“What’s My Age Again?” German Naval Strategy – The First 175/70 Years

Grouped around two regional flotillas and a naval aviation command, today’s German Navy has evolved from a coastal defense force of the early Cold War years – a navy “with an unlimited horizon, but limited tasks”[1] – to one facing a return to high-intensity warfare in the Baltic Sea and on the European northern flank after three decades of low-intensity missions. With seven decades since its creation in early January 1956, the German Navy has outlived its many predecessor navies by a long shot. At the same time, its effectiveness as a sea power – based on the basic, but highly illuminating definition coined by the late German admiral Edward Wegener – rested on the simple mathematical product of fleet size times bases (or better, geographical location). Naval strategy, in this context and for the purpose of this essay, was hence both: overcoming Germany’s more continental disadvantage at sea by building a fleet large and strong enough to attain overarching strategic objectives and through political or military means enhance the country’s sea-strategic position.

Germany’s checkered naval history

In January 2026, the German Navy celebrated its 70th anniversary. Curiously enough, in 2023, the Deutsche Marine also celebrated “175 years of German Navies” with a dedicated nation-wide promotional campaign and a multitude of events. It thus acknowledged its own long history dating back to the Revolution of 1848. While there were maritime predecessors, a unified German Navy was not created until the mid-19th century. On 14 June 1848, the Frankfurt Paulskirche parliamentary assembly ruled to procure and operate a navy. Earlier that year, the first Schleswig War had crippled German maritime trade in the Baltic and North Seas due to a Danish naval blockade of Schleswig-Holstein. The creation of a navy was seen as operationally necessary and vital to the nascent German state’s national identity. Planners even looked towards the United States of America to help procure and operate a modern warship. However, the counter-revolution in Germany was soon in full swing, and the Reichsflotte (Imperial Fleet) was auctioned off in 1852. In the 1860s, the state of Prussia created what can be considered as the second German Navy. Its operational reach and impact, such as in the German-Danish War of 1864, remained limited by a lack of strategy, industrial base, and a naval vision. After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Prussia emerged victorious from the conflict nonetheless, and its navy was soon reorganized as the North German Federal Navy, which in turn was succeeded by the Imperial Navy in 1871.

Buttressed by a multitude of innovations at the turn of the century, such as the torpedo, submarines, and fixed-wing aircraft, and lighter-than-air dirigibles, and the overarching political top cover from the 1890s through Kaiser Wilhelm II and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (State Secretary of the German Imperial Naval Office), Germany built a navy that was designed to turn the unified Reich into a venerable sea power. Beyond a naval build-up, there was little to no strategy for the High Seas Fleet. The Kaiser, it appears, wanted big ships to upstage his British cousins or for fleet reviews. When World War I broke out in 1914, the Royal Navy held the German fleet in check by administering a distant blockade. The few vicious battles that did occur – the Falklands in 1914, Dogger Bank in 1915, and the Battle of Jutland in 1916 – did not meaningfully affect the course of the war. While Germany resorted to unrestricted U-boat warfare, the High Seas Fleet “fell asleep in port”, as one sailor put it.[2] Frustrated, underprovided, and impatient, the crews of the warships revolted against an impending final one-way “final” deployment as negotiations were underway between a new government in Berlin and the Entente for an armistice. The ensuing Kiel Mutiny overturned the ruling military classes, forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and brought the war to an end. The remainder of Germany’s fleet was escorted to the British naval base at Scapa Flow, where it was scuttled on 21 June 1919 to prevent the capital ships from falling into enemy hands.

The naval officer caste remained skeptical, if not outright hostile, to the Weimar Republic, the first German democratic state. The Versailles Treaty limited any German maritime force to a meager 15,000 men, relegated to coastal defense, mine clearing, and commerce protection. The admirals sought to ease some restrictions through negotiations with former enemies and technological innovation, including weapons like aircraft and submarines banned by the Treaty. Three 10,000t Deutschland-class armored cruisers (Panzerschiffe), dubbed pocket-battleships by foreign navies but effectively powerful commerce raiders, were procured from 1928. However, a strong navy no longer served to unify the doomed Republic. After a series of domestic political turnovers, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists came to power in 1933 and soon rebuilt Germany. The Third Reich did away with all democratic institutions, jailed and murdered domestic opposition or those of Jewish faith, threatened its European neighbors, and began a massive military build-up.

