Anglo-German Naval Agreement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Anglo-German Naval Agreement brought Adolf Hitler what he called "the happiest day of his life". The treaty was an arms limitation pact between the United Kingdom and Germany, signed in London in 1935. On paper it dealt with the dry business of warship tonnage. Hitler's delight needs explaining, because Britain's reasons for signing looked very different from his.

  Three puzzles run through this story. Why did Britain agree to let a rearming Germany build warships at all? What did each side believe it had bought? And why did a pact meant to improve relations become one more symptom of their collapse?

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• 2. Versailles and Equality

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  Part V of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles left Germany with a tiny fleet. Submarines and naval aviation were banned outright. Germany was allowed only six obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships. The full permitted force was six armoured vessels of no more than 10,000 tons, six light cruisers of no more than 6,000 tons, twelve destroyers of no more than 800 tonnes, and twelve torpedo boats.

  Throughout the Weimar years, German opinion called these limits harsh and unjust. Berlin's demand was simple. Either every other European state should disarm to the German level, or Germany should be allowed to rearm to theirs. In Britain, guilt over the severity of Versailles made the claim to "equality" in armaments sound reasonable to many. Every Weimar government opposed the treaty, and Germany was potentially the strongest power in Europe. London reasoned that revising Versailles in Germany's favour was the best way to keep the peace. A deal better than Versailles but short of free rearmament might also temper German militarism. A Foreign Office memo from 1935 summed up the attitude: "from the earliest years following the war it was our policy to eliminate those parts of the Peace Settlement which, as practical people, we knew to be unstable and indefensible".

  In February 1932 the World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva, and two slogans collided there. Germany demanded Gleichberechtigung, meaning equality of armaments and the abolition of Part V. France demanded sécurité, meaning Part V should stay. Britain played the honest broker. In practice that meant backing a German right to rearm beyond Part V, though not to a level that would threaten France. Both the French and German delegations rejected several British compromises.

  In September 1932 the Germans walked out, claiming equality was impossible to achieve. The electoral success of the Nazis had alarmed London. British officials feared Hitler might come to power unless the Weimar Republic won a dramatic foreign policy success. After months of strong British pressure on Paris, every other delegation voted in December 1932 for a British-sponsored resolution. It promised "theoretical equality of rights in a system which would provide security for all nations". Germany returned. Before Hitler took power, it had therefore been accepted that Germany could rearm beyond Versailles, and only the extent was still open.

  In October 1933 the Germans walked out a second time. They said the others must either disarm to the Versailles level or let Germany rearm beyond it. London widely, if wrongly, blamed French "intransigence". The Germans had no serious interest in the British compromises. Later British efforts to bring them back were undermined by German proposals designed to charm London and be unacceptable to Paris. On the 17th of April 1934, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou rejected the latest German offer in the so-called "Barthou note". It ended French participation in the conference and declared that France would look after its own security in whatever way was necessary.

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• 3. The Admiralty's Fears

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  The Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 and the London Naval Conference of 1930 had already cut deep into the Royal Navy. Combined with the Great Depression, those cuts caused much of the British shipbuilding industry to collapse in the early 1930s. That seriously hindered naval rearmament later in the decade. As a result, the British Admiralty came to value treaties that set quantitative and qualitative limits on potential enemies. Such treaties looked like the best way to protect the Royal Navy's command of the sea.

  Admiral Sir Ernle Chatfield, First Sea Lord from 1933 to 1938, argued hardest for this approach. Limits promised a standard classification of warship types. They also discouraged technical innovations that the Royal Navy could not always hope to match. Chatfield especially wanted Germany to abandon its Panzerschiffe, which the London press called "pocket battleships". These ships combined the traits of battleships and cruisers, which threatened his vision of a world of regulated warship designs. The Admiralty had stated in March 1932, and again in the spring of 1933, that Germany had "a moral right to some relaxation of the treaty of Versailles".

  In December 1934, Captain Edward King, Director of the Royal Navy's Plans Division, studied which German fleet would be most dangerous. His answer was a Kreuzerkrieg, or cruiser war, fleet. Panzerschiffe, cruisers and U-boats would work in task forces and raid shipping in a guerre-de-course. The least dangerous German navy, in King's view, was a "balanced fleet" that mirrored the Royal Navy. It would have the same proportions of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and the rest, and in a war it would be the easiest to defeat.

