four ships were interned at Scapa Flow after the war, where they were scuttled on 21 June 1919. Grosser Kurfürst was raised in 1938 and broken up, but the other three vessels remain on the sea floor, where they remain popular diving sites. Background The König-class battleships were authorized in the context of the early-20th-century Anglo-German naval arms race, under the Second Amendment to the Naval Law, which had been passed in 1908 as a response to the revolution in naval technology created with the launch of the British in 1906. Many of the world's navies began building their own dreadnought battleships, which were significantly larger—and correspondingly more expensive—than the old pre-dreadnought battleships. The Germans began their own, the , in 1907, followed by the in 1908. As a result, the funds that had been appropriated for the Navy in the First Amendment, passed in 1906, were going to be used up before they were scheduled to be replenished in 1911. In the terms of the First Amendment to the Naval Law of 1906, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had requested but failed to secure funding for new battleships; they had now been approved by the under the 1908 amendment. Along with appropriating funds to continue the pace of battleship construction prescribed under the Naval Law, the new amendment also increased the naval budget by an additional 1billion marks. Tirpitz had initially planned on building four new capital ships per year, including battlecruisers, but the increased cost of the new ships forced him to reduce the number of ships laid down per year to two beginning in the 1912 fiscal year and continuing through 1917. Another effect of the 1908 amendment was to reduce the service life of all large warships from twenty-five years to twenty; this was done in an effort to force the to allocate more funds for additional ships, since vessels would then need to be replaced sooner than originally planned. In his effort to force the to pass the bill, Tirpitz threatened to resign from his post as the State Secretary for the Navy. As a result of Tirpitz's ultimatum, the bill was passed in March 1908 by a large margin. The reduction in service life necessitated the replacement of the coastal defense ships of the and es as well as the s. The followed the Helgolands and replaced the remaining coastal defense ships, leaving the Brandenburgs