The Three German Navies: Dissolution, Transition, and New Beginnings, 1945-1960 (review)

Douglas C. Peifer's comparative study of three interrelated naval entities—the Third Reich's Kriegsmarine, the Federal German Republic's Bundesmarine, and the German Democratic Republic's Volksmarine—is as groundbreaking as it is edifying. Drawing on his thorough knowledge of military and maritime Germany in the twentieth century, the author synthesizes several rich veins in his productive academic research pursuits and concentrates here on an exegesis of the complicated developments of two very different German navies after the demise in 1945 of the once-mighty Kriegsmarine.

Of the three Axis navies dismantled and dispersed by the Allies following World War II, what remained of Germany's surviving fleet designated for German use was truly a shadow affair when compared to the more representative leavings accorded both Japan and post-Armistice, postwar Italy. A politically confused personnel base, now divided by geography and ideology, challenged a routine transition from the Kriegsmarine ethos to the necessary new division of their loyalties, and Peifer's portrait of Kriegsmarine administration, personnel management, and judicial system at the book's outset prepares the reader for the abrupt shifts in standards and focus visited upon both veterans and new servicemen by their handlers from Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union beginning in 1945. In the East as well as in the West, former Kriegsmarine personnel and new hopefuls were meticulously screened for preferred aspects of political base and certain psychosocial predictors: Nazi ideology, as it happened, had pervaded the Kriegsmarine to a larger degree than subsequent memoirs might have comfortably wished to acknowledge, and any of its trace elements were scrutinized to varying degrees during this early period.

Peifer takes great care in his examination of the stepwise administrative journeys taken during the period 1945 to 1955 by the two nations' myriad maritime organizations through a labyrinth of various police, intelligence or other nonnaval designations (or guises!) that led, finally, to the formal establishment of the Bundesmarine and the Volksmarine. Both navies—whether in name or not—had been occupied from the late 1940s with similar key tasks, such as minesweeping and coastal patrol, but by the late 1950s the Bundesmarine was emerging as an oceangoing navy and fully integrated member of NATO, while the Volksmarine could be seen essentially as a component (with the larger Polish navy) of the Soviet Baltic Fleet. The two German fleets each carried important but differing markers from the parent Kriegsmarine which become even more distinct in the years beyond 1960.

Douglas Peifer wisely keeps this book's purview primarily within the historically and militarily significant decade of 1945-55, wherein he demonstrates that there is much to learn and reconsider. I look forward to his further investigations, especially if they lead him to chronicle the path to these two navies' reintegration in the 1990s, if a reviewer may be so bold.