My Great-Grandfather Grand-Admiral Von Tirpitz: German Leader After Bismarck and Before Hitler

By Corrado Pirzio-Biroli

Corrado Pirzio-Biroli offers a robust defense of the life and career of his great-grandfather, Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, in this engaging family history.

As the creator of the modern German navy, the trusted adviser of Wilhelm II for two decades, and an eminence grise during the Weimar Republic, Tirpitz was a central figure in European politics for several decades.

While Tirpitz agonized about Hitlers rising power, he could not prevent it, and he felt as though he was too old to assume dictatorial powers. If he had done so, he would have liked to have upheld the Reichstag, which he had always shown respect and counted on.

Drawing on personal recollections, unpublished family papers, and thoughtful analysis, the text reveals how Tirpitz had to adapt to a rapidly changing world in which his country went from being a juggernaut that traditional powers tried to rein in to a pariah nation.

Trace four generations of one of Europes most interesting families, and discover how Tirpitz proved to be a visionary leader in this account of one of historys most misunderstood and important figures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480835412

Corrado Pirzio-Biroli

Corrado Pirzio-Biroli is Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitzs first great-grandson. He spent thirty-five years as an official with the European Commission in Brussels with assignments in Africa, the U.S., Austria, and the United Nations, ending as chief of staff (agriculture and fisheries). He served as president of the European Landowner Organization and operates Spazio Brazz, a history and art museum.

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

I.   Alfred Tirpitz: The Man And His Family

II.   The Domestic Context: The German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, The Imperial Navy And Tirpitz

III.   From Bismarck’s Realpolitik To Wilhelm’s And Tirpitz’s Weltpolitik

IV.   The Risk Theory And The Tirpitz Plan

IV.1    Naval Theory And Strategy

IV.2    The Tirpitz Plan

IV.3    Were The Tirpitz Theory And Plan Failures Or Successes?

V.   The Naval Arms Race

VI.   The March Of Folly Into The First World War

VI.1    Count Down To War

VI.2    The Guns Of August

VI.3    Discussing Peace

VII.   The War At Sea

VII.1    Surface Warfare

VII.2    Submarine Warfare

VIII.   The Questions Of Fault And Fallout: An Appraisal

VIII.1    Who Is To Blame?

VIII.2    The Fallout

IX.   Tirpitz, Senior Statesman After Versailles

Appendix 1: Family And Descendants

Appendix 2: Grandmother Ilse Remembers

Appendix 3: Uncle Wolf Von Tirpitz’s Conversations With Winston Churchill And His Report On The Launching Of The Battleship Tirpitz

Appendix 4: Tirpitz-Stosch Letter Exchange (1895-1896)

Appendix 5: Letters By Tirpitz To His Daughter Ilse

Main Sources

List of Illustrations

To my son Federico, an angel for smart start-ups,

A reminder of another age in which, acting with vision, perseverance & common sense his ancestor

Alfred von Tirpitz met with triumph and disaster.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER

GRAND-ADMIRAL von TIRPITZ

German Leader after Bismarck and before Hitler (1849-1930)

Foreword

The title of this book – My Great Grandfather Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz. German leader after Bismarck and before Hitler – sums up an aspect of this unusual work: its character as family history. Corrado Pirzio-Biroli offers a robust defence of the life and career of Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), the creator of the modern German navy. His account of the career of Tirpitz as a young naval officer in the new and uncertain German navy of the 1870s and 1880s rests in part on private reminiscences of his family. The book indirectly tells the story of four German generations from the flamboyance of the Wilhelmine Era to the corridors of the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the European Commission, where the author served as a very senior EU official. The author also includes the wider history of Imperial Germany in peace and war. His account of the outbreak of the First World War makes use of the latest research on this still contested topic. He reconstructs with great skill the naval battles of the First World War and the success and failures of the Imperial German Navy. There is also a vivid account of Admiral Tirpitz as éminence grise during the Weimar Republic.

