ABSTRACT
In June 1912, the Reichstag passed the third Amendment to the Navy Law of 1900 (Novelle) within six years. Eventually, at least it seemed, Tirpitz had achieved his main aim: building up a powerful fleet which would be more than a ‘risk’ for the Royal Navy. The strength of the German navy, at least on paper, was indeed amazing. In the future, 61 capital ships, 40 small cruisers, 144 torpedo boats and 72 submarines would be able to defend the nation’s ‘sea-interests’ – as Tirpitz had always put it since the mid-1890s – even against the world’s supreme sea power, Great Britain. Moreover, when the Reichstag finally passed this Amendment with a great majority, every observer could have the feeling that the nation had realised that the expansion of its sea power was inevitable in an era of imperial rivalry. From a strictly naval point of view, Tirpitz had also achieved his most important aim, namely building up a fleet which renewed itself automatically within 20 years at an annual rate of three large ships. This triumph had, however, been very difficult to achieve. Occasionally, in the years before, it had seemed more likely that Tirpitz would fail instead of achieving a further success. Though the Amendment (Novelle) of 1908 had been passed in the Reichstag without any difficulties, the navy’s future had soon looked dark for various reasons. Most importantly, the British government made clear in mid-1908 that it was willing and prepared to take up the gauntlet which Tirpitz had thrown down in 1906/7. Unless the Germans both slowed down the tempo of naval building and stopped enlarging their navy, a naval arms race would follow. Though the Emperor stood firm and bluntly rejected any concessions in his talks with Sir Charles Hardinge during the visit of Edward VII at Cronberg in August 1908, the Chancellor, Prince Bülow, increasingly questioned the course that the German government had embarked upon. Unlike both the Emperor and Tirpitz, Bülow had realised that the situation had begun to change fundamentally. Whereas Germany’s leadership had hoped to pursue a free-hand policy between the other great powers at the turn of the century, the country had been isolated in Europe since the signing of the Anglo-Russian entente in 1907. With Britain on the side of its neighbours France and Russia, Germany’s freedom of movement was
increasingly constrained. Moreover, its military superiority on the continent, the country’s most important asset, was in fact in danger. As a result of this development Bülow began an exchange of letters with Tirpitz. Cleverly asking the State Secretary whether the German people would have nothing to fear if Great Britain attacked Germany in order to destroy the Imperial Navy before it became too strong, he hoped that he would find a lever to force him to make concessions, which would help ease tensions with Britain. For Tirpitz this change of the Chancellor’s attitude towards a policy both men had agreed upon only a decade ago was a deep shock. ‘Bülow deserted me’,1 Tirpitz angrily noted in his papers even years later. Thus the Chancellor opened a debate about Tirpitz’s policy among Germany’s political and naval leadership which would not end until the outbreak of war in 1914. The main issue of this debate, mirrored in several documents printed here [88, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99], was the question whether Germany should make any offers to Britain regarding either the tempo of Germany’s naval build-up or the size of its navy itself. Britain’s firmness and its willingness to keep up the traditional two-power standard by doubling Germany’s building rate in 1909 further emphasised the need to at least consider a solution. From Tirpitz’s point of view, however, only an agreement which included a ratio which did not deny the Imperial Navy any chance in a war with Britain was feasible. Moreover, such an agreement had to be accompanied by a political agreement to Germany’s advantage. However, even a high-level meeting, a rare event in Imperial Germany, in early June 1909, could not bridge the differences of opinion between Tirpitz and his followers on the one side and the Chancellor and the diplomats on the other [94]. As always, the State Secretary could count on the support of the Emperor [91] and Tirpitz was clever enough to convince him – as in October 1910 – that any concessions would eventually result in a ‘fiasco’ [98]. The Emperor shared this conviction and supported Tirpitz in his opposition to the endeavours of the new Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg,2 who had replaced Bülow in July 1909, to reach an agreement with Britain. As a result, the negotiations which had begun in late 1909 between the Chancellor and the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen,3 on both a political and a naval agreement remained futile. Germany’s deteriorating situation on the continent was, though, not the only driving motive of both Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg in their attempts at easing tensions with Britain. Contrary to Tirpitz’s promises at
