Hitler's navy planned 800 ships, but went to war with under a fifth of them
In January 1939 Hitler approved Plan Z, a vast programme meant to give Germany a fleet of about 800 ships to rival Britain's Royal Navy. War arrived that September with the navy at less than 20 percent of the plan, so it gambled instead on U-boats, which dominated the Atlantic until losses mounted in 1943.
The Versailles treaty of 1919 left Germany a token navy: 15,000 personnel, six small capital ships, a handful of cruisers and destroyers, and no submarines, aircraft carriers or naval aircraft. Germany worked around the limits from the start, designing U-boats through an office in the Netherlands and developing torpedoes in Sweden. In November 1932, even before the Nazis took power, the government secretly approved rearmament including submarines and a carrier. The pocket battleship Deutschland, launched in 1931, alarmed Britain and France because it was built for ocean raiding while staying within the letter of the treaty.
Hitler pushed further. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935 let Germany build to 35 percent of British surface tonnage and 45 percent of its submarine tonnage, and that year the Reichsmarine was renamed the Kriegsmarine, joining the army and air force as a branch of the Wehrmacht. Its first operations came in the Spanish Civil War, officially enforcing non-intervention but covertly backing Franco. Growth was slowed because the army and Luftwaffe were expanding at the same time and competing for steel and labour; Hitler scrapped the British agreement in April 1939.
When war came, the navy had only 78,000 personnel, and Plan Z was shelved in favour of crash submarine production. U-boat wolfpacks mauled British convoys in the early Battle of the Atlantic, and surface raiders such as the Bismarck and Admiral Graf Spee hunted merchant shipping, though Graf Spee was lost at the River Plate in 1939. The invasion of Norway in April 1940 was costly: the heavy cruiser Blücher was sunk by shore batteries in the Oslofjord, and ten destroyers, half the force, were lost at Narvik.
Convoy escorts gradually blunted both threats, and by May 1943 mounting losses forced the U-boats to abandon wolfpack tactics. After Germany's defeat in 1945 the Allies divided up the surviving ships, using some for minesweeping and scuttling others loaded with surplus chemical weapons.
Source: Kriegsmarine
