Plan Z

On 27 January 1939 Adolf Hitler approved a programme for expanding the German navy that went down in history as Plan Z. By 1948 the Kriegsmarine was to have a fleet capable of fighting the British Royal Navy: ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, twenty heavy cruisers and pocket battleships, dozens of light cruisers and destroyers, and 249 submarines. On the same day Hitler issued an order giving the expansion of the fleet priority over all other tasks, including the armament of the army and the air force, and over exports. The navy’s commander-in-chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, got what he had been pressing for for years. Nine months later came a war that Plan Z had not foreseen, and not a single new major warship of the whole programme was ever built.

Many accounts present Plan Z as a five-year programme that was to give Germany a fleet capable of defeating the Royal Navy by 1944, adding that this was the first and only time in the history of the Third Reich that the navy was given priority in the allocation of the economy’s resources. Both claims need qualifying. 1944 was the date by which Hitler wanted the new battleships ready, but the programme as a whole ran to 1947–1948. Even when completed, the fleet would not have matched the British one, and Raeder himself did not intend to seek a decisive battle with it. As for the navy’s priority, it existed above all on paper.

A fleet shaped by Versailles and the naval agreement

The Treaty of Versailles left Germany a coastal navy: six obsolete battleships, six light cruisers, and twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats, with no submarines and no naval aviation. The modern ships of the former High Seas Fleet lay on the bottom of Scapa Flow. In the 1920s the Reichsmarine built light cruisers and, from 1929, pocket battleships, the first of which, Deutschland, was launched in 1931. These ships, formally within the Versailles limit of 10,000 tons, were intended to hunt merchant shipping on the oceans.

For a long time Hitler did not want to repeat the mistake of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose naval arms race had turned Britain against Germany. At his proposal the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was concluded on 18 June 1935, allowing the Kriegsmarine to reach 35 per cent of the tonnage of the British fleet. On that basis the keels were laid of the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, then Bismarck and Tirpitz, five heavy cruisers of the Admiral Hipper class, the first German aircraft carrier, Graf Zeppelin, and the first submarines. Until 1938 the navy planned above all for war with France and possibly with the Soviet Union. Britain was expected to stay neutral.

In the autumn of 1937, when Hitler laid out his plans of conquest to his commanders at the Reich Chancellery, Raeder complained mainly about the shortage of steel for the shipyards. He was competing with Hermann Göring, who as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan allocated raw materials and at the same time commanded the Luftwaffe. In the division of armament funds the navy was the smallest of the three services.

After Munich: Britain as the enemy

The turning point was the Sudeten crisis. In September 1938 the British government made it clear that in a war over Czechoslovakia it would side with France. Although the Munich Agreement averted war, Hitler stopped believing in British neutrality, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain accelerated British rearmament. In Berlin, Britain became the main enemy in the navy’s plans.

As early as 20 August 1938 a planning committee was set up in the naval high command, and on 25 October it presented a memorandum on naval warfare against England. Its principal author was the staff officer Hellmuth Heye. The committee concluded that Germany would be unable to break a British blockade and that the fleet’s only possible aim was to fight British seaborne trade: pocket battleships and cruisers, operating simultaneously on every ocean, would scatter the enemy’s forces. Within the navy, however, two schools of thought clashed. Kapitän zur See Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat arm, and some staff officers wanted a fleet of cruisers and submarines. Other admirals, brought up on the ideas of Alfred von Tirpitz, still believed in battleships and the decisive battle. Raeder, who in the First World War had been chief of staff to Admiral Franz von Hipper, stood in the middle: he wanted a war on trade, but one waged by strong squadrons built around battleships.

Successive versions of the programme were presented to Hitler in the autumn of 1938. He rejected the variants based mainly on cruisers and demanded that six new, huge battleships be ready by 1944. Raeder later claimed that Hitler had assured him he would not need the fleet before the mid-1940s. The result of the compromise was the plan designated by the letter Z.

The content of the plan

The final version, approved on 27 January 1939 and supplemented in March, envisaged that by 1947–1948 the Kriegsmarine would have:

• 10 battleships: Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck and Tirpitz, plus six new ships of the H class displacing some 52,000–56,000 tons and armed with 406 mm guns;
• 15 pocket battleships: the three existing ones and twelve new, larger ships designated the P class;
• 4 aircraft carriers, two of them already under construction;
• 5 heavy cruisers;
• a dozen or more new M-class light cruisers alongside the six old ones, and more than twenty large “scout cruisers”;
• some 150 destroyers and torpedo boats;
• 249 submarines.

According to later calculations the programme would have cost some 33 billion Reichsmarks and comprised almost 800 vessels. It also required an expansion of bases: new dry docks in Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg and a large port on Rügen. The plan broke all of Germany’s treaty commitments: the naval agreement of 1935 and the supplementary protocols to the Second London Naval Treaty, to which Germany had acceded in 1937.

