Nazi Germany Had Plans For A Huge Fleet Of Battleships
But the never-realized Plan Z robbed resources from submarines
by ROBERT FARLEY
In the mid-1930s, the Nazi government began to plan in detail for the reconstruction of German naval power.
The destruction of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow remained central to the mythology of German betrayal and defeat in World War I. Rebuilding the fleet would be a grand achievement worthy of the Nazis, but also in accord with long-term German foreign policy goals.
In March 1935, Adolf Hitler announced that Germany would no longer abide by the naval restrictions established in the Treaty of Versailles, which had drastically limited German construction.
Berlin and London quickly came to a new agreement, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which would limit German construction to one-third that of the Royal Navy, and would establish Washington Naval Treaty style restrictions on ship size and gun caliber.
However, even before Germany reached the limitations of the new treaty, Hitler and the senior naval command developed plans for abrogating the agreement. These construction programs went by a variety of names, but became known in their final form as Plan Z.
If fully undertaken, Plan Z would have given Germany a world class navy by the late 1940s.