The book then contains much that a work of historical summary must have but there are also charming memoirs from Corrado’s grand mother, the formidable Ilse von Tirpitz, who married Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell (1881 – 1944), one of the greatest figures in the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell confronted the infamous Nazi ‘hanging judge’ Roland Freisler with a courageous indictment of Nazi crimes and went to his death at the hands of the Gestapo in Berlin-Plötzensee. The author’s great uncle Korvettenkapitän Wolfgang von Tirpitz (1888-1968), served in his father’s navy, went down with his ship, the Mainz, in the first great naval battle of 1914 and miraculously survived to become a prisoner of war. Wolf Tirpitz became friendly with Winston Churchill and his memoirs of the Great War and his Churchill visits adds another lively personal set of reminiscences. The author’s mother, Fey von Hassell (1918 - 2010) married the Venetian aristocrat, Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli, and was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1944. She was sent to concentration camps as part of the round up of prisoners of kin - relatives of those who plotted to kill Hitler after the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 failed. Her two sons, little boys of four and two, were taken from her. Her book, A Mother’s War tells the terrifying story of separation, imprisonment and reunion in the words of her diaries. It was published in 1990, reissued in 2003 and eventually made into a film (The Ripped Children –RAI TV). Corrado Pirzio-Biroli was the elder of the two lost boys and put up for adoption, but was rescued just in time by his grand mother Ilse at the end of the war. He devoted his life to the integration of Europe, sharing his grandfather Ulrich von Hassell’s outlook, who had written, Pour moi l’Europe a le sens d’une patrie.

In 1965 I had asked the Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge, Sir Herbert Butterfield, to write to Wolfgang von Tirpitz to introduce me. I had heard at the Admiralty that Tirpitz’s son had refused all historians access because they had made his father into a warmonger and evil genius of the Kaiser’s Germany. With the recommendation of Butterfield Herr von Tirpitz agreed to let me visit. I carried the galleys of my first book, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London: MacDonald & Co. 1966) to the little house in Irschenhausen in Bavaria, where Wolfgang and Elizabeth von Tirpitz had retired. I knocked on the door of the modest cottage and a large man with a ruddy complexion, white hair and brilliant blue eyes opened it and said in English, ‘Welcome on Board!’ I spent one of the most important weeks of my life in that little house. I gave him my manuscript and asked him to read it and, if he thought I had been fair to his father, to let me work in family papers. By day I worked in the cellar of the house and sat at the huge desk that Admiral von Tirpitz had used at his country home in Sankt Blasien. I stoked the little fire with briquets and read the private papers surrounded by Wilhelmine memorabilia. There was a fat file composed of menus from banquets held at the Reichsmarineamt in the years before 1914, amazing lucullan feasts with ten or more courses and always begun with oysters. Wolf Tirpitz told me that his father would lean across the table to ask guests not quite so fond of that delicacy as to whether they would mind passing him their plates so none would go to waste.

In the evenings after supper we would talk to the early hours of the morning. It became clear that I had passed the test. My portrait of his father struck him as fair and he only objected to my treatment of Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother, whom he knew well from the Imperial Navy. In the nightly conversations he and his wife expressed their sense of guilt that they had not done more to fight Hitler and to warn the Western powers of the threat of Nazism. The famous Martin Niemöller, a former U-Boat commander, served as pastor of their church in Berlin-Dahlem and they visited him regularly when he was arrested by the Gestapo. Wolfgang von Tirpitz told me that, when he and his sister Ilse were invited to attend the launch of the battle ship Tirpitz on 1 August 1939, he put on his naval uniform again (pleased that after two decades it still fitted) and concealed a dagger in the tunic to kill Hitler. As he reached for it, he thought of his three young sons and hesitated. After all, as he said ruefully, people like us do not kill people that way. At one point in our late night conversations, he paused and said with great force and bitterness, ‘anyone from my class who tells you that he did not know what was going on is lying.’

Nearly fifty years have passed since that magical week of warmth and conversation in which Wolfgang and Elizabeth von Tirpitz treated me with such courtesy, spoke to me so honestly and gave me their memories as precious gifts. One afternoon Ilse von Hassell came for a visit. She gave me a copy of her husband’s memoirs Vom andern Deutschland with a dedication to me. I have never forgotten the awe which this courageous and formidable great lady aroused in me.

