Erich Raeder

1. Lead

Erich Raeder (24 April 1876 – 6 November 1960) was the commander-in-chief of the German Navy for fifteen years, from 1928 to 1943, and the Grand Admiral who built the Kriegsmarine, planned its expansion under Plan Z, and directed it through the first three years of the Second World War.

He was a professional naval officer of the old Imperial Navy, a man who had served under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and who believed, as Tirpitz had, that Germany needed a great surface fleet to challenge British sea power. He was also a defendant at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace and war crimes, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

He was released in 1955, after nine years in prison, on grounds of ill health, and he spent his last years writing his memoirs and defending his record.

Raeder’s career must be judged on both sides of the record. As a naval officer, he was a capable administrator and a strategist of real ability: he rebuilt the German Navy from the ruins of the First World War, he created the U-boat arm that nearly won the Battle of the Atlantic, and he planned the invasion of Norway, one of the most daring amphibious operations of the war.

As a servant of the Nazi regime, he accepted its policies, he served it without protest for ten years, and he was convicted by an international tribunal of crimes that included the planning of aggressive war and the waging of unrestricted submarine warfare. This article presents both sides, and it does not excuse the second by praising the first.

2. Key Facts

Born	24 April 1876, Wandsbek, near Hamburg, German Empire
Died	6 November 1960 (aged 84), Kiel, West Germany
Nationality	German
Role / Office	Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, 1928–1943; Grand Admiral (Grossadmiral) from 1939
Known for	Rebuilding the German Navy; Plan Z; the invasion of Norway (1940); the Battle of the Atlantic; convicted at Nuremberg, sentenced to life imprisonment
Spouse / Family	Married Erika Hindermann in 1903; three children
Military rank	Grossadmiral (Grand Admiral)

3. Early Life and Education

The Imperial Navy

Erich Raeder was born on 24 April 1876 in Wandsbek, near Hamburg, the son of a schoolmaster. He entered the Imperial German Navy as a cadet in 1894, at the age of 18, and he was commissioned as an officer in 1897.

He served in the years when Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was building the High Seas Fleet, the great battleship fleet that was intended to challenge British sea power, and Raeder absorbed Tirpitz’s ideas: that Germany needed a surface fleet, that battleships were the measure of sea power, and that the Navy was an instrument of national greatness.

He served as a staff officer and as a navigating officer, and in the First World War he was chief of staff to Admiral Franz von Hipper, the commander of the German battlecruisers, and he took part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the greatest naval battle of the war.

He was, by the end of the war, a captain, and he was one of the officers who remained in the small Reichsmarine that the Treaty of Versailles allowed Germany to keep.

The Reichsmarine and the rise to command

After the First World War, Raeder served in the Reichsmarine, the small navy of the Weimar Republic, and he rose steadily through the 1920s. He commanded a cruiser squadron, he served as chief of staff of the naval command, and in 1928 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, the post he would hold for fifteen years.

He was a conservative officer, a monarchist by outlook, and he was not a member of the Nazi Party. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Raeder, like most senior officers, accepted the new regime and continued to serve. He saw in Hitler a leader who would rebuild the Navy, and Hitler saw in Raeder an officer who would build the fleet he wanted.

The partnership was, for both men, a matter of convenience, and it lasted for ten years.

4. Rise to Prominence

Rebuilding the Navy

Raeder’s first great achievement was the rebuilding of the German Navy. The Treaty of Versailles had limited Germany to a small fleet of old battleships, cruisers and destroyers, and it had forbidden submarines. Raeder worked within those limits in the 1920s, and then, after Hitler repudiated the treaty in 1935, he built rapidly: the pocket battleships Deutschland, Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the first U-boats.

In 1935 he negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which allowed Germany to build a navy up to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy’s strength, and which Hitler presented as a diplomatic triumph. Raeder’s building programme was, in the judgement of historians, a considerable achievement: in ten years he took the Navy from a coastal defence force to a fleet that could challenge the Royal Navy in the North Sea and the Atlantic.

Plan Z

In 1939 Raeder presented Hitler with Plan Z, the great building programme that was intended to give Germany a navy capable of challenging Britain by 1948. Plan Z called for ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, fifteen pocket battleships, and a large number of cruisers, destroyers and submarines — a fleet that would have taken a decade to build and that would have consumed a large part of Germany’s industrial capacity.