The Z fleet would not have been a mirror image of the Royal Navy. Raeder wanted squadrons of battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers to sail into the Atlantic and destroy convoys, not to give battle to the British battle fleet. In 1939 Britain had fifteen battleships and battlecruisers, with five more battleships under construction, and it could also count on France. The aim of the plan was to threaten Britain’s supply lines, not to win command of the sea.

Priority on paper

Hitler’s order of 27 January put the construction of the fleet ahead of all other armament tasks and ahead of exports. Historians of the German navy stress that the navy was never given such a provision in the Third Reich, either before or after. In practice, however, it meant little. In October 1938 Göring had announced a gigantic armament programme under which the Luftwaffe was to grow fivefold, and the army continued to expand. At the turn of 1938 and 1939 the Reich was going through an acute foreign-currency and raw-materials crisis. In January 1939 Hitler dismissed the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had warned of inflation, and according to historians of the Third Reich’s economy, among them Adam Tooze, the Wehrmacht’s steel allocations were cut at the beginning of 1939. Raw materials were still allocated by Göring, and the shipyards had neither the workers nor the capacity to carry out so vast a programme in a few years.

The most serious problem was fuel. At the end of 1938 the war economy department of the naval high command calculated that after mobilisation the Z fleet would need some 6 million tons of fuel oil and 2 million tons of diesel oil a year. Yet the whole of Germany consumed just over 6 million tons of petroleum products in 1938, of which only about 2.4 million came from domestic production, much of it synthetic. The planners envisaged building enormous storage tanks, but it was not clear where the oil to fill them would come from.

The claim that this was the “only time” should therefore be read with caution. Formal priority for the fleet as a whole was indeed never repeated. After the outbreak of war, however, the navy built mainly submarines, and in 1943, when Dönitz took command, U-boat construction was once again among the Reich’s most important armament programmes.

Eight months of Plan Z

In the spring of 1939 the shipyards received their first orders. On 14 April the first two H-class battleships, “H” and “J”, were ordered, and in May another four. On 1 April, the day Tirpitz was launched at Wilhelmshaven, Hitler promoted Raeder to Grand Admiral. The keel of battleship “H” was laid at the Blohm + Voss yard in Hamburg on 15 July, and that of “J” in Bremen on 1 September. At the end of July Raeder gave up the twelve new pocket battleships in favour of three fast O-class battlecruisers. None of them was ever laid down.

Politics, meanwhile, was moving faster than the shipyards. In the very days when Hitler was approving Plan Z, the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was visiting Warsaw and trying in vain to persuade the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck to agree to the incorporation of Gdańsk (Danzig) into the Reich. In the spring Britain and France guaranteed Poland’s independence, and Hitler denounced the naval agreement. A fleet that was to be ready in the mid-1940s had run out of time.

What September 1939 brought

The war with Britain and France began on 3 September 1939, when the Kriegsmarine had two modern battleships, two old ones from the imperial era, three pocket battleships, one heavy cruiser in service, six light cruisers, some twenty destroyers and 57 submarines, only some of which were fit for operations in the Atlantic. That day Raeder noted that the surface forces were so weak that they could do no more than show that they knew how to “die gallantly”. On 10 September he ordered that only ships well advanced in construction be completed. These were exclusively vessels ordered before Plan Z: Bismarck, Tirpitz and the cruiser Prinz Eugen. The keels of battleships “H” and “J” were broken up, the remaining orders were cancelled, and Graf Zeppelin never entered service. The shipyards were switched to building submarines and small craft.

The debate over Plan Z continues among historians to this day. Critics, following Dönitz, point out that the money and steel swallowed by the battleships would have been enough for more than a hundred additional Type VII submarines. Had Germany possessed several hundred of them in September 1939 instead of a few dozen, the Battle of the Atlantic might have taken a far more dangerous turn for Britain. Dönitz reached the figure of 300 boats that he considered necessary only in 1943, by which time the Allies had already gained the upper hand in the fight against the U-boats. Other historians observe that a large submarine fleet in 1939 was also beyond the capacity of the German economy, and that the fuel problem doomed Plan Z regardless of when the war broke out.

Significance

Plan Z was the clearest sign that Hitler had come to terms with the idea of war with Britain. Since 1933 he had insisted that Germany would not repeat the naval arms race of the years before 1914, yet in January 1939 he ordered a fleet aimed at England. At the same time the programme exposed the gap between Hitler’s goals and his timetable. The fleet was to be ready in the mid-1940s, but he unleashed war in September 1939, attacking Poland in the belief that London and Paris would back down again. The Kriegsmarine entered the war in the worst possible state: with the beginnings of a surface fleet it had not had time to build and a submarine fleet too small to cut Britain off from the world. The heavy ships, built before Plan Z, were lost one after another in the following years, and in 1943 Hitler lost patience with them and Raeder left his post.