It was one of the great privileges of my life to be welcomed into the Tirpitz home and to get to know several members of this remarkable and courageous family. If there is now ‘another Germany’, as Ulrich and Ilse von Hassel hoped, then the Tirpitz/von Hassel families made a contribution to it.

Cambridge, England

Jonathan Steinberg

June 2015

Preface

I was born at the outset of WW II at the Castello di Brazzà (Brazzà Castle) - a medioeval village in Friuli, Northern Italy - in a family whose history spans ten centuries touching on four continents.

Everybody can be tempted at some stage in his/her life to write about ancestors and personal memories, but I found that for a non historian like me writing about history was an intimidating undertaking.

I therefore confined myself to telling my memories viva voce on social occasions. Not without a certain success, I confess. Until when one day, while having dinner in a Prague restaurant, my German friend Prinz Michael Salm zu Salm said I should stop just narrating family stories, and write them down in a book instead, promising to buy the first 50 copies. This was perhaps the push I needed to switch-on my newly acquired Apple MacBook and start. I suddenly found both the motivation and a good reason to do so.

I had embarked on installing a museum in a recently restored building in our family property at Castello di Brazzà. When I had become too old to count stories with the necessary recollection and passion, the museum would continue telling them in my place. Writing biographies of my ancestors suddenly appeared a useful complement to the permanent exhibits I was installing.

As I looked for inspiration as to the best way to write history I stumbled on the preface of Practising History, a book by the late American historian Barbara Tuchman, in which she describes her own approach to history writing.

It is the quality of being in love with your subject that is indispensable for writing good history – or good anything, for that matter …"The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distil … select the essential, above all discard the irrelevant, and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative … I think myself as a storyteller, a narrator, who deals in true stories, not fiction … and find out wie es wirklich gewesen ist, what really happened, or literally, how it really was".¹

This Tirpitz biography is an attempt to follow Barbara Tuchman’s advice. There is a strain in my extended, cosmopolitan family where a substantial number of members stood up for what they thought and/or found honour and recognition during their lifetime, or after it, and/or paid for it. Several of them raised controversies, enthousiasm among their supporters and criticism among their detractors. Some of them had the power of persuasion, and possibly also the power of authority, but they were not corrupted by power. It makes sense to put down on paper their profiles of perseverance based not only on what historians wrote, but also on personal and family knowledge.

This work is the story of a family man and a leader of men, who lived through the triumph of his dreams and the disaster of the March of Folly that led to the Great War. His story is intertwined with an insane fight for supremacy among the World’s Great Powers. Gross-Admiral Tirpitz was a central figure in European politics, whose dominant personality was described by innumerable contemporaries and later historians. His formative years were those of the Kingdom of Prussia. His time as a key player coincided to a large extent with that of the German Empire, the shortest in history (1871-1918). But he remained a man of influence after the end of that Empire until his death, shortly before Hitler burst onto the German stage. If Germany was to take back its place among Europe’s leading nations, Tirpitz understood that the restitutions of the Versailles Treaty had to be scrapped and knew that this could only be done by installing a dictatorship. He abhorred Hitler as a person and agonized about Hitler’s rising power, but was unable to prevent it, turning down popular calls to assume dictatorial powers for which he felt too old. If he had done so, he would not have abolished the Reichstag for which he had always shown respect.

Tirpitz had to adapt to a rapidly changing world in which his country became, first a juggernaut that traditional powers tried to rein in and then a pariah nation. He had to endure witnessing his country, as well as himself, being unsoundly charged by the victors for causing WWI, a conflict that had many fathers in denial. Despite never reaching the chancellorship that many advocated and lobbied for him, he proved an unusual leader showing vision as regards the way Germany should conduct the war at sea as an instrument of diplomacy as well as its foreign policy tout court and proved prescient about later developments.

