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Raeder and Wegener were once friends, having began their careers as ensigns in 1894 abroad the cruiser Deutschland, but their differing concepts of future strategy turned them into the most bitter of enemies, and the two officers were to spent much of the 1920s waging a war in print over what the Navy should or should not had done in the First World War and what were the correct lessons of the recent conflict for the future.
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Raeder and Wegener
After reading all three of Wegener's papers setting out his ideas, Admiral Hipper decided to submit them to the Admiralty in Berlin, but changed his mind after reading a paper by Raeder attacking the " Wegener thesis " as flawed.
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.
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 ”.
After Raeder become Navy commander in 1928, officers were ordered to write journal articles attacking the " Wegener thesis ".
When Wegener died in 1956, Raeder refused to deliver the eulogy as his position as the senior most surviving member of the " enlistment crew " of 1894 would normally have obliged him to do.
Despite his strong dislike of Wegener, Raeder agreed that it had been a huge mistake on the part of Germany not to have occupied Norway, the " Gate to the Atlantic " in 1914 as control of Norway would allowed Germany to escape the North Sea by breaking the British distant blockade.
The second part of the " Wegener thesis " about breaking the British distant blockade, namely seizing the Shetland Islands, Wegener's other " Gate to the Altantic ", Raeder rejected as early as the 1920s as utterly impractical.
* Hansen, Kenneth " Raeder versus Wegener Conflict in German Strategy " pages 81 – 108 from U. S. Naval War College Review, Volume 58, Issue # 4, Autumn 2005.
* Raeder versus Wegener Conflicts in German Naval Strategy by Commander Kenneth Hansen
Raeder and were
Nineteen of the 22 were convicted, and twelve of them ( Bormann absentia, Frank, Frick, Göring, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Seyss-Inquart, Streicher ), were given the death penalty ; the other three ( Funk, Hess, Raeder ) got a life term.
As captain of the yacht Hohenzollern, Raeder earned commendations from the Kaiser and formed a friendship with Franz von Hipper, both of which were to greatly help his career in the Imperial Navy.
Coming as the same time as the defeat in the First World War, and the High Seas Fleet mutiny of 1918 which toppled the German monarchy, both of which were very traumatic events for Raeder, the years 1918-1919 were some of the most troubled in his life.
In private, Raeder often fumed against the Social Democrats for playing " party politics " with the naval budget as he deemed their opposition to navalism, and which was incensed that the S. P. D were against even building up the Navy to the levels allowed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Raeder's strong authoritarian tendencies came to the fore as soon he assumed command of the Reichsmarine in 1928 when he sent out a circular making clear that dissent would not be allowed while at the same time carrying out the " great seal hunt " of 1928-29 when Raeder forced most of the senior admirals into early retirement in order to promote men who were loyal to him.
Raeder was described as an ultra-conservative by the American historian Charles Thomas, who wrote that Raeder's core values were authoritarian, traditionalist and devoutly Lutheran.
From these, Raeder believed that Communists were seeking a mutiny, and he spent the next years on a " witch-hunt " for Communists in the Navy, giving a dishonourable discharge to any sailor who had an association with the KPD.
At the same time, it was becoming evident that much of the naval officers corps, especially the younger officers were falling under National Socialist influence, to which Raeder reacted cautiously.
In April 1932, when the Defence Minister General Wilhelm Groener decided to ban the SA as a threat to public order, Raeder strenuously objected to the ban, arguing that it was the Reichsbanner and the rest of the left-wing paramilitary groups that should be banned instead, and claimed right-wing paramilitary groups like the SA were essential to save Germany from Communism.
The American historian Keith Bird wrote about Raeder's thinking about the role of the military, state and society: " For Raeder, the military and the navy in particular could not have a firm foundation unless they were grounded in the people: " A military must stand in close relationship with the people whom they serve and cannot lead its own existence ".
In 1932, Raeder often used Levetzow, who was a Nazi Reichstag deputy to convoy messages to Hitler that he and the rest of the Navy were disappointed that Hitler did not see the necessity of sea power as a prerequisite for world power, and had even worse ordered the Nazi Reichstag delegation to vote against the Papen government's umbau ( rebuilding ) programme for the Navy in November 1932.
