The Anglo-German Naval Agreement

On 18 June 1935, at the Foreign Office in London, the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and Hitler’s special envoy Joachim von Ribbentrop exchanged the notes that went down in history as the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In them Britain agreed that the German navy could reach 35 per cent of the combined tonnage of the fleets of the British Empire and the Dominions. Submarines, which the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germany altogether, could amount to 45 per cent of British tonnage in that class, and in special circumstances even 100 per cent. The British government hoped in this way to keep German naval rearmament within safe bounds. In reality one of the victorious powers, without consulting France and Italy, had accepted that the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were no longer in force. Adolf Hitler called it the happiest day of his life.

Popular accounts of the agreement add that Germany was at the time building, in defiance of Versailles, a host of warships, submarines, aircraft, guns, tanks and zeppelins. This simplification conflates two different matters. Germany was indeed breaking the Versailles restrictions, but aircraft, tanks and guns were part of the Reich’s general rearmament, which the naval agreement did not cover. The agreement itself was not a German breach of the treaty but an agreed amendment to it, accepted by Britain. As for the fleet, for the first few years Germany lacked the steel, shipyards and foreign currency to build it, and by the outbreak of war it had not even reached 35 per cent. Zeppelins were not part of the Third Reich’s rearmament: the great airships, such as the Hindenburg of 1936, were passenger craft, and the air force did not use them.

A fleet in the Versailles straitjacket

The Treaty of Versailles left Germany a token navy: six obsolete battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats, with a maximum of 15,000 men. New capital ships could not exceed 10,000 tons displacement. Submarines and naval aviation were forbidden. Within this limit Germany built around the turn of the 1930s the “pocket battleship” Deutschland, a ship faster than anything more powerful and more powerful than anything faster. Her actual displacement exceeded the permitted 10,000 tons, and two further ships of the class alarmed both France and the British Admiralty.

Since the 1920s Hitler had believed that imperial Germany’s greatest mistake had been to challenge Britain at sea. In Mein Kampf he wrote that Germany should give up naval and colonial rivalry and in return gain British friendship and a free hand on the Continent. He reasoned that if he removed the cause of the hostility that had existed before 1914, London would leave him free to act in eastern Europe. The head of the navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, wanted a larger fleet, at least equal to the French one, but from 1933 Hitler spoke of a third of the British fleet. In November 1934 the Germans unofficially proposed a ratio of 35 to 100 to the British. The round figure was simply easier to say than “one third”, and it matched the ratio in capital ships that the Washington Treaty had granted France and Italy relative to Britain.

Spring 1935: from breaking the treaty to negotiation

In October 1933 Germany walked out of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and left the League of Nations. It was expanding its army and secretly building a military air force. In March 1935, two months after winning the Saar plebiscite, Hitler threw off the mask: on 9 March he revealed the existence of the Luftwaffe, and on 16 March he announced the reintroduction of universal conscription and the creation of an army of 36 divisions. At the same time the first submarines were already under construction in Kiel. At the end of April the Germans informed the British naval attaché.

The response was protest. On 11–14 April 1935 at Stresa on Lake Maggiore the heads of government of Britain, France and Italy – Ramsay MacDonald, Pierre-Étienne Flandin and Benito Mussolini – together with their foreign ministers, among them Pierre Laval, condemned the unilateral repudiation of treaties and pledged joint action against it. A few days later, on 17 April, the League of Nations Council also condemned Germany. The agreement of the three powers became known as the “Stresa Front”. On 2 May France signed a pact of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union.

The British government, however, believed that the disarmament clauses of Versailles could no longer be upheld in any case. A Foreign Office memorandum of 1934 called them a “rotting corpse” that would be better buried while Hitler was still willing to pay for the funeral. The Admiralty, under the First Sea Lord, Admiral Ernle Chatfield, preferred a German fleet limited by agreement to an unlimited one. It calculated that Germany could not reach 35 per cent before 1942 anyway. When the Foreign Secretary John Simon and the Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden held talks with Hitler in Berlin on 25–26 March, he repeated the offer. On 21 May, in a major “peace speech” in the Reichstag, he made it public: Germany recognised Britain’s supremacy at sea and would be content with 35 per cent of its fleet for ever. The next day the British Cabinet decided to open talks.

Ribbentrop’s ultimatum

Hitler entrusted the negotiations not to professional diplomats but to Ribbentrop, a former wine merchant who had been his plenipotentiary for disarmament since 1934. The Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, did not believe the mission would succeed and hoped his rival would discredit himself. The talks opened on 4 June 1935 at the Admiralty. Ribbentrop began by demanding that the British accept the 35:100 ratio as “fixed and unalterable” before the end of the week. Otherwise the delegation would go home and Germany would build as much as it pleased. An indignant Simon replied that it was not customary to lay down conditions at the start of negotiations, and left the room.

