Raeder claimed to be ignorant of the plans for a putsch, but in the days preceding the putsch, Trotha and Raeder had been in close contact with General Walther von Lüttwitz ( the real leader of the Kapp putsch ) and the Freikorps leader Captain Hermann Ehrhardt.

This incident received much sensationalized and exaggerated press coverage in Germany where it was claimed that an attempted mutiny had occurred on the Emden, and which Raeder apparently took more seriously than he did the reports from his own officers.

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.

At the same time, Raeder worked to promote National Socialist ideology as opposed to the NSDAP in the Navy, ordering in September 1936 that all officers read a tract by Kriegsmarine Commander Siegfried Sorge called Der Marineoffizier about what it took to be a good officer., Sorge had claimed that one could not be a good naval officer without believing in National Socialist values.

Raeder later claimed when on trial for his life at Nuremberg that the Hossbach conference was a flight of fancy on Hitler's part that nobody took seriously, and he did not object because there was nothing to object to.

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.

In a speech in early January 1943, Raeder called World War II an ideological war, praised National Socialism for its " moral strength ", and claimed that only through National Socialist indoctrination could the war be won.

In his report to Hitler about Weserübung, Raeder claimed that the success of the operation was " undoubtedly largely " the work of the capital ships, and argued that the campaign in Norway had " amply confirmed the soundness " ( emphasis in the original ) of the construction policies of the 1930s that favoured capital ships over U-boats and carriers.

After the North Cape raid, Raeder blamed Marschall for the damage that Scnarnorst and Gneisenau had endured, claimed that Marschall had failed to understand his orders for Operation Juno properly, and sacked him.

The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wanted Raeder and the other high officials of the " grocery ring " like Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring and Hans Lammers who used their positions to ignore rationing when grocery shopping to be punished in order to let the German people know that the elite were suffering like everyone else, but Hitler claimed if the German people learned of the luxurious lifestyles of the elite in the middle of a war that the effect would be fatal to morale.

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.

Raeder claimed that he was not involved in a conspiracy to commit aggression because Hitler's statements in the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937 and again to senior officers including Raeder for plans for a war with Poland in May and August 1939 together with Raeder's own statements to Hitler about seizing Norway in October – November 1939 were all just mere talk that was not to be taken seriously.

When questioned by Maxwell Fyfe about the Libau massacres, Raeder claimed that he no idea about what had happened, and maintained that he would have stopped the massacres had he known.

Raeder claimed that Dönitz had made made all sorts of blunders and mistakes " resulting from his personal viewpoint, which were known to the officer corps, soon became apparent, to the detriment of the Navy ".

Finally, Raeder claimed that Dönitz was unqualified to become Commander-in-Chief of the Navy in 1943, and that Dönitz was only appointed to that position because Hitler preferred an unqualified " Hitler-boy " like Dönitz to qualified officers like himself.

Dönitz was savage in his relentless attacks against Raeder for his " policy of bloated surface vessels " and for not spending enough money on building U-boats in the 1930s, a policy that Dönitz claimed had cost him victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

In a 1950 interview, Erika Raeder claimed that her septuagenarian husband was forced to do brutal " hard labour " in Spandau when Raeder's job in Spandau was to work in the prison library.

In another interview in 1951, Erika Raeder claimed that :" The treatment we Germans had to endure is worse than anything that happened to the Jews ".

Erika Raeder's campaign to free her husband was joined by German veterans, who bombarded the American, British and French governments with demands that Raeder, who they claimed was an innocent man wrongly convicted at Nuremberg, be freed.

" In an interview in November 1950, Admiral Hanson claimed that American and other United Nations commanders fighting in the Korean War would have been convicted of aggression if the same standards that were applied to Raeder applied to them.

The German navy thus ignored Beatty's request that its Commander-in-Chief, Erich Raeder, attend his funeral – as Raeder had done at Jellicoe's funeral earlier.

* 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.

This ultimately placed responsibility for Sea Lion's success squarely on the shoulders of Raeder and Göring, neither of whom had the slightest enthusiasm for the venture and, in fact, did little to hide their opposition to it.

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.

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.

As soon as they learned that Berlin had been occupied by Marinebrigade Ehrhardt on the morning of 13 March 1920, Trotha and Raeder issued a proclamation declaring that the Weimar Republic had ended, declared their loyalty to Kapp " government ", and ordered the Navy to seize Wilhelmshaven and Kiel for the putsch.

On 18 March 1920 when Raeder's close friend, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow who had seized Kiel proposed a march on Berlin with the aim of deposing the government after the failure of the putsch in Berlin, Raeder declared his intention of joining Levetzow, only to change his mind a few hours later, and hastily called the Defence Minister Gustav Noske to tell him he had been " misunderstood " about joining Levetzow on his proposed march.

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.

In private, Raeder was prepared to admit that Tirpitz had made mistakes, but to do so publicly was anathema to him as would mean damaging the mystique of the " Tirpitz cult " that Raeder believed essential to maintain the prestige of the Navy.

Raeder testified that he had frequently violated the Versailles treaty, but denied any intention of aggressive war.

Raeder was keenly aware that the Army was the senior service and that many in Germany took the view that because the great High Seas Fleet that Tirpitz had built had done almost nothing in World War I that it would be a waste of money and time to attempt to rebuilt Tirpitz's fleet.

Raeder did not care for the " pocket battleships " programme that had been launched in 1928, and much preferred to build large capital ships.

Raeder only supported the " pocket battleships " as a way of keeping German shipyards busy and as the only way of improving the naval budget until such time as Germany would overthrow the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, and start building capital ships that Versailles had outlawed.

Raeder refused Schleicher's attempts to involve him in his intrigues against Groener, stating that attempts to involve the Navy overtly in politics like the Kapp putsch had been disastrous for naval expenditures in the 1920s, and that he would not risk future naval budgets by becoming involved in plots against the Defence Minister.

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.

The meeting had been called following complaints from Raeder that the Navy could not meet its current construction targets as both the Army and Air Force were gobbling up the raw materials needed to build warships.

In the same way, the sexually conservative Raeder who had a very strong dislike of homosexuality was one of the loudest who called for the resignation of the Army commander Werner von Fritsch when he learned that he had been accused of homosexuality, through Raeder qualified this that Fritsch should be reappointed Army commander if the charges were proven to be false.

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.

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 German historian Jost Dülffer wrote that Raeder would have been better off in preparing the Z Plan with following the advice of Commander Hellmuth Heye who had advocated in a 1938 paper a guerre-de-course strategy of Kreuzerkrieg ( cruiser war ) in which groups of Panzerschiffe and submarines would attack British convoys or Karl Dönitz who also advocated a guerre-de-course strategy of using " wolf-packs " of submarines to attack British commerence.

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.

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.

Raeder was obsessed with the fear that " the war would end before the heavy units had been engaged " and that the sailors would " fail " in their duty to the fatherland " due to inactivity ", the last a veiled reference to the mutiny of 1918.

The period from April to June 1940 was one of the most stressful periods of the war for Raeder with operations involving the entire fleet in Norway, the French campaign and Raeder's obsessive fear that the Army and Air Force might win the war without the Navy, and which led to act in an manner that has been described as " irrational ".

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.

The second was Ernst von Weizsäcker, who testified that Raeder had not been involved in the propaganda effort to blame the sinking of the Athenia on the British.

The third was Raeder's aide Vice Admiral Erich Schulte-Mönting who supported Raeder's claim to have been an apolitical officer just doing his job, and that Raeder had not been a Nazi.