Korvettenkapitän Reinhard Hardegen (18 March 1913 – 9 June 2018) was a German U-boat commander during World War II.

[2] Hardegen served as 1.WO (First Watch Officer) under Kapitänleutnant Georg-Wilhelm Schulz aboard U-124 and, after two war patrols, was given his own command, the Type IID U-boat U-147, operating out of Kiel, on 11 December 1940.

During the dive, the tower hatch was damaged, forcing U-147 to resurface after a short while to make feverish repairs only a few hundred meters from the destroyer.

[3] The water leaks had damaged the diesel engines aboard the boat, forcing Hardegen to use his electric motors when, later in the night, he saw another merchant passing by.

Hardegen's first patrol with U-123 started on 16 June 1941, with a course for West African waters to attack British shipping around Freetown.

Some of the crew abandoned the cruiser, however, and Hardegen picked up a survivor who was brought back to France as a prisoner of war.

Five boats, which was all Dönitz could muster, were sent towards the American coast, to take advantage of the confusion in the Eastern Seaboard defense networks shortly after the declaration of war.

During the night of 15 January, Hardegen entered the harbour, nearly beaching the boat when he mistook shorelight for a light ship.

[7] The crew of U-123 were elated when they came within the sight of the city itself, all lights burning brightly,[Note 1] but Hardegen did not linger long, due to the lack of merchant traffic.

A couple of hours later, he happened upon five more merchants traveling in a group and attacked them with his last two torpedoes and his 105 mm deck gun, sinking a freighter and claiming the tanker Malay (8,207 GRT) as well.

[10] Although badly damaged, Malay, traveling empty, had enough buoyancy to stay afloat and managed to make its way to New York under her own power five days later.

[12] Hardegen, realizing that the whaler was too close for him to submerge, turned hard to port and ordered full ahead.

With its port engine unable to deliver top RPMs, U-123 only just managed to keep ahead of the tanker, and it took over an hour for Hardegen to gain enough of a lead to have room to maneuver.

He reached the target area in late March, attacking the American tanker Liebre (7,057 GRT) on 1 April with his deck gun.

Already planes were overhead trying to locate the submarine with parachute flares, while a destroyer and several smaller patrol boats were closing in.

[25] Forced by an aircraft to crash dive, U-123 found itself on the bottom, only 20 metres (66 ft) under the surface, when the destroyer, USS Dahlgren dropped six depth charges.

[27] Luckily for him, the Dahlgren, for reasons unknown, failed to drop any more depth charges and, after a short time, moved away, allowing the U-123 to complete emergency repairs and limp towards deeper waters.

[28] About two hours after this attack, Hardegen shelled the Swedish motor ship Korsholm (5,353 GRT) under British charter, and sank her within twenty minutes.

Throughout his career, Hardegen, as U-boat historian Michael Gannon documents meticulously with accounts from survivors, furnished food and navigational directions to the lifeboats of torpedoed merchantmen when possible and, when he sank the tanker Pan Norway, forcibly halted a neutral ship to have it pick up survivors of a vessel he had sunk nearby.

[32] One time, he and fellow Oak Leaves winner Erich Topp were invited to a dinner with Hitler at the Wolf's Lair.

[30][33][34] A 1994 interview alleges Hardegen expressed some skepticism regarding Nazi atrocities, stating "(Germany stands) accused of some of the most cruel and sadistic crimes against the peoples of Europe.

According to other reports, Hardegen said that by 1942, he and his crew had realized that "Hitler was a madman who was wreaking havoc and driving Germany towards catastrophe".

After the war, Hardegen was mistaken for a SS officer with the same last name, and it took him a year and a half to assemble the evidence to convince the Allied interrogators of his real identity.

He visited the United States many times, conversing with survivors and veterans regularly, amongst them, men who had tried to kill him during his U-boat service and made friends with them.

[38] In 1989, he appeared in an episode of the American TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, presented originally by Robert Stack, which examined the sinking of the Muskogee.