Anglo-German Naval Agreement
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) of 18 June 1935 was a naval agreement between the United Kingdom and Germany regulating the size of the Kriegsmarine in relation to the Royal Navy.
Notes between His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and the German Government regarding the Limitation of Naval Armaments
Naval limitation agreement
18 June 1935
London, United Kingdom
Ratification by the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the German Reichstag.
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement fixed a ratio whereby the total tonnage of the Kriegsmarine was to be 35% of the total tonnage of the Royal Navy on a permanent basis.[1] It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 12 July 1935.[2] The agreement was abrogated by Adolf Hitler on 28 April 1939.
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was an ambitious attempt on the part of both the British and the Germans to reach better relations, but it ultimately foundered because of conflicting expectations between the two countries. For Germany, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was intended to mark the beginning of an Anglo-German alliance against France and the Soviet Union,[3] whereas for Britain, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was to be the beginning of a series of arms limitation agreements that were made to limit German expansionism. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement had been controversial ever since because the 35:100 tonnage ratio allowed Germany the right to build a navy beyond the limits set by the Treaty of Versailles and because London had made the agreement without consulting the French or Italian governments.
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Equally important as one of the origins of the agreement were the deep cuts made to the Royal Navy after the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922 and the London Naval Conference of 1930.[8] The cuts imposed by the two conferences, combined with the effects of the Great Depression, caused the collapse of much of the British shipbuilding industry in the early 1930s.[9] That seriously hindered efforts at British naval rearmament later in the decade, leading the British Admiralty to value treaties with quantitative and qualitative limitations on potential enemies as the best way of ensuring the Royal Navy's sea supremacy.[10] Maiolo argues that it was actually of little importance whether potential enemies placed voluntary limitations on the size and the scale of their navies.[11] In particular, Admiral Sir Ernle Chatfield, the First Sea Lord between 1933 and 1938, came to argue in favour of such treaties. They promised a standardised classification of different warships and discouraged technical innovations, which under existing conditions the Royal Navy could not always hope to match.[12] Chatfield especially wished for the Germans to do away with their Deutschland-class Panzerschiffe (known in the London press as "pocket battleships"), as such ships, embracing the characteristics of both battleships and cruisers, were dangerous to his vision of a world of regulated warship types and designs.[13] As part of the effort to do away with the Panzerschiffe, the British Admiralty stated in March 1932 and again in the spring of 1933 that Germany was entitled to "a moral right to some relaxation of the treaty [of Versailles]".[14]
World Disarmament Conference[edit]
In February 1932, the World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva. Among the most hotly-debated issues at the conference was the German demand for Gleichberechtigung ("equality of armaments", abolishing Part V of Versailles) as opposed to the French demand for sécurité ("security"), maintaining Part V. The British attempted to play the "honest broker" and sought to seek a compromise between the French claim to sécurité and the German claim to Gleichberechtigung, which in practice meant backing the German claim to rearm beyond Part V, but not allowing the Germans to rearm enough to threaten France. Several of the British compromise proposals along those lines were rejected by both the French and the German delegations as unacceptable.
In September 1932, Germany walked out of the conference and claimed it was impossible to achieve Gleichberechtigung. By then, the electoral success of the Nazis had alarmed London, and it was felt unless the Weimar Republic could achieve some dramatic foreign policy success, Hitler might come to power. To lure the Germans back to Geneva, after several months of strong diplomatic pressure by London on Paris, all of the other delegations voted for a British-sponsored resolution in December 1932 that would allow for the "theoretical equality of rights in a system which would provide security for all nations".[15][16] Germany agreed to return to the conference. Thus, before Hitler had become chancellor, it had been accepted that Germany could rearm beyond the limits set by Versailles, but the precise extent of German rearmament was still open to negotiation.
French reaction[edit]
The Naval Pact was signed in London on 18 June 1935 without the British government consulting with France and Italy or later informing them of the secret agreements, which stipulated that the Germans could build in certain categories more powerful warships than any of the three other major Western European nations then possessed. The French government regarded that as treachery and saw it as a further appeasement of Hitler, whose appetite grew on concessions. Also, it resented that the British agreement had for private gain further weakened the peace treaty, which added to Germany's growing overall military power. France contended that the British had no legal right to absolve Germany from respecting the naval clauses of the Versailles Treaty.[45]
As an additional insult for France, the Naval Pact was signed on the 120th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, when the British and the Prussians had troops defeated the French under Napoleon.