Dönitz in Queensland

In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sent two warships on a world cruise to enhance their status as world leaders. Eventually the two light cruisers arrived at Cairns, where crowds flocked to see them. It had not been an uneventful voyage, as at one point the Emden broke down, and much to the delight of Il Duce, and the chagrin of the Führer, the Armando Diaz had to tow its German ally part of the way.

Everyone admired the svelte lines of the streamlined Italian ship. Indeed when she was launched in Venice, record crowds flocked to the Rialto to see her graciously glide by and some bystanders were pushed into the Lagoon, scattering frightened gondoliers.

In Cairns my father was the Government Medical Officer, whose duty was to perform autopsies when there had been a suspicious death. He was ably assisted by my mother, who was a qualified nursing sister.

Like many waterfront homes in Cairns, due to high tides and flooding in the monsoonal season our house possessed two storeys. The lower storey was occupied by the surgery, with a large staircase leading up to the living quarters.

Alerted one day for an important event in the surgery, we were up early in time to hear the sound of loud martial music beating out “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles”, as a large steel catafalque emblazoned with a swastika was wheeled in by German sailors, heads bowed low, with arms reversed. Shortly afterwards there was more loud music and the arrival of the ship’s captain with his Nazi Party overseer Kapitän Dönitz.

I stood at the head of the stairs with my nanny behind me, looking down on the unfolding event. The coffin lid was partially opened, revealing a cadaver of porcelain-white appearance. With a pointer my father delineated deep knife wounds secondary to an assault on the Cairns waterfront.

The coffin was closed, the two officers gave the Nazi salute and stood back. On looking up, Kapitän Dönitz, the future Führer, spotted me and gave a little baby side wave, which I returned and consequently received a tremendous slap on the back by my nanny.

Everyone went down to the docks to see the ships sail off. One of the Italian doctors practising in the Cairns area sailed away on the Italian warship to fight in Eritrea. He didn’t last long over there. He was ambushed in a grove, slashed to death, and his bones fed to the jackals. A large funeral was held in Cairns when news filtered back.

The body of the German rating was taken back to his home port, Lübeck, where in 1528 the Lutheran creed was established, though Jürgen Wullenwer, who was accused of Anabaptism, briefly had control of the city in 1533–34. If the rating was a Lutheran, his body would have been carried through the colourful ancient gate of Lübeck, at slow march and reversed arms, to its cathedral and its large imposing statue of Martin Luther with index finger, anointed with pigeon droppings, pointing heavenwards. If the rating was a Hussite, his body would have been greeted by Jan Hus in similar pose but with a larger dollop of bird droppings, as the Hussite church was close to the prolific bird population of the tributaries of the headwaters of the Elbe River.

Being in the Protestant north, the procession would have passed nowhere near the Catholic cathedral. But by a quirk of history, after the Second World War, the Catholic cathedral became a popular stop-off point for tourist buses, for here the Gestapo murdered a number of the monks of St Francis for harbouring Jews, beggars, invalids, no-hopers, conscientious objectors and cripples.