Hitler approved the plan in January 1939, and Raeder began to build it. The outbreak of war in September 1939, nine years before Plan Z was due to be completed, made the plan irrelevant: the Navy went to war with a fleet that was far short of what Plan Z had promised, and Raeder was forced to fight with what he had.

He told Hitler, in a phrase that has often been quoted, that the Navy could do no more than “show that it knows how to die gallantly”.

5. Erich Raeder’s Role in World War II

The invasion of Norway

Raeder’s most daring operation was the invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Operation Weserübung, and it was the operation by which his reputation as a naval commander must be judged. Raeder had argued for the invasion, on the grounds that Norway’s ports would give the Navy bases on the Atlantic, and that the iron ore from Sweden, which came through the Norwegian port of Narvik, was vital to the German war economy.

Hitler approved the operation, and Raeder planned it: a simultaneous seaborne and airborne invasion, carried out by warships that sailed into Norwegian ports in the face of the Royal Navy, and by troops landed from the air. The operation was a success, and it was also costly: the Navy lost a heavy cruiser, two light cruisers and ten destroyers, half its destroyer force, and it never fully recovered from the losses.

This section describes the operation and its cost, and it explains why the losses at Norway shaped the rest of Raeder’s war.

Operation Weserübung

Raeder’s most daring operation was the invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Operation Weserübung. Raeder had argued for the invasion, on the grounds that Norway’s ports would give the Navy bases on the Atlantic, and that the iron ore from Sweden, which came through the Norwegian port of Narvik, was vital to the German war economy.

Hitler approved the operation, and Raeder planned it: a simultaneous seaborne and airborne invasion, carried out by warships that sailed into Norwegian ports in the face of the Royal Navy, and by troops landed from the air. The operation was a success: Denmark fell in a day, Norway fell in two months, and the Navy gained the bases it wanted.

It was also costly: the Navy lost a heavy cruiser, two light cruisers and ten destroyers — half its destroyer force — and it never fully recovered from the losses. Raeder’s planning was, in the judgement of historians, brilliant, but the cost was high, and the Navy’s surface fleet was crippled for the rest of the war.

The cost of Norway

The losses at Norway shaped the rest of Raeder’s war. The Navy had lost so many destroyers that it could no longer mount a surface operation of any size, and the battleships that remained were, one by one, sunk or crippled: the Bismarck was sunk in May 1941, the Scharnhorst was sunk in December 1943, and the Tirpitz was sunk in November 1944.

Raeder’s surface fleet, which he had spent fifteen years building, was destroyed in the first three years of the war, and the Navy’s war became, increasingly, the U-boat war. Raeder accepted the change, and he supported the U-boat campaign, but he never abandoned his belief in the surface fleet, and his reluctance to give the U-boats the priority they needed was, in the judgement of historians, one of his failings as a naval commander.

The Battle of the Atlantic

The U-boat war was the Navy’s main contribution to the war, and Raeder’s part in it was to build the U-boat arm and to direct its operations in the first years of the war. Under his command, and under the tactical direction of Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boats, the U-boats sank millions of tons of Allied shipping in 1940–1942, and they came close to cutting Britain’s lifeline.

Raeder supported the U-boat campaign, but he did not give it the priority that Dönitz wanted: he continued to build battleships and cruisers, and he was slow to accept that the U-boat, not the battleship, was the weapon that could win the war at sea.

The dispute between Raeder and Dönitz over the allocation of resources was one of the central arguments within the German Navy, and it was resolved only when Raeder resigned in January 1943 and Dönitz succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief.

6. Key Decisions

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement

Negotiating the agreement (1935). Raeder’s negotiation of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in 1935 was a diplomatic success that allowed Germany to build a navy openly, for the first time since the First World War. The agreement, which limited the German Navy to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy, was presented by Hitler as a sign of British acceptance of German rearmament, and it was, in Raeder’s judgement, a reasonable basis for building a fleet.

Historians have debated whether the agreement was a mistake: it gave Germany the freedom to build, but it also gave Britain a clear picture of what Germany was building, and it committed Germany to a building programme that it could not complete before the war began.

Presenting Plan Z (1939). Raeder’s presentation of Plan Z in January 1939 was the high point of his influence with Hitler. The plan promised a navy that could challenge Britain by 1948, and Hitler approved it. The plan was, in retrospect, a fantasy: it required resources that Germany did not have, and it assumed that Britain would allow Germany ten years of peace in which to build. The outbreak of war nine months later made the plan meaningless, and Raeder’s reputation suffered accordingly. The decision to present Plan Z, and Hitler’s decision to approve it, show how little either man understood the industrial and strategic realities of the war that was coming.

