German Sea Power, 1918–1945

From the collapse of the Kaiserliche Marine beginning in October 1918 and the establishment of the postwar Reichsmarine, renamed the Kriegsmarine under Hitler’s Third Reich, to its total defeat in 1945, the navy’s leadership elite and their supporters sought to create a “usable” history and tradition that matched their institutional goals and aspirations. The failure of the High Sea Fleet in the “Great War” to meet the expectations promised for German sea power shaped their group identity and self-image and hardened their resolve to create the conditions for the navy’s rebirth and its blue-water ambitions. The ideologically unified, national-conservative officer corps, driven by revenge and an inflated sense of honor, created a narrative that would justify its past and ensure its future existence. In 1933, the navy celebrated its “frictionless” integration and coordination (Gleichschaltung) into Hitler’s National Socialist state and saw Germany’s new Führer’s aggressive foreign policy and forced rearmament as an opportunity to reach its long-held goal of becoming a Weltmachtflotte. Although expecting war, the timing was a surprise for the unprepared navy, both in inferior numbers of completed ships and operational planning, whose role was to “fully engage” the enemy and sacrificially, in “dying gallantly,” build the foundations for restoring Germany as a major sea power. Despite the evidence and judgements of the Nuremberg war crimes trials the intensifying Cold War provided the navy with an opportunity to cultivate a “sanitized” history of the Kriegsmarine, beginning with a group of former officers writing their analysis of “Hitler’s war” and of British and American naval intelligence, that asserted the navy was independent from National Socialism’s influence, and had fought an honorable, “clean” war, and was defeated because of Hitler’s “seapower blindness”—The institutional culture of the postwar Federal Republic’s Bundesmarine (1956) struggled for decades to preserve its self-image and historical consciousness and what it perceived as its best traditions (as did the Soviet-dominated East German Democratic Republic’s Volksmarine, which was also created in 1956). With the release of captured German records in the 1960s, a new generation of German and international historians began to question the traditional naval “orthodoxy” from the first two decades of the postwar period, broadening the scope of naval history and stimulating interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., Sozialgeschichte). Although critics accused these historians of ideological bias (i.e., left-wing) or questioned civilian technical expertise, the scholarship and the often-acrimonious debates of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s gradually became integrated into German naval historiography. Recent studies expanding cultural history approaches, the role of innovation and technology, collective memory, and “history-from-below” have further enriched military and naval history thereby contributing to the larger issue of Germany’s struggle to come to terms with its past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). By Germany’s 1990 Reunification and the absorption of the former Volksmarine, the Federal Republic’s Bundesmarine, renamed in 1995 as the Deutsche Marine, had begun its critical engagement with its past and was further refining its own tradition and identity. In 2018 the new “Tradition Decree” emphasized the Bundeswehr’s sixty-two-year history as the “central reference point” for its tradition. This process had already begun for the navy in 2015 with renovations at the Marineschule in Mürwik/Flensburg to focus on the navy’s role as a multilateral force and de-emphasize the navies of the two world wars. (The following sections in the Oxford Bibliographies in Military History article “German Sea Power, 1848–1918” also include key sources for German naval history from 1848 to 1945: General Overviews and Handbooks; Bibliographies and Historiography; German Naval and Maritime Societies, Museums, Official and Specialized Resources; Anthologies; Festschrifts; Journals; Published Documents; Published Papers, Letters, and Diaries; Memoirs and Autobiographies of the Major Naval Commanders; Biographies of Major Naval Officers; and Biographies of Senior Naval Officers.)