My family’s saga needs further portrayals of the lives of my relatives who distinguished themselves in politics, explorations, and diplomatic, philanthropic and military affairs:

• My French great-granduncle Pietro di Brazzà Savorgnan, the founder of Brazzaville and French Equatorial Africa, and his race with Morton Stanley along the Congo River.²

• My American great-grandaunt Cora di Brazzà Slocomb, Italy’s first female industrial leader, a prominent advocate of women’s’ rights and the first campaigner against the death penalty in the USA.

• My German grandfather Ulrich von Hassell, Germany’s anti-nazi Ambassador in Mussolini’s Rom, and the German opposition against Hitler of which he was a leading figure and for which he was executed for crimes against the nazi state.

• My Italian granduncle Alessandro Pirzio-Biroli, leading general in Mussolini’s colonial conquests (Lybia, Abissinia/Ethiopia, Albania), Governor of Montenegro and co-founder of the Equadorian army.

• My Chilean grandaunt Eugenia Pirzio-Biroli - founder and long-time mayor of the south-chilean city of Puerto Cisnes and trusted political astrologer of Chile’s presidents.

• My mother Fey von Hassell, who endured a concentration-camp saga as Himmler’s hostage as well as my own’s internment in an Austrian Kinderheim.

• My father Detalmo - antifascist, Africanist, Christian ecumenist, diplomat and writer, who was EU’s ambassador in Dakar and Mali and became a sheik in Senegal.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the debt I have towards my grand-mother Ilse von Tirpitz, the most brilliant story teller I have met, who infused me with a passion for European 20th century history and transmitted to me the genes of discipline, persuasiveness and how to captivate an audience. I very much learned from her personal accounts about her father and the Kaiser. I must also thank Ilse’s brother, my uncle Wolf, who told me a few stories and recorded in great detail his meetings with Churchill from 1913 to 1953. I wish also to thank the encouragement and collaboration of my cousin Wolf Henning von Tirpitz, who has favoured my undertaking, provided me with some unpublished and other documents and has eventually been kind enough to tell me that I had written the book about the Gross-Admiral that his father Wolf would have liked to write, but did not because he feared he might be charged for bias as his father’s son. Unfortunately, I got to write this book so late that my grandmother Ilse and my granduncle Wolf had by then left this world. Although they did tell me some stories, I was not equipped then as I am today to raise the right questions.

For this book I owe an immense academic debt of gratitude to Cambridge Professor for History Jonathan Steinberg who has supported my project as if I were his student preparing for a doctorate, has read word by word more drafts than I can remember, and has offered countless insightful comments and suggestions. He did so with perspicacity and incomparable knowledge of the sources, including the family letters and other papers that he had the opportunity to consult at Wolf von Tirpitz’s residence. His is one of the very best biographies of my grandfather to date. He alone allowed me to turn my collection of sources and thoughts into a book, and at the end even exhorted me to read a couple more books in order to incorporate the very last documented discoveries made by historians about the causes of World War I. Less important to the readers, but more important to me, this collaboration turned into a cherished friendship. I am also indebted to those classical and revisionist historians whose writings enlightened me. A special thanks goes to Raffael Scheck, who allowed me to freely draw on his work about Tirpitz, in particular as regards his life as a post-Versailles statesman. I am also indebted to all other historians that were my sources, in particular Franz Uhle-Wettler – the best account of Tirpitz by a German writer –, Christopher Clark – notably about his new insights into the causes of World War I – and A. Massé for his unequalled description of the major naval battles. My debt of gratitude to Jonathan Steinberg as well as to several other historians is highlighted by my copious use of quotations from their works. It was indeed one of the purposes of this work to reflect what historians had already written about my great granfather’s ideas, actions and judgements and his times, and to therefrom draw some conclusions for a non-historian like myself. But I have added also passages from unpublished written family memoirs and notes, recorded a few oral family recollections, and added my personal assessments on how events unfolded, about the consequences of choices made by key actors and as regards prospects of different outcomes if Tirpitz’s advice had been followed by the Kaiser and his Chancellors. For all the errors that remain I accept sole responsibility.

