'Kill Everybody': Hegseth's Reported Order Echoes WWII War Crime

In 1945, a German U-boat captain was executed for ordering his men to open fire on shipwrecked survivors. Eighty years later, a four-star SEAL admiral faces questions for doing the same.

U-boat captain Heinz Eck, left, and four of his crew on trial for war crimes in Hamburg, Germany, in October 1945.

On March 13, 1944, as dusk settled over the Atlantic, the periscope of a German U-boat broke the surface.

Peering through it, Heinz Eck, the 27-year-old captain of U-852, spotted a steamship. He would later learn that it was the Peleus, a Greek tramp freighter chartered to the British Ministry of War. She was riding high in the water, her cargo holds empty, bound for South America. No member of the Peleus’ crew of 35 noticed the surfaced U-boat chasing them in the darkness.

Eck gave the order to fire two torpedoes, both of which hit the target. The 8,000-ton ship sank in less than three minutes. About 12 survivors bobbed in the water, clinging to rafts and floating debris. The Peleus’ third officer was brought aboard, questioned, and then returned to a raft, with assurances that Allied help would come.

What happened next would lead to one of the most significant war crimes trials of the postwar era, one with direct bearing on recent U.S. military strikes on suspected drug vessels that have killed more than 80 people.

A Modern Parallel in the Caribbean

On Sept. 2, monitoring the first boat strike from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, SEAL Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley faced essentially the same choice Kapitänleutnant Heinz Eck had confronted 80 years earlier.

Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, was on a secure conference call after a missile obliterated a suspected drug vessel speeding across the Caribbean. SEAL Team Six, one of the elite units under his command, provided intelligence and targeting for the operation.

As the smoke cleared and survivors were spotted clinging to the wreckage, Bradley, according to The Washington Post, ordered a second “double tap” strike to finish them off.

Eight decades earlier, the same sequence, carried out with cruder weapons, sealed Eck’s fate and that of several of his men.

The Peleus case, now included in naval warfare law textbooks, stands for two simple legal principles: killing shipwrecked survivors is a manifestly unlawful act, and following an illegal order to do so is no defense. Enshrined in 1945, it has gained new urgency as Congress signals it will investigate the legality of the Pentagon’s campaign against suspected drug traffickers.

No Quarter

Eck ordered weapons brought up from below. Acting on his orders, four members of the crew opened fire with a machine gun mounted on the conning tower and dropped hand grenades into the debris field. One was the ship’s medical officer, the first to shoot.

The shooting went on for five hours. When it was over, Eck addressed his heavy-hearted crew: “If we are influenced by too much sympathy, we must also think of our wives and children who at home die also as victims of air attack.”

Nine of the survivors were killed or later died of their wounds, but the first officer and two seamen survived, and their later testimony formed a central pillar of the prosecution’s case. They drifted for more than a month before being rescued by a passing steamship.

Despite atrocities committed by other branches of the Nazi military, the German Navy maintained a reputation for professional conduct. The Peleus trial showed that the U-boat command did not approve the killing of survivors and had issued orders expressly forbidding it.

The Order From Washington

To be clear, the US military forbids attacks on shipwrecked survivors as well. The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual calls them “dishonorable” and “inhumane.” But in the SEAL Team Six case, the orders ran in the opposite direction and came from the very top. According to The Washington Post’s report by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order: “Kill everybody.” (Hegseth called the Post’s report “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”)

Image released by President Trump of a suspected drug vessel with 11 people on board, moments before it was destroyed on Sept. 2, killing all on board.

The Post’s report set off immediate political alarm. Representative Mike Turner, the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the reported order “would be an illegal act.” Leaders of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees announced inquiries into the operation, marking the sharpest oversight to date of the Trump administration’s campaign.

The Intercept’s Nick Turse was the first to report that several people on the boat survived the initial strike and that the attack came from an unmanned U.S. military drone. He added a detail not included in the Post’s account: the crew appeared to realize they were being tracked and turned back toward shore before they were hit.

In the hours after the strike, President Trump announced on Truth Social that U.S. forces had killed 11 “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Hegseth told Fox News that “we knew exactly who was in that boat.” The administration has not provided any names or evidence to back that up.

The First Postwar War-Crimes Trial

After rounding the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, U-852 came under attack. According to naval historian David Miller, U-852’s coded position reports were among the ULTRA intercepts decrypted by British codebreakers.