Under its commander, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the Kriegsmarine, as it was known since 1935, developed a hyper-ambitious “Z Plan”. If it had come to fruition by the late 1940s, it would have created a huge force of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and panzer ships. Alas, World War II broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Although the opening salvos came from the 35-year-old obsolete battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had pulled into the port of Danzig in a Trojan Horse operation a few days earlier, the Kriegsmarine was seen as unfit and unprepared for the escalating conflict. The force structure was disconnected from strategy, and World War I-era ships mixed with the Anglo-German naval agreement fleet and the 1939 Z plan paper fleet. France’s and Great Britain’s declaration of war against Hitler’s Germany led to despair already.

“Echoing Trotha’s call in 1918 for the fleet to ‘go down with honor’, Raeder acknowledged that the surface forces were ‘too weak in number and strength’ and could only ‘show – through [their] full engagement – that they know how to die gallantly […].”[3]

As it were, Germany’s good dozen of major surface combatants were sunk or disabled. Raeder was replaced by Karl Dönitz, who focused all shipbuilding and pretty much all operational planning on unrestricted submarine warfare. In the Battle of the Atlantic, German “wolf packs” threatened allied convoys, but the allies prevailed. More than 72,000 merchant mariners, sailors, and airmen, perished in this theater alone. Of the 40,000 German Kriegsmarine submariners alone, who went down to sea in fighting ships, 30,000 never returned. Even at the highpoint of subduing Europe, the Nazis failed to appreciate the value of naval power through their expansion. Instead, maritime power was limited to submarines. Capital ships drew Adolf Hitler’s disdain. The Kriegsmarine leadership remained fervent Hitler supporters and, to avoid being accused of backstabbing the overall German war effort as it was seen in 1918, remained loyal through the end. After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945, it was Dönitz who assumed the position of Chancellor of the Reich. His bizarre “Flensburg government” outlasted Germany’s capitulation to the Allied powers on 8 May 1945 while the available navy and civilian ships finally received the fuel in the waning days of the war – an action Doenitz and his supporters would later claim credit. They successfully framed the Kriegsmarine as apolitical and single-handedly exercising the evacuation of military and civilian personnel from East Prussia and Pomerania to Schleswig-Holstein. After 1945, this would contribute to the well-tendered myth of the “clean Kriegsmarine”, a force that had allegedly always acted honorably, did not partake in the murderous dictatorial Nazi regime but remained loyal to the end, and managed to gallantly save tens of thousands of countrymen from the Soviet wrath. Former Kriegsmarine personnel, supported by post-war allied and German policy-makers, even saw this as a veritable method to whitewash their own personal history and that of the military they served.

Ironically, the two most senior naval leaders of the Kriegsmarine survived the war and the Nuremberg war crime trials. Karl Dönitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Erich Raeder was sentenced to life in prison but released on medical grounds in 1956. At Raeder’s 1960 funeral, a remorseless Dönitz (†1981) gave the eulogy. The shadows of the Kriegsmarine loomed large over the West-German Navy, as the Großadmiralsfrage – the question how to deal with and assess the grand admirals and the wider German naval legacy – of almost Faustian proportions.[4]

The Bundesmarine, West Germany’s navy (1956-1990)[5]

Right after the war, the superpower confrontation turned former allies into enemies. The U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West faced the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact in the East. An “Iron Curtain” had come down across Europe, cutting Germany in half. In light of the Korean War (1950-1953) and the evolution of the nuclear bomb with its devastating power, a West German defense contribution to Europe was increasingly desirable. After the Western allies relinquished their rule over West Germany in 1955, the Konrad Adenauer government worked towards joining NATO (in parallel with European integration efforts). In this vein, the Bundeswehr was founded. The 1950 Himmerod Abbey memorandum had already outlined a defense contribution. Former Kriegsmarine had been employed in mine-clearance and river patrol, and strategic, operational and tactical lessons from World War II were studied in depth by a Naval Historical Team, supported by the U.S.

Buttressed by strong U.S. and Royal Navy support, the West German Bundesmarine was soon equipped to contribute to geographically limited alliance defense in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Admiral Arleigh Burke, the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations 1955-1961, remarked that “[…] If we [the United States] were to support the development of a German Navy at all, we should do it wholeheartedly.”[6] Yet, tonnage and operational restrictions would remain in place until the 1960s and 1980s, respectively.[7] From its outset, the German Navy was integrated into NATO command structures. NATO was the vehicle, and thus the enabler and limitation at once, of what the German Navy would and could do. Perhaps most strikingly, NATO offered an alliance that would both contain the Germans who were so very much needed in the defense of the West, but also provide – for the first time in German naval history – by implication the geographic scope and location spanning the North Atlantic proper that previous German attempts at maritime influence never could attain.

