Raeder's traditional Anglophobia, which always led him to view Britain as the main enemy and together the chance for increased naval building represented by the anti-British turn made Raeder into one of the strongest supporters of the anti-British foreign policy.

Through Raeder expressed some worry in the first half of 1939 over the prospect of a war with Britain when the Plan Z had barely began, he accepted and believed in the assurances of Hitler and the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that neither Britain nor France would go to war if the Reich attacked Poland.

Raeder attained the highest possible naval rank — that of Großadmiral ( Grand Admiral ) — in 1939, becoming the first person to hold that rank since Alfred von Tirpitz.

Raeder led the Kriegsmarine ( German Navy ) for the first half of the war ; he resigned in 1943 and was replaced by Karl Dönitz.

For the puritanical Raeder, the divorce was a huge personal disgrace, and as a result for the rest of his life, he always denied his first marriage.

For Raeder, the first step towards persuading decision-makers to adopting navalist policies again was to end the damaging debates about what went wrong in the World War, and instead project a positive image of the Navy's history that was meant to sway decision-makers into navalism.

For the present, the first war plan that Raeder drew up in January 1929 stated that there was nothing that the Reichsmarine could do to stop a French fleet from entering the Baltic.

Shortly afterwards, Raeder had his first private meeting with Hitler, and came away impressed, believing that if Hitler was no navalist, then he could be made into one just like his mentor Tirpitz had converted Wilhelm II to navalism.

Raeder dismissed carriers as " gasoline tankers ", argued that aviation had a small role to play in naval warfare and had little use for submarines, ordering that battleship construction should have first priority over submarines in German ship-yards.

Though Raeder had promised to join the campaign to reinstate Fritsch as Army Commander if he was acquitted, after Fritsch ’ s trial ended, he reneged on his promise, and instead argued that the Fritsch case was an Army matter that did not concern him, through that had not stopped Raeder from demanding that Fritsch resign when he first learned of the allegations of homosexuality.

On 27 January 1939 Hitler approved the Plan Z presented to him by Raeder, and ordered that henceforth the Kriesgmarine would be first in regards to allocation of money and raw materials, marking the first time during Raeder's tenure that the Navy had enjoyed such a position, indeed the first time since 1912 that the Navy had been given the first call on the defence budget.

Raeder was promoted to Großadmiral ( Grand Admiral ) in 1939, the first to hold that rank since Alfred von Tirpitz.

Raeder first raised the subject of invading Norway during a meeting with Hitler on 10 October 1939, during which he argued that naval bases in Norway would allow the Kriegsmarine to avoid the North Sea, and thus strangle Britain better.

The desire to use Norway as a base for naval attacks on Britain was the primary reason that motivated Raeder to advocate attacking Norway, and only in early 1940 did Raeder first mention protecting the sea lanes that allowed Swedish iron ore to reach Germany as a secondary reason for occupying Norway.

In September 1940, Raeder first presented his " Mediterranean plan " to Hitler.

On 18 March 1941, Raeder asked Hitler to end the rules that U-boats could not fire on American warships unless fired upon first, and instead demanded a policy that would allow the Kriegsmarine to sink all American warships on sight.

Raeder claimed in his 1957 memoirs Mein Leben that he had first learned that the regime in which he served so long was a criminal regime in March 1945 when he visited his old colleague, the former Defence Minister Otto Gessler in a hospital when he was recovering from the torture he received in a concentration camp.

The first was Carl Severing, who testified that every government in the Weimar Republic had violated the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, and the politicians of Weimar were well aware that officers like Raeder were violating Versailles.

These drawbacks, whilst probably acceptable to Hitler, were not acceptable to Raeder in his considered estimation four months after the plan was first floated.

The rank of Generaladmiral was first given to the future grand admiral Erich Raeder on 20 April 1936.

Though Hitler rejected Raeder's advice, Raeder spent the entire second half of 1941 persistently pressing for Germany to go to war with the United States.

Raeder took the view that because of the increasing number of naval " incidents " in the second half of 1941 between U-boats and US ships guarding convoys to Britain, that the best thing to do was to declare war on America in order to end all of the restrictions on fighting the U. S. Navy.

Felmy pressed this case firmly throughout 1938 and 1939, and, on 31 October 1939, Großadmiral Erich Raeder sent a strongly worded letter to Göring in support of such proposals.

In a speech given on Heroes ' Day on 12 March 1939, Raeder praised Hitler: "... for the clear and unmerciful declaration of war against Bolshevism and International Jewry is referring to the Kristallnacht pogrom here, whose drive for destruction of peoples we have felt quite enough in our racial body ".

On 4 January 1939 Raeder advised Hitler that given the Kriegsmarines status as third in regards to allocation of resources and spending behind the Army and the Air Force, the construction targets could not be met within the deadlines given.

Raeder later claimed during his testimony at Nuremberg and in his memoirs to have been opposed to the denunciation of the A. G. N. A., which he claimed to have been kept in the dark about, but contemporary evidence from 1939, not the least Raeder's own role as the author of the Z Plan suggests otherwise.

Raeder supported the idea of aggression against Poland, but on 31 March 1939 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had announced the “ guarantee " of Poland, by which Britain would go to war against any nation that attempted to end Polish independence.

In July 1939, Raeder told Karl Dönitz that his fears of a general war were groundless, and told him he take the entire summer off for a vacation.

Despite his belief that the attack on Poland would cause only a local war, on 15 August 1939 Raeder took the precaution of ordering two Panzerschife the Admiral Graf von Spee and the Deutschland, a number of U-boats and the Dithmarschen ships Altmark and Westerwald to the Atlantic in case Britain should go to war.

