Anglo-German Naval Agreement
| Exchange of Notes between His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and the German Government regarding the Limitation of Naval Armaments | |
|---|---|
| Type | Naval limitation agreement |
| Signed | 18 June 1935 |
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
| Condition | Ratification by the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the German Reichstag. |
| Signatories |
 United Kingdom Germany
|
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 18 June 1935 was a naval agreement between the United Kingdom and Germany regulating 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. The agreement was renounced by Adolf Hitler on 28 April 1939.
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was an ambitious attempt on the part of both London and Berlin to reach better relations, but it ultimately floundered because of conflicting expectations between the two states. For the Germans, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was intended to mark the beginning of an Anglo-German alliance against France and the Soviet Union, whereas for the British, 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 was highly controversial, both at the time and 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 the British had made the agreement without consulting France or Italy first.
Part IV 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 6 pre-dreadnought battleships; the total naval forces allowed to the Germans were six heavy cruisers of no more than 10,000 tons displacement, six light cruisers of no more than 6,000 tons displacement, 12 destroyers of no more than 800 tonnes displacement and 12 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 down 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. 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".
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