The Lützow and the Sinking of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
Eventually sunk during the defence of Leningrad, the unfinished German cruiser Lützow is a fitting symbol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
On the last day of May 1940 a peculiar sight appeared in the approaches to Leningrad. A German heavy cruiser was being towed into a shipyard on the western edge of the city. There was no bunting, no military band and little ceremony. No mention was made of the arrival in the Soviet press; instead, the newspapers Izvestia and Leningradskaya Pravda reported the Anglo-French collapse at the other end of the Continent in studiedly neutral tones. Consequently, the huge grey monster attracted little attention as it was nudged and cajoled into place by puffing black tugs. Nonetheless, its arrival was an event of profound significance.
The ship was the Lützow. Named in honour of Ludwig Freiherr von Lützow – one of the Prussian heroes of the German wars of liberation, who had raised a citizens’ militia in 1813 to fight alongside the Russians against the French – she had been constructed in Bremen and launched in July 1939. As one of the Admiral Hipper class of five heavy battlecruisers built by the Nazis in the 1930s, it was larger and heavier than Germany’s famed ‘pocket battleships’; over 200 metres from stem to stern, with a displacement of just under 20,000 tonnes. In finished form, the Lützow would be powered by three Blohm & Voss steam turbines, boast a top speed of 32 knots and carry a crew of over 1,300. Its main armament would consist of four 20.3 cm (8-inch) twin gun turrets, each weighing approximately 250 tons, with an effective range of around 33km. It was now the largest and most modern vessel in the Soviet fleet.
For all its impressive pedigree, however, what the few Leningraders watching the ship arrive in 1940 would have noticed was that the Lützow was not finished. In fact, despite its sleek lines and impressive size, it looked rather unlike a warship, with little completed superstructure above deck level, only two of the four main turrets were installed, and there was no anti-aircraft armament. Below decks, the vessel was similarly unfinished, most critically lacking a propulsion system. Indeed, if the time taken to fit out the Lützow’s sister ships was any guide, it would not be ready for commissioning for at least another year. But, despite such shortcomings, the transfer into Soviet hands was a remarkable event. For one thing, the Admiral Hipper class had originally been devised by German engineers to meet the threat posed by the Soviet Kirov class of battle cruiser, which had first been launched in 1936. So, if nothing else, there was a certain irony in the Lützow’s delivery to Leningrad.
Moreover, the German navy was not exactly awash with capital ships in the summer of 1940. Alongside its four battleships – the Bismarck, the Tirpitz, the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst – it possessed only two smaller ‘pocket battleships’, the Deutschland and the Admiral Scheer, the third of that Deutschland class, the Graf Spee, having been scuttled in the South Atlantic the previous winter. Of the five heavy cruisers, the Blücher had been sunk a few weeks earlier, after succumbing to shellfire in Oslofjord during the Norwegian campaign; the Seydlitz and the Prinz Eugen were still unfinished; and the Lützow was now being handed over to the Soviets, thus leaving only the Admiral Hipper in German service. Given that Hitler had only seven capital ships at his disposal, many Germans might have concluded that the delivery of the Lützow to the Soviets was an act of foolhardy generosity.
Officially, however, the sale of the Lützow was trumpeted as a significant step in the improvement of Nazi-Soviet relations; a symbol, in hardened Krupp steel, of a new age of détente and co-operation between Europe’s two primary totalitarian powers. Beyond the symbolism, it was the headline transaction in a burgeoning commercial relationship between Moscow and Berlin, which had accompanied the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact the previous August. Indeed, as the Lützow was eased into its berth at the Baltic Shipyard, German and Soviet representatives were busy finalising a raft of commercial deals covering the supply of all manner of raw materials and finished goods.
The idea of an economic arrangement between Berlin and Moscow was one that had long mesmerised politicians and economists on both sides. The two were a natural fit; industrialised Germany had an insatiable need for raw materials, while resource-rich Russia sought assistance in industrialising. When the political stars had aligned, as after the Rapallo Pact of 1922, the two countries had enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship, and it is highly significant that the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was preceded by a commercial agreement signed a few days earlier. That August, Stalin and Hitler had found that they were on strategic common ground in confronting the ‘imperialists’ of the West, but – for Stalin at least – it was the economic arrangement with Berlin that had been decisive.
