Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
TARIH INCELEMELERI DERGISI, cilt.36, sa.2, ss.421-442, 2021 (ESCI)
This article, which was mainly written in the light of German military archive documents, is about the information and technology transfer between Turkish and German naval forces in the years between the two World Wars. Germany's submarine production, whose sovereignty was limited in military areas as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, was also banned in the same context. For this reason, in order to overcome the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany continued its activities covertly between 1922 and 1933, with its own engineers, as a shipbuilding and submarine export center, through Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw company operating in the Netherlands. In this way, Germans continued to keep their knowledge fresh through the development of submarine technology. The Turkish navy, which was one of the first buyers of the enterprise, which consisted of German personnel, offered German submarine engineers, technical personnel and ship commanders the opportunity to practice their training and knowledge in Istanbul as a result of the extinction of the German submarine fleet in accordance with the Versailles Treaty. This also provided the opportunity for the submarines they produced for the German navy to be tested in Turkey by their own personnel. Therefore, Turkey, together with Argentina, Spain and Finland, stood out as one of the important operation centers of German submarines until the beginning of the Second World War. The key point in the Turkish authorities' preference for German submarines in this process is Germany's experience in this field and the fact that compared to the UK, which has an important tradition in submarines, its colonial ambitions on Turkey's geography were shelved until Hitler's rule after the First World War.