I am fortunate to have in Cécile Cornet d’Elzius a loving wife, who has encouraged me throughout also when I worked into the early hours of the morning to better understand my great-grandfather and the bellicose times in which he lived and served. She has run our life so as to spare me as many worries as possible, and took me off writing when it was taking precedence to other more urgent responsibilities. She has also supported the construction of the Spazio Brazzà museums that inspired me to write family biographies in the first place. I also thank Russell Elliott, who has been managing our property at the Castello di Brazzà, and who has read and corrected more than once the language of my manuscript.

Dramatis Personae

(Cast of characters in the period up to 1930 covered in this book)

ROYALS

Alexander III. Tsar of Russia (1881-1904)

Edward VII (Bertie). King of the United Kingdom & Emperor of India (1901-1910)

Franz Joseph I Habsburg. Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary³ (1848-1916)

George V of Hanover (Georgy). King of the UK and Emperor of India (1910-1936)

Nicholas II Romanov (Nicky). Tsar of Russia (1894-1917), Grand Duke of Finland and King of Poland

Nicholas Nikolaevich Romanov. Grand Duke and commander in chief of the Russian Imperial Army (1914-1915)

Wilhelm II (Willy) von Preussen. Emperor (Kaiser) of Germany and King of Prussia (1888-1918)

Victoria of Hanover. Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1837-1901) and Empress of India (1876-1901)

GOVERNMENT

Asquith, Herbert Henry. Liberal British prime minister (1908-1916)

Bark, Peter. Russian minister of finance (1914-1917)

Berchtold, Leopold von, Count. Foreign minister of Austria-Hungary (1912-15)

Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von. Chancellor of Imperial Germany (1909-1917)

Bismarck, Otto von, Prince. 1st Chancellor of Germany (March 1871-March 1890)

Brüning, Heinrich. German Chancellor (March 1930-May 1932)

Bülow, Bernhard von, Prince. Chancellor of Imperial Germany (1900-1909)

Clemenceau, Georges, Prime minister of France (1906-1909 and 1917-1920)

Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer, Sir. Home secretary (1910-1911), Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-1915), minister of munitions (1917-1919), secretary of state for war and for air (1919-1921), Chancellor of the exchequer (1924-1929)

Kapp, Wolfgang. East Prussian leader, headed May 1920 putsch

Krivoshein, A.V. Russian minister of agriculture (1906-1915)

Grey, Sir Edward. His Majesty’s (British) foreign secretary (1905-1916)

Grigorovich, Ivan K., Admiral. Russia’s navy minister (1911-1917)

Hindenburg, Paul. President of Weimar Germany (1925-1934)

Hitler, Adolf. German Führer (1933-1945)

Jagow, Gotlieb von. State secretary of imperial Germany (1913-1916)

Kahr, Gustav Ritter von. Prime minister (1920-21) and state commissioner (virtual dictator) (1923) of Bavaria

Lloyd-George, David, the Earl of Dwyford. Chancellor of the exchequer (1908–1915) and British prime minister (1916–22)

McKenna, Reginald. First Lord of the Admiralty (1908-1911) & Home secretary (>1915)

Müller, Georg Alexander von, Admiral. Chief of German naval cabinet (1906-18)

Morley, Lord John. Lord President of the Council in Britain (1910-1914)

Messimy, Adolphe. France’s minister of war (1911-1916 and June-August 1914)

Pasic, Nikola. Prime minister of Serbia (1912-1918)

Poincaré, Raymond. President of France (1913-1919)

Sazonov, Sergei. Foreign minister of Russia (1910-1916)

Seeckt, Johannes Friedrich Hans von. Chief of staff (1919- 1920) and commander in chief (1920-1926) of the German army

Streseman Gustav. Chancellor (1923) & Foreign Minister (1923-1929) of Germany

Sukhomlinov, V.A. Russian war minister (1909-1915)

Tirpitz, Alfred von. Grand Admiral, secretary of state of the German Imperial Naval Office (1897-1916), President of the Vaterlandpartei/DNV (1917-1924) and from 1924 of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP)