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• 4. Hitler's Sea Pact

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  During the 1920s, Hitler's view of Britain changed dramatically. At the start of his political career he considered Britain an enemy of the Reich. After the British opposed the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, he began to rank Britain as a potential ally. In Mein Kampf, and even more in its sequel Zweites Buch, he criticised the pre-1914 German government. In his view it had needlessly antagonised Britain by challenging the British Empire at sea and in the colonies.

  Hitler saw Britain as a fellow "Aryan" power whose friendship Germany could win by renouncing naval and colonial ambitions against it. In return he expected an alliance against France and the Soviet Union. He also expected British support for German efforts to win Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. The first step, he wrote in Mein Kampf, would be a "sea pact" in which Germany would renounce any naval challenge to Britain.

  In January 1933 Hitler became chancellor, and his admirals had grander ideas. Admiral Erich Raeder of the Reichsmarine persuaded him to order two more Panzerschiffe. In 1933 Raeder advised that by 1948 Germany would be best served by three aircraft carriers, 18 cruisers, eight Panzerschiffe, 48 destroyers and 74 U-boats. Raeder wanted naval parity with France as the prime goal. Hitler, from April 1933 onwards, said he wanted a Reichsmarine of one-third of the Royal Navy's total tonnage.

  In November 1934, the Germans formally told the British they wanted a treaty letting their navy grow to 35% of the Royal Navy. The figure was rounded up because the phrase "one third of the Royal Navy except in cruisers, destroyers, and submarines" sounded rhetorically awkward. Raeder thought 35:100 was too low, but Hitler overruled him. The Admiralty called the ratio "the highest that we could accept for any European power". It would have preferred a smaller figure, yet still found 35:100 acceptable. Chatfield repeatedly advised that a treaty regulating the future German navy was the wiser course.

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• 5. Cracks in Versailles

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  In August 1933, Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, visited Germany. The change of regime that year had alarmed London, and nobody was sure what Hitler wanted. Hankey's report, written that October, asked whether Britain was still dealing with "the Hitler of Mein Kampf, lulling his opponents to sleep with fair words to gain time to arm his people". The alternative was a changed man who had discovered the burden of office. Hankey concluded: "That is the riddle that has to be solved". That uncertainty coloured British policy toward Germany until war broke out in 1939.

  By March 1934 a Foreign Office memo declared Part V of Versailles dead for practical purposes. Left unburied, it said, the treaty would become "a putrefying corpse which, if left unburied, would soon poison the political atmosphere of Europe". The memo added that if there was to be a funeral, it was better to arrange it "while Hitler is still in a mood to pay the undertakers for their services". Britain's backing for German equality at Geneva had also left it poorly placed to object. When London complained of violations, Berlin replied that it was simply exercising rights the British delegation had been ready to concede.

  In December 1934, a secret Cabinet committee met on German rearmament. Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon told it that if the choice were between legalizing rearmament and preventing it, there would be everything to be said for preventing it. But London had already ruled out war to stop German rearmament. Simon argued that Germany wished to be "made an honest woman", but that "this laudable ambition may wear off" if she was left too long to indulge in illegitimate practices. In January 1935 he wrote to George V that the practical choice lay between a Germany rearming without regulation and one drawn into "the comity of nations". In February 1935, a London summit between French Premier Pierre Laval and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald produced an Anglo-French communiqué. It proposed talks with Germany on arms limitation, an air pact, and security pacts for Eastern Europe and the Danube nations.

  Then came the submarines. Germany had begun building its first U-boats since World War I in 1933, and they were launched in April 1935. On the 25th of April 1935, Captain Leopold Bürkner of the Reichsmarine officially told the British naval attaché, Captain Gerard Muirhead-Gould, that twelve 250 ton U-boats had been laid down at Kiel. On the 29th of April, Sir John Simon told the House of Commons that Germany was building U-boats. On the 2nd of May, Ramsay MacDonald announced his government's intention to reach a naval pact.

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• 6. Ribbentrop in London

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  In early March 1935, Simon was due in Berlin to discuss the scale of German rearmament. Hitler postponed the talks after taking offence at a British White Paper. The paper justified a higher defence budget by pointing to German violations of Versailles. Hitler claimed to have a "cold". While he "recovered", his government formally rejected all the Versailles clauses on land and air disarmament. Britain was obsessed with the fear of German bombers destroying London, and prized an air pact outlawing bombing. A naval agreement seemed a useful stepping stone toward it.

