The German Navy. From 1872 to 1918 the Imperial German Navy was known as the Kaiserliche Marine; from 1919 to 1921 as the Vorlaeufige Reichsmarine; from 1921 to 1933 as the Reichsmarine. In the Nazi period, from 1933 to 1945, it was called Kriegsmarine. During World War I the Kaiserliche Marine put to sea a “High Seas Fleet” of powerful capital and other surface warships. It was not the equal of Britain’s “Grand Fleet,” but effectively forced the Royal Navy to concentrate its great battlefleet in home waters from 1914 to 1918. Germany also commissioned 419 U-boats during the Great War, of which 186 were lost to enemy action by aircraft and escorts, or to other submarines. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) forced the surrender or internment of 74 named German surface ships and over 200 U-boats. Naval aviation was forbidden under terms of the Treaty, but the ban was later circumvented through efforts of a private company, the Luftdienst, which supplied aircraft to the Reichsmarine. Admiral Erich Raeder was Fleet Commander in Chief of the Kriegsmarine during the interwar years and deep into the naval war. The submarine arm was commanded by Admiral Karl Dönitz from its creation.
Shipbuilding was severely limited by Versailles to surface warships no larger than 10,000 tons and no U-boats at all. To counter these limits, the Kriegsmarine secretly preserved ship design expertise by establishing a front company and naval design bureau in the Netherlands that took commissions for foreign navies. Special machine tools and other U-boat components were stored in secret by another company in Denmark. Work on new submarines for Finland and Spain thus simultaneously advanced eventual German designs. Serious secret planning for resumption of naval construction began in 1927, including plans for an initial force of 16 U-boats. Some were built in secret before the diplomatic coup for Germany of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in July 1935. Within two months of that breakthrough, Germany openly declared that it possessed a fleet of 9 U-boats and announced a construction program for two “Scharnhorst”-class capital ships and another 28 U-boats. At the start of World War II German naval air power was limited to 15 squadrons of reconnaissance and anti-submarine aircraft. Nine training U-boats were already serviceable when the Anglo-German Naval Agreement allowed Germany to build in the open. Construction continued on the “Scharnhorsts” and other major surface ships. German naval aviation was always sharply limited by Hermann Göring’s jealous suspicion that the Kriegsmarine wanted to operate a separate air force. That interservice and personal rivalry was more limiting than production or design problems.
A critical moment came in May 1938, when Raeder was told by Hitler to prepare for war. He was ordered to speed completion of two “Bismarck”-class battleships and build U-boats to parity with the Royal Navy. The quasi-debate between Hitler and Raeder that ensued led the former to adoption of the latter’s 10-year capital shipbuilding program, or Z-Plan. Hitler told Raeder that war with Britain was a distant prospect and approved this plan for a battlefleet of aircraft carriers, battleships, battlecruisers, and heavy cruisers. But he also decreed that yards should speed completion of several pocket battleships and of more U-boats, to be employed alike as commerce raiders. Dönitz oversaw expansion of the U-boat fleet, always protesting the waste of resources spent on surface ships. Still, by September 1939, he had 57 operational boats plus two large experimental Type-Is. Although Hitler’s confidence in the Z-Plan slipped and it was later modified, until 1943 he remained committed to its vague strategic vision and allowed some costly work on capital ships to continue. In addition, work began in mid-1940 transforming the Norwegian port of Trondheim into a German city and major Kriegsmarine base, continuing until March 1943. That was only the first of several major bases planned for construction around the world. They were all proposed by the Kriegsmarine to sustain a world-class blue water navy that would eventually be able to challenge and defeat the Royal Navy and U.S. Navy. Other bases were planned for Morocco and the Canary Islands. The idea of bases from which to launch the final naval war against the United States was so important to Raeder and Hitler that the latter forewent facilitating Spanish entry into the war in mid-1940 when Madrid refused to permit a Kriegsmarine base in the Canaries. In the interim, most wartime experience and energy centered on the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945). That saw progressive diminution and withdrawal of Germany’s surface fleet from 1939 to 1942, alongside all-out unrestricted submarine warfare against convoys.