On May 2, 1944, off the coast of what is now Somalia, a Royal Air Force antisubmarine aircraft dropped several depth charges. The attack drove U-852 aground, and Eck ordered the boat abandoned and scuttled. Eck and the surviving crew were taken prisoner.

The trial of the Peleus was the first of all the WWII war crime trials, occurring a month before the Nuremberg trials began. It was held in October 1945 at a British military tribunal convened in Hamburg, Germany. Eck and four members of his crew were accused of violating the laws of war not by sinking the freighter, but by firing and throwing grenades at the survivors.

Eck’s defense rested on “operational necessity.” He argued that he ordered all traces of the Peleus eliminated, not out of cruelty or revenge, but to save the U-boat and the lives of his crew. Eck ordered the rafts destroyed, he said, because they could signal the spot of the sinking to passing planes, and they might contain communications equipment. The other four defendants said they were merely following orders.

Eck believed his actions were justified because he had been told of an earlier incident in which a German ship carrying rescued survivors and displaying a Red Cross sign was still attacked by an aircraft. He claimed this convinced him that enemy forces put military advantage ahead of saving lives, and that this belief explained his own decision.

The tribunal was composed of senior British Army and Navy officers, joined by two officers of the Greek Navy. The judges received legal advice from Major A. Melford Stevenson, the Judge Advocate. Wearing the gown and white wig of an English barrister, Stevenson noted that extreme circumstances could conceivably justify killing an unarmed person to save one’s life, but Eck’s actions fell far outside that narrow exception. Eck had spent hours circling the wreckage and firing on rafts, and the Judge Advocate asked whether a commander genuinely concerned with saving his crew would not have fled immediately.

Conflicting Explanations

Operational necessity also figures in the SEAL Team Six case. According to the Post, Admiral Bradley, the mission commander, argued that the survivors remained legitimate targets “because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.”

SEAL Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley

JSOC has reportedly provided more than one explanation for the second strike. In briefing materials prepared for the White House, JSOC said the follow-on strike was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard, not to kill survivors.

Procedures were later changed to emphasize rescuing survivors, according to the Post. Survivors from subsequent strikes, men the president and his defense secretary have called “narco-terrorists,” are processed as ordinary civilians and quietly sent back to their home countries. At least one was released without a single charge.

Sometimes referred to as the “president’s secret army,” JSOC got the mission only after CIA lawyers reportedly objected to earlier plans for the agency to carry out the strikes. To date, 21 strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people, with the CIA providing “the bulk of the intelligence,” according to The Guardian.

“I Would Not Have Done It”

At the Peleus war crimes trial, the defense called Captain Adalbert Schnee, a highly decorated and experienced member of the German U-boat command who had sunk more than 20 Allied ships. Under cross-examination, Schnee was pressed on what he would have done in Eck’s position.

“I would under all circumstances have tried my best to save lives, as that is a measure which was taken by all U-boat commanders,” he replied, “but when I hear of this case, then I can only explain it as this, that Captain Eck, through the terrific experience he had been through, lost his nerve.”

“Does that mean that you would not have done what Captain Eck did if you had kept your nerve?”

“I would not have done it.”

In closing arguments, Stevenson, the Judge Advocate, told the court that following orders was no defense.

“No sailor and no soldier can carry with him a library of international law, or have immediate access to a professor in that subject who can tell him whether or not a particular command is a lawful one,” Stevenson said. “But is it not fairly obvious to you that, if in fact the carrying out of Eck’s command involved the killing of these helpless survivors, it was not a lawful command, and that it must have been obvious to the most rudimentary intelligence that it was not a lawful command, and that those who did that shooting are not to be excused for doing it upon the ground of superior orders?”

All five of the accused were found guilty of a war crime. The court rejected the “operational necessity” defense and agreed with the Judge Advocate that firing on defenseless survivors was a “grave breach of the law of nations.”

Eck and two of his officers were sentenced to death. The chief engineer, who had initially protested that the order was unlawful but then opened fire, was sentenced to life in prison. An enlisted sailor was sentenced to 15 years in prison, demonstrating that responsibility extends down the chain of command when unlawful orders are carried out.

On November 30, 1945, Kapitanleutnant Heinz Eck, medical officer Walter Weisspfennig, and Leutnant zur See August Hoffmann, the gunnery officer, were executed by firing squad.

Eighty years later to the day, the law has not changed. The question is whether the United States is prepared to live by it.