was the lead ship of her class of heavy cruisers (often termed pocket battleships) which served with the of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ordered by the Weimar government for the , she was laid down at the shipyard in Kiel in February 1929 and completed by April 1933. Originally classified as an armored ship () by the , in February 1940 the Germans reclassified the remaining two ships of this class as heavy cruisers. In 1940, she was renamed , after the unfinished heavy cruiser was sold to the Soviet Union the previous year.
The ship saw significant action with the , including several non-intervention patrols in the Spanish Civil War, during which she was attacked by Republican bombers in the Deutschland incident. At the outbreak of World War II, she was cruising the North Atlantic, prepared to attack Allied merchant traffic. Bad weather hampered her efforts, and she sank or captured only a handful of vessels before returning to Germany. She then participated in Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Norway. Damaged at the Battle of Drøbak Sound, she was recalled to Germany for repairs. While en route, she was torpedoed and seriously damaged by the British submarine HMS Spearfish.
Repairs were completed by March 1941, and in June she left Germany for a commerce raiding operation in the Atlantic. Before reaching the Atlantic, she was torpedoed by a British aircraft and had to return. After repairs, returned to Norway to join the forces arrayed against Allied shipping to the Soviet Union. She ran aground during Operation Rösselsprung, a planned attack on Convoy PQ 17, and returned to Germany for repairs. She next saw action at the Battle of the Barents Sea with the heavy cruiser , which ended with a failure to destroy Convoy JW 51B. Engine problems forced a series of repairs culminating in a complete overhaul at the end of 1943, after which the ship remained in the Baltic as a training ship. In October 1944 re-entered front line service with Task Force Thiele, participating in shore bombardments of Russian positions in support of the German army. Sunk in shallow waters in the in April 1945 by Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers, was used as a stationary gun battery until 4 May 1945, when she was disabled by her crew. Raised by the Soviet Navy in 1947, she was subsequently sunk as a target in the Baltic.
Design
was long overall and had a beam of and a maximum draft of . The ship had a design displacement of and a full load displacement of , though the ship was officially stated to be within the limit of the Treaty of Versailles. was powered by four sets of MAN 9-cylinder double-acting two-stroke diesel engines. The ship's top speed was , at . At a cruising speed of , the ship could steam for .
Since the Treaty of Versailles limited the total strength of the to 10,000 men, could not take on a full complement. Only 33 officers, 595 enlisted men and 15 civilians could be taken aboard, 474 of them came from the light cruiser , which was temporarily decommissioned to provide men for . After 1935, when Adolf Hitler renounced the Treaty of Versailles and concluded the Anglo-German Naval Agreement these restrictions were lifted and received a full complement of 43 officers, 943 sailors and 14 civilians. When prepared for war patrols, more officers and crew were taken aboard in order to establish prize crews for captured merchant ships.
s primary armament was six SK C/28 guns mounted in two triple gun turrets, one forward and one aft of the superstructure. The ship carried a secondary battery of eight SK C/28 guns in single turrets grouped amidships. Her anti-aircraft battery originally consisted of three L/45 guns, though in 1935 these were replaced with six 8.8 cm L/78 guns. Two SL-2 stabilized anti-aircraft director posts were also installed for these guns, one above the signals bridge and one abaft the funnel. In 1940, the 8.8 cm guns were removed, and six L/65 guns, four guns, and ten guns were installed in their place. By the end of the war, her anti-aircraft battery had again been reorganized, consisting of six L/60 guns, ten 3.7 cm guns, and twenty-eight 2 cm guns.
The ship also carried a pair of quadruple deck-mounted torpedo tubes placed on her stern. The ship was initially not equipped with seaplanes but became in 1935 the first German warship to install a catapult, seaplane handling cranes and a Heinkel He 60 floatplane. s armored belt was thick; her upper deck was thick while the main armored deck was thick. The main battery turrets had thick faces and 80 mm thick sides. In Autumn 1937 a FMG G(gO) "Seetakt" set radar operating on a Wavelength of 80 cm was installed; in 1942, a FuMO 26 set was added.
Service history
was ordered by the Reichsmarine from the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel as , a replacement for the old pre-dreadnought battleship . Her keel was laid on 5 February 1929, under construction number 219. The ship was launched on 19 May 1931; at her launching, the ship accidentally started sliding down the slipway while German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning was giving the christening speech and before German President Paul von Hindenburg could christen the ship with the traditional bottle of Sekt. After the completion of fitting out work, initial sea trials began in November 1932. The ship was commissioned into the on 1 April 1933.
spent the majority of 1933 and 1934 conducting training maneuvers; early speed trials in May 1933 indicated that a top speed of was preferable, but the ship comfortably reached on speed trials in June. Trials were completed by December 1933, and the ship was ready for active service with the fleet. The ship also made a series of goodwill visits to foreign ports, including visits to Gothenburg, Sweden, and in October 1934, a formal state visit to Edinburgh, Scotland. In April 1934, Adolf Hitler visited the ship; he reportedly toured the ship alone, speaking informally with crewmen.
