Tirpitz was officially appointed State Secretary in charge of the Imperial Navy Office on 15 June 1897. A new era was about to begin, one sufficiently distinct from earlier periods for later historians to refer to the ‘Ära Tirpitz’. If not for the impact of his policies, the sheer duration of his term in office (1897–1916) provided ample justification for this labelling. However, the State Secretary's naval policy did not achieve what it was meant to. Tirpitz himself later despondently acknowledged that the work of his lifetime would come to a close under a negative prefix. This was not least due to the measures his British opponent had rather unexpectedly taken from around 1904/5 onwards, which were to falsify Tirpitz's basic assumptions. Though the roots of the State Secretary's ultimate failure can accordingly be traced back to pillars central to his very own plan, these fallacies did not emerge until the last years of his first decade in office.

Most of the documents in this chapter are selected so as to present a more or less detailed view of Tirpitz's programme as it unfolded almost unimpeded during the first seven to eight years of his term in office. This plan basically centred on an armaments programme designed to secure Germany's rise to world power status in the face of anticipated British interference. At the same time, it aimed at emancipating the fiscal foundation of the Imperial Navy from budgetary control of the Reichstag. Seen in a broader context, both objectives were aimed at the ulterior objective of shielding Prusso-German constitutionalism, which favoured the rule of pre-industrial elites, from the political effects of the industrialisation by relying on this very same industrialisation in Germany's quest for world power status. As a rather complex armaments programme the Tirpitz Plan had to take into account and integrate political, economic, fiscal, strategic, tactical, and technical matters and consider their interdependency. International politics and strategic or operational naval concepts to be applied against the designated opponent suggested the creation of a specific naval capability which could only be created by observing given tactical and technical needs and potentials. Likewise the required naval capability had to be provided for under the twofold constraints of the industrial capacity available, and the willingness of parliament to appropriate the funds requested.

Rationale for the Volume

The Anglo-German naval race, as its name implies, had two participants, both of whom were equally important to the events that unfolded. Despite this, many of the accounts of this, probably the most totemic of all modern armaments competitions prior to the Cold War, analyse it largely from the viewpoint of one or other of its principal actors. Rarely, in such studies, are both contestants the equal focus of attention.

There are, to be sure, many good reasons for this tendency. Without doubt, the naval policies of Britain and Germany were both significant undertakings in their own right, worthy of detailed individual scrutiny and capable, within their exclusive national contexts, of revealing much about the political progress taking place in their particular settings. Indeed, that the growth of the German navy can best be understood not as a military or foreign policy tool, but rather in a domestic setting, as a policy response to the difficulties faced by the autocratic German political elite to the demands for greater political pluralism on the part of the wider population has long been a mainstay of the ‘Kehrite’ school of German history, a point that will be elaborated later in this introduction. In this context, giving equality of focus to Britain, the other player in the naval race, would make little sense.

In addition to the strong pull of such domestic contexts, it is also true that many of the leading players in the saga of the naval race were colourful characters that merit serious and close personal study on their own terms without the encumbrance that comes from intruding a wider international context. That one might examine the life and policy judgements of a Fisher or a Churchill without equal reference to their German counterparts is not, in this sense, a matter of great surprise. Equally, that a historian might chose to write about Tirpitz or Kaiser Wilhelm II without conterminously putting the British dimension on display in terms of absolute equality is clearly not an invalid approach.

If existing studies of the Anglo-German naval race thus tend to be studies of British naval policy or of German naval policy, or alternatively biographical evaluations of Fisher or of Tirpitz, this is entirely understandable and justifiable. Nevertheless, this is an approach that this volume intends to abjure.

The following 17 documents cover the period from 1905 to 1907 which witnessed some fundamental changes in the schedule of the German naval build-up. In the end, the construction rate was quite surprisingly accelerated to a temporary four-ship tempo [62]. To some extent, the document drafted by Tirpitz in November 1905 can claim a central position in this development. In this he presented a comprehensive survey of his naval policy which was to inform the Chancellor [49], and to reaffirm the guiding principles of his naval programme. The paramount objective was to secure a guaranteed construction rate of three large ships per annum for an indefinite period of time. The primary method was to curtail the budgetary control which the Reichstag could exert over the Navy Estimates by providing for a proper law. The chief purpose of the fleet was to eliminate ‘the English threat’. To this end, Tirpitz aimed to establish a ‘Risk Fleet’, this time labelled a ‘defensive fleet’, at least for the time being. The next step would be to introduce the draft of an Amendment (Novelle) to renew the request of six large cruisers originally tabled in 1900, but at that time denied by the Reichstag [50]. As long as the basic concept of the build-up, which centred on a battle fleet whose structure and types were defined in the Navy Law, served its purpose, the gradual achievement of the envisaged steady building rate would be the right way to go. Even though this confirmation of the essentials did not provide much surprising information, the vigorous defence mounted by Tirpitz and some additional hints suggested that the foundations on which Tirpitz's design rested were already giving way.

The critical state of the imperial finances probably caused the gravest concern to the Imperial Navy Office. The debt of the German Empire had already reached staggering levels. In 1890, it amounted to 1,117.9 million marks. By 1895 it had risen to 2,081.2 million marks and by 1900 to 2,298.5 million marks. At the time of Tirpitz's 1905 memorandum, it was estimated at 3,203.5 million marks only to reach 4,844.1 million marks by 1910. In spite of several initiatives to get this debt under control, a thorough reform of the German tax regime failed to gain approval due to the irreconcilable interests of the parties from which the Imperial Government tried to draw support.