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German rearmament (Aufrüstung, German pronunciation: [ˈaʊ̯fˌʀʏstʊŋ]) was a policy and practice of rearmament carried out by Germany from 1918 to 1939 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which required German disarmament after World War I to prevent it from starting another war.
West Germany joins NATO: Walter Hallstein (left) and Konrad Adenauer (centre) at the NATO Conference in Paris in 1954. West German rearmament (German: Wiederbewaffnung) began in the decades after World War II. Fears of another rise of German militarism caused the new military to operate within an alliance framework, under NATO command. [1]
The German government needed to spend a large amount of money to fund the Depression-era reconstruction of its heavy industry based economy and, ultimately, its re-armament industry. However, it faced two problems. First, rearmament was illegal under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and secondly there was a legal interest-rate limit of 4.5%.
After the Nazi regime took power in January 1933, Germany began working towards rearmament and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. On 7 March 1936, using the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance as a pretext, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to march 20,000 German troops into the Rhineland, which caused joyous celebrations across Germany.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hitler soon began to more brazenly ignore many of the Treaty restrictions and accelerated German naval rearmament. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 18 June 1935 allowed Germany to build a navy equivalent to 35% of the British surface ship tonnage and 45% of British submarine tonnage; battleships were to ...
The navy was also prioritized last in the German rearmament scheme, making it the smallest of the branches. [84] [85] In the Battle of the Atlantic, the initially successful German U-boat fleet arm was eventually defeated due to Allied technological innovations like sonar, radar, and the breaking of the Enigma code. [86]
Ralph Follett Wigram CMG (/ r eɪ f ˈ w ɪ ɡ r əm / rayf WIG-rəm; 23 October 1890 – 31 December 1936) was a British government official in the Foreign Office.He helped raise the alarm about German rearmament under Hitler during the period prior to World War II.
In early March 1935, talks intended to discuss the scale and extent of German rearmament in Berlin between Hitler and Simon were postponed when Hitler took offence at a British government White Paper that justified a higher defence budget under the grounds that Germany was violating the Versailles Treaty, and Hitler claimed to have contracted a ...