The
Kriegsmarine, the
Navy of
Germany under the
Third Reich, was well underpowered and unprepared for
World War II when the war began with
Great Britain and
France in August, 1939. The
Treaty of Versailles following
World War I had limited Germany to a meager
coastal defense force and little more.
Vessels such as battleships and submarines were strictly and completely forbidden.
The inter-war years brought widespread
depression to Germany, and the rise of the political
Nazi party. In 1921, the
Reichsmarine (
Imperial German Navy) was nothing more than a skeleton force capable of little to nothing. The Versailles treaty forced the WWI German Navy to
scuttle all their ships where they stood upon surrender.
Jan 30, 1933
Adolf Hitler was appointed
Chancellor of Germany by
Paul von Hindenburg. By May 1935, the Führer reorganized the German Armed Forces into the
Wehrmacht, and the Reichsmarine became the
Kriegsmarine. The Kriegsmarine was still underequipped to take on any major naval power. The
Oberkommando der Marine (OKM, Naval
High Command) worked on plans on how best to build up the Navy. The two main ideas were to have a large
U-Boat fleet and a sparse number of
high seas surface ships for
coastal defense, or to have a limited U-Boat fleet and a decent sized surface fleet. The OKM ended up siding with the latter of the two in January 1939, and the project became known as the
Z-Plan. The Z-Plan called for the construction of:
This plan was begun as soon as possible, but it was never fully satisfied. Full
construction numbers can be seen below. As one can see, focus ended up on the U-Boat after all and final surface ship production was less than ordered. The
Großadmiral at the time,
Erich Raeder, remarked that the forces were not sufficient to be taking on the combined
Allied fleet, especially the
British Royal Navy.
”The number and strength of our surface units is so small compared to the British fleet that they can only show how to die in honor - even when operating with full effort.”
-- Großadmiral Erich Raeder, September 3, 1939.
The Kriegsmarine was noted as the least
politically oriented branch of the Wehrmacht, and out of all three Wehrmacht branches and the
Waffen-SS, Kriegsmarine
officers and
sailors numbered least at the Nuremburg War Tribunals following the war. The same might be said for the
Luftwaffe, if it were not for their association with the death camps.
The Kriegsmarine was a very formidable opponent for the Allied Navies, considering that the German Navy did not exist ten years earlier and the British had a decent Navy since 1587. Throughout the course of World War II, Kriegsmarine ships (mostly U-Boats) sunk 14,878,000 tons of Allied ship.
The Unterseebootwaffe was the U-Boat arm of the Kriegsmarine and was responsible for much of the damage inflicted in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. The U-Boat arm was well known for it’s wolfpack tactics (rudeltaktik).
Karl Dönitz was the influential Commander of the U-Boat arm until 1943.
The Kriegsmarine High Command, or
Oberkommando der Marine, was headed by the
Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine (Commander in Chief of the Navy). General Erich Raeder held this post from 24 September 1928 until 30 January 1943. Before the 1935 formation of the Wehrmacht, Rader’s official title was
Chef der Marineleitung. In 1943, Raeder was succeeded by Großadmiral Karl Dönitz. Dönitz served this position well until the last few days of the Reich, when
Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg filled the spot and Dönitz filled in for the fallen Führer.
The major types of ship the Kriegsmarine held in her
order of battle were (numbers in parenthesis are final production numbers):
By the end of the war, over 1.5 million men had served in the Kriegsmarine. 138,000 of these men were
KIA and about 105,000
MIA. The Kriegsmarine
legacy ended with the
unconditional German surrender to the Allies May 7, 1945.