Through such conscientious efforts put in place by skeptical Western allies, readily adopted by new generations of Bundesmarine naval officers, this new navy simply emerged as an “alliance navy”. Its strategic culture reflected that. Its operational focus was on securing the Baltic Approaches, holding at bay a Red Banner fleet amphibious assault on Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and helping escort allied reinforcements into Europe’s North Sea ports. The West Germans managed to create and maintain a navy that remained at the operational-conceptual level because the NATO strategy framework in which it operated was several echelons above. There was no need for a genuine naval strategy, with sea powers such as the United Kingdom and the United States on the West German home team.

It was not until the final phase of the Cold War that the German Navy truly expanded its scope, neatly aligned with the naval renaissance of the U.S. Maritime Strategy, which i.e., focused strongly on the North European theatre.[8] Three U.S.-built guided-missile destroyers (Charles F. Adams-class) were commissioned in 1969-1970. The 1980s saw a modernized force, with Tornado naval jets gradually replacing the ageing Starfighters. Eight guided-missile frigates of the Bremen-class, built under a program with the Netherlands, came online to replace older frigates and destroyers. A new class of fast-patrol boats (Gepard-class), modern mine-hunters, and signal intelligence ships were also added. Crucially, there was not a 1-on-1 replacement as old units were retired. The force shrank from a Cold War highpoint of 200 vessels somewhat, but confidence in new technology and platforms, as well as a renewed strategic vigor, helped float the Bundesmarine’s boat. With the Concept of Maritime Operations (CONMAROPS), a trilateral effort to conceptualize combined containment, defense in depth, and keeping the initiative activities at and from the sea, German naval strategic thought began to take a wider space.[9]

The Deutsche Marine: The Unified Germany’s Expeditionary Navy (1990-2014)

In 1987, the then-Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Hans-Joachim “Jimmy” Mann, gathered a group of naval leaders and created “Marine 2005”, colloquially dubbed “Sylt Fleet” for the North Sea island on which the first conference had been held. Its proposed force reductions were not seen as the minimum; rather, they were seen as a top-level that could be chipped away as the Cold War eased and ended. Suddenly, the German Navy’s business model was in limbo: The Bundeswehr had to absorb former Volksmarine personnel (only 2,000 were integrated, ~16,000 people were fired), and all of the 100 or so East German warships and planes were soon sold or scrapped. German unification proved to be a herculean task domestically, and part of the 2+4 negotiations was the clear-cut reduction of Bundeswehr end strength from a Cold War high of 500,000 to no more than 370,000, in addition to the departure of the troops of allied powers from Germany by 1994.

For the Deutsche Marine, a name formally adopted in 1995 to distinguish itself from its Cold War predecessors and signal a unified country, the world did not wait. When U.S. President George H.W. Bush amassed an international, United Nations-mandated coalition against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1990/1991, Germany opted for “checkbook diplomacy”. It only deployed some of its venerable mine-sweepers to the Gulf region after hostilities had ended. With a fresh verdict by the High Constitutional Court in 1994 to allow for out-of-area operations, German frigates patrolled the Adriatic Sea (first under a Western-European-Union mandate, later under NATO command) in the long Balkan Wars of the 1990s. S-boats, coastal submarines, and minesweepers appeared to be a thing of the past, and German thought turned to more expeditionary assets, including sea-basing.[10]

Since 2001, the “War on Terror” has consumed naval resources. Germany operated off the Horn of Africa as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, conducted maritime domain awareness in the Mediterranean Sea, and its frigates have routinely been integrated in U.S. and French aircraft carrier groups. Anti-piracy and migrant rescue operations kept the navy busy, but echoing Samuel Huntington’s 1954 verdict on American naval missions, that is not what navies are procured for.[11] On the home front, the navalized Tornado aircraft were transferred to the Luftwaffe in 2005, and type flotillas of the Cold War were reorganized into two geographic commands in the Baltic Sea (Flotilla 1, Kiel) and the North Sea (Flotilla 2, Wilhelmshaven). Germany began building the F125 Baden-Württemberg-class “stabilization frigates,” designed for low- and medium-intensity scenarios. Overtime and over budget, only four were procured. The suspension of the draft in 2011, at the time a pure cost-cutting effort, robbed the Navy of a key recruitment pool, a problem the Deutsche Marine suffers from until today. Readiness problems and a series of high-profile scandals around the proud sail training ship Gorch Fock hampered the reputation. Slowly but steadily, the force hollowed out, despite having grown from a mere coastal waters navy of the Cold War to one with regular regional force projection missions (albeit under NATO, European Union, or United Nations mandates).

