Whose Idea was the “Graf Spee” ?
When the Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo, the Admiral Scheer torpedoed off the Norwegian coast, and the Deutschland rumoured to have been sunk or damaged in some North Sea encounter, the Press and the war propagandists announced these events as the destruction of Nazi ships. “Hitler’s pocket battleships,” they said, “built to outrun or outgun British capital ships or cruisers, had met their end in fight with the warships they were designed to destroy.”
But the curious fact, hardly noticed, is that Germany’s pocket battleships were neither built nor planned by Hitler’s regime but by his predecessors, the Democrats, Catholics and Social-Democrsts, who for the most part, ruled Germany from 1919 to the end of 1932. The Deutschland was laid down in 1930, the Graf Spee in 1931 and the Admiral Scheer in October, 1932. At that time, prior to Hitler’s advent to power, two other pocket battleships were projected, but the plan was changed, and two 26,000-ton battleships, the Gneissenau and Scharnhorst, were built instead. The difference between the Nazi naval programme and the earlier one was not a difference of aim but only of method. The pre-Nazi German governments felt still too weak to defy the limitations imposed by the victors in the last war and therefore directed the skill of their naval designers to the problem of building the most powerful and destructive type of ship within the limit of 10,000 tons imposed upon them. Hitler’s Government, working at a later stage of Germany’s secret re-armament came out into the open and disregarded the restriction. The object was the same, that of building a fleet with which to challenge the sea power of rivals, particularly Great Britain. (It is hardly necessary to treat seriously the German Government’s explanation that the “pocket battleships” were “designed with a view to service against the Polish Navy in the Baltic.”)
Similarly it was the pre-Nazi governments which, with the help of Russia and other Powers, were carrying on the secret building up of Germany’s military forces. According to a naval correspondent of the Evening Standard. (April 9th, 1940) the plan for the invasion of Norway was worked out years before and had been “considered as long ago as 1926.”
From German Social Democrats to British Labourites
What are we to conclude from this ? It certainly shows the absurdity of placing the full responsibility for making war on one man. Does it then justify those who maintain that the Germans (including the German workers and Labour Party) are an inferior people, particularly prone to aggression and to being twisted by their naval, military and political castes ? Are they a deceitful race, guilty of having made these preparations for war while talking all the time of peaceful methods and supporting League of Nations schemes for disarmament and peace ? The answer can be found by looking up the record of their counterparts in Great Britain. The 1924 Labour Government, with protestations that another war was unthinkable, nevertheless went on with the building of the battleships Rodney and Nelson, put into effect a programme for five new cruisers, increased the expenditure on the Air Force and planned that Air Force expenditure would go on increasing for several years. Just as, in England, there was a slight protest from a minority Labour group, so also did a similar small group protest in Germany against their Government’s naval programme. The British Labour Government were not, however, by any means sure that the enemy against which these forces might be used was Germany. Indeed, at the 1925 Labour Party Conference the late Mr. Arthur Henderson resisted a resolution for disarmament on the ground that the armaments might be need for defence against France if that country “continued in the frame of mind she was now in” (Conference Report, Page 232).
How then does it happen that British and German Labour politicians claiming to represent the workers’ desire for peace should alike have been instrumental in making preparations for war ? It is because capitalism does and must breed international rivalries leading to war. No amount of good intentions on the part of those who, in the name of Labour, take on the administration of capitalism will disarm that savage monster.
There is ample room in a Socialist world for the peoples of the world co-operating for their common good, but there is no room in a capitalist world for rival powers, each seeking profit through the capture of markets, conquest of raw materials and the control of trade routes and strategic points for their armed protection. For all of them the watchword is “Expand or explode.” Hitler or no Hitler, it is the law of capitalism, the law of the jungle.
(Editorial, Socialist Standard, May 1940)