Tirpitz, Ilse von. Daugther of AvT & wife of diplomat Ulrich von Hassell

Tisza, Istvan, Count. Minister-president of Hungary (1903-1905, 1913-1917)

Viviani, Réné. France’s premier and foreign minister at various points in 1914-15

Wilson, Woodrow. President of the United States of America (1913-1921)

Zimmermann, Arthur. German undersecretary of state (1911-1916)

MILITARY

Beatty, David Richard, 1st Earl of Beatty. 1st Battlecruiser Squadron commander (1914-1916), First Sea Lord (1919-1924)

Bachmann, Gustav. Chief of the German Admiralty Staff (1915)

Capelle, Eduard von. Admiral in the Imperial Navy Office (1914)

Caprivi de Caprera, Georg Leo von, Count. General, Chief of the Admiralty (1883-1888) and German Chancellor after Bismarck (1890-1894)

Conrad von Hötzendorf, Franz. Austria-Hungary’s army chief of staff (1912-16)

Dobrorolskii, Sergei, General. Chief of Russian army’s mobilization section, 1914

Falkenhayn, Erich von. Prussian minister of war (1913-1915)

Fisher John Arbuthnot Jacky, Baron. Royal Navy Admiral of the Fleet, First Sea Lord (1904-1910 and 1914-1915)

Goodenough, William Edmund, Sir. Cruiser Squadron Commander (1913-1916)

Heeringen, August von. Chief of Germany’s Admiralstab (1911-1913)

Hindenburg, Paul. Chief of German General Staff (1916-1919)

Hipper Franz Ritter von. Admiral of the German Imperial Navy & commander-in-chief of the High Seas Fleet (1918)

Hollman, Friedrich von, Freiherr. Admiral of the Imperial Navy (1896-1897)

Ingenohl Gustav Heinrich von. Commander of the German High Seas Fleet in WWI

Jellicoe, John Henry. Commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet (1914-16) & First Sea Lord (Nov.1916-17)

Joffre, Joseph. Chief of staff of the French army (1911-1916)

Keyes, Roger. Commodore, Battle Squadron commander in World War I

Lawrence of Arabia (T.E.). Leader of the Arab Revolt against the Turks (1916-1918)

Ludendorff, Erich. German infantry general (1883-1918) and prominent nationalist leader: Kapp putsch (1920) and Hitler Beer Hall putsch (1923)

Maltzahn, Kurt von. German navy captain & theoretician (1849-1930)

Moltke the Younger, Helmut von. Chief of staff of the German army (1906-1914)

Monts, Alexander von. Head of the Admiralty of the German Navy (1888)

Moore Archibald Gordon, Sir. Battle Cruiser Commander of the Grand Fleet in WWI

Montecuccoli Rudolf von, Count. Commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy (1904-1913)

Müller, Georg Alexander von. Chief of the German Imperial Naval Cabinet (1906-18)

Pool, Hugo von. Chief of Naval Staff (1913-14) and Commander of the High Seas Fleet (Feb. 1915-Jan. 1916)

Princip, Gavrilo. Bosnian Serb terrorist, trained in Belgrade

Scheer, Reinhard. Commander of Germany’s High Seas Fleet (1916-1918)

Schlieffen, Alfred von, Count. Chief of the German General Staff (1891-1906)

Senden-Bibran, Gustav von. Chief of the German naval cabinet (1889-1892)

Stosch, Albrecht von. Chief of the German imperial admiralty (1872-1889) & State Secretary of the Naval Office (1889–1897)

Sukhomlinov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich.A. Chief of the General Staff of the Russian army (1908-1909) and War Minister in 1914

Tirpitz, Wolfgang (Wolf) von. Officer on the German cruiser Mainz (August 1914)

Trotha, Adolf von. V-Admiral, Chief of Staff after Tirpitz, supported the Kapp putsch

Tyrwhitt, Reginald Yorke, Sir. Light cruiser commander in World War I

Vollerthun. German admiral, Hitler supporter and newspaper editor

Yanushkevitch, N.N. General, Chief of Russian Army General Staff (1914-1915)