The German Navy and the Zeitenwende (since 2014)

When Russia annexed Crimea and began a brutal war of aggression in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Deutsche Marine turned out to be quick on its feet. As if buried Cold War muscle memory were reactivated, the naval leadership under Vice Admirals Andreas Krause and Rainer Brinkmann refocused on the Baltic Sea. They understood that the Baltic, one of Russia’s front lines with the West, would quickly become a center of conflict. Having served as operators in the Baltic on submarines and S-boats, respectively, the admirals sought to build cooperation across the Baltic Sea. Across-the-board European cuts had affected all navies in the region.[12] That left the Deutsche Marine as the largest force of the economically most powerful nation on the Northern flank. Putting 2+2 together, this spelled German naval leadership in its home waters. Admiral Krause even commissioned a capstone document, written outside of hierarchical structures.[13] While the document was not published as a stand-alone work, its ideas reflected the strong Allied spirit of the military. As an “alliance navy”, it also sought to be more ambitious rather than outsourcing all strategic thought to NATO or the EU. In terms of force structure, some modest building programs – including new U.S. P-8A “Poseidon” maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) – made progress but served little to actually grow the navy in size.

When Vladimir Putin escalated his war against Ukraine and the West in earnest in February 2022, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a Zeitenwende (or sea change). The 100bn € for defense, it soon emerged, was but the first step toward a wider rearrangement of defense spending, procurement, and strategy. As it were, the German Navy needed some time to provide a force structure plan that the parliament would fund. Yet, the Deutsche Marine looks at a significant increase in its ship numbers and capabilities, i.e. more MPAs, more large conventional submarines jointly procured with Norway, two generations of anti-submarine and air defense frigates (though ballooning to be venerable cruisers if judging by prospective tonnage alone). For a country that for ten years had navigated around even committing to basic NATO GDP spending goals of 2% and having hoped that Russia would come to its senses and the U.S., and other capable allies would forever guarantee national survival and alliance defense, this is nothing short of a sea change. Scholz’ successor Friedrich Merz and his allies in parliament have essentially done away with defense spending caps, seek to re-instate a military draft of some form, and be stronger on defense and foreign policy than the previous government. Whether Germany can fulfill its broader global ambitions – such as regular Indo-Pacific deployments of 1-2 warships every other year – in light of the drastic and likely lasting changes in European security remains to be seen. The German Navy can only be as effective as the policy-makers and the defense-intellectual and defense-industrial complexes allow it to be. Because of the size of the Navy still lingering around 46 warships, any new possible operation – politically viable as it might be, such as the discussion on sending minesweepers to the Strait of Hormuz – risks overwhelming what Vice Admiral Jan Kaack, Chief of Navy, recently called “Germany’s smallest navy ever”.[14]

Today’s German Navy holds little to no connections to its predecessor navies. For instance, when the Kiel naval base was renamed from “Tirpitzhafen” to “Marinestützpunkt Kiel-Wik” in 2021, the most indignant individuals appeared to be senior citizens and some retirees. In terms of its strategic culture, it has to navigate with the challenges of any big warfighting organization: Different unions (warfighting areas), a geographical dispersal, and an uncertain future operating environment across the whole spectrum of conflict. At the same time, the departure of the U.S. as an ally appears to be imminent and European solutions with strong German leadership have to be considered.[15] From a cocktail reception on a frigate’s flight deck in a visiting port to high-intensity warfare, the German Navy remains a prime tool for a maritime-dependent nation such as Germany. Still, Admiral Wegener’s dialectic of maritime power as the product of fleet size and bases holds true, even in the 2020s. It will take a sizeable, larger and more capable German Navy to play its role in a European pillar of NATO, one that reaches from the North Cape to Gibraltar, and beyond. That includes ships, personnel, the industrial base, and the political will.