Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days

These celebrated memoirs are the story of WWII, as told from the perspective of the German Navy's Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. Credited with inventing U-boat tactics, he recounts his experiences over ten years as a U-boat commander and his twenty days as President of Germany. Explaining the Nazi regime as a product of its time, he argues that he was not a politician and thus not morally responsible for the regime's war crimes. He criticizes dictatorship as a fundamentally flawed form of government and blames it for much of the Nazi era's failings.