The Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) of 18 June 1935 was a naval agreement between the United Kingdom and Germany that regulated the size of the Kriegsmarine in relation to the Royal Navy.
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. It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 12 July 1935.League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 161, pp. 10–20. 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, 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.
Background Part V of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had imposed severe restrictions on the size and capacities of Germany's armed forces. Germany was allowed no submarines, no naval aviation, and only six obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships; the total naval forces allowed to the Germans were six armoured vessels of no more than 10,000 tons displacement, six light cruisers of no more than 6,000 tons displacement, twelve destroyers of no more than 800 tonnes displacement, and twelve torpedo boats.
Through the interwar years German opinion had protested these restrictions as harsh and unjust, and demanded that either all the other states of Europe disarm to German levels, or Germany be allowed to rearm to the level of all the other European states. In Britain, where after 1919 guilt was felt over what was seen as the excessively harsh terms of Versailles, the German claim to "equality" in armaments often met with considerable sympathy. More importantly, every German government of the Weimar Republic was implacably opposed to the terms of Versailles, and given that Germany was potentially Europe's strongest power, from the British perspective it made sense to revise Versailles in Germany's favour as the best way of preserving the peace; moreover, by allowing Germany some rearmament, Britain might win it to a position favorable to British interests, and, by offering a position better than Versailles but short of free rearmament, temper German militarism. The British attitude was well summarised in a Foreign Office memo from 1935 that stated "... from the earliest years following the war it was our policy to eliminate those parts of the Peace Settlement which, as practical people, we knew to be unstable and indefensible".
The change of regime in Germany in 1933 caused alarm in London, but there was considerable uncertainty regarding Hitler's long-term intentions. The Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), Sir Maurice Hankey, visited Germany in August 1933, and wrote a report of his impressions of the "New Germany" that October. His report concluded with the words:
"Are we still dealing with the Hitler of Mein Kampf, lulling his opponents to sleep with fair words to gain time to arm his people, and looking always to the day when he can throw off the mask and attack Poland? Or is it a new Hitler, who discovered the burden of responsible office, and wants to extricate himself, like many an earlier tyrant from the commitments of his irresponsible days? That is the riddle that has to be solved".Document 181 C10156/2293/118 "Notes by Sir Maurice Hankey on Hitler's External Policy in Theory and Practice October 24, 1933" from British Documents on Foreign Affairs Germany 1933 page 339.
That uncertainty over Hitler's ultimate intentions in foreign policy was to colour much of the British policy towards Germany until the outbreak of World War II definitively resolved the question in favor of the former in 1939.
London Naval Conference 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. 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. 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. Maiolo argues that it was actually of little importance whether potential enemies placed voluntary limitations on the size and the scale of their navies. 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. Chatfield especially wished for the Germans to do away with their 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. 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]".
World Disarmament Conference 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", that is, abolishing Part V of Versailles) as opposed to the French demand for sécurité ("security"), maintaining Part V as it was. 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 to a level that would allow it to present a real threat to 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". 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.
Adolf Hitler During the 1920s, Hitler's thinking on foreign policy went through a dramatic change. At the beginning of his political career, Hitler was hostile to Britain and considered it an enemy of the Reich. However, after the British opposed the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, he came to rank Britain as a potential ally. In Mein Kampf and even more in its sequel, Zweites Buch, Hitler strongly criticised the pre-1914 German government for embarking on a naval and colonial challenge to the British Empire and in Hitler's view, needlessly antagonising Britain. In Hitler's view, Britain was a fellow "Aryan" power, whose friendship could be won by a German "renunciation" of naval and colonial ambitions against Britain. In return for such a "renunciation", Hitler expected an Anglo-German alliance against France (Britain's centuries-old rival, but recent ally) and the Soviet Union and concomitant British support for the German efforts to acquire Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. As the first step towards the Anglo-German alliance, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf of his intention to seek a "sea pact", by which Germany would "renounce" any naval challenge against Britain.
In January 1933, Hitler became German chancellor. He had inherited a relatively strong negotiating position at Geneva from Schleicher's government. The German strategy was to make idealistic offers of limited rearmament out of the expectation that all such offers would be rejected by the French, which would allow Germany to go on ultimately with the maximum rearmament, regardless of Paris' thoughts. The ultranationalism of the Nazi regime had alarmed the French, who put the most minimal possible construction on German demands for "theoretical equality" in armaments and thereby played into the German strategy. In October 1933, the Germans again walked out of the conference and stated that everyone else should either disarm to the Versailles level or allow Germany to rearm beyond Versailles.
Though the Germans never had any serious interest in accepting any of the various compromise proposals of the British, in London, the German walk-out was widely, if erroneously, blamed on French "intransigence". The British government was left with the conviction that opportunities for arms limitation talks with the Germans should no longer be lost because of French "intransigence". Subsequent offers by the British to arrange for the German return to the World Disarmament Conference were sabotaged by the Germans, who put forward proposals that were meant to appeal to the British but to be unacceptable to the French. On 17 April 1934, the last such effort ended with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou's rejection of the latest German offer as unacceptable in the so-called "Barthou note," which ended French participation in the Conference while declaring that France would look after its own security in whatever way was necessary. Meanwhile, Admiral Erich Raeder of the Reichsmarine persuaded Hitler of the advantages of ordering two more Panzerschiffe, and in 1933 advised the Chancellor that Germany would be best off by 1948 with a fleet of three aircraft carriers, 18 cruisers, eight Panzerschiffe, 48 destroyers and 74 U-boats. Raeder argued to Hitler that Germany needed naval parity with France as a prime goal, but Hitler from April 1933 onwards expressed a desire for a Reichsmarine of one-third of the total tonnage of the Royal Navy.