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

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 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 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.

As part of his role as the self-appointed " father " of the Navy, Raeder was obsessed with the sex lives of his men, giving a dishonourable discharge to any officer or sailor who was found to have engaged in premarital or extramarital sex.

From 1929 to 1933, Raeder was obsessed with the belief that the KPD was seeking to organize a mutiny in the Navy.

A harsh disciplinarian, Raeder was obsessed with the fear that the Navy might " disgrace " itself like in the last war with High Seas mutiny of 1918, and to prevent another mutiny, Raeder imposed " ruthless discipline " designed to terrorize his sailors into obedience.

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.

Together with the war-time plans of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to start building capital ships with diesel engines in order to expand the range of German warships, Trotha influenced Raeder into thinking about deep operations into the Atlantic as a way of forcing the British to break up their fleet.

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.

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.

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.

From when he assumed leadership of the Reichsmarine in 1928, Raeder ’ s leadership was extremely authoritarian with no tolerance extended to those whose views differed from his.

Other officers complained about the way in which Raeder sought to re-write history in the Official History in way that gloried Tirpitz with no regard to what actually happened with Admiral Assemann of the Historical Branch complaining to Raeder: " I am convinced that it makes no difference to you Herr Admiral, what we write ... We must only write in such a way that you have peace with the old admirals ".

As a sign of his thinking for the future, all of the war plans that Raeder drew up from 1929 onwards for war in the future assumed that the Navy would go to war with regular capital ships instead of the " pocket battleships ".

In war plans that Raeder drew up in 1931-32 stated that the Reichsmarine would start a war with an surprise attack on the Polish naval base of Gdynia that was intended to destroy the Polish Navy and would then attack French ships in the North Sea before they could enter the Baltic.

Raeder took the view that the Navy should be " one family " with himself as the stern, but loving father figure, and the sailors as his " children ", from whom he expected unconditional obedience.

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.

In the same way, Raeder always refused to appoint an flag officer with command experience to act as the liaison with the OKW out of the fear that such an officer might a threat to his power.

Under the leadership of Raeder and even more so under his successor Karl Dönitz, it was official policy for naval courts-martial to impose the death penalty as often as possible, no matter how slight the offence, so that the sailors would fear their officers more than the enemy.

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 ".

However, Raeder and the Navy failed to press for naval air power until the war began, mitigating the Luftwaffe's responsibility.

With the prospect of the Channel ports falling under Kriegsmarine ( German Navy ) control and attempting to anticipate the obvious next step that might entail, Grand Admiral ( Großadmiral ) Erich Raeder ( head of the Kriegsmarine ) instructed his operations officer, Kapitän Hans Jürgen Reinicke, to draw up a document examining " the possibility of troop landings in England should the future progress of the war make the problem arise.

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.

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

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.

Raeder wanted to see the replacement of democracy with an authoritarian, militaristic regime that in Raeder's analogy ensure that Germany would become " one family " united behind the same goals of world power, or as Raeder put it in 1932 Germany needed a " unified Volk " led by one strong leader to win the next war.

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 ".

Raeder contended to Hitler that on one hand an extremely powerful German fleet would deter Britain from intervening if Germany should commit aggression against another European country while on the other hand, a strong German battle fleet could tip the scales in the event of an Anglo-American war, and as such, Britain would ally herself with Germany against the rising power of the United States ( like many Germans of his time, Raeder believed there was a strong possibility of an Anglo-American war ).

To support the planned global war on the high seas against Britain, Raeder planned to get around the problems posed by the lack of bases outside of Germany by instructing naval architects to increase the range and endurance of German warships and build supply ships to re-supply German raiders on the high seas.

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 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.

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.