  On the 26th of March 1935, Hitler told Simon and his deputy Anthony Eden that he would reject the naval disarmament section of Versailles. He was nonetheless willing to discuss a treaty regulating German naval rearmament. The next day he appointed Joachim von Ribbentrop to lead the German delegation. Ribbentrop held two roles: Extraordinary Ambassador at large and chief of a Nazi Party organization called the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, which competed with the German Foreign Office. Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath at first opposed the choice. He then decided that the British would never accept the ratio, and that Ribbentrop's failure would discredit a rival.

  On the 21st of May 1935, Hitler gave a "peace speech" in Berlin and formally offered a navy that would stay at a 35:100 ratio forever. He disavowed any pre-1914 style naval race with Britain. He declared: "The German Reich government recognises of itself the overwhelming importance for existence and thereby the justification of dominance at sea to protect the British Empire, just as, on the other hand, we are determined to do everything necessary in protection of our own continental existence and freedom". For Hitler this was a bargain. Britain would accept German mastery of Continental Europe, and Germany would accept British mastery of the seas. On the 22nd of May, the British Cabinet voted to take up the offer as soon as possible. Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps in Berlin urged that no chance be lost "owing to French shortsightedness".

  Ribbentrop arrived in London on the 2nd of June 1935. The talks opened on Tuesday the 4th of June at the Admiralty, with Simon leading the British side. Determined to succeed at any cost, Ribbentrop opened with an ultimatum. Britain must accept the 35:100 ratio as "fixed and unalterable" by the weekend, or the Germans would go home and build as large a navy as they pleased. Simon was visibly angry. "It is not usual to make such conditions at the beginning of negotiations", he said, and he walked out.

  The next day the British mood shifted. A report to the Cabinet said the delegation was "definitely of the opinion that, in our own interest, we should accept this offer of Herr Hitler's while it is still open". It warned that Germany would otherwise seek a higher level. That same day, Sir Robert Craigie, the Foreign Office's naval expert, spoke with Ribbentrop's deputy, Admiral Karlgeorg Schuster. The Germans agreed that the ratio would be expressed in tonnage, building up to the British total in each warship category. By evening the Cabinet had voted to accept, and Ribbentrop was informed.

  Two more weeks of technical talks followed, mostly on how to calculate tonnage in each category. For submarines, the Kriegsmarine was allowed 45% as many as the Royal Navy, rising to 100% under certain circumstances. Desperate for success, Ribbentrop agreed to almost all British demands. On the 18th of June 1935, he and the new British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, signed the agreement in London. It was registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series on the 12th of July 1935.

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• 7. Treachery and Tonnage

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  The 18th of June 1935 carried an extra sting for France. It was the 120th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, where Prussian and British-led troops had defeated Napoleon's French army. The naval pact was signed without consulting France or Italy. Nor were they later told of secret agreements that let Germany build certain categories of warship more powerful than any of the three other major Western European navies then possessed.

  The French government regarded this as treachery and as further appeasement of a dictator whose appetite grew on concessions. It resented that Britain had weakened the peace treaty for private gain, adding to Germany's growing military power. France also contended that Britain had no legal right to excuse Germany from the naval clauses of Versailles.

  The agreement's practical impact on the water was limited, because warships take a long time to build and the pact did not last long. British and German naval experts both estimated that Germany could not reach the 35% limit before 1942. In practice, a lack of shipbuilding space, design problems, a shortage of skilled workers and a scarcity of foreign exchange all slowed the rebuilding. The Kriegsmarine, renamed that year, was third in German rearmament priorities behind the Heer and the Luftwaffe. Steel and non-ferrous metals were therefore scarce, and the fleet stayed far from the 35% limit when Hitler denounced the agreement.

  Strategically, the pact gave Britain a quiet bonus. Because the German tonnage had to be divided by warship category, Germany was pushed toward the symmetrical "balanced fleet" that the Royal Navy considered easiest to defeat. Chatfield valued above all that the building of Panzerschiffe had ended, since the Royal Navy built no such ships.

