Z plan

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Z-Plan is the common name for a large-scale fleet armament plan that the German Navy developed under its Commander-in-Chief Erich Raeder in 1938/39 and which Hitler put into effect on January 27, 1939.

prehistory

After the most modern ships of the Imperial Navy in 1919 in Scapa Flow ( Orkney Islands, Scotland was sunk) by their crews, the reconstruction was the Imperial Navy dominated the tight quantitative and qualitative limits that the Part V of the Versailles Treaty for the German armed forces fixed. In fact, the Reichsmarine was busy for years to gradually replace the contractually granted, but completely outdated ship material. Even during the Weimar Republic , this framework was mentally abandoned again, when u. a. set up for an early resumption of the battleship or submarine construction. In November 1932, Reichswehr Minister Wilhelm Groener approved the so-called "conversion plan", which provided for the construction of an aircraft carrier , an increase in the number of destroyers and the construction of a submarine and a naval air force.

Naval armament after 1933

Since the NSDAP came to power , with Hitler's backing - and analogous to the German negotiating tactics at the Geneva Disarmament Conference , which aimed to abolish the Versailles arms limits - hardly any consideration was given to the contractual obligations. Instead of the 10,000-tonne armored ships , 18,000-tonne ships were laid on the keel, but their construction was canceled after the conclusion of the fleet agreement with Great Britain in favor of 30,000-tonne battleships of the Scharnhorst class . The preparations for the construction of submarines were accelerated and plans carried out, which culminated in a new armament plan in March 1934, which provided for 8 ironclips, 3 aircraft carriers, 18  cruisers , 48 destroyers and 72 submarines and was to be implemented by 1949 .

With the German-British naval agreement of June 18, 1935, the limits for German naval armament were significantly expanded; now the armed forces of the German Navy, which had recently been renamed "Kriegsmarine", were allowed to comprise 35% of the British fleet (with special regulations for submarines), the qualitative upper limits being based on the provisions of the naval conferences in Washington in 1922 and in London in 1930. Since the naval leadership viewed the agreement as rather provisional, the internal games of thought about the size and composition of a larger “dream fleet” continued.

Fleet plans against Great Britain

Far-reaching armored ships (here Admiral Scheer ) were supposed to split up the British fleet

When the British government announced in the course of the Sudeten crisis in 1938 that it would fight against Germany if war broke out, the armaments plans of the Navy were given a clearly anti- British thrust. The basis of the deliberations was now the question with which and how many ships Germany would be able to wage a sea war against Great Britain with a prospect of success.

On August 20, 1938, under the chairmanship of the Chief of Staff of the Naval War Command (Skl) Günther Guse, a "Planning Committee" was founded to develop proposals for the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy on strategic bases for building the Navy in peacetime and in the event of war This should lead to conclusions for the type design of new ships and prepare decisions for the new ship and other planning of the Navy. In addition to Guse (with the exception of Dönitz ), the committee consisted of all major department heads of the Navy as permanent members: Hellmuth Heye (la / 1 / Skl), Hermann von Fischel (chairman of the new building committee and also head of the General Naval Office), Kurt Fricke (chief 1./Skl), Werner Fuchs (Head of the Fleet Department) and Leo Riedel (Chief of Staff of the Navy Weapons Office), as well as Karl Witzell , Head of the Navy Weapons Office, and Otto Schniewind , Head of the Navy Armed Forces Office , took part in the committee meetings. On October 25, 1938, the committee presented a memorandum with the title Naval Warfare against England and the resulting demands for the strategic objectives and the development of the Navy , which was presented to Raeder on October 31, 1938. It came to the conclusion that an expected British blockade could not be broken and the aim of the Navy can only be to disrupt British overseas trade. The document, also known as the "Heye memorandum" after the (main) author, essentially envisaged a further development of the strategic trade war with armored ships , which - operating on all oceans at the same time - split up the British fleet and thus their own numerical inferiority up to should compensate to some extent.

Despite this concrete approach, it was not possible to develop a coherent concept - neither for the battleships nor for the submarine weapon could a clearly defined purpose be found, which is why these points were initially left open. So z. For example, the chief of staff found that the battleships favored by Hitler were “needed, but a complete clarification of the purpose could not be achieved”. This problem is mainly due to the existence of different currents within the Kriegsmarine: One group, represented u. a. by Heye and Dönitz , favored the massive use of submarines and a pure "cruiser fleet", which should consist mainly of armored ships and avoid skirmishes with British battleships; while another group around Admiral Carls adhered to the Tirpitz principle , a decisive battle of its own battleships against the British fleet. The preliminary result was the so-called "Blueprint III", which tried to consider both directions in the naval command.

