Dismissal of Alfred von Tirpitz

In mid-March 1916 Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz left the office of State Secretary of the Imperial Navy. The British chronology of the war records his dismissal under 14 March. Tirpitz himself wrote in his memoirs that he sent the Emperor his request to be relieved on 12 March and received his dismissal on 17 March. It was officially announced in Berlin on 15 March by the semi-official Wolff agency, which at the same time named his successor, Admiral Eduard von Capelle. The departure of the man who for almost twenty years had built the German navy was the result of a lost dispute over unrestricted submarine warfare.

Creator of the fleet

Tirpitz, born in 1849 in Küstrin, joined the Prussian navy in 1865. In 1897 he became head of the Imperial Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt), which was responsible for shipbuilding, the budget and naval legislation. The successive Navy Laws, passed from 1898 onwards, provided for the construction of a battleship fleet strong enough that Britain could not risk war with Germany. This programme became one of the main sources of tension between the two countries before the war. In 1900 Tirpitz was ennobled, and in 1911 he received the title of grand admiral.

After the outbreak of war, however, it turned out that the High Seas Fleet he had built could not challenge the superior Royal Navy. As state secretary, Tirpitz ran only the navy’s administration and did not command ships. He therefore demanded ever more loudly the ruthless use of submarines against British shipping. As early as 1915 he clashed over this with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who feared war with the United States. When, after the sinking of the Arabic, Germany gave way to the Americans, Tirpitz offered his resignation, but the Emperor did not accept it at the time.

A conference without the state secretary

At the beginning of 1916 the dispute flared up again. Tirpitz and the Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, argued that unrestricted submarine warfare could force Britain to make peace within a few months. The Chancellor agreed only to an intensified campaign against armed merchant ships, in force from the end of February. Emperor Wilhelm II took the final decision at a conference attended by the Chancellor, Falkenhayn and the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Henning von Holtzendorff. Tirpitz dates it to 6 March. The State Secretary of the Navy was not summoned to it. According to his memoirs, when he asked the head of the Emperor’s Naval Cabinet whether he should attend, he was told that the Emperor had not summoned the state secretary. Against Falkenhayn’s advice, the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare was postponed indefinitely.

Tirpitz regarded being passed over as an open affront. On 8 March he reported sick and, as he wrote, immediately received a telegraphed summons to submit his request for dismissal. He sent it on 12 March. In it he wrote that in the most important decisions on the use of the fleet he had been unable to exert the influence the Emperor had promised him, and could no longer represent the government before the nation in naval matters. Wilhelm II recalled after the war that, because of his personal closeness to the admiral, he had not wanted to carry out his dismissal himself and had left it to the Chancellor.

Echoes of the dismissal

The Wolff agency’s communiqué stressed that Tirpitz was leaving “with full honours” as the creator of the fleet, and that the choice of his successor was meant to show that “nothing will change in the vigour with which the naval war is waged”. Tirpitz was very popular in Germany and, at home and abroad, was regarded as the patron of submarine warfare. His departure caused a storm in the press and in the Reichstag, where the Conservatives and National Liberals tried in vain to force the government into ruthless submarine warfare. The admiral himself, as he claimed, in agreement with the military authorities prevented demonstrations planned in his honour.

Bethmann Hollweg won the dispute, but not for long. On 24 March a submarine torpedoed without warning the French passenger ship Sussex in the English Channel, with Americans on board, and the conflict with the United States broke out again. Tirpitz never returned to service. In 1917 he became leader of the nationalist German Fatherland Party, which opposed a compromise peace.