  In May 1938, when the Kriegsmarine began planning a war against Britain, its senior operations officer, Commander Hellmuth Heye, reached a blunt conclusion. The best strategy was a Kreuzerkrieg fleet of U-boats, light cruisers and Panzerschiffe operating together. He criticised the building priorities the agreement dictated, since no balanced German fleet could realistically defeat the Royal Navy. Senior German naval officers began to argue for the switch, but Hitler overruled them. He insisted on the prestige of a balanced fleet that could seek a decisive battle with the Royal Navy in the North Sea. Historians including Joseph Maiolo and Geoffrey Till, and the authors of the Kriegsmarine Official History, agree with Chatfield. A cruiser-war fleet offered Germany its best chance of damaging Britain, and Britain gained from ensuring it was not built in the 1930s.

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• 8. The Pact Unravels

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  Sir Robert Craigie told Ribbentrop that the agreement "was designed to facilitate further agreements within a wider framework and there was no further thought behind it". The British also treated it as a "yardstick" for measuring German intentions. Hitler, who saw it as the start of an Anglo-German alliance, was much annoyed when no alliance followed. By 1937 he was raising the sums of Reichsmark and the supplies of raw materials going to the Kriegsmarine, reflecting a growing belief that Britain would be an enemy in any war. In December 1937 he ordered the laying down of six battleships with 16-inch guns. Yet in November 1937 he told Lord Halifax that the agreement was the only part of Anglo-German relations not "wrecked".

  On the 16th of April 1938, Hermann Göring told British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson that the pact had never been valued in England. He said Hitler had bitterly regretted agreeing to it without getting anything in return, and he threatened to build to a 100% basis. A joint Admiralty-Foreign Office note told Henderson to answer that this was "clearly bluff". It argued that Germany lacked the raw materials and foreign exchange, and faced competing demands from vast land and air rearmament. The note also stressed that Britain wanted to avoid a denunciation, which would create uncertainty about German intentions. It analysed why Hitler had misjudged Britain. He believed that removing naval rivalry was all it took to win good relations. He overlooked that Britain would resist the dominance of Europe by any aggressive military power, especially one threatening the Low Countries and the Channel Ports.

  At the Munich conference in September 1938, Hitler told Neville Chamberlain that if Britain meant to intervene in a mainland European war, the political preconditions for the agreement no longer existed. That led Chamberlain to mention the naval agreement in the Anglo-German Declaration of the 30th of September 1938. In January 1939, Hitler gave the Kriegsmarine first priority for money, skilled workers and raw materials. He launched Plan Z, a colossal fleet of 10 battleships, 16 "pocket battleships", 8 aircraft carriers, 5 heavy cruisers, 36 light cruisers and 249 U-boats by 1944. It was far bigger than the 35:100 ratio allowed, so renunciation was inevitable.

  Reports reaching London in October 1938 that Germany might denounce the pact helped Halifax argue in Cabinet for a tougher line. On the 9th of December 1938, Germany announced it would build to the 100% submarine ratio the agreement allowed, and to the limits in heavy cruisers. Chamberlain answered with a speech warning of the "futility of ambition, if ambition leads to the desire for domination". Talks on the German build-up began in Berlin on the 30th of December 1938. The Germans were obdurate, and London concluded they did not want the talks to succeed.

  Britain's guarantee of Poland on the 31st of March 1939 enraged Hitler, who proclaimed, "I shall brew them a devil's drink". At Wilhelmshaven, at the launch of the battleship Tirpitz, he threatened to denounce the agreement if Britain kept up its "encirclement" policy. On the 28th of April 1939, he denounced it. To supply an excuse and block any new treaty, Germany stopped sharing information about its shipbuilding. Britain could either accept the unilateral move or reject it and hand the Germans their pretext.

  At a Cabinet meeting on the 3rd of May 1939, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Stanhope, said Germany could not exceed the 35 per cent ratio before 1942 or 1943. Chatfield, now Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, said Hitler had "persuaded himself" that Britain had given Germany a "free hand" in Eastern Europe in exchange for the pact. Chamberlain replied that Britain had never given such an understanding. He had first heard of Hitler's belief at the Berchtesgaden summit in September 1938. Britain replied with a note disputing the claim of encirclement. The denunciation, and reports of increased German shipbuilding in June 1939 under Plan Z, helped persuade the Chamberlain government to build a "Peace Front" of states in both Western and Eastern Europe.

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