Norway and resignation

Invading Norway (1940). Raeder’s decision to advocate the invasion of Norway was, in the judgement of historians, his most successful operational decision. It gave the Navy the Atlantic bases it needed, it secured the Swedish iron ore, and it denied Norway to the British. The cost — half the destroyer force — was high, but the operation succeeded, and it is remembered as one of the most daring amphibious operations of the war. Raeder’s planning of the operation, which involved the simultaneous landing of troops by sea and by air, was a model of joint operations.

Resigning (January 1943). Raeder resigned as Commander-in-Chief in January 1943, after Hitler criticised the Navy’s performance in the Battle of the Barents Sea, in which a German surface force had failed to destroy a British convoy. Hitler threatened to scrap the surface fleet, and Raeder, who had spent his life building it, resigned rather than preside over its destruction. He was succeeded by Karl Dönitz, who gave the U-boats the priority Raeder had denied them. Raeder’s resignation was, in the judgement of historians, an honourable act, but it was also an admission that his strategy — the building of a great surface fleet — had failed.

7. Controversies

Raeder and the Nazi regime

The central controversy about Raeder is his relationship with the Nazi regime. Raeder was not a member of the Nazi Party, and he was, by outlook, a conservative monarchist who distrusted the Nazis. But he served the regime for ten years, from 1933 to 1943, and he accepted its policies without protest.

He was present at the conferences at which Hitler announced his plans for aggressive war, and he did not object. He was responsible for the Navy’s part in the invasion of Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France, and for the waging of unrestricted submarine warfare, in which merchant ships were sunk without warning.

At Nuremberg, the Tribunal found that Raeder had been a party to the planning of aggressive war, and that he had committed war crimes. Raeder’s defence — that he was a soldier who obeyed orders — was rejected by the Tribunal, and it has been rejected by historians: a commander-in-chief who serves a regime for ten years cannot claim to be merely a technician.

The Nuremberg verdict

Raeder was tried at Nuremberg in 1945–1946, and he was convicted on three counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, and war crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict has been debated: some historians have argued that the charge of conspiracy was stretched, and that Raeder, as a naval officer, was less responsible for the planning of aggressive war than the political leaders.

Others have argued that the verdict was just, and that Raeder’s long service as Commander-in-Chief, and his presence at the conferences where aggressive war was planned, made him a party to the conspiracy. The Tribunal’s judgement, which has stood for eighty years, is that Raeder was guilty, and that his sentence — life imprisonment, later commuted by his release in 1955 — was appropriate.

This article accepts the Tribunal’s verdict, while noting the debate about it.

8. Later Life and Death

Prison at Spandau

Raeder served his sentence at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was held with the other Nuremberg defendants who had been sentenced to imprisonment. He was, by all accounts, a model prisoner: quiet, dignified, and devoted to his family. He wrote his memoirs in prison, and he maintained his innocence of the charges on which he had been convicted, arguing that he had been a soldier who had obeyed orders.

He was released on 26 September 1955, after nine years in prison, on grounds of ill health, and he returned to Kiel, where he lived with his wife. His release was controversial: some argued that a man convicted of war crimes should not have been released, while others argued that, at the age of 79 and in poor health, he had served enough of his sentence.

Memoirs and death

Raeder spent his last years in Kiel, writing his memoirs, Mein Leben (My Life), which were published in 1956–1957. The memoirs are a detailed account of his naval career, and they are also, as historians have noted, a work of self-justification: Raeder presents himself as a professional naval officer who served Germany, and he says little about the regime he served or about the crimes for which he was convicted. He died on 6 November 1960, at the age of 84, in Kiel, and he was buried there. His death was reported in the German press, and the obituaries reflected the divided judgement of his career: a great naval officer, and a convicted war criminal.

9. Legacy

The builder of the Kriegsmarine

Raeder’s legacy as a naval officer is the Kriegsmarine itself. He took a navy that had been reduced by the Treaty of Versailles to a coastal defence force, and he built it into a fleet that could challenge the Royal Navy, even if it could not defeat it. His building programme, his creation of the U-boat arm, and his planning of the Norwegian invasion are studied in naval colleges as examples of naval strategy and of amphibious operations. The ships he built — the Bismarck, the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the U-boats — are remembered as the instruments of a navy that fought a war it could not win, but that fought it with skill and with courage.