This included:

  • 10 battleships (6 new ships of the "H" class with 55,000 tons and 40.6 cm guns, plus 2 of the Scharnhorst and 2 of the Bismarck class , which were already under construction);
  • 12 armored ships of a new type of 20,000 t (project " Kreuzer P "), plus the existing 3 armored ships of the Germany class of 10,000 t;
  • 8 aircraft carriers of 20,000 t and 12,000 t, two of which 20,000 t ships had been under construction since 1936 ( Graf Zeppelin and B );
  • 5 heavy cruisers of 10,000 t of the Admiral Hipper class , which resulted from the naval agreement and were under construction;
  • 24 light cruisers of the new 8,000 t type " M ", the existing 6 cruisers from the Weimar Republic were to become school cruisers from 1943;
  • 36 “ Spähkreuzer ”, a kind of large destroyer of around 5,000 t;
  • 70 destroyers;
  • 78 torpedo boats ;
  • 249 submarines, including 162 large, 27 special and 60 small submarines;

as well as auxiliary ships and small vehicles (M, R, S boats).

The total number of ships was to be completed in stages by 1947/48, with the focus on armaments in the first few years on armored ships and submarines. In view of the long construction time that battleships required, a certain number of operational ships should be ready as soon as possible. With regard to the utilization of the shipyard capacities, the construction plan was available in variants "III.x" and "III.y". After Hitler called for the preferred completion of the battleships by 1944 in November, the plan was modified and finally accepted as "Umbauplan z" by the "Führer" - the more common name "Z-Plan" can be traced back to this.

Final construction program

In the following weeks, however, the plan experienced further changes resulting from the internal naval discussion, in which the “thick ship faction” was able to further enforce its ideas insofar as the number of light units was significantly reduced. The final version of the building plan, known as the "Z-Plan", provided for the following units:

  • 10 battleships (including 2 "Bismarck" and 2 "Scharnhorst" class)
  • 12 new ironclads and 3 old ones
  • 4 aircraft carriers
  • 5 heavy cruisers
  • 16 new light cruisers “M” and 6 old ones
  • 22 "Scout cruiser"
  • 158 destroyers and torpedo boats
  • 249 submarines

This construction plan left all contractual obligations far behind. He violated the German-British agreement as well as the international naval agreement of London 1936 , which Germany had largely acceded to by treaty of July 17, 1937.

Failure of the Z-Plan armament

A seemingly almost unsolvable problem arose at the end of 1938 through a calculation by the Defense Economics Department in the Ministry of the Navy, when they estimated the annual heating oil requirement for the Z-Fleet at 6 million tons in the case of mobilization and 2 million tons for diesel oil, but the entire German Consumption of mineral oils in 1938 was 6.15 million tons, with only 2.4 million tons coming from domestic production. The aim was to counteract this problem by storing operating materials - 10 million cubic meters of tank space should be built by 1945 - and increasing domestic production, although the requirements of the other two Wehrmacht sections were not yet taken into account.

Because the German arms industry was already overworked, only two of the six new battleships were started of all the newly planned ships; the armored ships disappeared from the plan even before the war began and were replaced by three O-class battlecruisers . Although there were other reasons for this change, such as the need to install 38 cm guns that were already in the making or were already in production (which were later used instead in the Todt battery ), this is a further indication of the superiority the "thick ship faction" seen.

Dönitz's counter -writ, entitled Thoughts on the Construction of the U-Boat Weapon, dated September 1, 1939, came too late to be able to influence the “Z-Plan” in the direction of the cruiser war concept originally pursued.

The British declaration of war on September 3, 1939 meant the end of the "Z-Plan". With an instruction of September 10th, Raeder ordered that only the ships that were well advanced under construction were to be completed - without exception, these were ships that had been planned or started before the “Z-Plan” (of which only nor Bismarck , Tirpitz and Prinz Eugen finished). The two new battleships were broken up again on the slipways; for the other “Z-Plan” ships, the orders are canceled if they have already been placed. Now the naval armament has been almost entirely set up for the accelerated construction of submarines and coastal vehicles. Although there were still other memoranda during the war that dealt with the question of the “future fleet”, these were aimed at a corresponding post-war world order and no longer had any reference to the original “Z-Plan”.

literature

  • Michael Salewski : The German naval warfare. 1935-1945. 3 volumes. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main,
  • Jost Dülffer : Hitler, Weimar and the Navy. Reich policy and naval building 1920–1939. Droste, Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-7700-0320-9 (also: Freiburg i. Breisgau, Univ., Diss., 1972).
  • Elmar B. Potter, Chester W. Nimitz : Sea power. A history of naval warfare from antiquity to the present. German version published by Jürgen Rohwer on behalf of the Defense Research Working Group . Pawlak, Herrsching 1982, ISBN 3-88199-082-8 .
  • Maik Nolte: "... know how to die with decency." Fleet armament between Tirpitzian tradition, strategic necessity and ideological calculation 1933–1943. Der Andere Verlag, Tönning et al. 2005, ISBN 3-89959-386-3 (at the same time: Oldenburg, Univ., Master's thesis, 2004).
  • Siegfried Breyer, The Z-Plan - Striving for World Power , Podzun-Pallas, Wölfersheim-Berstadt 1996, Marine-Arsenal special volume No. 5, ISBN 3-7909-0535-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jost Dülffer: Hitler, Weimar and the Navy. Reich policy and naval building 1920–1939. Droste, Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-7700-0320-9 , p. 566.
  2. ^ Michael Salewski: The German Naval Warfare 1935-1945. Volume 2: 1942-1945. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-7637-5138-6 .
  3. ↑ MGFA : DRZW , Volume I, p. 472.