At the start of the German–Soviet war in June 1941, the Kriegsmarine had 404,000 personnel, many still deployed in the surface navy on ships concealed from the British in Norwegian fjords or operating from safe Baltic bases. The main shift in Kriegsmarine personnel and strategy occurred on January 30, 1943, when Raeder was wildly berated by Hitler and resigned. Dönitz replaced Raeder as supreme commander. He immediately halted all construction on capital warships, including the vain but by then 95 percent completed aircraft carrier DKM Graf Zeppelin. Crews were reassigned to U-boats and all yards turned to building a warfleet of over 400, mostly Type IX, U-boats by the end of 1943. Work continued on new long-range and other experimental designs, but not all were successful. Hitler approved a new base plan in April that refused materials or labor for any surface craft other than E-boats, destroyers, and minesweepers. All other effort went into floating Type IX U-boats, ordered built at a rate of 30 per month into 1944, when the advanced Type XXI “Elektroboote” was expected to be ready for mass production. Albert Speer subsequently authorized increased production to 40 U-boats per month. That strained labor and material resources without addressing the worsening issue of training sufficient U-boat captains and crews. Nor did the proposed fleet and kill rate come close to matching enemy replacement cargo and escort construction. German yards did not begin a shift to modular construction techniques until April 1943, when the change was driven by a need to disperse production to escape mounting bombing. None of the reforms made any difference: the U-boat arm failed to interfere with, let alone stop, the OVERLORD invasion and remained mostly confined to base or coastal waters. Despite new boats and technologies it was savaged even in the Channel when the invasion came. Still, U-boats made a major contribution to the overall German war effort by slowing supplies of war matériel to Britain and Russia from 1939 to 1943 and thus delaying the Anglo-American build-up needed to launch a second front. The Kriegsmarine thereby greatly prolonged the war and the agony of all participants.
German naval cooperation with the Italians and Japanese was minimal throughout the war, even concerning joint amphibious, convoy, and extraction operations with the Italians in the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Italian submarines operating in the Atlantic were ignored by Dönitz and then relegated to marginal areas. Italian and Rumanian coastal patrols and submarines came under Kriegsmarine command in the Black Sea. The Kriegsmarine could never persuade Hitler that the Mediterranean was a theater where the Royal Navy could be seriously threatened: he saw it as an Italian problem. U-boats were sent into the Mediterranean in larger numbers from 1942—as were large Luftwaffe formations—only after the Italian position in North Africa had already crumbled. After the start of BARBAROSSA, several hundred small German patrol craft were transported overland and deployed in the Black Sea, along with six U-boats and an entire Italian light flotilla. From September to December 1943, the German boats were used to ferry 250,000 Axis troops and their equipment across the Kerch Straits—a true German Dunkirk that exceeded the evacuation from Sicily. After that, the boats ran supplies into ground forces cut off in the Crimean peninsula, operating from Odessa to Sebastopol. When Hitler finally permitted the evacuation of Sebastopol on May 6, 1944, the order came too late for many: a flotilla of small ships and barges was massively bombed as it loaded desperate men. About 130,000 German and Rumanians got out, but at least 8,000 drowned or were killed by bombs and 80,000 were left behind. Few efforts were made to link with the IJN beyond token long-range U-boat cruises in Southeast Asia and some late-war technological exchanges. That was true despite Hitler’s initial exuberance about Japanese naval power adding weight to the Axis order of battle.
The Kriegsmarine made its last major surface effort in the Baltic during the last months of the war. Dönitz concentrated all remaining surface ships along the southern Baltic coast, covering retreat and evacuation of cut off garrisons and civilian refugees. Evacuations totalling 1 million troops and 1.5 million civilians were carried out under intense Soviet bombing and submarine attacks, altogether forming the single largest maritime evacuation in history. Soviet submarines caused three of the greatest maritime disasters in history when they sank three German liners packed with troops and refugees. Each sinking cost several times the peacetime casualties lost on the far more famous civilian ships “Titanic” and “Lusitania”: over 9,000 died in the frigid Baltic when the “Wilhelm Gustloff” was sunk by three torpedoes. There were only 900 survivors. The Kriegsmarine continued to run the gauntlet to Courland until the end of the war, supplying the shrinking pocket and removing wounded and refugees. By the end of the Baltic campaign the Germans had lost 1 old battleship, 7 U-boats, 12 destroyers, and nearly 200 smaller warships (minelayers, minesweepers, and various landing craft).
When the end came, Dönitz ordered the U-boat fleet scuttled in Operation REGENBOGEN. Some captains disobeyed or never got the signal. They surrendered their boats in Western Allied or neutral ports. Surviving U-boats were divided among the major Allied navies, including the Soviet Navy, but most were simply taken to sea and destroyed by January 1946. The few remaining German surface ships all went to the Soviet Navy, except for minesweepers, which were taken by the Royal Navy. Using German naval munitions, British engineers blew up all Kriegsmarine docks, pens, yards, barracks, and even several military hospitals in a demolition and disarmament program that lasted into mid-1946.
Suggested Reading: Howard Grier, Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea (2007); J. P. Malcolm Showell, The German Navy in World War II (1979).
