Resignation of Capelle

On 13 August 1918, according to a British chronology of the war, Admiral Eduard von Capelle resigned as Secretary of State of the Imperial Naval Office (Reichsmarineamt). He had headed it since March 1916, when he succeeded Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. His departure was not the personal decision of a tired official. It was one element of a thorough change of personnel at the top of the German navy, carried out in August 1918 by Admiral Reinhard Scheer and his associates.

A shake-up in the naval command

By the summer of 1918 unrestricted submarine warfare, on which Germany had staked everything at the beginning of 1917, was clearly losing momentum. The Allies were sailing ships in convoys and strengthening their defences, and German U-boats were being lost along with their most experienced commanders. According to Scheer, monthly sinkings had fallen to about 500,000 tons, and there was a danger that Allied shipyards would soon be building more than the U-boats could sink. In the circle of the commander of the High Seas Fleet, especially with his chief of staff Rear Admiral Adolf von Trotha and Captain Magnus von Levetzow, the conviction had matured that the war at sea was being directed by men who were too slow, and that a single strong command was needed on the model of the army’s Supreme Command.

At the end of July the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, asked to be relieved on grounds of health. On 11 August Wilhelm II appointed Scheer as his successor and agreed to the creation within the Admiralty Staff of a Seekriegsleitung, or Naval War Command, with wide powers of command. The chief of the Naval Cabinet, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, had expected the monarch to reject the idea, since he regarded himself as the naval war command, and only two days earlier the Kaiser had indeed spoken to him against the new body. Admiral Franz von Hipper took over the fleet from Scheer.

There was no place for Capelle in these plans. Scheer wrote after the war that a change of Secretary of State seemed to him “very desirable”, because it was hard to expect a man convinced that he had done everything humanly possible to commit himself without reservation to new projects that ran counter to his previous conduct. Fleet circles reproached Capelle above all with slowness in building submarines. Scheer recalled that the fleet had had to press for half a year, from July to December 1917, for the creation of a separate U-boat Office. Capelle also believed to the end in the importance of great battleships and did not want to give up building them altogether.

The successor

The British chronology states that on 15 August Vice Admiral Paul Behncke became the new head of the Imperial Naval Office; he had until then commanded the III Battle Squadron, had been wounded at the Battle of Jutland and had taken part in Operation Albion. His candidacy was put forward by the Naval Cabinet with Scheer’s consent. According to German biographies Behncke, recalled from his squadron on 11 August, took over the duties of Secretary of State in an acting capacity from 28 August, and received his formal appointment only on 18 September. Sources also differ on the date of Capelle’s formal departure, giving anything from August to September and October.

The new head of the office was to prepare the so-called Scheer Programme, an increase in U-boat production from fewer than 13 to 36 a month by the autumn of 1919, drawn up jointly with industry under the leadership of Hugo Stinnes. Behncke did not last long, however. According to the historian Wilhelm Deist, at the end of September Scheer, citing the industrialists’ dissatisfaction, obtained his dismissal from the Kaiser, and the office was taken over by the previous head of the U-boat Office, Vice Admiral Ernst Ritter von Mann. The Scheer Programme, conceived on a scale comparable to the army’s Hindenburg Programme, no longer had any chance of being carried out, as less than three months of the war remained.