DIPLOMATS

Ballin, Albert, German industrialist

Buchanan, Sir George. Britain’s ambassador to Russia (1910-1918)

Cambon, Jules. France’s ambassador to Germany (1907-1914)

Cambon, Pierre-Paul. France’s ambassador to Britain (1898-1920)

Goschen, Sir W. Edward. Britain’s ambassador to Germany (1908-1914)

Hassell, Ulrich von. German Diplomat, son-in-law and Secretary to Tirpitz

House, Edward M., Colonel. American presidential envoy (29 May 1914)

Hoyos, Alexander, Count. Berchtold’s secretary (envoy to Berlin July 1914)

Keynes, John Maynard. Economist, British delegate, Versailles conference (1919)

Lichnowsky, Prince Karl Marx. Germany’s ambassador to Britain (1912-1916)

Mensdorff, Albert, Count. Austria-Hungary’s ambassador to England, 1904-1914

Metternich, Paul Wolff von, Count. German ambassador in London (1901-1912)

Monnet, Jean. Cognac merchant, coordinator of franco-british supplies in WWI (1916-1918), deputy secretary general of the League of Nations (1920-1946)

Paléologue, Maurice. France’s ambassador to Russia (1914-1917)

Pourtalès, Friedrich. Germany’s ambassador to Russia (1907-1914)

Robien, Louis de. French embassy attaché in St. Petersburg

Szapàry, Friedrich, Count. Austria-Hungary’s ambassador to Russia (1913-1914)

Szögyény, Ladislaus, Count. A-Hungary’s ambassador to Germany (1892-1914)

Tschirschky, Heinrich von, Count. German ambassador to Austria-Hungary 1907-1914)

Chapter l

ALFRED TIRPITZ: THE MAN AND HIS FAMILY

Ziel erkannt — Kraft gespannt.

— (Alfred von Tirpitz)⁴

Origin and Youth

Gross-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, ‘Germany’s Fisher⁵, is the builder and the soul of the German Fleet, who with his Neptune-like beard served as Secretary of the Navy for nineteen years, longer in one post than any German minister since Bismarck, and was active with four Chancellors: Caprivi (1890-94), Hohenlohe, Bülow, and Bethmann-Hollweg (1909-1917).

His origin can be traced back to the Czernin von Terpitz family of ancient stock from Schlesia and Bohemia in old Prussia who gave up their title and property, the Castle of Türpitz near Brzeg (ex Brieg). When Kaiser Wilhelm II ennobled him (1900), Alfred chose the coat of arms of the Czernin von Terpitz family.⁶

Alfred was born on 19 March 1849 in Küstrin (today Kostrzyn) at the Oder. He was the second child of Rudolph Friedrich Tirpitz (1811-1905), a liberal monarchist who supported the revolution of 1848, and of Malwine Hartmann. The family moved in 1850 to Frankfurt on the Oder. As a boy Alfred loved to go on raids and adventures.⁷ Because of his family background, Alfred was destined like his brother to the Real Gymnasium, a secondary technical school with modern languages. His father was ambitious for his only remaining son and passed on to him an attitude of service for the fatherland, and an urge for achievement. Quoting from Schiller’s Glocke, he pressed home that ‘Der Mann muss hinaus ins feindliche Leben, muss wirken und wagen, das Glück zu erjagen. Das tuhe, mein Junge, und damit rüstig vorwârts. Dem mutigen gehôrt die Weit.’⁸

AVTArchway1.jpg

1. Alfred’s father Rusolph Friedrich Tirpitz

Alfred was the first to admit his mediocrity at school and was aware that his teachers had a low opinion of him. But he had an equally low opinion of the school. Our teachers were so antiquated — he wrote — that they spoke a language that we did actually not understand. He might have also suffered the use of the cane, which was customary for underperformers. Years later he told his first daughter and life-long confidante Ilse (my grand-mother) that, whatever the reasons, he was fed up with the Realschule and that his parents did not know what to do with him and actually told him they were praying for his future.⁹

