German cruiser Leipzig

Leipzig was laid down at the Reichsmarinewerft in Wilhelmshaven on 28 April 1928, launched on 18 October 1929 and commissioned into the Reichsmarine on 8 October 1931, lead ship of a two-vessel class with her sister Nürnberg. She was 177 metres long overall, displaced 8,100 tonnes at full load and carried 26 officers and 508 enlisted men. Her main battery was nine 15 cm SK C/25 guns in three triple turrets — one forward and a superfiring pair aft, all on the centreline.

Her machinery was mixed: two steam turbines on six oil-fired water-tube boilers, plus four seven-cylinder MAN two-stroke double-acting diesels, giving 32 knots at full power and roughly 3,900 nautical miles at 10 knots on the diesels alone. Protection was slight — a 30 mm armoured deck, a 50 mm belt, 100 mm on the conning tower sides. A refit in late 1934 added a catapult, exchanged her 50 cm torpedo tubes for 53.3 cm, and made her the first Kriegsmarine ship to receive anti-aircraft fire control.

In 1934 she and the cruiser Königsberg made the first German goodwill visit to the United Kingdom since the end of the First World War. Hitler came aboard during fleet manoeuvres the following year. From August 1936 she worked the non-intervention patrols off Spain, and in late June 1937 an alleged torpedo attack on her was the pretext on which Germany and Italy withdrew from those patrols. In March 1939 she took part in the annexation of Memel, demanded from Lithuania.

At the outbreak of war she was in the force meant to stop the Polish Navy escaping the Baltic, which it failed to do, then went to the North Sea to lay defensive minefields with the other light cruisers. She swept the Skagerrak for Allied shipping with Deutschland, Köln and three torpedo boats on 21–22 November 1939, and escorted Scharnhorst and Gneisenau through the strait and covered their return on the 27th.

On 13 December 1939, escorting destroyers on a minelaying run through the Skagerrak, she was hit at 11:25 by a torpedo from the British submarine HMS Salmon. It struck just below the waterline at the bulkhead dividing two boiler rooms, bent her armoured deck, damaged her keel and let in some 1,700 tonnes of water, cutting electrical power to the pumping system and shutting down the port turbine. Nürnberg was torpedoed at about the same time, and an escorting destroyer an hour later.

RAF Wellingtons of No. 99 Squadron attacked the damaged cruisers on 14 December and were intercepted by fighters of II./JG 77; six bombers were lost and Leipzig took no further damage. She was repaired at the Deutsche Werke yard in Kiel, decommissioned during the work and reclassified as a training ship, with four boilers removed to make room for extra training crews. Back in service late in 1940, she gave gunfire support during Barbarossa and shelled Soviet positions on Moon Island in 1941.

On 14 October 1944, in heavy fog off Gotenhafen, she was switching from her diesels to her turbines — briefly without propulsion — and drifted out of her fairway into the path of Prinz Eugen, then making 20 knots. The heavy cruiser struck her on the port side just forward of the funnel and cut her nearly in half, the point of her clipper bow protruding beyond Leipzig's starboard side. The collision destroyed one engine room, flooded another and killed or wounded 39 men.

The two ships stayed locked together for over a day before Leipzig was towed back to Gotenhafen. Repairs were judged impractical given Germany's position by late 1944, and only enough work was done to keep her afloat in the harbour. In March 1945 she fired in support of the German defenders as the Red Army closed on the city, and on 24 March she was moved to Hela laden with refugees, capable of no more than 6 knots.

Soviet aircraft attacked her repeatedly and Allied submarines twice tried to torpedo her, but she reached Denmark safely on 29 April. Her state after the war ruled out anything else, and she was used as a barracks ship for the men of the German Mine Sweeping Administration, whose crews were clearing mines off the German coast. She was eventually towed out and scuttled in July 1946.