Emden

Emden was the first large warship built in Germany after the First World War, laid down at the Reichsmarinewerft in Wilhelmshaven on 8 December 1921, launched on 7 January 1925 and commissioned that October. Her design was dictated by the Treaty of Versailles and the Allied disarmament commission: displacement capped at 6,000 long tons, and a main battery of eight surplus wartime 15 cm guns in single turrets after the Allies refused the twin-turret arrangement the navy wanted.

Political instability and Germany's financial weakness dragged construction out over three years, and the ship was based on the late-war cruiser Karlsruhe's blueprints because the design staff was short-handed. Her weak six-gun broadside made her something of a disappointment, but she carried real advances: large-scale welding in her construction, and a propulsion system efficient enough to stretch her cruising radius fifty per cent beyond the older cruisers — exactly what her later career required.

Her legality was a matter of definitions. Fully loaded she exceeded the 6,000-ton treaty ceiling by almost 1,000 long tons, and only in 1923, with work already under way, did the Germans propose measuring her by the Washington Treaty's standard-displacement rule instead — a figure just under the limit. The Allied powers approved, and the ship was retroactively made legal. The launch itself was heavy with lineage: Admiral Hans Zenker spoke, and the ship was christened by the widow of Karl von Müller, who had commanded the original Emden of the First World War.

Emden spent the inter-war years as the navy's ocean-going classroom, taking cadets on long training cruises to East Asia, the Americas and the Indian Ocean. On the first, in 1926–28, she rounded Africa and called at the Cocos Islands, where the wreck of the first Emden still lay; the crew held a memorial service there on 15 March 1927 before sailing on to Japan, Alaska and South America.

Her captains' list reads like a history of the German navy: the U-boat ace Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière took her to Australia and Hawaii in 1928–29, and from September 1934 she was commanded by Karl Dönitz, the future commander of the Kriegsmarine. In 1937 and 1938 she twice broke off her cruises to join the non-intervention patrols enforcing the arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War, and in October 1938 she lay at Istanbul during the funeral of Atatürk.

In the war's first days Emden helped lay the defensive minefield across the German Bight, from the Dutch coast to Jutland. Moored in Wilhelmshaven on 4 September 1939, she was attacked by ten RAF Blenheims; one of her 2 cm gunners shot down a bomber, which crashed into the ship. The newest research puts her losses at eleven killed, including two officers, and thirty wounded — among the very first casualties of the German fleet in the war.

For the invasion of Norway in April 1940 she sailed with Group 5 against Oslo, embarking 600 soldiers at Swinemünde. In the Drøbak narrows the flagship Blücher was sunk by the Norwegian guns of Oscarsborg Fortress and Lützow damaged. Emden disembarked her troops further down the fjord to take the coastal defences from the rear, closed with Oscarsborg on 9 April to provide covering fire, and entered Oslo on the 10th, serving as the joint communications centre for the German services.

From September 1941 she supported the invasion of the Soviet Union with the short-lived Baltic Fleet built around the new battleship Tirpitz, forming the core of its southern group at Libau alongside Leipzig. Off Dagö on 16 September she came under fire from Soviet coastal batteries and survived an unsuccessful attack by four Soviet torpedo boats undamaged, then gave gunfire support to German troops on the Sworbe Peninsula on 26–27 September. Otherwise her war was the Training Unit of the Fleet, to which she was attached from November 1941 until the end.

Late 1944 brought minelaying in the Skagerrak until Allied air attacks forced cancellation, then a grounding in the Oslofjord that sent her to Königsberg for repair. When the Soviet Army closed on the city in January 1945, Emden embarked the disinterred remains of Paul von Hindenburg and his wife to keep them from capture, carrying them under icebreaker tow to Pillau, where they were transferred to the transport Pretoria. On one working propeller she limped to Kiel by 6 February.

In dry dock at Deutsche Werke she was bombed again and again: incendiaries on 11 March, a direct hit that destroyed her forward funnel on 3 April, and serious damage on 13 April in the raids that also destroyed the heavy cruisers Admiral Hipper and Admiral Scheer. Towed out with a 15-degree list, she was run aground in the shallows of Heikendorfer Bucht and decommissioned on 26 April 1945.

She had been running on borrowed time long before the bombs found her. On sea trials after her 1942 overhaul she managed only 26.9 knots against the 29 she was built for, sixteen years into her service and still turning her original engines; she was due for replacements the war would never allow, and soldiered on without them. Her crew blew the ship up on 3 May 1945, five days before the war in Europe ended, to prevent her capture. The wreck was broken up for scrap where it lay over the following five years, but her bow ornament survives, on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.