The ship conducted a series of long-distance training voyages into the Atlantic in 1935. In March 1935, she sailed as far as the Caribbean and South American waters. After returning to Germany, she went into dock for routine maintenance work, as well as installation of additional equipment. She had her aircraft catapult installed in this period, and was provided with a He 60 floatplane. The first He 60 was damaged during the tests with a new helping device for landing and recovering floatplanes, and a replacement He 60 was flown in. participated in fleet maneuvers in German waters in early 1936. She was joined by her newly commissioned sister ship for a cruise into the mid-Atlantic, which included a stop in Madeira.
Spanish Civil War
Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and were deployed to the Spanish coast on 23 July 1936 to cover the evacuation of diplomatic personnel and civilians from Spanish ports. At the end of August, she assisted in the evacuation of San Sebastián, Bilbao, Santander, Gijón and A Coruña on the Atlantic coast, followed in July by Cádiz, Almería, Ceuta, Málaga, Alicante, Valencia and Barcelona. During the deployment, her gun turrets were painted with large black, white, and red bands to aid in identification from the air and indicate her neutral status. By end October, the German navy had evacuated 15,317 people, amongst them many foreigners. On 31 August, was back in Wilhelmshaven.
On 1 October, left Germany for Spain on her first non-intervention patrol off the Republican-held coast of Spain. Her duties during the deployment included evacuating refugees fleeing from the fighting, protecting German ships carrying supplies for Francisco Franco's Nationalists, and gathering intelligence for the Nationalists. On 21 November, the ship was back in Germany but left from Kiel for her third patrol on 31 January 1937. On this patrol, her main duty was to control Spanish ships in the Mediterranean Sea and verify if a Non-Intervention Committee observer was aboard in order to avoid the transport of arms or international volunteers trying to join the Republican side. In April, returned to Germany but on 10 May the ship embarked upon her fourth patrol. By this time the Non-Intervention Committee had divided the Spanish coast in four sectors and Germany was allocated the coast between Portugal and Valencia. made a visit to the British base in Gibraltar and participated in exercises together with a British and an Italian cruiser.
On 24 May 1937, the ship was docked in the port of Palma on the island of Mallorca, along with several other neutral warships, including vessels from the British and Italian navies. The port was attacked by Republican aircraft, though anti-aircraft fire from the warships drove them off. The torpedo boats and escorted to the island of Ibiza on 26 May. While moored in port there, she was again attacked on 29 May by Republican bombers; a pair of Soviet-built SB-2 bombers, secretly flown by Soviet Air Force pilots, bombed the ship. At the same time four Republican destroyers shelled the port with inaccurate fire. Two bombs struck the ship; the first penetrated the upper deck near the bridge and exploded above the main armored deck while the second hit near the third starboard 15 cm gun. Splinters from this hit perforated the seaplane fuel tanks and set it on fire, the burning fuel igniting the munitions for the starboard 15 cm guns. The first hit caused serious fires below decks. The attack killed 31 German sailors and wounded 74.
quickly weighed anchor and left port. She rendezvoused with to take on additional doctors before proceeding to Gibraltar where the dead were buried with full military honors. Ten days later, however, Hitler ordered the men be exhumed and returned for burial in Germany. The ship's wounded men were also evacuated in Gibraltar for treatment. Hitler, furious over the attack, ordered to bombard the port of Almería in retaliation for the so-called "Deutschland incident". Stalin subsequently issued orders that further attacks on German and Italian warships were strictly prohibited. On 15 June, was back in Wilhelmshaven where the 31 deceased sailors were buried. Repairs of the bomb damage took ten days. On 1 October, KzS Paul Wenneker took command of . His first assignment was taking the ship once more to patrol off Spain to protect merchant shipping. During this patrol she was replenished in Italian ports. In February 1938 she was back in Germany. By now the ship had sailed over 130,000 nautical miles and her motor room was in need of an extensive overhaul. Especially the diesel engine mountings proved to be too fragile and suffered from cracking.
Pre-war maneuvers Rising tensions with France and the UK during the Sudeten crisis in September 1938 led to war preparations: on 20 September left Germany to take up a position in the Mid-Atlantic in order to wage commerce raiding on the shipping lanes to South America and Cape of Good Hope. The replenishment oiler was also sent into the Atlantic to support during her operations, but first replenished from the tanker in the Spanish port Vigo. There she made the first operational use of her Seetakt radar to slip out of Vigo in dense fog, and escaped her British shadowers. With the Munich Agreement on 29 September, a war was avoided. continued her patrol for training purposes. She simulated war operations together with the U-boats and . It proved to be too difficult to direct U-boats operating independently from a ship at sea, and as a result, the advocated by Karl Dönitz became more prominent. paid a visit to Tangier and Gibraltar before returning to Germany. Between 6 and 26 February the ship was again in Spanish waters, for gunnery exercises and visits to Palma, Tenerife and Ferrol.