Werner Henke Lieutenant Commander Werner Henke ( May 13 , 1909 - June 15 , 1944 ) born in Thorn ( Toruń ) in Germany ( now Poland ) was the commander of during the Battle of the Atlantic of World War II . " U - 515 " was sunk by the American task group 22 . 3 , commanded by Daniel V . Gallery on April 9 , 1944 and " Kapitänleutnant " Henke was captured along with about 40 of his crew . Early life . Henke was raised in Rudak , a small village just outside Thorn . When Thorn reverted to Polish rule in 1920 after the end of World War I , the Henke family moved to Celle in the state of Hanover . Henke joined the " Reichsmarine " in April 1934 after several years in the merchant marine . Early naval career . Henke attended the Naval Academy at Mürwik and served on the pocket battleship " Admiral Scheer " . In five years of training he only spent one week studying U - boat warfare . He spent nearly two years stationed at the Pillau ( now Baltiysk ) naval base starting in 1937 . In May 1939 he was assigned to the battleship , where he participated in the first shots of World War II at Westerplatte . In April 1940 he commenced six weeks of training at the U - boat school at Neustadt in Holstein . Before completing this training however , he was convicted of desertion and sent to a punishment unit . In November he was assigned to . In November 1941 he was sent to submarine commander ' s school , and on 21 February 1942 " U - 515 " was commissioned with Henke in command . 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 , 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 .