This plan required the battleships and cruisers of the imperial navy to stay in port until they could safely sail. Regrettably for German naval pride, which should have been high after the apparent successes of Jutland, the U-boat threat was conquered and valuable ships slowly rusted at their moorings. Further ignominy was to come, for after the war Allied forces impounded great sections of the German fleet, especially at Scapa Flow where ships were scuttled rather than surrendered. Finally, the Treaty of Versailles banned the new Weimar government in Germany from owning any craft larger than 10,000 tons. Thus, by 1920 the once proud Imperial German Navy, a well-trained military force which had been borne out of considerable rivalry with the British in the early 1900's, was reduced to a set of small and obsolete craft bereft of capital ships.
This general dismemberment created considerable pressure within the navy, government and some sections of society: they wanted to regain their pride and rebuild the fleet. Indeed, this movement began well over a decade before Hitler, the figure chiefly associated with the re-emergence of Germany's military might, rose to power. Pressure, whether seen as a 'head of steam' or an unhealed wound, grew over the next few years, aggravated partly by the rise of the US navy as a rival to Britain instead of Germany. Naval engineers responded to these pressures by building a new line of ships in 1929: the Deutschland class were compact, heavy cruisers that remained within the terms of the Versailles treaty; crucially, they could be, and were, promoted to the German public as 'pocket battleships'. This might have eased some tensions, but the Deutschland class were flawed craft that paled in comparison to other nation's capital ships, especially the Hood.
If pro-naval pressures existed before the Third Reich, they were increased greatly under it. Hitler responded swiftly, commissioning two battlecruisers that flaunted the demands of Versailles, but steps were taken in 1936 to negate the hated 'diktat': the German and British governments signed the London Naval treaty, an agreement which allowed both nations to build 31,000 ton ships. Of course, the German naval renaissance wasn't occurring simply for show. Very real military pressures, not least of which were the French government's new Dunkerque battlecruisers and the unpredictable Soviet navy in the Baltic, were being felt by the increasingly militant Reich.
Initial German developments were simply offshoots of the Deustchland craft, but that changed as the 1930's progressed. The Nazi's, as history has confirmed countless times, wanted to expand Germany and make her great, a process that heavily incorporated martial prowess and territorial expansion. There would have to be a great Nazi fleet, and it needed a ship to make the nation proud: battleship F. Laid down in 1936, battleship F was to be the most powerful battleship ever built, incorporating state of the art technology, massive armour, thundering guns and great speed; it was also to ignore the considerations of any naval treaty. Intended as status symbols for the German Reich, two were produced: the Tirpitz and Bismarck. The latter was named after Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian and German chancellor whose name was synonymous with German 'greatness' and empire.
The Bismarck was already legendary when Hitler launched it on February 14th 1939. 50,900 tons of awe-inspiring strength, "a distillation of capital-ship power" (Mearns and White, Hood and Bismarck, p. 33) which pushed naval expectations further than ever, the Nazi's swiftly imbued it with meaning: a representation of German - and Nazi - power, modernity and quality, a giant battleship which would dominate the seas on behalf of the Third Reich. Indeed, for Hitler the Bismarck was more of a symbol than a weapon. When war was declared on Germany in September 1939 the Bismarck wasn't rushed into combat because Hitler was afraid his great capital ship might be crippled or sunk, damaging the Reich's reputation. Instead, the Bismarck fought via its reputation, causing fear and wonder in others until Hitler was persuaded to change his mind.
