The launch of the Deutschland

On 19 May 1931, at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel, the armoured ship Deutschland was launched – the first large warship built in Germany since the First World War. The ceremony was attended by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, who acted as the ship’s sponsor, and by Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Popular accounts sometimes call the Deutschland the first cruiser of its type. At the time of her launch, however, she was in German terminology an armoured ship (Panzerschiff), built as a replacement for the old battleship Preussen. The German navy reclassified her as a heavy cruiser only at the turn of 1939 and 1940, while the British press called her a “pocket battleship” from the outset. The ship complied with the limits of the Treaty of Versailles only on paper. In practice she was something the victors of 1918 had not foreseen: a vessel capable of waging war on the high seas rather than merely defending her own coast.

A loophole in the treaty

The Treaty of Versailles limited the German navy to 15,000 men, six old battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats, and forbade it submarines. Article 190 permitted old ships to be replaced by new ones only after twenty years’ service, and a new armoured ship could displace no more than 10,000 tons. The treaty did not, however, specify what calibre of guns such a ship might carry, nor exactly how displacement was to be calculated. The Allies assumed that within such a limit Germany could build at most slow coastal-defence ships, like those of the Scandinavian navies. By comparison, the Washington Naval Treaty allowed the great powers to build battleships of up to 35,000 tons.

The oldest German battleship, the Preussen, launched in 1903, could legally be replaced as early as 1922. Design studies for her successor began in the early 1920s and dragged on for years, interrupted for a time by inflation and the occupation of the Ruhr. The head of the navy, Admiral Hans Zenker, considered both a heavily armoured, slow monitor and a fast, less well-protected ship of cruiser type. An intermediate solution was chosen. The new ship was to have six 280 mm guns in two triple turrets, eight 150 mm guns, belt armour up to 80 mm thick and a speed of about 26–28 knots. Instead of steam turbines she was given MAN diesel engines, a novelty in warships of that size at the time. They gave her an enormous range – according to German figures, about 10,000 nautical miles at 20 knots. More than 90 per cent of the hull was welded rather than riveted, saving weight that could be devoted to guns and armour.

The idea was put like this: the ship was to be stronger than anything faster than her and faster than anything stronger. This was something of an exaggeration. A few ships in the world were both faster and more heavily armed, above all the British battlecruisers Hood, Renown and Repulse and the Japanese ships of the Kongō class. Against ordinary cruisers, which could catch the Deutschland on the open ocean, she had an overwhelming superiority in firepower, and she could outrun battleships. She was the ideal ship for a war on merchant shipping.

“Food for children, not battleships”

Her construction provoked one of the bitterest political disputes of the Weimar Republic. Money for “Armoured Ship A” appeared in the 1928 budget, and the Social Democrats and Communists fought the May 1928 election under the slogan of food for children instead of battleships. The Social Democrats won the election, but in August 1928 their ministers in Hermann Müller’s government, under pressure from their coalition partners, agreed to the construction. SPD voters felt betrayed, and in October 1928 the Communists tried to force a referendum against the ship. They failed to collect the required number of signatures. The Social Democratic parliamentary group then forced the chancellor to vote in the Reichstag against his own government’s decision, which undermined his authority. The construction was supported by the Reichswehr Minister, General Wilhelm Groener, and from October 1928 the navy was headed by Admiral Erich Raeder, who would lead it until 1943.

The keel was laid on 5 February 1929. When details of the design became known, the powers tried to stop the construction. According to American and German studies, Berlin offered to halt work in exchange for Germany’s admission to the Washington treaty system with the right to a certain tonnage of battleships – in effect, in exchange for the abolition of Versailles’s naval restrictions. Britain and the United States were willing to talk, but France refused any change to the treaty. Since the design formally kept within the limits, there was no way to forbid Germany to build it.

The launch and the real displacement

The launch itself is remembered for an amusing incident. According to accounts, the ship began to slide down the slipway prematurely, during Chancellor Brüning’s speech, before Hindenburg had managed to break a bottle of sparkling wine against her side. An anecdote has survived according to which the old marshal remarked that “the tub must be teetotal”. The ship was not commissioned until 1 April 1933, after Adolf Hitler had come to power.

Officially the Deutschland displaced 10,000 tons. In reality the figure was higher. According to most studies her standard displacement was about 10,600 long tons, or more than 10,700 metric tons, and according to some Polish sources her design displacement reached 11,700 tons. Fully loaded, she exceeded 14,000 tons. The next two ships of the type were heavier still. The Admiral Scheer, named after Reinhard Scheer, the fleet commander at Jutland, was launched on 1 April 1933, and the Admiral Graf Spee, commemorating Admiral Maximilian von Spee, killed off the Falklands in 1914, on 30 June 1934. Her standard displacement exceeded 12,000 tons. The excess was concealed, and abroad it was long only half believed.

Alarm abroad

Abroad the ship caused consternation. It turned out that a state disarmed at Versailles could build, within the limits of the treaty, a vessel more dangerous than any cruiser. The strongest reaction came from France, whose routes to North Africa and the colonies lay within range of a German raider. For years the French navy had been designing small capital ships to counter Italian cruisers, and once construction of the Deutschland began it changed its requirements. The new ship was to have armour that could withstand German 280 mm shells and guns capable of destroying her. The design was approved in April 1932, and on 24 December 1932 the keel of the battleship Dunkerque was laid at Brest, the first of the two ships of the Dunkerque class, armed with eight 330 mm guns.

That was not the end of it. In 1934 Italy, alarmed by the French programme, announced the construction of the large Littorio-class battleships; France responded with the Richelieu class; and Germany, after Hitler came to power, stopped building further armoured ships and began building the much larger battleships of the Scharnhorst class. The small ship from Kiel became one of the first links in a naval arms race in Europe – precisely what the London Naval Treaty of 1930 had been meant to prevent.

On the road to war

When the Deutschland was launched, the Weimar Republic was sinking into the Great Depression, and after the election of September 1930 the NSDAP was the second force in the Reichstag. The ship ordered by a democratic government would, however, serve a different state. In 1935 the naval agreement with Britain allowed Germany to build a fleet equal to 35 per cent of the British one and made the Versailles restrictions a dead letter. During the Spanish Civil War the Deutschland patrolled the coast as part of the international control scheme. On 29 May 1937, in the roadstead off Ibiza, she was bombed by Republican aircraft, which killed 31 sailors, and in reprisal the Admiral Scheer shelled Almería. In March 1939 Hitler sailed aboard the Deutschland to Klaipėda (Memel), which had been taken from Lithuania.

At the end of August 1939 the Deutschland and the Admiral Graf Spee put out into the Atlantic in order to attack Allied shipping once war broke out. The Deutschland sank or captured only a few vessels, and after her return she was renamed Lützow, because Hitler did not want the Allies to be able to announce, if she were sunk, that the “Deutschland” had gone to the bottom. The Admiral Graf Spee sank nine ships in the South Atlantic and on 13 December 1939 fought three British cruisers in the Battle of the River Plate. Damaged, she took refuge in Montevideo and on 17 December was scuttled by her own crew. The Lützow later fought off the coast of Norway and in the Baltic, and on 16 April 1945 she was badly damaged by British bombers at Swinemünde (Świnoujście). The ship whose construction had split the German left in 1928 and alarmed Paris in 1931 ended her service as an immobilised battery shelling the advancing Red Army, until on 4 May 1945 she was blown up by her own crew.