the turn of the century, the build-up of the navy increasingly became a great financial burden. In particular, the change from pre-dreadnought to dreadnought-type capital ships had had almost disastrous consequences for the Empire’s finances. Between 1906 and 1909 the naval budget had risen from 259 million marks to an incredible 419 million marks,1 and there was no end to the spiralling increases in sight. The internal discussions on the steady increase of battleships and battle cruisers indicated that Tirpitz’s policy was increasingly facing unexpected difficulties with no solution in sight unless the State Secretary was prepared to give in and declare political, military and financial bankruptcy [89, 92, 96, 97]. This dramatic and unforeseen development had severe repercussions on domestic politics. On the one hand, public finance had always been a matter of dispute. Due to the constitution the government at least partly depended upon financial contributions from the federal states. Indirect taxes and tariff revenues were its only sources of income, unless it borrowed money on the market to avoid increasing the burden of naval expansion for the normal taxpayer. Since the turn of the century, in order to improve the financial situation of the government and to share the burden of public spending more evenly, Bülow had tried to change this situation by introducing a direct inheritance tax. These attempts had, however, met with fierce opposition by the rich landowners who feared for their privileges. In the end the failure of the 1908/09 tax-reform had been one of the reasons for Bülow’s decision to resign from office. Distributing the burden of naval expansion more evenly was, though, only one aspect for Bülow’s changing attitude. The policy of ‘encirclement’, as it was called, had convinced him that Germany sooner or later would have to strengthen its army again. Only the army was able to defend the nation on the continent, not the least since Tirpitz had admitted that the navy would still have no chance against its more powerful rival on the other side of the North Sea. In his opinion, even a country like Germany was unable to afford both a strong army and a strong navy in the long run. To Tirpitz’s surprise and anger, in his discussions with the State Secretary the Chancellor had also touched upon a weak point in the former’s policy: Tirpitz’s emphasis of a battleship strategy which completely ignored other and more modern means of naval warfare like mines, submarines or modern coastal artillery. Having read pamphlets by other high-ranking admirals like Carl Galster2 and obviously having even been advised by the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Admiral Count
Baudissin, Bülow had tried to open a debate about the foundations of Tirpitz’s policy, though without any success. For Tirpitz, these ideas were pure heresy and by rallying the Emperor behind him, he proved able to silence all his critics. Developments in foreign and domestic politics, finance and renewed criticism of his policy were, of course, not the only aspects Tirpitz had to consider at this time. Building dreadnought-type battleships and battlecruisers also had a deep impact upon naval strategy in the case of war. Building ships now that were too big for the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, the Imperial Navy had lost one of its advantages in the case of war with Britain. For many years to come, it was virtually impossible to move vessels between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Moreover, the Admiralty Staff, in 1908/9, proposed a more offensive strategy. Two developments were responsible for this change of mind. On the one hand, the Admiralty Staff began to perceive that the British Battle Fleet would not present itself to German torpedo-boat attacks close to the German coastline but rather would leave the execution of the blockade to forwarddeployed light forces. On the other hand, the Admiralty Staff was afraid of a British submarine and mine-laying offensive immobilising the High Seas Fleet in its own bases. Both trends combined to the effect that Count Baudissin opted for a rigorous offensive strategy [87, 90]. This in itself was a rather risky, if not desperate, undertaking for an inferior fleet. Yet, the risk increased with the shrinking strategic mobility which narrowed the High Seas Fleet’s options with every dreadnought commissioned unable to pass the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. Not surprisingly the offensive spirit gradually lost its force [95, 100]. The internal discussion in the winter of 1911-12 about the deployment of the High Seas Fleet in case of war with Britain revealed the cautious sentiment of an inferior force expecting the initiative of the superior opponent [102-104]. Moreover, these discussions revealed the notion that the German navy would be more of a threat to vital British interests if deployed in the corner of the German Bight than off Skagen. In spite of the darkening horizon Tirpitz was in many ways lucky. For him, the failure of the Chancellor’s policy during the Agadir Crisis in summer 1911 opened up the possibility of introducing another Amendment, something he almost had not dared to hope for. If he succeeded with his plans, the German Empire would possess the fleet he had planned to build in 1898/1900 and he would have stabilised the annual rate of three large ships a year. Such a fleet, he was deeply convinced, would prove more than a risk for Britain and then, as he had told the Emperor in 1899, ‘England, for general political reasons and from a down-to-earth businesslike point of view, will have lost any inclination to attack
Germany so that Your Majesty will be conceded such a degree of naval prestige [Seegeltung] as to allow Your Majesty to pursue a grand overseas policy’ [7]. ‘For a State’, he later claimed, ‘which is conscious that the welfare of its citizens does not consist in extenuation, but in power and prestige, there is only one means of restoring its reputation if it wants to avoid war: that is, to show that it is not afraid, and at the same time to strengthen its protection against a defeat when serious trouble seems imminent.’1 Moreover, an Amendment to the Navy Law would strengthen the position of the government, for it would help to rally the conservative as well as the bourgeois parties behind it and thus ‘take the wind out of the socialdemocratic and left-liberal parties’ sails’.2
