Anglo-German Naval Agreement

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was a 1935 naval accord under which Germany undertook not to build a fleet larger than 35 per cent of the Royal Navy. In the book, its importance lies not only in that limit but in the competing meanings attached to it: Adolf Hitler presented it as evidence of German restraint, while British officials feared it had been read as permission for expansion elsewhere. Its later appearance in a declaration of goodwill exposes the distance between a symbolic pledge and an enforceable commitment.

Terms and Intended Meaning

The agreement set a concrete ceiling on German naval construction relative to British strength. In a later speech, Adolf Hitler described the arrangement as a voluntary renunciation of a renewed naval arms race, made to give the British Empire a sense of security. He also presented it as morally justified only if both nations solemnly promised not to wage war on one another, and asserted that Germany possessed that intention.

That argument made the accord do more than regulate naval armaments: it cast a numerical limitation as evidence of peaceful intent. But the agreement’s material restriction and Hitler’s broader claim were not the same thing. The book shows British officials confronting the risk that a limited, specific naval arrangement could be used to suggest a much wider political understanding.

The British Dispute over Its Political Cost

The Foreign Office had come to regard the agreement as a mistake. William Strang argued that Adolf Hitler had interpreted it as a tacit signal: Britain would accept a German navy three times the size of Germany’s previous fleet in return for leaving him free to act in Eastern Europe. Strang called this the point at which the deterioration began. His objection was therefore not simply to the naval ratio, but to the political inference he believed Adolf Hitler had drawn from it.

This retrospective argument gave the accord an uncomfortable double character. It could be cited as a limit on German naval power, yet also remembered as an arrangement that may have encouraged British passivity toward German ambitions beyond the sea. The text presents that second reading as Strang’s judgment, not as a settled or mutually acknowledged interpretation of the agreement.

Reappearance in the 1938 Declaration

During the Sudeten crisis, the agreement returned as Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain sought language for a public declaration after the Munich Agreement. Strang initially cautioned against revisiting the naval accord. He proposed that the declaration refer instead to the agreement reached over the Sudetenland, using Adolf Hitler’s stated wish that Germany and Britain should not go to war as the basis for a narrower expression of goodwill.

The wording ultimately read aloud went further: it described both the agreement signed the previous night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the two peoples’ desire never to fight one another again. Adolf Hitler recognized the language as his own and did not interrupt the reading. In this new formulation, the naval accord served less as a limit on fleets than as a sign invoked to support a promise about relations between the two countries.

Symbolism and Limits

The declaration’s invocation of the agreement did not make the declaration legally binding. William Malkin, the Foreign Office lawyer, warned that it had no legal force and amounted only to a declaration of goodwill. The distinction matters: the naval agreement supplied a recognizable precedent for the rhetoric of mutual restraint, but the new words did not, in themselves, guarantee peace.

The accord thus gathers the book’s tension between formal terms and political interpretation. Its fleet ceiling was specific; its supposed implications for British policy in Eastern Europe were disputed; and its later use as a peace symbol could not turn goodwill into a legal safeguard. Its recurrence in the declaration makes the agreement an emblem of both diplomatic hope and the danger of mistaking a symbol of restraint for proof that war has been ruled out.