Within two days, however, the British gave way. The British delegation advised the Cabinet to accept Hitler’s offer while it still stood, as otherwise Germany might build a fleet larger than 35 per cent and Britain would come to regret it. The Cabinet – led from 7 June by Stanley Baldwin, with Hoare replacing Simon at the Foreign Office – agreed to the principle. Over the next two weeks experts – the diplomat Robert Craigie on the British side and Admiral Karlgeorg Schuster on the German – worked out the details. Ribbentrop, eager for success, gave way on almost every technical point.

Terms of the agreement

The agreement was not a treaty ratified by parliaments but an exchange of notes between governments. The British note of 18 June stated that the future strength of the German fleet would stand in a ratio of 35 to 100 to the combined naval strength of the members of the British Commonwealth, and called the arrangement “permanent and definite”. The ratio was to apply “in all circumstances”, even if other countries began to build more. If, however, the balance of naval armaments were violently upset, Germany could ask for the matter to be re-examined. The ratio applied not only to the total but to each class of warship: battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers and destroyers. The calculations showed that Germany could have some 425,000 tons in all, including almost 184,000 tons of capital ships.

Submarines were the exception. Without exceeding the overall 35 per cent limit, Germany obtained the right to submarine tonnage equal to Britain’s. It undertook, however, not to exceed 45 per cent unless it judged that a situation had arisen that required it. In that case it was to notify the British government and discuss the matter in a “friendly” manner before exercising the right. The British accepted this relatively easily, because the Admiralty believed that sonar (ASDIC) had robbed submarines of their former menace.

The agreement was registered with the League of Nations on 12 July 1935. On 29 June, eleven days after it was signed, U-1 was commissioned – the first German submarine since 1918, built before the agreement allowed it.

Reactions

In Germany there was celebration. Hitler regarded the agreement as the first step towards an alliance with Britain, and in his eyes Ribbentrop had earned a reputation as a man who could do what professional diplomats could not. In Paris the agreement was received as a betrayal. Britain, which two months earlier at Stresa had condemned the unilateral repudiation of treaties, had on its own, without consulting its allies, granted Germany the right to a far larger navy than Versailles permitted. The French pointed out that London had no right by itself to release Germany from the provisions of a treaty signed by many states. It also rankled that the agreement was signed on the 120th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, in which the British and Prussians had defeated Napoleon. After the war the French ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, called the agreement the first breach in the wall of solidarity against Hitler. For Mussolini, who was already preparing to attack Ethiopia, it was a sign that Britain put its own interests above a common front against Germany. The Stresa Front fell apart a few months later.

A fleet that ran out of time

The agreement opened the way for Germany to build large warships. In 1935 the keels of the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were laid down, and in 1936 those of Bismarck and Tirpitz. The latter two were officially to displace 35,000 tons, as the naval treaties of the day stipulated; in reality their standard displacement exceeded 41,000 tons. Yet the British-imposed limit had one advantage for the Royal Navy that the Germans failed to appreciate. It forced the Kriegsmarine, as the German navy was called from 1935, to build a “balanced” fleet – a scaled-down copy of the British fleet, and thus precisely the kind the Royal Navy could most easily deal with. Some German officers believed a fleet designed for commerce raiding, with particular emphasis on submarines, would have been better.

For several years the agreement remained the only lasting achievement in Anglo-German relations. When Japan renounced the naval treaties and the Washington and London system began to unravel, Germany acceded in 1936 to the London Protocol on the rules of submarine warfare, and in July 1937 concluded an agreement with Britain on qualitative limits for warships. Once Hitler realised, however, that Britain would not give him a free hand in Europe, the agreement became an obstacle. In December 1938 Germany announced that it would exercise its right to 100 per cent of British submarine tonnage. In January 1939 Hitler approved Plan Z, a programme for a huge fleet that by the mid-1940s was to number ten battleships, several aircraft carriers and more than 240 submarines, far exceeding 35 per cent.

On 28 April 1939, in response to the British guarantee to Poland, Hitler used a speech in the Reichstag to renounce the naval agreement together with the German–Polish Declaration of Non-Aggression of 1934. In September 1939 the Kriegsmarine was far below the 1935 limit: it had two new battleships, three “pocket battleships” and 57 submarines, of which only some were fit for operations in the Atlantic. Even so, it was the submarines, permitted by the British in 1935, that in the Battle of the Atlantic came close to cutting Britain off from its supplies.

Significance

The naval agreement was the first clear act of British appeasement of the Third Reich. It rested on the conviction that Hitler was a politician one could do business with, and that it was better to regulate rearmament that could not be stopped than to let it grow unchecked. From a purely naval point of view the British lost little: the German fleet never came close to the agreement’s limits, and in 1939 the Royal Navy enjoyed overwhelming superiority. Politically the cost was enormous. Britain showed Hitler that unilaterally breaking treaties not only went unpunished but could actually pay. It also showed France and Italy that it would not take them into account in matters of its own security. Hitler read into the agreement a promise the British had never made: a free hand on the Continent in return for giving up rivalry at sea. When in 1938 and 1939 this proved to be a misunderstanding, he came to regard Britain as his chief adversary, and the 1935 agreement – his “happiest day” – he threw away as soon as he no longer needed it.