stop enemy submariners from watching us sit down to our lobster dinners. Like all the neighbors who feared peering eyes offshore, Grandpa and Nana friction-taped the headlights on their ’37 Hudson sedan while the kids departed for duty overseas. One morning at dawn, two strangers in U.S. Army uniforms showed up on our front lawn. They dug a foxhole in our sea roses, framed it in railroad ties, and installed a machine gun. While my father was flying B-17s with the squadron made famous in Twelve O’Clock High, back home we braced for sinkings and bombardment from possibly the worst-handled wartime secret ever. Through leaks and cryptic warnings Mainers learned that millions of tons of shipping were being sunk offshore. This led to panic.

I’ve always wondered, did the measures my family talked about over bourbon work? What must it have been like for a U-boat crew member to look at us through a periscope? Exactly how prepared did we Yankees look to the enemy below?

The Welcome Party

“My first impression was…surprise. The place was lit up like a Christmas tree!” says Karl Robert Bauer, a former U-boat torpedoman, of his first glimpse of the U.S. shore from his submarine. Everywhere looked like Broadway. “At the beginning, America was not prepared for anything like a German U-boat,” he says. “But I wasn’t off the Maine coast until the end of the war.”

My dad, the B-17 pilot, is dead now. But I still have Robert Bauer to talk to. He was the same age as my father, barely 20 during the worst of it. Bauer’s now 98.

After initially setting the tempo for battles on land and sea, Germany was losing World War II, fast. Things were losing their center. Everything was in freefall. “By that time, in mid to late 1944, we were stationed in Norway,” a hiding place for U-boats once the German coast was made unsafe by American and British bombers.

Orders came in for Bauer’s boat, the U-805, to join “Seewolf,” a submarine wolf pack patrol, to hunt freighters off the coast of Maine. “We went all the way from Norway past Iceland in the North Atlantic,” cruising “off the eastern coast, 200 miles off Cape Cod.”

Trouble on Deck

Morale was so low by then—savagely low, bizarre. So far from home, “We started developing problems with the boat. By that time, there was a lot of sabotage by the dockworkers. They knew we weren’t going to make it [when they sent us out on this last patrol].”

Then, finally, German Admiral Karl Donitz radioed the order for the fleet to surrender. Fate’s musical chairs had placed the U-805 off Bar Harbor.

They’d wondered about Americans, listened to our music on the wavery VHS channels. Now the crew was finally going to meet us face-to-face.

“Commander [Korvettekäpitan Richard] Bernardelli told us to take all the arming pistols off the torpedoes. We started radioing on an open frequency, knowing we were going to be taken prisoner.”

Humiliation, Interrogation

The legendary Lieutenant Eliot Winslow was in command of the Coast Guard cutter Argo, which approached the U-805, boarded her, accepted her surrender, and took most of the enemy crew below decks of the Argo under armed guard. Without delay, Argo harshly accompanied (escorted would be too polite) the U-805 to internment at the Portsmouth Navy Yard.

Feeling ruined, frightened, off balance, the crew of U-805 sailed disconsolately past Bar Harbor, Boothbay Harbor, Brunswick, Portland, the darkened amusement park at Old Orchard Beach, Boon Island, turned right at the Isles of Shoals, and finally delivered the submarine into the hands of surly U.S. Navy authorities in Portsmouth. An underwater creature thrown onto the beach.

There were hoots and jeers as the U-boat sailors slinked across the gang plank onto the mainland.

“My crew and I were taken to Portsmouth Naval Prison” on May 14, 1945. Navy intelligence interrogators closed in. “I told them our boat had the latest T-5 torpedoes in it. That’s when they perked up. It had a homing/listening device where it would actually home in on a ship’s propeller noise. It kept circling until it picked up an interesting loud noise.” Not that it always worked perfectly. “Sometimes the noise was from the U-boat itself!”

Surviving photographs from the surrender show nervous smiles from the crew. I want to hear Bob Bauer tell me what was so funny.

Why were you guys laughing?

“They seemed so afraid of us. We were unarmed. When we were standing there by the bus, we were all kind of chuckling, laughing.” Sure, it was a cover for their fear. But “the big joke was all these Americans had all these guns [trained at us]—what did they think we were going to do, swim to Germany? We knew they were going to eventually end up fighting Russia. So we were also wondering, are we going to go fight the Russians with you?”

Everybody’s got an enemy. You shuck one off, another takes his place.

Atonement

“They ended up taking us to the Boonesville, New York, prison camp. I got to leave in late 1946.”

Was that rough?

“Oh, I loved it there. It was the greatest time I ever had. They treated us well. We helped the farmers pick apples.”

Were you a Nazi?

“No. Everyone in the Wehrmacht [the armed forces] were forbidden to be party members after they enlisted. The Waffen SS was not part of the Wehrmacht.”

A New Life

Then, Bauer disappeared. He went back to Germany to get his wife. Bauer’s son, Daniel Bauer—exactly my age—picks up the story. All the while during this interview, Dan has been sitting at his dad’s side, because they live together in Mountain Lake, Minnesota.

“He’d met my mother during the war when he was on leave in Hanover, Germany. She was from southern Bavaria. Garmisch, a ski town. During the war, she was in the Luftwaffe. She carried ammunition for anti-aircraft guns.”

After Robert and his wife, the late Lois Zimmermann Bauer, were reunited, “I got a job when I got back with Caterpillar, in Germany,” Robert says. “I was a draftsman by trade before the war, and Caterpillar asked me if I’d be interested in going back to the United States—in Peoria. I worked for Caterpillar for 34-35 years. I was a tool designer.”

Does anyone ever really thank anyone else for their service? Many Americans have exotic immigration backstories, but some might consider Bauer a former terrorist. Let’s just say if we’re lucky, we get to live and love. I ask Dan, the boy on the other side of the mirror, “What was it like going to high school in the U.S. in the cornfields of the Midwest with a former U-Boat P.O.W. as your dad?” I mean, John Cougar Mellencamp never wrote a heartland song about that.

The son waits a beat, then laughs. “My dad thought the Nazis were idiots.” Technically, “my mom was a member of the Hitler Youth for girls. So whenever a classmate would sneak up to me and ask, ‘Was your father a Nazi?’ I’d say, ‘No, my mother.’”