Germany passes its first Navy Law

On 10 April 1898 at Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Emperor Wilhelm II signed the “Law concerning the German Fleet” (Gesetz, betreffend die deutsche Flotte), countersigned by the Chancellor, Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (PL). The Reichstag had passed it a fortnight or so earlier, at the end of March, after almost four months of argument. It was the first of five Navy Laws which by 1912 built the second-largest navy in the world. Its author was Rear-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who had been State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office for less than a year.

Battleships instead of cruisers

Wilhelm II loved the navy, but for a long time he was unsure what form it should take. Tirpitz’s predecessor, Admiral Friedrich von Hollmann, preferred cruisers: cheaper, and able to show the German flag on every sea. Tirpitz held that a country without a network of overseas bases could not wage cruiser warfare, and staked everything on a concentrated battleship fleet in the North Sea. In a memorandum of 15 June 1897 he named Great Britain outright as the most dangerous opponent at sea. His “risk theory” assumed that the German fleet need not equal the British one: it would be enough if a battle against it endangered British command of the seas, so that London would rather give way than risk war.

The programme fitted into Weltpolitik, the “world policy” proclaimed by the Emperor and by the new State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bernhard von Bülow. Tirpitz, however, wanted more than further money for ships. The number of vessels was to be fixed by law, so that the fleet would grow steadily and not depend on annual haggling in parliament.

The law in the Reichstag

The bill was laid before the Reichstag at the end of 1897. According to an account in “Die Grenzboten”, its opponents attacked it on three fronts: that the fleet was unnecessary, that its cost would be unbearable, and that fixing the strength of the fleet by law was unconstitutional because it took away the Reichstag’s right to vote the budget. The Social Democrats and some of the Liberals were against it. On 24 March 1898 the house adopted the key paragraph 1 by 212 votes to 139. The decision lay with the Centre Party, which voted in favour after its leader, Ernst Lieber, had thrown his full authority behind the bill. The second reading ended on 26 March, and the final vote took place in the last days of March. Some accounts give 26 March as the day the law was passed.

The law fixed the strength of the fleet, excluding torpedo boats and training ships: a fleet flagship, two squadrons of eight battleships each, two reserve battleships, eight coastal defence ships, and 12 large and 30 small cruisers. Of the ships already in service or under construction, 12 were counted as battleships, so seven new ones had to be built, by the end of the 1903 financial year. Battleships were to be replaced after 25 years, large cruisers after 20 and small cruisers after 15. For six years the Reichstag was not obliged to spend more than 408.9 million marks on construction and armament, and any excess spending could not be covered by new indirect taxes falling on mass consumption.

The beginning of the race

The law came into force on 30 April 1898. On the same day the German Navy League was founded in Berlin by industrialists, bankers and men from the press office of Tirpitz’s department. In 1898 it had almost 79,000 members, and in 1908, counting corporate members, more than a million.

The 1898 law on its own did not yet threaten Great Britain, because seven new battleships were not enough to fight either the British or the French fleet. It was, however, the foundation. In 1900 the second law doubled the number of battleships to 38, and the historian Dirk Bönker writes that the laws of 1898 and 1900 set the course for a massive naval expansion directed against Great Britain. For several years London did not regard the German fleet as the main threat, but the naval arms race which poisoned relations between the two powers before 1914 began here.