HAMBURG, West Germany -- Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the Nazi U-boat commander who became the last leader of the Third Reich, was buried Tuesday in a wooded graveyard ringing with thousands of voices singing 'Deutschland uber alles.'
Speakers condemned the Bonn government's refusal to accord military burial honors to the man whose submarines nearly won the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. Two West German soldiers defied a ban on wearing uniforms to the funeral.
An estimated 4,000 mourners, many wearing iron crosses, clustered in and around a red brick church in the Hamburg suburb of Aumuehle where Doenitz died of heart failure Christmas eve. He was 89.
More than 100 lavish wreaths from Nazi figures, veterans organizations and refugee groups honoring him for their rescue from Soviet troops lay strewn in the snow around the church.
Among them was one from Rudolf Hess, formerly Adolf Hitler's deputy and now, at 86, the sole occupant of Spandau Prison in West Berlin.
Doenitz, who ruled 23 days as Hitler's successor after the Fuehrer committed suicide in April 1945, served a 10-year sentence at Spandau after the Nuremberg tribunal found him guilty of war crimes.
After the hour-long service, members of 26 different military and other groups bearing standards headed a procession to Doenitz's grave.
Ten pall bearers wearing the iron cross carriedthe flag-draped coffin. Men bared their heads and some women wept as the standard bearers lowered their flags and Doenitz was laid to rest.
A group of young people started singing 'Deutschland uber Alles,' the former national anthem that came to symbolize Hitler's Germany. Elder mourners took up the tune and the wooded graveyard rang with the final farewell.
Rear Admiral Edward Wegener, who served under Doenitz, eulogized his former commander as 'a great leader and soldier' who was only 'drawn into politics' by being named Hitler's successor.
Doenitz himself, unswervingly loyal to Hitler, denied he knew about the Nazi concentration camps where 6 million Jews were murdered. But he shared Nazi nationalism and in 1944 condemned 'the poison of Jewry.'
Harry Poley, representing wartime refugees, praised the dead admiral for using the German navy to evacuate more than 2 million people fleeing advancing Soviet troops in the last days of World War II.