Through Raeder had doubts about Hitler's commitment to navalism, the banning of the SPD and KPD together with the militarist and ultra-nationalist tone of the new regime were appealing to him.
The status of chaplains within the Navy were one of the few areas where Raeder did resist the attempts of the NSDAP in an aggressive manner, making it clear that his absolute opposition to introducing Nazi neo-paganism into the Navy, and that he would never tolerate neo-pagan rituals in the Navy.
The American historian Keith Bird wrote if Raeder's claims after 1945 that he resisted efforts to introduce National Socialism in the Navy were true, then it would been very unlikely that Hitler would had awarded Raeder the Golden Party Badge.
Raeder was not a radical anti-Semitic along Nazi lines, but he shared the widespread anti-Semitic prejudices of most German conservatives of the time, viewing Jews as an alien element who were corrupting the otherwise pure German Volk.
Raeder accepted without complaint orders from the War Minister von Blomberg on 21 May 1935 that those who were of " non-Aryan descent " would not be permitted to join the Wehrmacht and all members of the Wehrmacht could only marry women of pure " Aryan descent " and another order from Blomberg in July 1935 saying no member of the Wehrmacht could buy from a store owned by " non-Aryans " under any conditions.
At the same time, Raeder fought Blomberg's attempts to have officers who were Mischling or were married to Mischling dishonourably discharged.
Raeder and once
Raeder severed his once close friendship with Pastor Martin Niemöller after Niemöller rejected his advice to stay clear of " politics " and accept the application of the Aryan paragraph to the Lutheran church.
During the Blomberg-Fritsch affair, the sexually puritanical Raeder was enraged when he learned that the War Minister Werner von Blomberg had married a woman who had posed for pornographic photos, and demanded that Blomberg resign at once for his " disgrace ".
Raeder never addressed the question of where the oil that was supposed to power the Z Plan fleet was going to come from, or where the oil would be stored once it had been imported.
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 believed that once Britain was defeated, Germany would have to take on and destroy Japan to properly achieve its " world power status " because as a great sea power, Japan was bound to become an enemy of the Reich sooner or later.
Raeder and friends
Owning to his cold and distant personality, Raeder was a man whom even his friends often admitted to knowing very little about.
Goda charged that Erika Raeder and her friends had grossly quoted out of context certain passages from Churchill's 1948 book The Gathering Storm to support their claim that the invasion of Norway was a " preventive war " forced on the Third Reich while ignoring the evidence that had convicted Raeder at Nuremberg.
Raeder and having
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.
At that point, Admiral Lütjens advised cancelling the operation as having one battleship with only one heavy cruiser in support operating alone in the Atlantic was too risky, but was overruled by Raeder who insisted on going ahead.
On 4 February 1941, Raeder sent Hitler a memo suggesting that the continual neutrality of the United States was not the in the best interests of the Reich, and suggested that having the United States as an enemy might even be " advantageous for the German war effort " if that would bring in Japan into the war against Britain and the United States.
The authoritarian Raeder, who was not used to having his orders disobeyed, never forgave Dönitz.
In December 1942, Raeder enforced the Commando Order by having captured British Royal Marines shot after the Operation Frankton raid on a German naval base in Bordeaux.
Instead it was claimed Raeder was opposed to war with the United States and had always worked to protect neurtal shipping during the war with the committee having Raeder say: " We had to consider neutrals to avoid any possible unfortunate incidents " at sea.
Finally, Raeder was presented as a victim of Hitler with the committee having Raeder say " It was the tragedy of my life that our future took a completely different path ".
Raeder and began
However, Raeder and the Navy failed to press for naval air power until the war began, mitigating the Luftwaffe's responsibility.
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 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.
Owing to the fact that the great fleet envisioned in Plan Z existed only in blue-prints or had just began to be built, Raeder like Tirpitz before him in 1914 was forced to abandon his pre-war plans for a great naval battle in the North Sea, and instead embrace the guerre de course strategy that he had previously been opposed to.
Despite Rheinübung and the damaging attack on the Lützow, in July 1941 Raeder began planning for what he called " the battle of the Atlantic ", a plan to send every single warship in the Kriegsmarine into the Atlantic to take on the Royal Navy in one colossal battle that almost certainly result in the destruction of the German force, but would hopefully make the British victory a Pyrrhic one.
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