The German-Soviet trade agreement, which preceded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by three days, established a credit facility of 200 million Reichsmarks and envisaged 300 million Reichsmarks of bilateral trade – Soviet raw materials for German technology – in a deal scheduled to last for seven years. Though often neglected or overshadowed by its political counterpart, economics played an essential role in the new Nazi-Soviet relationship, offering Germany the chance to avoid the worst effects of any wartime British blockade, and giving the Soviet Union the opportunity to modernise, learning from one of the most advanced industrial economies in the world.
Such was its importance that the first trade treaty was swiftly augmented by a revised commercial agreement the following February, which more than quadrupled the total figures already agreed and committed both sides to additional exports to the value of 650 million Reichsmarks each. It was, the Nazi press swooned, more important ‘than a battle won’. Stalin concurred, declaring that the agreement was no mere trade treaty, it was one of ‘mutual assistance’, thereby rather undermining his declared position of neutrality in the ongoing war.
The figures proposed in the revised agreement were certainly impressive: the Soviet Union, for instance, committed to supply one million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of petroleum, 800,000 tons of scrap and pig iron, 500,000 tons of phosphates, 500,000 tons of iron ore with lesser amounts of platinum, chromium ore, asbestos, sulphur, iridium, iodine, glycerine, albumin, tar, lime and numerous other products.
German counter-deliveries, meanwhile, were set out in four separate lists, the first of which, concerning military equipment, ran to 42 typewritten pages and encompassed everything from submarine periscopes and hydrographic instruments to complete tanks and aircraft, including Messerschmitt Bf-109E fighters, Junkers Ju-88 and Dornier Do-215 bombers, half-tracks, prototype helicopters and one ‘fully-equipped’ Panzer Mk III. The other lists covered sundry military and industrial supplies and included equipment for the mining, chemical and petroleum industries, turbines, forges, presses, cranes, machine tools, locomotives, generators, diesel engines, 146 excavators and a number of ships, including a 12,000-ton tanker, which was to be delivered ‘promptly’.
One of the first items on that Soviet ‘shopping list’ was the heavy cruiser that was already being referred to by the Germans as the ‘ex-Lützow’. According to the agreement, it was ‘to be delivered for completion in the USSR’, accompanied by ‘all equipment, armament [and] spare parts’, as well as ‘complete plans, specifications, working drawings and trial results’. As with many other categories, the negotiations that led to the sale of the vessel had been rather complex. The Soviets had first requested the ship in early November 1939, along with the similarly unfinished Seydlitz. Then, at the end of that month, the stakes had been raised higher when the Prinz Eugen was added to the list of Soviet demands, as well as the plans for the battleship Bismarck. The matter was referred to Hitler, who vetoed the sale of the Seydlitz and the Prinz Eugen, but agreed to the sale of the Bismarck plans, on condition that they would not be permitted to fall into the ‘wrong’ (i.e. British) hands.
With a green light for the sale of the Lützow, the two sides could begin haggling over price. An initial suggestion from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring of 152 million Reichsmarks, nearly twice the cost of construction, was dismissed by the Soviets out of hand. Thereafter, negotiations dragged on until early May 1940, at which point a renewed German proposal of 109 million Reichsmarks for the cruiser and ammunition was immediately met with a Soviet counteroffer of 90 million Reichsmarks. Just as Germany’s forces were invading France and the Low Countries, it seems the negotiators tired of haggling and opted to split the difference, agreeing a price of 100 million Reichsmarks for the ship; nearly one-sixth of the agreed German export total.
