The Peleus War Crimes Trial: When 3 German U-Boat Officers Were Executed in 1945 for Shooting Shipwreck Survivors
A Deeper Look Historical Brief
On November 30, 1945, three German U-boat officers were executed by firing squad on Lüneburg Heath after being convicted of war crimes. Their offense: ordering and carrying out the machine-gunning and bombardment of shipwreck survivors in the South Atlantic, then trying to explain it away by saying they were only trying to sink the wreckage. Sound familiar? It’s known as the Peleus War Crimes Trial and it’s worth a Deeper Look.
Here’s the story.
The Sinking of SS Peleus and the Massacre
On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek steamship SS Peleus was sailing in ballast from Algiers and Freetown toward Buenos Aires when she was intercepted in the South Atlantic by German submarine U-852, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Heinz-Wilhelm Eck.
Eck stalked the ship until nightfall, then fired two torpedoes at close range: Peleus broke up and sank in about three minutes, leaving only a field of floating wreckage, rafts, and survivors.
Eck brought two survivors aboard for interrogation, then returned them to a raft. At that point, he made the decision that would define the rest of his life.
Fearing that the wreckage might be spotted by Allied aircraft and reveal his submarine’s presence and patrol route, Eck decided that all traces of the ship had to be eliminated. For roughly five hours, into the early hours of March 14, U-852 criss-crossed the debris field:
Machine-gunning rafts and wreckage
Firing smaller weapons
Throwing grenades at floating debris and rafts
Survivors were in and among that wreckage the entire time. Most were killed. Out of a crew of 35 plus 6 gunners, only three ultimately survived.
Those three — two Greek sailors and a Maltese stoker — drifted for over a month before being rescued by the Portuguese ship Alexandre Silva on 20 April 1944. Once ashore in Angola, they gave sworn affidavits to British authorities describing what had happened.
Meanwhile, U-852 continued toward the Indian Ocean. In May 1944, she was attacked by British aircraft and driven aground off Somalia. The crew was captured — and crucially, the Allies recovered the boat’s log, which contained entries about the Peleus incident.
That combination — survivor testimony plus the log — set the stage for one of the earliest and most important war crimes trials of the postwar era.
The Peleus Trial: Eck and Others Before a British Military Court
In October 1945, a British Military Court convened at Hamburg (Curiohaus) to try Heinz-Wilhelm Eck and four of his crew members: August Hoffmann (2nd watch officer), Walter Weispfennig (boat’s doctor), Hans Lenz (chief engineer), and Wolfgang Schwender (engine-room rating).
They were charged jointly with:
Violations of the laws and usages of war, namely, the killing of members of the crew of the Greek steamship Peleus by firing on rafts and floating wreckage after the ship had been torpedoed and sunk on the high seas.
This became known as the Peleus Trial or Eck and Others. It was the first war-crimes case completed by a British military court after WWII and remains the only case where Kriegsmarine U-boat personnel were convicted of war crimes for attacking survivors.
The prosecution’s evidence included:
Affidavits from the three surviving crew of Peleus
Testimony from multiple members of U-852’s crew, who described hours of gunfire and grenades directed at rafts and wreckage
Documentary evidence from the U-boat’s logs and operational records
There was no serious dispute that gunfire and grenades were used against the rafts, and that survivors died as a result. The fight was over why.
The Defense: “Operational Necessity” and “We Were Just Destroying Debris”
Eck’s defense was almost tailor-made to echo through time.
He did not deny that he ordered the firing. Instead, he contended that:
The purpose of the attack on rafts and wreckage was to eliminate all traces of the sinking, so Allied air patrols could not locate his submarine.
He was acting under “operational necessity”: his first duty, he argued, was to protect his boat and crew from detection.
Any deaths among the survivors were an unfortunate side effect of what he portrayed as a legitimate effort to sink debris, not an objective in themselves.
In other words, his line was essentially:
“I wasn’t targeting the survivors; I was targeting the wreckage for operational reasons. If the survivors died, that was collateral, not the point.”
