Paul Werner Wenneker (27 February 1890 – 17 October 1979) was a German admiral and diplomat who was most notable for serving as the German naval attaché in Japan from 1940 until the end of World War II in 1945. He served as the commanding admiral of German naval forces in Asia, and oversaw the activities of German U-boats and commerce raiders in the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the war. Wenneker also attempted to share German submarine technology and tactics with the Japanese to assist them in the Pacific War, though his efforts in that regard were mostly treated with indifference by the Japanese. Wenneker was also became associated with Richard Sorge and his Soviet spy ring at the German embassy in Tokyo. He was detained by American occupation authorities after the war and then returned to Germany.
Biography
Born in Kiel to a naval family in 1890, Paul Wenneker joined the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in 1909 as a Seekadett and completed his training aboard the . During World War I he was serving on , which sank during the Battle of Helgoland Bight, and he was one of the survivors taken prisoner. Wenneker returned to Germany at the end of the war and continued serving in the Reichsmarine. He was promoted to Oberleutnant zur See (lieutenant junior grade) in 1919 while serving in the Baltic Sea aboard a minesweeper, and was promoted to Kapitänleutnant (lieutenant) in 1920. Wenneker served on and commanded several minesweepers and torpedo boats, before serving on cruisers in the second half of the 1920s. He became a Korvettenkapitän (lieutenant commander) in 1928 and a Fregattenkapitän (commander) in 1933. From 1933 to 1937 he served as the German naval attaché in Japan, and was promoted to Kapitän zur See (captain) in early January 1935.
During his first term as attaché, in January 1935 Wenneker was invited to tour the . In-between these terms, from 1937 to 1940, he was commanding officer of the . He was promoted to Konteradmiral (rear admiral) in 1939. After arriving in Japan for the second time as naval attaché, he was promoted to Vizeadmiral (vice admiral) to increase his status among the Japanese. He met with Richard Sorge, a diplomat at the German embassy in Tokyo and secretly a Soviet spy, who became well acquainted with Wenneker, proving him with the details of army and navy politics in Japan.
While he was the German naval attaché, Wenneker urged that the submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy be used to attack American supply ships traveling between the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii, as Germany's U-boats were doing in the Atlantic. The Japanese rejected his advice, believing that submarines should only be used to attack U.S. Navy warships. Wenneker believed that Japanese submarines were inferior to German designs, being too large to be maneuverable and having worse radar capabilities, and on his initiative, Hitler eventually agreed to send two Kriegsmarine U-boats to Japan for the Japanese to be able to study their technology. The first, U-511, arrived in Japan in the summer of 1943 and was examined before being used as a training ship. The Japanese believed the German U-boat was too complicated for them to build more in their shipyards. The second German submarine, U-1224, was used by a Japanese crew that had traveled to Germany and spent several months being trained by the Kriegsmarine there on German submarine operations and tactics, but they were lost when the submarine was destroyed on its way to Japan in the spring of 1944 by a U.S. anti-submarine hunter-killer group. Wenneker also managed the Yanagi missions, the exchange of technology and key personnel between Japan and Germany during the war using submarines. They had to pass through the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, and many of the submarines were lost during the journey with their entire cargo and passengers.