Jutland 2e:
Tirpitz’s Battleships, Part Five
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2025

Germany paused her battleship building following the Deutschland class pre-dreadnoughts. While some secondary sources attribute this to the appearance of the revolutionary British battleship Dreadnought in 1906, this was only a tangential reason. The German Navy stopped building battleships because the money had run out.

Imperial Germany’s political system didn’t provide for long-term appropriations, like those needed for building battleships. These had to be enshrined in a separate law, as had been done to build State Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz’s so-called risk fleet to date. The Naval Laws had provided for 20 battleships so far, half of them hopelessly out-classed by British ships and the other half only somewhat out-classed by their potential rivals.

Dreadnought probably couldn’t sink all twenty by herself, but a huge gap in capability yawned between Dreadnought and Deutschland. The next class of battleships would have to be much more capable, meaning larger and more expensive. Adding to the financial challenge, rapid inflation gripped German industry at the time, fueled in large part by the monopolies held by the Krupp conglomerate (allowing them to set prices where they wished). In terms of naval construction, Krupp kept a hammerlock on hardened-steel armor and relentlessly gouged the Navy. Tirpitz tried to work around this by encouraging other German mills to enter to armor market, and by buying armor from American suppliers, but these sources could not provide the quality and quantity offered by Krupp. On top of that, the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal linking the North and Baltic Seas would have to be enlarged to accommodate a larger battleship.

Undeterred, Tirpitz marshaled his political forces, consisting of the German Naval League outside the Reichstag, and the coalition of industrial and agricultural interests within the chamber. The shipyards and steel mills obviously favored more battleships; Tirpitz sold his program to the farmers by appealing to their desire to see the Empire grow in power and prestige.

The Nassau class (right) with pre-dreadnoughts of the II Squadron (left), seen pre-war.

The 1906 and 1908 Supplementary Naval Laws would be addenda to the 1900 Naval Law under which those last ten pre-dreadnoughts had been built. Between them, they authorized six large cruisers for overseas stations (one of which would be in reserve). Tirpitz lost his bid for six new battleships, but pulled off a bait-and-switch by accepting the consolation prize of a service life of 20 years for battleships (down from the previous 25 years). That allowed the Navy to replace up to three ships per year, which at this point satisfied Tirpitz, since he intended to do so with far more capable ships. In addition to that, work on improving the canal began in 1907, widening the channel and adding two new locks to allow passage by much larger battleships.

With the new battleships funded, and new “great cruisers” (battle cruisers) now enjoying a separate funding stream, Germany’s first dreadnought could begin construction. The design process had been under way for several years, progressing from a semi-dreadnought (with a mixed main battery of four 280mm and eight 240mm guns), through a small dreadnought that could fit through the pre-modernization Kiel Canal (with eight 280mm guns). Those ships, and their stories, are included in our Risk Fleet book.

The design chosen for the new battleship, to be named Nassau, would carry a dozen 280mm guns in six twin turrets, a clear evolution from Deutschland through the semi-dreadnought and small dreadnought designs. Kaiser Wilhelm II had final approval, and disliked the relatively low speed of the ship, urging an improvement to 22 knots. That would make her faster than Dreadnought, and as fast as most contemporary armored cruisers. Perhaps it was time, the Supreme Warlord suggested, for the two types to converge into one.

The ”type question” (Typenfrage) would be a centerpiece of German naval discussion for the next decade, until Tirpitz lost his job in March 1916 and wartime measures had already rendered the question moot. Under the Supplements, Tirpitz had established separate funding for great cruisers and battleships. Should they become one type, he feared (probably correctly) that the funding line for great cruisers would be lost, and the big, fast ships would count against the battleship total. Therefore, Tirpitz actually wanted a less capable ship, and somehow convinced his kaiser to go along.

Nassau, seen in 1910 when brand.new.

