Werner Henke - U-515

U-515

Henke was captured when U-515 was sunk at 1510hrs on 9 April 1944 in the mid-Atlantic north of Madeira at 34.35N, 19.18W by bombs from the US escort carrier USS Guadalcanal and depth charges from the destroyer escorts USS Pope, Pillsbury, Chatelain and Flaherty. 16 of the crew were killed and about 40 survived.

Henke had been accused in a US propaganda broadcast of shooting British survivors of SS Ceramic, a passenger ship, that U-515 had sunk on December 7, 1942. Henke falsely believed the British wanted to try him as a war criminal. Knowing this, Captain Gallery, hoping to extort intelligence from him or his crew, idly threatened to turn him over to the British if he did not cooperate. Captain Gallery was successful in getting Henke to sign a paper agreeing to cooperate with interrogators. Henke reneged on the agreement but upon seeing that their captain had agreed to talk, many of his crew signed similar agreements and lived up to them.

Henke was interned in the interrogation center known as P. O. Box 1142 in Fort Hunt, Virginia. While there his interrogators threatened to hold him to his agreement to cooperate or be extradited to England to face war crime charges. On 15 June 1944, he dashed to the fence of the interrogation center and began to climb over. He continued to climb after a guard ordered him to stop and he was fatally shot.

Henke was posthumously promoted to Korvettenkapitän and is interred at The Post Cemetery in Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, along with 32 other German POWs and 3 Italian POWs.

A ceremony is held at the gravesite every year on Volkstrauertag in November, the German equivalent of Memorial Day, at which the Naval attaché of the German embassy in Washington, DC, lays a wreath with a ribbon in the colors of the German flag in commemoration of all those buried at this gravesite. Flowers are not uncommon to see in front of the grave.