AVTArchway2.jpg

2. Tirpitz as Marinekadett (1863)

His lack of parental and self-confidence led Alfred to leave school. When his friend Maltzahn expressed his intention of entering the navy … it occurred to me that it might mean a certain relief for my parents if I too were to take up the idea — Tirpitz wrote. His father did not object, and so on 15 May 1865, Tirpitz, 16, applied for admission to the Prussian Navy, becoming a navy cadet. This was relatively easy; the Navy accepted most candidates because it had too few.¹⁰

His way to be noticed was to insist on passing all his exams in English. Out of 34 candidates, Alfred ranked fifth, but the fourteen that failed were recruited as well. The navy appeared to Alfred’s parents as a climb down, because its role was insignificant at the time and its future uncertain. Its reputation was at low ebb after losing two naval battles against the Danes in 1848 and 1864. The army was viewed as more prestigious, but Alfred’s parents, as Alfred himself, doubted his suitability for the army, and indeed for doing anything useful in life.

How mistaken they were! Tirpitz actually had found his element and arranged his personal life pretty well. Although he married late at 35 (1884) — a quite common occurrence for young officers, who could not live with their 75DM a month pay - he drew much strength from his wife, Marie Auguste Lipke (1860-1948) and his four children.

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3. Alfred Tirpitz and wife Marie Auguste Lipke newlyweds (1884)

Marie came, like himself, from West Prussia. Her father was a barrister and a member of the Reichstag and of the Prussian Parliament. Her mother was Swiss. She was a part of the same liberal and monarchist circles that included the biggest supporters of the German fleet: academics, middle-class, and moderate revolutionaries of 1848.

Career

In 1865, Alfred joined the service in Kiel, where he embarked on the training ship Arcona and soon after that changed to the former English sailing boat Niobe where he served as battery cannon charger. In 1867-1868 he served on the sail frigate Thetis. At the end of 1869, Tirpitz became second lieutenant and moved first to the Artillery testing commission and then to the battle frigate König Wilhelm, his first steam ship. Tirpitz’s years as gunnery officer aboard the König Wilhelm and the Friedrich Karl were spent cruising the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, showing the flag in ports that had never before seen a German warship. He then became frustrated when the Prussian Navy was not involved in the Franco-Prussian War.

Alfred almost died when he fell head first between two war ships at anchor in Kiel harbour. He owed his life to a friend who noticed his sudden disappearance, looked around and finally saw one of his boots sticking out of the water. According to the description of Alfred’s daughter Ilse (my grandmother), once pulled out of the water and revived with artificial ventilation, his first words were, Why did you rescue me? It was so beautiful, I witnessed my whole life flow by, I saw the good and the evil, the light and the shadows. I had no sense of apprehension until I saw a kaleidoscope of colours and lost consciousness. That experience is unforgettable. If he had drowned then, it might have changed the course of German history.

In 1871, First Officer Tirpitz became Vice-Commander on the gunboat Blitz on the Elbe. A year later he embarked on the battle frigate Friedrich Karl, whose mission was to protect German citizens in coastal cities in southern Spain during the civil war there. As soon as Whitehead invented the torpedo, General von Stosch¹¹ introduced it in the Imperial Navy only to discover that the launching of that torpedo was less dangerous for the enemy than for the launchers themselves. Stosch therefore asked for advice from his naval officers. Tirpitz’s analysis proved the most original. He complained that the Admiralty had left to the discretion of naval construction firms important considerations such as sea-worthiness, speed, size and price, whereas it is the strategic idea of the ship which must be firmly determined before anything else … only the supreme naval command, and not the firm, can decide this.¹² At the end of 1877, Tirpitz was assigned to visit the Whitehead Torpedo Centre at Fiume (Austria),¹³ where he managed to resell to Whitehead half the torpedoes that had been bought and had proved defective. When he returned to Germany he was placed in charge of torpedo development for the German navy. He accepted with enthusiasm. I was glad when the torpedo boat brought me back to my natural field of activity, viz. tactics" – he wrote.¹⁴

His big opportunity came in May 1878, when as Commander of the Zieten