The choice fell on Design G, an 18,000-ton ship carrying a dozen 280mm guns in six twin turrets, all on the same level with one each fore and aft and the other four in the “corner” positions. She would retain the triple-expansion engines of the later Deutschland-class ships, with a dozen water-tube boilers, fired by coal, in three boiler rooms.

Secret Senior Designer Hans Bürkner drafted the ship design. Tirpitz told him to maximize the ship’s “unseen” qualities, especially her underwater protection. She had a double bottom, and the “honeycomb” internal structure with 16 watertight compartments in the lead ship (Nassau) and 19 in her three sisters. Belt armor extended over most of the ship’s length, with a maximum thickness of 300mm, tapering down at its upper and lower edges. By comparison, the last pre-dreadnought (Schleswig-Holstein) had a maximum belt thickness of 240mm, while the rival Dreadnought carried 279mm.

The Germans considered their new-model 280mm SK/L45 superior to the British 12-inch Mark X (305mm) that armed the early British dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, despite its smaller caliber. The British gun threw a heavier shell (386 kilograms, compared to 302 kilograms for the German weapon) and had substantially better penetration, but the German gun fired twice as fast and had approximately the same range.

The unsatisfactory 170mm secondary guns of the latter pre-dreadnoughts gave way to the new 15cm SK L/45, a reliable weapon with a high rate of fire. Nassau carried a dozen of them in a casemate battery, and sixteen 88mm guns for defense against enemy torpedo boats.

Battleship Posen on trials.

Nassau had a rather squat hull form, shorter and beamier than Dreadnought, and despite making 26,000 horsepower (compared to 23,000 horses for Dreadnought), she only barely touched 20 knots, a full knot slower than the British ship. She had a much larger crew; over 1,000 officers and men for Nassau, 700 for Dreadnought; Nassau had two more heavy guns than the British ship.

Two ships were authorized under the 1906 Naval Budget, and two more under the 1907 appropriations. All four were laid down in 1907, Nassau at the Wilhelmshaven Naval Shipyard and the other three at private builders. Officially the four ships replaced the four decrepit armored corvettes of the Sachsen class, built in the mid-1870’s and still around thanks to an ill-advised reconstruction under the watch of Tirpitz’s predecessor, Friedrich von Hollman. Unable to obtain funding for new ships, Hollman had resorted to the expedient (common in many navies) of reconstructing old ships, which could often be sold to parsimonious legislators as “cost-effective.” Their continued existence allowed Tirpitz to use them in his bureaucratic maneuver, creating authorization for four new battleships where his enemies thought to fund none.

Rheinland unloads German troops in the Åland Islands.

Nassau and her sister Westfalen commissioned in 1909, with Rheinland and Posen following a year later. They initially joined the I Squadron of the High Seas Fleet, and spent the pre-war years in full commission training with the rest of the active fleet. They took part in all of the High Seas Fleet’s operations during the war. None of them sustained a heavy-caliber hit during the Battle of Jutland; Nassau suffered minor damage when she rammed the British destroyer Spitfire. Posen rammed and sank the German light cruiser Elbing. Nassau suffered two hits from secondary shells, with 11 men killed and 20 wounded. Rheinland and Westfalen took one hit each; the former had ten dead and 20 wounded, the latter two dead and eight wounded. Posen was not hit at all.

All four ships took part in the August 1916 German probe into the North Sea, where Westfalen was torpedoed but suffered only minor damage. They steamed into the Baltic for the invasion of the Estonian islands in October 1917. In April 1918 Rheinland ran aground off the Åland Islands west of Finland; she was salvaged only with difficulty and would never be repaired, becoming a barracks ship. Westfalen suffered a major boiler accident in August 1918 and afterwards became a gunnery training ship.

The Nassau class were not required to be interned after the war, and so did not go the Scapa Flow with the newer dreadnoughts and the battle cruisers. After the fleet’s sailors scuttled their ships in June 1919 the Nassaus were seized and parceled out to Allied nations as war reparations; all of them were broken up for scrap.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his new puppy. His Iron Dog, Leopold,would have fitted flash baffles on his ships.

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