German pocket battleship Deutschland
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| Career | 
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| Ordered: | |
| Laid down: | February 5 1929 |
| Launched: | May 19 1931 |
| Commissioned: | April 1 1933 |
| Fate: | Scuttled |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 12,100 t standard; 16,200 t full load |
| Length: | 610 ft (186 m) |
| Beam: | 71 ft (21.6 m) |
| Draft (max.): | 24 ft (7.4 m) |
| Armament: | Six 11 inch (280 mm) guns (2 triple turrets), eight 5.9 inch (150 mm) guns, eight 21 inch (530 mm) torpedo tubes (2 quadruple) |
| Armor: | 5.5 inch (140 mm) turret face, 2.3 inch (58 mm) midships belt, 1.6 inch (41 mm) deck |
| Aircraft: | Two Arado 196 seaplanes, one catapult |
| Propulsion: | Eight MAN diesels, two screws, 52,050 hp (40 MW) |
| Speed: | 28.5 knots (53 km/h) |
| Range: | 8,900 nautical miles at 20 knots (16,500 km at 37 km/h) |
| Crew: | 1,150 |
Deutschland ("Germany"), later re-named Lützow, was the first German large armoured ship built after World War I.
Its keel was laid down in February 1929, at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel, and launched in May 1931. It completed fitting out in late 1932 and took its maiden voyage in May 1932.
Its size and characteristics where severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles, which limited Germany to ships of no more than 10,000 tons displacement. A number of technical innovations used by the Germans to build a formidable warship within this restricted weight. Even so, the Deutschland was 600 tons overweight, although for political reasons its announced displacement was always given as the 10,000 tons of the treaty limit.
Two other very similar (but not identical) ships were built in its class, the Admiral Graf Spee and the Admiral Scheer. The class was termed Panzerschiff ("armoured ship"); they were designated "pocket battleships" by the British because of their characteristics: their guns (6 x 28 cm in two turrets) were substantially bigger than those of the heavy cruisers of her time, but they were faster (and much less armoured) than the standard battleships.
After the start of World War II, she was renamed Lützow in November 1939 because Adolf Hitler feared that the loss a ship with the name "Germany" would have a significant negative psychological and propaganda effect.
In February 1940 she and her sisterships were re-classified as heavy cruisers, and in April of that year she participated in the invasion of Norway. Lützow was then to return to Germany to refit for an extended raiding cruise into the Atlantic, but was torpedoed by the british submarine Spearfish in the Skagerrak north of Jutland. The hit nearly tore of the entire stern of the ship and repairs were not finished until late 1941.
She participated in various minor events during the next years, but her only other significant service came starting in September 1944 in the Baltic Sea when she fired on land targets in support of the retreating German army, a service she would continue to provide in the subsequent months.
The ship was badly damaged by three 6-ton Tallboy bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force in April 1945 as it lay off Swinemünde, and it came to rest on the bottom. It was repaired, and then did further support of the army; it was finally scuttled by its crew on 4 May 1945.
After the war, the Soviet navy raised her and used her as a target ship for artillery practice. As such, she finally sank in the Baltic Sea in 1949.
Further reading
- Siegfried Breyer, Gerhard Koop, (translated Edward Force), The German Navy At War 1939-1945: Volume 1 - The Battleships (Schiffer, West Chester, 1989)
- Bernard Ireland, Tony Gibbons, Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century (HarperCollins, New York, 1996) pp. 42-43de:Panzerschiff Lützow