The raid on Kiel

On the evening of 9 April 1945 nearly six hundred Avro Lancaster heavy bombers took off from airfields in eastern England. Their target was Kiel – the German navy’s main Baltic base and one of the most important U-boat building centres in the Reich. The raid, which lasted less than half an hour, proved one of the most accurate in the history of RAF Bomber Command. In the harbour basins the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer capsized, while the cruiser Admiral Hipper and the light cruiser Emden suffered damage that put them out of the war for good.

It is often written that the British bombers destroyed the last two large German warships, the Admiral Hipper and the Admiral Scheer, that night. This needs two qualifications. The Admiral Scheer did indeed sink that night, whereas the Admiral Hipper was “only” badly damaged, and was ultimately blown up by her own crew on 3 May 1945. Nor were they the last large ships of the Kriegsmarine – among others, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the light cruiser Nürnberg survived to the end of the war and surrendered to the British in Copenhagen in May 1945.

Kiel – the Reich’s naval port

Since imperial times Kiel had been the heart of the German navy in the Baltic. It lay at the mouth of the Kiel Canal, linking the Baltic with the North Sea, and had extensive harbour basins, arsenals and three large shipyards: the state-owned Deutsche Werke, Krupp’s Germaniawerft and Howaldtswerke. During the war they built above all U-boats; the Kiel docks also repaired heavy surface ships.

For this reason the city was a target for bombers from the first months of the war. The British attacked it many times in 1940–1941, in June 1943 the Americans carried out one of the Eighth Air Force’s first daylight raids there, and in the summer of 1944 Bomber Command struck Kiel in several raids involving hundreds of aircraft. According to German figures, the city endured 90 air raids over the whole war; some 75 per cent of its housing was destroyed or damaged, and more than 80 per cent of the city centre lay in ruins.

In the spring of 1945 Kiel became more important still. After the loss of the ports in East Prussia and Pomerania, warships, transports and refugee ships converged on the western Baltic, and the shipyards worked under pressure from a naval command still pinning its hopes on new types of U-boat. In early April the port was already under Allied air attack – on 3 April a bomb hit the Admiral Hipper, killing six sailors, and over the following days several U-boats sank in the docks.

Cruisers in dock

Both ships had a long war record behind them. The Admiral Scheer, launched in 1933 as the second ship of the Deutschland class, was one of the so-called pocket battleships – ships designed nominally within the limits of the Treaty of Versailles, with 280 mm guns and diesel propulsion that gave them an enormous range. From 1940 the Germans classed them as heavy cruisers. Her sister ship, the Admiral Graf Spee, had ended her career as early as December 1939 off the River Plate. The Scheer, by contrast, carried out the most successful raiding cruise by any German surface ship in the war: in November 1940 she scattered convoy HX 84, sinking the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, and for five months roamed the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. In 1942 she operated from Norway against the Arctic convoys, then served as a training ship, and in the winter of 1944/1945 she shelled advancing Soviet troops on the Sõrve Peninsula, in Samland and in Pomerania. In March 1945, her gun barrels worn out, she came to Kiel for a refit.

The Admiral Hipper, the first ship of her class, took part in the invasion of Norway in 1940, hunted Atlantic convoys and in December 1942 fought in the Battle of the Barents Sea, whose failure led Hitler to relegate the large ships to the reserve. From 1944 she was a training ship at Gdynia (Gotenhafen). On 29 January 1945, with only one working turbine, she left port with nearly 1,400 refugees on board and on 2 February reached Kiel, where she entered the Germaniawerft yard. Next to her the light cruiser Emden was under repair; in January she had evacuated from East Prussia, among other things, the coffins of Field Marshal Hindenburg and his wife.

The Kriegsmarine’s heavy ships had long been losing their war with air power. In November 1944 the British had sunk the battleship Tirpitz in Norway with Tallboy bombs, and the ships lying in dock in the port of Kiel were almost stationary targets.

The night of 9/10 April

By the spring of 1945 Bomber Command, led by Arthur Harris, had a strength it could not have dreamed of in 1940–1942: more than a thousand heavy bombers ready for operations, good radio navigation and experienced pathfinder groups that marked the target with flares. The Luftwaffe had almost ceased to be a threat – it lacked fuel, pilots and airfields – and the skies over northern Germany were open even at night.

According to Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt’s The Bomber Command War Diaries, the Kiel raid was assigned 591 Lancasters of Nos 1, 3 and 8 Groups, supported by a few Mosquitoes. The targets were the harbour basins and shipyards, especially the Deutsche Werke U-boat yard. The bombs fell on the night of 9/10 April, over a few dozen minutes, with great accuracy. The Admiral Scheer, hit by several bombs in dock, heeled over and capsized; most of her crew happened to be ashore, and the number of casualties on board remains unknown. The Admiral Hipper took three hits, and the Emden – also badly damaged – never regained her fighting capability. The shipyards and several U-boats were also damaged. The British lost three aircraft.

The bombs that missed the port fell on the neighbouring working-class districts, already mutilated for years by earlier raids. By then Kiel was largely a city of ruins; the inhabitants sheltered in air-raid bunkers, and thousands of people had left earlier for the countryside. On the night of 13/14 April Bomber Command carried out another large raid on the port, this time with less success.

The end of the German surface fleet

The raid of 9/10 April was one of the last chords of the long air campaign against the Kriegsmarine’s heavy ships. A week later, on 16 April, bombers of No. 617 Squadron RAF sank the heavy cruiser Lützow in the canal near Świnoujście (Swinemünde) – she settled on the bottom in shallow water and kept firing as a battery against the Red Army until early May. The Admiral Hipper in her Kiel dock was to serve as a floating battery, but on 3 May 1945, as the British approached the city, her crew blew her up. The Emden met a similar fate. A few days later Kiel passed into British hands without a fight.

Of the large ships, only those that found themselves in Denmark in May 1945 survived – the Prinz Eugen, the Nürnberg and the badly damaged Leipzig. The fleet that Admiral Erich Raeder had built with a war against Britain in mind ceased to exist before the war ended; the Kriegsmarine’s last weeks under Karl Dönitz belonged to the destroyers, torpedo boats and merchant ships that evacuated soldiers and refugees across the Baltic from the encircled bridgeheads in the east.

The wreck of the Admiral Scheer was partly broken up after the war, and the rest was buried under rubble when the shipyard’s inner basin was filled in. In 2024 German researchers used seismic methods to locate some 70 per cent of the hull, together with its guns, beneath the car park of the naval arsenal.

Significance

The raid on Kiel did not go down in history as a catastrophe on the scale of the bombing of Dresden, but it showed how much the air war had changed in its final months. Bomber Command, which in 1940 had struggled to find cities, could by 1945 hit individual docks – just as the lighter RAF squadrons carried out precision strikes such as Operation Carthage in Copenhagen. That same day, far to the east, Königsberg surrendered, and with it one of the last Baltic ports in whose defence ships like the Scheer had been shelling Soviet positions only a few weeks earlier. At sea, as on land, the Third Reich was entering the last month of the war without a fleet, without air cover and without hope of turning the tide.