Erich Raeder
Erich Johann Albert Raeder was a German admiral who played a major role in the naval history of World War II and was convicted of war crimes after the war. He attained the highest possible naval rank, that of grand admiral, in 1939. Raeder led the Kriegsmarine for the first half of the war; he resigned in January 1943 and was replaced by Karl Dönitz. At the Nuremberg trials he was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released early owing to failing health in 1955.
Early years
Raeder was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Wandsbek in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in the German Empire. His father was a headmaster.Raeder idolised his father Hans Raeder, who as a teacher and a father was noted for his marked authoritarian views, and who impressed upon his son the values of hard work, thrift, religion and discipline – all of which Raeder was to preach throughout his life. Hans Raeder also taught his children to support the existing government of alleged "non-political" experts led by Bismarck who were said to stand "above politics" and were alleged to only do what was best for Germany. In the same way, Hans Raeder warned his children that if Germany were to become a democracy, that would be a disaster as it would mean government by men "playing politics"-doing what was only best for their petty sectarian interests instead of the nation.
Like many other middle-class Germans of his time, Hans Raeder strongly disliked the Social Democrats, whom he accused of playing "party politics" in the Reichstag by promoting working class interests instead of thinking about the national good, a stance that his son also adopted. Throughout his entire life, Raeder claimed that he was apolitisch, and as an "apolitical" officer, Raeder thus maintained that his support for sea power was based upon objective consideration of the national good.
Naval career until World War II
Imperial German Navy
Raeder joined the Kaiserliche Marine in 1894 and rapidly rose in rank, becoming chief of staff for Franz von Hipper in 1912. Raeder's rise up the ranks was due mostly to his intelligence and hard work though from 1901 to 1903 Raeder served on the staff of Prince Heinrich of Prussia, and gained a powerful patron in the process. Owing to his cold and distant personality, Raeder was a man whom even his friends often admitted to knowing very little about. The dominating figure of the Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the autocratic State Secretary of the Navy. Tirpitz's preferred means of obtaining "world power status" was through his Risikotheorie where Germany would build a Risikoflotte that would make it too dangerous for Britain to risk a war with Germany, and thereby alter the international balance of power decisively in the Reich favor. Tirpitz transformed the Navy from the small coastal defense force of 1897 into the mighty High Seas Fleet of 1914.In 1904, Raeder, who spoke fluent Russian, was sent to the Far East as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War. Starting in 1905, Raeder worked in the public relations section of the Navy, where he first met Tirpitz and began his introduction to politics by briefing journalists to run articles promoting the Seemachtideologie and meeting politicians who held seats in the Reichstag in order to convert them to the Seemachtideologie. Working closely with Tirpitz, Raeder was heavily involved in the lobbying the Reichstag to pass the Third Navy Law of 1906 which committed Germany to building "all big gun battleships" to compete with the new British in the Anglo-German naval race that had only begun at the start of the 20th century.
Raeder was the captain of Kaiser Wilhelm II's private yacht in the years leading up to World War I. In itself, this was not a rewarding post, but often people in this post were quickly promoted afterwards.
World War I
Raeder served as Hipper's chief of staff during World War I, as well as in combat posts. He took part in the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Raeder later described Hipper as an admiral who "hated paperwork"; accordingly, Hipper delegated considerable power to Raeder, who thus enjoyed more influence than his position as chief of staff would suggest.During and after World War I the German navy was divided into two schools of thought. One, led by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, consisted of avid followers of the teachings of the American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan and believed in building a "balanced fleet" centered around the battleship that would seek out and win a decisive battle of annihilation against the Royal Navy in the event of war. The other school, led by Commander Wolfgang Wegener, argued that because of superior British shipbuilding capacity Germany could never hope to build a "balanced fleet" capable of winning an Entscheidungsschlacht, and so the best use of German naval strength was to build a fleet of cruisers and submarines that would wage a guerre de course. After reading all three of Wegener's papers setting out his ideas, Admiral Hipper decided to submit them to the Admiralty in Berlin, but changed his mind after reading a paper by Raeder attacking the Wegener thesis as flawed. This marked the beginning of a long feud between Raeder and Wegener, with Wegener claiming that his former friend Raeder was jealous of what Wegener insisted were his superior ideas.
In May 1916 Raeder played a major role planning a raid by Hipper's battlecruisers that aimed to lure out the British battlecruiser force which would then be destroyed by the main High Seas Fleet. This raid turned into the Battle of Jutland. Raeder played a prominent role, and was forced midway through the battle to transfer from to as a result of damage to Hipper's flagship.
As chief of staff to Admiral Hipper he was closely involved in a plan of Hipper's for a German battlecruiser squadron to sail across the Atlantic and sweep through the waters off Canada down to the West Indies and on to South America to sink the British cruisers operating in those waters, and thereby force the British to redeploy a substantial part of the Home Fleet to the New World. Though Hipper's plans were rejected as far too risky, they significantly influenced Raeder's later thinking.
On 14 October 1918, Raeder received a major promotion with appointment as deputy to Admiral Paul Behncke, the Naval State Secretary. Raeder had doubts about submarines, but he spent the last weeks of the war working to achieve the Scheer Programme of building 450 U-boats.
On 28 October 1918 the Imperial German fleet at Kiel mutinied when some of the ships' crews refused to sail out for the a final battle against the British Grand Fleet that the Admiralty had ordered without the knowledge or approval of the German government. Raeder played a major role in attempting to crush the mutiny.
Weimar Republic
Raeder's two younger brothers were both killed in action in the First World War, and in 1919 his first marriage, which had been under heavy strain due to war-related stress, ended in divorce. For the puritanical Raeder, the divorce was a huge personal disgrace, and for the rest of his life he always denied his first marriage. The years 1918–1919 were some of the most troubled in his life.High Seas Fleet mutiny
In the winter of 1918–19, Raeder was closely involved in the efforts of the naval officer corps, strongly backed by the Defense Minister Gustav Noske to disband the workers' and soldiers' councils established after the Kiel mutiny. Noske was a Majority Social Democrat with firm "law and order" views. During this period, Raeder served as the liaison between the naval officer corps and Noske, and it was Raeder who suggested to Noske on 11 January 1919 that Adolf von Trotha be appointed commander-in-chief of the Navy. Tirpitz's attacks on the Emperor's leadership during the war had caused a split in the officer corps between the followers of "the Master" and the Kaiser, and Raeder saw Trotha as the only officer acceptable to both factions. Noske in turn asked the Navy for volunteers for the Freikorps to crush uprisings from the Communists. The Navy contributed two brigades to the Freikorps. Under the Weimar Republic, the military considered itself überparteilich, which did not mean political neutrality as implied. The military argued that there were two types of "politics": parteipolitisch which was the responsibility of the politicians, and staatspolitisch which was the responsibility of the military. Staatspolitisch concerned Germany's "eternal" interests and the "historic mission" of winning world power, which was to be pursued regardless of what the politicians or the people wanted.Kapp ''putsch''
After the war, in 1920, Raeder was involved in the failed Kapp Putsch when, together with almost the entire naval officer corps, he declared himself openly for the "government" of Wolfgang Kapp against the leaders of the Weimar Republic. In the summer of 1920 Raeder married his second wife, with whom he later had one son.After the failure of the Kapp Putsch he was marginalized in the Navy, being transferred to the Naval Archives, where for two years he played a leading role in writing the official history of the Navy in World War I. After this, Raeder resumed his steady rise in the navy hierarchy, becoming Vizeadmiral in 1925.