VOLUME XIV

16 May 46
Afternoon Session
DR. SIEMERS: Mr. President, I must first make a formal request,
namely, that in addition to my own secretary I may have another
here in Court. She was here this morning but has just been told
that she may not come into the courtroom, and she is now standing
outside the door.
THE PRESIDENT: All right.
[The Defendant Raeder resumed the stand.]
DR. SIEMERS: Herr Grossadmiral, you just saw the affidavit
of Dr. Siichting. I ask you: Is it true, or rather-not to confuse ym
I will ask-on what did the Navy base its ideas about enlarging
the battleships by about 20 percent?
RAEDER: Originally there was no intention to enlarge the
ships by 20 percent. But at the time when we resumed battleship
construction, when we could see that we would have a very small
number of battleships in any case, it occurred to us that the
resistance to sinking of ships should be increased as much as
possible to render the few we had as impregnable as possible. It
had nothing to do with stronger armament or anything like that,
but merely with increasing the resistance to sinking and to enemy
guns. For this reason a new system was worked out at that time
in order to increase and strengthen the subdivision of the space
within the ship. This meant that a great deal of new iron had
to be built into the ships. Thereby the draught and the displace-
ment were enlarged. This was unfortunate from my point of view,
for we had designed the ships with a comparatively shallow
draught. The mouths of our rivers, the Elbe, Weser, Jade, are so
shallow that ships with a deep draught cannot navigate all stages
of the rivers. Therefore, we had these ships built broad, intending
to give them a shallow draught; but by building in these many
new latitudinal and longitudinal bulkheads, we increased the
draught and also the displacement.
DR. SIEMERS: Were these disadvantageous changes, which took
place during construction, due in part to a comparatively limited
experience in battleship construction?
RAEDER: Yes. Since the designers in the High Command of
the Navy and the designers and engineers in the big shipyards had
not built any heavy warships for a very long time, they lacked
experience. As a result, the High Command of the Navy had to
issue supplementary orders to the shipyards. This in itself was a
drawback which I tried hard to overcome.
DR. SIEMERS: Did the construction of these four battleships
surpass the total tonnage accorded by the naval agreement?