We are sorry to cast doubt on the story of the U-boat captain who spared the Dunera and its cargo of internees from being sunk in July 1940 (Letters, 18 February), but it goes against the known facts. In the first place, the logbook of the U-56 was not “released in 1980”; along with numerous other U-boat logbooks, it has been held in the Naval Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defence since the second world war and was available to researchers such as ourselves during the 1970s. In his log, the U-56’s captain, Oberleutnant Harms, does describe firing two torpedoes at the Dunera, one missing, the other failing to explode. But he wrote nothing about sending out divers to retrieve jettisoned luggage or giving the Dunera safe passage.
This fanciful story was related by Benzion Patkin in his book, The Dunera Internees (1979), who named the U-boat captain as one SC Clerque. Searches of the archives failed to find a U-boat captain of this name. We told all this in our own book about the wartime internment of refugees, Collar the Lot! (1980), which contains a full account of the Dunera’s voyage. We interviewed four of the deportees, two of whom had survived the sinking of the Arandora Star. Although internees’ luggage was looted, none said it had been thrown overboard, nor was this recorded in a statement compiled by the internees when they reached Australia. For the record, the log of Günther Prien, the captain of U-47 who sank the Arandora Star, is in the naval archives too.
Peter and Leni Gillman
London
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