Background
Eduard von Capelle was born at Celle on October 10, 1855, the son of a factory owner.
Eduard von Capelle was born at Celle on October 10, 1855, the son of a factory owner.
Capelle entered the newly formed Imperial German Navy in 1872, and after several board commands was assigned to the Navy Office. By 1897 he had become Admiral Alfred Tirpitz's most trusted aide and expert on budgetary matters; Capelle worked out the details of Tirpitz's Navy Bills of 1898 and 1900, being careful to make the navy as independent of parliament as possible. Capelle showed great skill in handling deputies in naval matters, plying them with a combination of flattery, statistics, and sea cruises. He was promoted captain in 1900, rear admiral four years later, and vice admiral in 1909. Capelle was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of naval expansion by being raised into the Prussian nobility in 1912; he was promoted admiral the following year.
Entering the war as chief of the Administrative Department of the Navy Office, Capelle was concurrently appointed under secretary of the Navy Office. He had from the start thought British neutrality unlikely, yet he shared Tirpitz's fears that the war had come five years too early, before the fleet stood a genuine chance of success against the Royal Navy.
In August 1915, Capelle became very ill, and on November 1, at age sixty, was removed from the active list. On March 17, 1916, however, he was reactivated and replaced Tirpitz as state secretary as a result of the grand admiral's resignation over Wilhelm II's refusal to continue submarine warfare a outrance. Capelle's willingness to succeed his erstwhile chief brought him from fellow naval officers the nickname Judas Iscariot. Above all, Capelle was installed at the Navy Office with implicit instructions to cooperate with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in the matter of submarine warfare.
The new state secretary opposed the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare loyally throughout 1916, but on January 9, 1917, gave in to the demands of Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff and Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. However, Capelle greatly feared the future of a navy totally devoted to guerre de course. As early as January 1917, he foresaw the need to create a "special cemetery" for the U-boats being built, and in October asked Holtzendorff to rescind "unlimited construction orders," since these would seriously jeopardize promotion and battleship building. Indeed, the exigencies of the war at sea forced Capelle to abandon Tirpitz's master plan of a fleet of sixty capital units and instead to divert available funds and materials to small craft, such as submarines, destroyers and cruisers.
Capelle's critical hour came in August 1917, when several hundred sailors rebelled against the fleet's failure to institute special food supervisory commitees promised by him in parliament. Rather than force naval commanders to carry out his order, Capelle chose to blame the unrest in the fleet on the alleged machinations of the Independent Socialists (USPD) and to ask parliament to outlaw that party. Moreover, he demanded the death penalty for the rebellious sailors. The state secretary was only partially successful: on September 5 two of the leaders of the sailors' movement were executed, but the Reichstag refused to endorse his political stricture when Friedrich Ebert declared on behalf of the Social Democrats (SPD), "We shall be glad for every day sooner that the German people are freed from this government." Capelle bore the brunt of the resulting criticism for his blunder in the Reichstag and on October 13 drafted a letter of resignation. The kaiser refused to change command at the Navy Office and thereby to revive calls for Tirpitz's return.
The state secretary continued in office as a lame duck until the fall of 1918. On August 11, Admiral Reinhard Scheer assumed control through the newly created Supreme Command of the Navy, and Capelle was forced to retire on October 9, 1918, as part of the overall reorganization. He died in Wiesbaden on February 23, 1931. Without the charisma of Tirpitz or Scheer and with a penchant primarily for fiscal detail, Capelle proved unable to master the political furor aroused by the issues of unrestricted submarine warfare and sailors' revolts.