Yet, if the two sides imagined that what would follow would be plain sailing, they were mistaken. As in most aspects of this benighted alignment, signature of the agreement was just the opening shot in a torturous saga of negotiations that sought to put the theory of economic collaboration into practice in an atmosphere of endemic mutual mistrust. Both Moscow and Berlin were equally to blame, each essentially viewing itself as the dominant partner in the relationship and consequently seeking to drive as hard a bargain as possible. The Soviets proved to be the tougher negotiators, bolstered by the mistaken belief that the Germans needed them more than vice versa. Consequently, they routinely inflated their own prices while driving down those of their German partners. The sum for consignments of German hard coal, for instance, was pushed so low that Moscow was able to sell much of it on to its neighbours at a healthy profit. Its own deliveries of oil, meanwhile, were inflated by up to 50 per cent beyond the industry standard Gulf Price, while the price of Soviet manganese mysteriously rose by 75 per cent between 1938 and 1940. For Communists, Stalin’s negotiators certainly demonstrated a solid understanding of the fundamentals of capitalism.
There were other problems. The staggered nature of the arrangement, whereby Soviet raw material exports were followed by later German deliveries of technology and finished goods, inevitably gave rise to complaints, mainly on the Soviet side, about suspected foot-dragging. One such dispute concerned the Lützow’s missing turrets, and a Soviet delegation was duly dispatched to Essen in 1940 to confront the manufacturer, the German steel magnate Gustav Krupp von Bohlen. After complaining about the slow progress of the assembly of the guns and accusing Krupp of ‘violating the schedule’, the Soviets were told that the delays were due to ‘forces beyond our control’. Blaming the war and Anglo-French intransigence, Krupp protested that he was doing his ‘patriotic duty’ in supplying the Wehrmacht first of all, though he promised to look into the Soviet complaints, pledging to finish work on the Lützow as soon as the Prinz Eugen had been completed. Needless to say, the turrets were never delivered.
Spying was another obstacle. Although the Germans appear largely to have desisted, perhaps suspecting that there was little benefit to be gained from spying on their partner’s often primitive industrial installations, the Soviets seem to have viewed the economic relationship with Berlin as a golden opportunity for some military-industrial espionage. Soviet delegations in Germany, therefore, soon gained a reputation for off-limits snooping, so much so that those visiting the Krupp plant found large areas of the workshops hidden from view behind vast sheets of tarpaulin.
Ensconced in her berth in Leningrad, the Lützow was also not immune. As Nikita Khrushchev related in his postwar memoir, the German rear-admiral Otto Feige, who had been sent to Leningrad to oversee the job of fitting it out, naturally attracted the attentions of the Soviet intelligence service. A ‘honey-trap’ was prepared for him, involving, as Khrushchev delicately put it, a ‘young lovely’, an ‘indecent pose’ and some photographic equipment. Yet, despite the ensuing scandal, which so enraged the puritanical Hitler that he raised it with the head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, Moscow failed to recruit Feige, as the brazen admiral evidently ‘couldn’t have cared less’ about his indiscretion.
By the time that Feige was being ‘compromised’, in the autumn of 1940, the economic relationship between Berlin and Moscow was already in trouble. Endless rounds of exhaustive negotiations, which it seemed were only broken when Stalin temporarily found cause to ingratiate himself with the Germans, had soured what little trust had been allowed to develop.
For Germany, the trade agreements with Moscow, which had promised so much, were proving hugely frustrating. Milking Soviet natural resources had turned into something akin to getting blood out of a stone. And, far from oiling the wheels of Hitler’s war machine, it seemed that the connection to the Soviet economy was proving to be more of a hindrance, with every delivery dogged by delays, squabbles and endless prevarication. Also, crucially for Berlin, more generous, less capricious trading partners had in the meantime been found elsewhere: in Sweden and Romania, for example, whose deliveries of iron ore and oil, respectively, quickly dwarfed those coming from the USSR. In an economic sense, therefore, the relationship with Stalin became less and less vital to Hitler as time went on.
The Soviets were a little more positive. Having been promised the shortcut to a modern industrial economy, they had generally done rather well out of the deal, retooling many new factories with German-made hardware and benefiting from some of the latest examples of German industrial technology. It was not all positive, however. Soviet buyers had been unimpressed by much of the military equipment that they had been shown and had not been permitted to see the latest technology, such as the prototype jet engines then under development at Junkers. They had, meanwhile, been sold ten examples of the Heinkel He-100 fighter – about which Berlin had made grand claims – only to discover that it was fundamentally unsuited to combat and had not even been adopted by the Luftwaffe.
