Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow, 1919

The armistice of 11 November 1918 stopped the fighting in the First World War, but it did not end it. Among its terms, Germany had to hand over its submarines and 74 warships of the High Seas Fleet for internment at an Allied base while the peace was negotiated. With much of the fleet controlled by sailors' councils after the November revolution, getting the ships to sea was not simple. They sailed from Wilhelmshaven from 18 November under Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, the officer chosen by Admiral Hipper to lead them into captivity.²

Into captivity

Off the Firth of Forth the German ships were met by more than 250 Allied warships with guns and torpedo tubes manned. At sunset Admiral David Beatty ordered the German flags hauled down, not to be raised again without his permission, an insult the German officers never forgot. Only after Rosyth did Reuter learn the fleet's final destination: Scapa Flow, a great natural harbor in the Orkney Islands.³

Internment there was closer to imprisonment. About 20,000 officers and men arrived, but Reuter sent the least reliable and the most revolutionary home, until some 1,800 hand-picked men were left as skeleton crews. They were not allowed to leave their own ships, let alone go ashore. Food came from Germany, fresh water was bought locally, and crews supplemented their diet with fish caught in the torpedo nets and gulls shot from the decks.⁴

Paragraph eleven

In May 1919 the Allies published their peace terms. They cut the German navy to a fraction of its size and divided the interned ships among the victors. Reuter decided they would not be handed over. His plan matured in secret, because he feared the revolutionary sailors would betray it, and on 17 June his written orders went round the fleet, carried, without knowing it, by the British guard trawlers.⁵

The morning of 21 June, midsummer's day, began quietly. The British 1st Battle Squadron under Vice Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle had left the Flow for a torpedo exercise. At 11 a.m. Reuter's flagship, the light cruiser Emden, hoisted a harmless-looking signal: "Paragraph eleven. Confirm." Across the anchorage, crews opened seacocks and torpedo tubes, smashed pipes and threw valve wheels overboard so the flooding could not be stopped.⁶

The fleet goes down

The first sign the British noticed was a sound. At 12.16 p.m. shore parties heard the bell of the battleship Friedrich der Grosse tolling as she began to list. Half an hour later the König Albert followed, and the calm water of the Flow turned into what the Scapa Flow centenary project calls seething pandemonium. Four British destroyers came racing back at about 2.30 p.m. German crews took to the boats with their hands raised while the guard ships opened fire on them, not yet understanding what was happening.⁷

The British could do little. They managed to tow or push some ships ashore, among them Reuter's Emden, the battleship Baden and several light cruisers and destroyers. Around 2 p.m. the official photographer C. W. Burrows caught the battleship Bayern sinking by the stern, the picture at the top of this page. At 4.45 p.m. the battleship Markgraf rolled over. By evening only upturned hulls, beached ships and the funnels of the battlecruiser Hindenburg were left above the water.⁸

The sources differ on the tally. German History in Documents and Images counts 52 of the 74 ships sunk; the Scapa Flow centenary project counts 54. The day also cost lives. Nine German sailors died, among them Korvettenkapitän Walter Schumann of the Markgraf, and they are counted as the last German dead of the First World War. One more, Kuno Eversberg of the cruiser Frankfurt, was shot aboard HMS Resolution on the night of 23 to 24 June. Most are buried in the naval cemetery at Lyness on Hoy.⁹

Prisoners and scrap

Sinking the ships broke the armistice, so Reuter and his men became prisoners of war. They spent months in a camp at Park Hall near Oswestry and returned to Germany in January 1920, after the Treaty of Versailles came into force, to a welcome as heroes. The Allies demanded compensation for the lost ships. For Orkney the wrecks became an industry. Some 417,000 tons of steel lay on the bottom, and from the 1920s salvage firms such as Ernest Cox's raised battleships and battlecruisers that had been built to fight at Dogger Bank and Jutland. In a few hours on 21 June, as the centenary project puts it, the German navy had sunk more steel than had ever gone down in history, and done to itself what the Royal Navy had failed to do at Jutland.¹⁰