Hitler’s navy, the German Kriegsmarine, was designed to do one thing: disrupt British shipping to cut the otherwise isolated United Kingdom off from its empire and the vital supply chain keeping Britain in the war against Nazi Germany. Great battleships such as the mighty Bismarck and Germany’s fearsome U-Boat fleet were exemplars of Hitler’s maritime strategy to break Great Britain. 

Unlike so many navies of the age, though, the Kriegsmarine never completed construction of an aircraft carrier.

But Hitler’s Germany did make progress towards building an aircraft carrier. This was the Graf Zeppelin—named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, best known for developing the eponymous airship.

The ship emerged following a period of German naval resurgence after the country began breaking through the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended the First World War. 

Hitler’s mercurial nature meant a steadfast commitment to developing such a complex and costly naval system—as well as the dysfunction of the Nazi military hierarchy, in terms of interservice rivalries—was impossible for the Nazi state.

The 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement loosened the constraints imposed upon Germany’s naval development at the end of World War I. By loosening these restraints, Germany was able to build aircraft carriers up to a total displacement of 38,500 tons. 

Looking around the world, at friendly and rival regimes alike, Hitler’s Nazi government recognized there existed a yawning gap between their growing Kriegsmarine and the navies of Britain, the United States, and Japan. Thus, in 1935, Hitler decreed that Germany would construct its own force of carriers.

Designated as “Flugzeugträger A” (Aircraft carrier A), the Graf Zeppelin’s keel was laid down on December 28, 1936, at........

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