The convicted admiral

Raeder’s second legacy is as the admiral who was convicted at Nuremberg. He was the most senior naval officer to be tried, and his conviction established the principle that a commander-in-chief, even one who was not a member of the Nazi Party, could be held responsible for the planning of aggressive war and for war crimes. His case is cited in the literature of international law as an example of command responsibility, and his memoirs are read as an example of how a convicted man can present his own case. The two legacies — the builder and the convict — are inseparable, and they must be held together to understand Raeder.

10. Assessment by Historians

The naval assessment

Historians rate Raeder as a capable naval administrator and a strategist of real ability, but not as a great operational commander. His building programme was a considerable achievement, his planning of the Norwegian invasion was brilliant, and his direction of the U-boat war in its early years was competent.

But he was slow to accept that the U-boat, not the battleship, was the decisive weapon, and his insistence on building a surface fleet consumed resources that the U-boat arm needed. His resignation in January 1943 was, in the judgement of historians, an admission that his strategy had failed, and his successor, Dönitz, was a better wartime commander.

Raeder’s naval reputation is therefore a mixed one: a great builder, and a mediocre wartime commander.

The moral assessment

The moral assessment of Raeder is clear: he was convicted by an international tribunal of conspiracy, crimes against peace and war crimes, and the verdict has stood for eighty years. He served a criminal regime for ten years, he was present when aggressive war was planned, and he directed a navy that waged unrestricted submarine warfare.

His defence — that he was a soldier who obeyed orders — was rejected by the Tribunal, and it has been rejected by historians. Raeder’s case is therefore a central example in the history of the Second World War of the responsibility of senior officers: a commander-in-chief cannot claim to be merely a technician, and loyalty to a regime does not excuse participation in its crimes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Erich Raeder?
Erich Raeder (1876–1960) was Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy from 1928 to 1943 and Grand Admiral from 1939. He rebuilt the Kriegsmarine, planned Plan Z and the invasion of Norway, and was convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to life imprisonment.

What was Plan Z?
Plan Z was Raeder’s building programme, approved by Hitler in January 1939, to give Germany a navy capable of challenging Britain by 1948. It called for ten battleships, four aircraft carriers and many other ships. The outbreak of war in September 1939 made the plan irrelevant, because the Navy went to war with a fleet far short of what Plan Z had promised.

Why did Raeder resign in 1943?
He resigned in January 1943 after Hitler criticised the Navy’s performance in the Battle of the Barents Sea and threatened to scrap the surface fleet. Raeder, who had spent his life building the surface fleet, resigned rather than preside over its destruction. He was succeeded by Karl Dönitz.

What was Raeder convicted of at Nuremberg?
He was convicted of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace and war crimes, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Tribunal found that he had been a party to the planning of aggressive war and that he had directed unrestricted submarine warfare.

When was Raeder released from prison?
He was released from Spandau Prison on 26 September 1955, after nine years in prison, on grounds of ill health. He returned to Kiel, where he wrote his memoirs and died on 6 November 1960, at the age of 84.

Was Raeder a member of the Nazi Party?
No. Raeder was never a member of the Nazi Party. He was a conservative monarchist by outlook, but he served the Nazi regime as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy for ten years, from 1933 to 1943, and he was convicted at Nuremberg for his part in its crimes.

Related articles

• Adolf Galland
• Douglas Bader
• Ernest King

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Erich Raeder” — birth 24 April 1876, death 6 November 1960, Commander-in-Chief 1928–1943, Plan Z, Norway, resignation January 1943, Nuremberg conviction, release 1955.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Erich Raeder” (britannica.com) — biography, Grand Admiral, Kriegsmarine, Nuremberg.
3. Erich Raeder, My Life (Mein Leben, 1956–1957) — memoirs; the Imperial Navy, the rebuilding of the Kriegsmarine, Plan Z, Norway, Nuremberg.
4. Keith W. Bird, Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich (Naval Institute Press, 2006) — the standard biography; Plan Z, Norway, the U-boat war, Nuremberg.
5. Michael Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung 1935–1945, 3 vols. (Bernard & Graefe, 1970–1975) — the German naval command, Plan Z, the Battle of the Atlantic.
6. Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 1994) — the Kriegsmarine, Norway, the Battle of the Atlantic, Nuremberg.