German Navy History: Kaiser's Fleet to Kriegsmarine

Germany came late to sea power. The Imperial navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, was built up in the years before 1914 to challenge Britain, and it ended at the bottom of Scapa Flow in 1919. Hitler’s navy, the Kriegsmarine, was rebuilt in the 1930s and ended in 1945 with almost all of its big ships sunk. In both wars Germany had fewer heavy ships than its enemies, so it relied on raiders, U-boats and the threat of a breakout. The stories here follow those ships.

The Kaiser’s navy

Germany’s overseas cruisers went after Allied trade in 1914. The light cruiser SMS Emden captured or sank over twenty merchant ships in the Indian Ocean, shelled the oil tanks at Madras, and rigged a fake fourth funnel to slip into Penang, where she torpedoed the Russian cruiser Zhemchug at anchor. Twelve days later HMAS Sydney caught her at the Cocos Islands.

The U-boat did more damage. On 7 May 1915 Walther Schwieger in U-20 fired one torpedo into the liner Lusitania off Ireland, after the German Embassy had printed a warning in the New York papers. She sank in eighteen minutes.

The High Seas Fleet met the British Grand Fleet once, at Jutland on 31 May 1916. German shells blew up three British battlecruisers, but Admiral Scheer took his fleet home and never again risked a full fleet action. After the Armistice, 74 German warships were interned at Scapa Flow. On 21 June 1919, rather than hand them over, Rear Admiral von Reuter gave the signal and his crews sank 52 of them in the British anchorage.

Hitler’s raiders

The Kriegsmarine’s first heavy ships were the three “pocket battleships”, six 11-inch guns on a hull of around 12,000 tons. The lead ship, Deutschland, had an unimpressive first cruise, and Hitler renamed her Lutzow rather than risk a headline about Germany being sunk. Her sister Admiral Graf Spee sank nine British merchant ships without killing anyone, then was trapped at Montevideo in December 1939 and scuttled by her own crew.

In June 1940 the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau caught the carrier HMS Glorious off Norway with no aircraft in the air and sank her. In May 1941 Bismarck sank HMS Hood in the Denmark Strait, then had her rudder jammed by a Swordfish biplane and was sunk days later. Whether British shells or her own crew finished her was argued for sixty years.

Norway, the Arctic and the end

After Bismarck, the big ships went north. Tirpitz spent most of the war in Norwegian fjords. She fired her main guns at an enemy only once, but the threat of her scattered convoy PQ 17 and kept British battleships at home until Lancasters sank her at Tromsø in November 1944.

On New Year’s Eve 1942, Lutzow and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked convoy JW-51B in the Barents Sea and were held off by six British destroyers. Hitler berated Grand Admiral Raeder for over two hours and ordered every capital ship in the Kriegsmarine scrapped.

In 1945 the navy’s last big job was evacuation from the Baltic. On 30 January the former cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff left Gotenhafen with thousands of refugees and was sunk by a Soviet submarine, the deadliest ship sinking ever recorded. Of the big surface ships, Prinz Eugen was one of the few to end the war intact. She had run the Channel in daylight in 1942. The US Navy took her to Bikini Atoll as a target in 1946, and she survived two atomic bombs before sinking from a leak.