How Britain Tricked a German Battleship into Sinking Itself

By Michael Peck,The National Interest

Just before he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, the German officer penned a final note.

“For a captain with a sense of honor, it goes without saying that his personal fate cannot be separated from that of his ship,” wrote Hans Langsdorff on December 19, 1939, in a hotel room in Buenos Aires. Langsdorff finished his letter to the Nazi ambassador to Argentina, lay down on a German battle flag, and shot himself.

Langsdorff had been the commander of the Admiral Graf Spee, [3] which had been prowling the South Atlantic the week before, and now was resting on the bottom of the harbor at Montevideo, Uruguay. Many a captain has chosen to atone for the loss of his ship by going down with it. Langsdorff had suicide with a pistol two days after he had ordered his ship to be scuttled.

“I can now only prove by my death that the fighting services of the Third Reich are ready to die for the honor of the flag,” he wrote.

But what had led Langsdorff to kill himself? Why meet death in a hotel room instead of at sea? Therein lays one of the most remarkable sea battles of all time: how the Royal Navy bluffed a German battleship into sinking itself.

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