The agreement with Britain allowed Germany to build 50,000 tons’ worth of heavy cruisers: five 10,000-ton ships armed with 8-inch main guns. Building the ships would show the world that Germany had broken its diplomatic isolation and put the limits of the Versailles Treaty firmly in the past. But Adolf Hitler had wrung the right to build such ships out of the British, and believed it politically important to follow through with the concession. The type did not really fulfill any of the fleet profiles proposed by the naval staff’s various and bitterly-opposed factions. Once the naval provisions of Versailles had been swept away, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler believed the political, economic and military clauses would follow (correctly, as things turned out). Unilaterally, the British had erased the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, which forbade German cruisers with main guns larger than 150mm (5.9-inch). Germany’s Kriegsmarine officially added heavy cruisers to its fleet planning after the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed construction of such ships.
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