Sound familiar?
His crew’s defenses complemented this:
Some claimed they had merely shot at debris and rafts, not at people.
Others argued they were acting under superior orders and could not be blamed for obeying their captain.
Eck also invoked broader wartime context:
He pointed to the Laconia Order, which forbade U-boat commanders from rescuing survivors, as part of the climate in which he believed he had to protect his submarine at all costs.
But the heart of it was this:
“We were only trying to sink the wreckage. We weren’t really trying to kill survivors.”
The Court’s Response: No to “Operational Necessity,” No to “Just Following Orders”
The British Military Court was not persuaded.
From subsequent summaries of the judgment and the Judge Advocate’s directions, several key points emerge:
Killing survivors is a war crime, full stop.
The court treated the deliberate attack on rafts and floating wreckage with survivors on them as a clear violation of the laws of war at sea.
“Operational necessity” didn’t fly here.
The Judge Advocate essentially told the court that even if one could imagine some extreme case where killing helpless survivors might be claimed as “necessary,” the facts in this case came nowhere near that line. The operational goal — preserving the safety of the U-boat — could have been achieved without machine-gunning rafts for hours.
Put more bluntly: you don’t get to call mowing down rafts full of exhausted sailors “necessary.”
Superior orders were not a shield.
For the junior officers and crew, the plea that they were “just following orders” failed. The tribunal applied emerging principles (later codified in Nuremberg and beyond): when an order is clearly illegal — like firing on helpless survivors — obedience is not a full defense.
Targeting “debris” isn’t a magic incantation.
The court did not accept the idea that you can launder intent by describing what you’re shooting at as “wreckage” rather than “people,” when it is obvious that people are in that wreckage and will die if you keep firing.
In later legal commentary, the Peleus case is often cited precisely for the idea that you cannot justify shooting at rafts by claiming the real target was the lifeboat, not the lifeboat’s occupants.
In the end, all five accused were convicted.
Three — Eck, Hoffmann, and Weispfennig — were sentenced to death and shot by British firing squad on 30 November 1945. The other two received prison terms (life for Lenz, 15 years for Schwender) and were released early in the 1950s.
Why the Peleus Case Still Matters — Especially Now
Legally and historically, the Peleus trial has become a touchstone for several principles that are directly relevant to modern incidents like the September 2 boat strike:
Killing shipwreck survivors is a war crime, even if you dress it up as “firing at wreckage” or “clearing the area.”
Operational or “military necessity” has limits — it doesn’t legalize cruelty when the same operational aim could be achieved without slaughtering helpless people.
Superior orders are not a safe harbor when the unlawfulness of the order is obvious.
And critically: you can’t re-label your target after the fact to escape liability. If everyone knows that shooting at rafts with people on them will kill those people, courts will treat that as targeting survivors, whatever you say your “real” objective was.
The British Judge Advocate in the Peleus case framed it in a way that still resonates: the court did not need to decide under what extreme circumstances “necessity” might justify killing the helpless, because on the facts of that case, the operational goal — protecting the submarine — could have been better achieved without machine-gunning exhausted sailors on rafts.
So when modern officials say:
“We weren’t targeting survivors, we were destroying debris,” or
“The purpose of the strike was to eliminate a threat from the cargo, not the people,”
they are reaching for a line of argument that was tested, in almost the same fact pattern, eighty years ago — and decisively rejected.
The Peleus precedent doesn’t resolve every question in the September 2 case. But it does do something important:
It tells us that courts and military tribunals have seen this movie before, in almost the same script. And they have made it clear that you cannot shoot up rafts full of shipwreck survivors and then hide behind semantics about what, exactly, you were “really” aiming at.
Thank you all for taking this journey with me. I know historical posts don’t bring the urgency of what we’re dealing with today — but this one I thought was worthwhile, and thank you for letting me share it with you.
Thank you so much for the history! We wouldn’t be in this situation if more people knew and understood our history.
Keep going. You're doing important work.