Admiral Scheer

Admiral Scheer was laid down at the Reichsmarinewerft in Wilhelmshaven on 25 June 1931 as Panzerschiff B, ordered as Ersatz Lothringen — the money voted only after the Social Democrats abstained rather than force a political crisis over rearmament. Launched on 1 April 1933 and christened by Marianne Besserer, daughter of the Jutland commander whose name she carried, she was commissioned on 12 November 1934. Officially she sat inside the Treaty of Versailles limit of 10,160 tonnes; in fact she displaced 15,420 tonnes at full load.

The design answered a strategic problem with an armament-and-speed trade. Six 28 cm SK C/28 guns in two triple turrets could outgun any cruiser fast enough to catch her, while 28 knots from four sets of MAN nine-cylinder double-acting two-stroke diesels left only a handful of Anglo-French ships both quick enough to run her down and strong enough to sink her. Those diesels gave her 9,100 nautical miles of range at 20 knots — the endurance of a raider. Her armour was thin for her gun power: a belt of 60 to 80 mm, a main armoured deck of 17 to 45 mm, and 140 mm turret faces.

She carried eight 15 cm guns in single amidships turrets, a heavy anti-aircraft battery of three twin 8.8 cm mounts, two quadruple 53.3 cm torpedo tubes on the stern, and a Heinkel He 60 seaplane with catapult. A 1939–40 refit remade her: a new raked clipper bow, the heavy command tower replaced with a lighter structure, 10.5 cm guns for the 8.8s, Arado Ar 196 floatplanes, and updated radar. In February 1940 the surviving ships of the class were reclassified as heavy cruisers.

Her first overseas work came in July 1936, evacuating German civilians from the Spanish Civil War, and from 8 August she joined her sister Deutschland on non-intervention patrols off the Republican coast — nominally controlling war materiel, in practice logging Soviet supply ships and protecting German deliveries to the Nationalists. After aircraft attacked Deutschland off Ibiza on 29 May 1937, Admiral Scheer was sent in reprisal: on 31 May, the anniversary of Jutland and flying the Imperial War Flag, she arrived off Almería at 07:29 and shelled shore batteries, naval installations and shipping in the harbour.

Under Kapitän zur See Theodor Krancke she slipped through the Denmark Strait on the night of 31 October 1940 and into the open Atlantic. Her B-Dienst intercept team found convoy HX 84 out of Halifax, and her Arado located it on 5 November. The lone escort, the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay, reported the raider and turned to fight while the convoy scattered behind smoke. Scheer's first salvo knocked out Jervis Bay's wireless and steering, the second killed her commander Edward Fegen on the bridge, and she sank in 22 minutes — but the delay let most of the convoy escape, and only five of 37 ships were sunk.

The cruise ran on for months. She let the refrigerator ship Duquesa transmit a distress call on purpose, drawing Formidable, Hermes, Dorsetshire, Neptune, Dragon and Pretoria Castle into a hunt that pulled attention away from Admiral Hipper. In February 1941 she met the raider Atlantis and the supply ship Tannenfels east of Madagascar, then worked the Seychelles, taking the tanker British Advocate as a prize and sinking the Greek Grigorios, the Canadian Cruiser and the Dutch Rantaupandjang. Distress signals brought HMS Glasgow's aircraft onto her on 22 February and set the East Indies Station hunting with Hermes, Capetown, Emerald, Hawkins, Shropshire and HMAS Canberra; Krancke turned southeast and was clear by 3 March.

She broke back through the Denmark Strait on 26–27 March, evading the cruisers Fiji and Nigeria, spent a day in the Grimstadfjord at Bergen, and picked up a destroyer escort for the last leg to Kiel, which she reached on 1 April 1941. In one operation she had steamed over 46,000 nautical miles and sunk seventeen merchant ships totalling 113,223 gross register tons — by far the most successful German capital-ship commerce raider of the war. Krancke left her in June, replaced by Kapitän zur See Wilhelm Meendsen-Bohlken, who would take her on her next and stranger voyage.

Bismarck's loss in May 1941 and the Royal Navy's destruction of the German supply-ship network killed a planned second Atlantic sortie. Instead Admiral Scheer went north, sailing for Norway in February 1942 with Prinz Eugen and five destroyers. In July she joined Operation Rösselsprung, the surface attempt on Arctic convoy PQ 17, forming one group with Lützow while Tirpitz and Admiral Hipper formed the other. Lützow and three destroyers ran aground en route; the British scattered the convoy anyway, the Germans abandoned the surface attack, and U-boats and the Luftwaffe destroyed twenty-four of its thirty-five transports.

In August 1942 she ran Operation Wunderland alone — a sortie into the Kara Sea against Soviet shipping, too long for destroyer escort beyond Novaya Zemlya, conducted under strict radio silence with Kapitän zur See Wilhelm Meendsen-Bohlken holding complete tactical control. She met heavy ice, and the Arado spent as much time scouting leads as hunting ships. On 25 August she sank the Soviet icebreaker Sibiryakov, which got a distress signal away; two days later she damaged two ships and shelled the harbour at Dikson, Soviet shore batteries deterring a landing party. She was back at Narvik on 30 August with nothing significant to show.

From December 1942 she was a training ship, moved from Wilhelmshaven to Swinemünde after RAF bombs found her. Late in 1944 she returned to combat in the Baltic, relieving Prinz Eugen off the Estonian island of Saaremaa in November and covering the evacuation of 4,694 troops. In February 1945 she stood off Samland shelling Soviet positions near Peyse and Gross-Heydekrug, artillery support that helped a local counterattack briefly reopen the land route to Königsberg. By March her gun barrels were worn out; she carried 800 civilian refugees and 200 wounded soldiers west, then fired off her remaining ammunition at Soviet forces outside Kolberg.

She had come into Kiel on 18 March 1945 with refugees aboard, threading minefields that had turned her back from the port once already, and there her stern turret had its guns replaced at the Deutsche Werke yard by early April. Most of her crew were ashore during the repairs. On the night of 9 April more than 300 RAF aircraft bombed the harbour; Admiral Scheer was hit and capsized at her berth. The number of dead is unknown — an oddly blank ending for a ship whose tonnage sunk had been counted to the last register ton.

She was partly broken up after the war, but the rest of the hull was left where she lay and buried under rubble when the inner harbours at Kiel were filled in. She stayed buried until 2024, when an industrial archaeologist and a geophysicist working with reflection seismology surveyed a naval arsenal car park in Kiel and located roughly 70 per cent of the ship, main guns and superstructure included.