The greatest debit on the Soviet balance sheet, however, was the ex-Lützow. At the end of September 1940, though only two-thirds completed and moored in her dock in Leningrad, the ship was formally incorporated into the Red Navy and given the name Petropavlovsk, commemorating a Russian victory against the British and the French in the Crimean War. However, in a microcosm of the wider problems, the cautious co-operation on board the ship between German and Soviet crew and engineers had all but collapsed, with interminable haggling effectively paralysing any genuine progress on finishing the vessel.
Much of the wrangling was rather mundane, centring on training regimes or translation costs. For instance, the Soviets requested that instruction of their crews should be carried out in Russian and demanded that specialist officers should be sent to German factories for tuition. They also suggested that a Red Navy training team should be permitted to serve aboard the Admiral Hipper. Mindful of the widespread suspicions of systematic Soviet espionage and unwilling to accommodate Moscow’s demands without reciprocity, Berlin unsurprisingly refused.
As work on the Petropavlovsk stalled, the relationship, which had been tentative at best, soured further. When an article appeared in Izvestia in October 1940 outlining the historical background of a number of Soviet warships, including the Petropavlovsk, the vessel’s German origins were strangely not mentioned. The cynic might have surmised that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was already being airbrushed out of history.
Late in 1940, however, a curious shift occurred. Just as Hitler was privately calling time on the pact with Moscow, giving the order on 18 December to start military planning for Operation Barbarossa, Stalin began using economics to woo his German partner, freeing up the torturous negotiations and finally permitting genuine progress to be made. In December, a Nazi-Soviet Tariff and Toll treaty was signed, followed by a new commercial agreement in January 1941, which was hailed by the normally sober senior German negotiator, Karl Schnurre, as ‘the greatest agreement that Germany had ever concluded’. Only at this point, then, did the economic relationship belatedly come close to realising its potential. In the first half of 1941, trade between Berlin and Moscow duly flourished, with fully one third of the total of contracted German exports to the USSR being transacted, while from April to June alone the Soviets exported over half a million tons of grain in the opposite direction, a third of their total for that commodity.
As the politicisation that had previously conspired to hinder progress finally served to spur it on, the Nazi-Soviet economic relationship enjoyed something of a swan song. Even the Petropavlovsk shared in the momentary enthusiasm, with Berlin making renewed promises to deliver the missing turrets and agreeing that instructors would be dispatched to Leningrad in the summer of 1941 to provide training to the ship’s Soviet crew.
In addition, in May 1941, the Soviets made a list of further requests regarding the Petropavlovsk, for instance, demanding that power systems be installed in August, and that control and communications systems be supplied by October. Little practical co-operation would be forthcoming, however, and in June Admiral Kuznetzov informed a curiously unconcerned Stalin that deliveries of parts for the vessel had inexplicably halted.
When war finally came that summer, the unfinished German cruiser was inevitably pressed into service in the defence of the Soviet Union’s second city. Though it was not yet seaworthy, the vessel nonetheless had two of her four main turrets installed and so could be used as a floating battery when the Wehrmacht approached the city in late August. On 7 September, the Petropavlovsk – built by German labour in Bremen – opened fire on approaching German troops, firing around 700 German shells from her Krupp turrets. Ten days later, German artillery in turn found its range and hit the cruiser with 53 rounds, causing her to sink, bow first, in the shallow waters of the Leningrad coal harbour.
It was a fitting end. The Petropavlovsk/Lützow had been, in many ways, the very symbol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Intended to signify a new era of collaboration, she had become a sorry symptom of a relationship whose potential, thankfully, would never be realised. Ambitious in conception, but half-finished, mired in political machinations and hamstrung by endemic mutual mistrust, the ship’s story mirrored that of the wider strategic relationship almost perfectly. Like the pact, the ship met its end in that brutal summer of 1941, and – like the pact – it was subsequently erased from history. If Hitler and Stalin had wanted a flagship for their joint venture between 1939 and 1941, they could not have wished for a better candidate.