In late August 1939, Raeder told other senior officers that the danger of a war with Britain and France was extremely remote, and at most Germany had to fear only sanctions if the invasion of Poland went ahead.

Erich Raeder offers a National Socialist salute in 1939 ( Berlin ).

When Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Raeder was shocked and shattered by the outbreak of a general war that for the Kriegsmarine was at least five years too early.

Raeder wrote in the Seekriegsleitung war diary on 3 September 1939: " Today the war against England and France, which the Führer had previously assured us we would not have to confront until 1944 and which he believed he could avoid up until the very last minute, began ... As far as the Kriegsmarine is concerned, it is obvious that it is not remotely ready for the titanic struggle against England.

To get around the problem of the lack of bases outside of Germany and the shortage of Dithmarschen ships, Raeder had the Foreign Office in late 1939 negotiate secret agreements with Japan, Spain and the Soviet Union allowing German ships and submarines to use the ports of those nations to resupply, refuel and rearm.

In September 1939 to further concentrate power in his hands, Raeder created two Naval Group Commands, namely Naval Command West and Naval Command East that operated between the fleet commands and the naval headquarters in Berlin.

In October 1939, Raeder started to strongly push for an invasion of Norway.

During the same meeting on 10 October 1939, Raeder stated his belief that the more ruthless the war at sea, the sooner victory would come.

Later in December 1939, Raeder befriended Vidkun Quisling, whose claims that most Norwegians were National Socialists and would welcome a German invasion he used to support the planned attack.

The American historians ' Williamson Murray and Alan Millet wrote about Raeder's thinking about Norway: "... since fall 1939, Admiral Raeder had advocated an aggressive policy toward Scandinavia to protect ore shipments and to establish naval bases in the area.

On 11 July 1940 Raeder met with Hitler where it was agreed that the work on the H-class " super-battleships " envisioned in Plan Z of January 1939 that had been stopped at the outbreak of war in September 1939 should resume at once.

Raeder also complained about the poor standard of aerial torpedoes, although their design was the Kriegsmarine's responsibility.

* German leadership rejected Hartenstein's cease fire proposal, partly because Admiral Raeder did not think it wise to enter into a " deal " with the Allies, nothing was to interfere with Eisbär's surprise attack on Cape Town to strike at the supplies destined for the British and Soviets, and Hitler had directed that no word of Laconias sinking or the proposed Axis rescue be transmitted to the Allies, though subordinates ignored Hitler's orders and communicated messages to the Allies about the proposed rescue attempt.

Admiral Raeder was strongly opposed to Sea Lion since the almost entire Kriegsmarine surface fleet had been either sunk or badly damaged in Weserübung, and therefore his service was hopelessly outnumbered by the ships of the Royal Navy.

Erich Johann Albert Raeder ( 24 April 1876 – 6 November 1960 ) was a naval leader in Germany before and during World War II.

Raeder was born into a middle-class family in Wandsbek in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in the German Empire.

Owning to his cold and distant personality, Raeder was a man whom even his friends often admitted to knowing very little about.

Raeder was the captain of Kaiser Wilhem II's private yacht in the years leading up to World War I.

Another major influence on Raeder was his close friend Admiral Adolf von Trotha who had commanded the " Detached Division " of the Navy before 1914 and often taken the " Detached Division " on long voyages into the Atlantic.

This marked the beginning of a long feud between Raeder and Wegener with Wegener claiming that his former friend Raeder was jealous of what Wegener insisted were his superior ideas.

For Raeder, the idea that all of the suffering and sacrifice of the Great War, which had affected him personally was all in vain was unthinkable, and he become obsessed with making certain that Germany would one day obtain the " world power status " that the Reichs leaders had sought, but failed to achieve in the Great War.

For Raeder as for other naval officers, the defeat of 1918 was especially humiliating because under the charismatic leadership of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Naval State Secretary from 1897-1917, the Navy had been promoted as the service which would give Germany the " world power status " that her leaders craved, and to that end, vast sums of money had been spent in the Anglo-German naval race before 1914.

After the war, in 1920, Raeder was involved in the failed Kapp Putsch where together with almost the entire naval officer corps he declared himself openly for the " government " of Wolfgang Kapp against the leaders of the Weimar Republic, which Raeder loathed.

After the failure of the Kapp putsch he was marginalized in the Navy, being transferred to the Naval Archives, where for two years he played a leading role in the writing of the Official History of the Navy in World War I. Raeder also was the author of a number of studies about naval warfare, something that resulted in his being awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree honoris causa by the University of Kiel.

In October 1928, Raeder was promoted to Admiral and made Commander-in-Chief of the Reichsmarine, the Weimar Republic Navy ( Oberbefehlshaber der Reichsmarine ).

In the 1920s, Raeder as one of the authors of the official history of the German Navy in World War I, he sided with Tirpitz against the Jeune École-inspired theories of Wegener, arguing that everything that his mentor Tirpitz did was correct, and dismissed the strategy of guerre de course as a “ dangerous delusion ”.

Tirpitz was greatly pleased by Raeder ’ s defence of his leadership and theories.

And in Tirpitz, who was still very influential in the Navy despite having retired in 1917 started to speak of Raeder as an ideal man to head the Navy.

Raeder came to fear that this debate was starting to sully the image of the Navy to such an extent that he would never convince anyone in power to fund the Navy again, and so took extraordinary steps in the late 1920s to end the debate by trying to silence all critics of Tirpitz.