The cruiser Königsberg in the Firth of Forth

On 15 November 1918 the German light cruiser Königsberg entered the Firth of Forth in Scotland, where the British Grand Fleet lay. She brought Rear-Admiral Hugo Meurer, the plenipotentiary of the German navy, who was to settle with the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral David Beatty, how the naval terms of the Armistice of Compiègne were to be carried out. In the evening, between seven and eight, Meurer and his staff went aboard Beatty’s flagship, the battleship Queen Elizabeth. A British chronology of the war records this meeting under 15–16 November, because the talks began on the evening of 15 November and ended the following day.

Who was to hand over the fleet

The armistice of 11 November required Germany to hand over all its submarines to the Allies within 14 days, and within 7 days to disarm and hand over for internment the newest surface ships of the High Seas Fleet: 10 battleships, 6 battlecruisers, 8 light cruisers and 50 destroyers. They were to go to a neutral port or, if none could be found, to an Allied port. Norway and Spain refused, so the First Sea Lord, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, persuaded the Allied admirals to intern the ships at the main base of the Grand Fleet, Scapa Flow in Orkney. Carrying out these terms was entrusted to Beatty.

The difficulty was that no one knew who in Germany still gave orders to the fleet. Since the Kiel mutiny the ships had been run by sailors’ councils, and in Berlin power had passed to the government of Friedrich Ebert. The British Admiralty decided to deal with the old command. Beatty called by wireless on the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper, to send a flag officer to Rosyth. At noon on 13 November the reply came that Rear-Admiral Meurer would come in the cruiser Königsberg.

Meurer was no chance envoy. In the spring of 1918 he had commanded the German naval expedition to Finland, and from October he had chaired the naval commission preparing the armistice talks. Königsberg herself bore the name of the cruiser destroyed in 1915 in the Rufiji delta in East Africa. The new ship had entered service in 1916, and in November 1917 she was badly hit by a British battlecruiser in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight.

Talks aboard Queen Elizabeth

The first conference began at 7.40 p.m. On the British side sat Beatty, his second-in-command Admiral Charles Madden and his chief of staff Vice-Admiral Osmond Brock, and the commander of the Harwich Force, Rear-Admiral Reginald Tyrwhitt, took part in some of the talks. Meurer, after his credentials had been checked, was given a document in two columns: the left summarised the terms of the armistice, the right listed the questions he was to answer and the orders he was to carry out. The British wanted to know how many submarines were ready to be handed over, where the surface ships lay and how long it would take to assemble them.

Meurer replied that he could not answer everything at once and had to consult home. He asked the British to bear in mind the chaos in Germany: the old institutions had collapsed and their place had been taken by soldiers’ and workers’ councils. Beatty agreed that if any of the ships named in the armistice could not be made ready because of the disorder in the dockyards, it could be replaced by another. The unfinished cruiser Wiesbaden was to be replaced by another light cruiser. At 8.30 p.m. Meurer returned to his ship. The scene of the Germans arriving aboard Queen Elizabeth in the dark was captured in a painting by the Irish painter John Lavery.

On 16 November three more conferences were held, dealing solely with technical matters: rendezvous points, supplies of coal and water, the size of the crews for the passage, and the transport of the sailors back to Germany. The submarines were to surrender at Harwich, and the surface ships were to come disarmed to the Firth of Forth, from where they would be escorted to Scapa Flow. According to the British official history Meurer’s answers were “simple and businesslike”. In the evening Beatty handed him a written summary of what had been agreed. Meurer tried once more to bargain for postponement of the deadlines but in the end accepted the terms. He left Queen Elizabeth at 10 p.m. (according to some accounts the documents were signed only after midnight), and soon afterwards Königsberg sailed for Germany. The cruiser herself was not interned. In 1920 Germany handed her over to France, where she served under the name Metz.