German cruiser Nürnberg

Nürnberg, named after the city of Nuremberg, was laid down at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel in 1934, launched on 6 December that year, and completed in under a year, commissioning on 2 November 1935. She and her sister Leipzig formed the Leipzig class, armed with nine 15 cm guns in three triple turrets — one forward, a superfiring pair aft — plus twelve torpedo tubes and stowage for 120 mines.

Her machinery was her most distinctive feature: two steam turbines paired with four MAN two-stroke double-acting diesel engines, good for 32 knots, with the diesels alone giving a cruising range of roughly 3,900 nautical miles at 10 knots. Protection was light — a 50 mm belt and 30 mm armoured deck. Through the war her radar suite was steadily upgraded, from FuMO 21 in March 1941 through FuMO 25 to the Hohentwiel set, alongside four Metox radar warning receivers.

As flagship of the German navy's reconnaissance forces, Nürnberg made four non-intervention patrols off Spain during the Civil War, her only excitement a claimed submarine attack south of the Balearics in July 1937. In March 1939 she joined the fleet sent to seize Memel. When war came she first blockaded the Polish Navy in the Baltic — several Polish destroyers and submarines escaped to Britain regardless — then laid defensive minefields off the German coast and escorted destroyer minelaying runs to the British coast.

On 13 December 1939 the submarine HMS Salmon fired a spread at her flotilla. Nürnberg turned hard to port; one torpedo passed ahead, but the second struck her bow. As she slowed to inspect the damage three more tracks appeared, and she ran clear at full speed, the torpedoes exploding in her wake. The next day some twenty RAF Wellingtons came for her and the also-torpedoed Leipzig, only to be intercepted by the fighters of JG 77; RAF records show six bombers lost, and no further damage to the cruisers. Repairs in Kiel lasted until April 1940.

From June 1940 Nürnberg was based at Narvik, where her only action was a floatplane's unsuccessful attack on a British submarine; in late July she helped escort the torpedoed battleship Gneisenau home from Trondheim to Kiel. In February 1941 she was reclassified a training cruiser, feeding trained crews to the rapidly expanding U-boat arm, and that autumn briefly joined the Baltic Fleet formed around Tirpitz against a Soviet breakout that never came.

She returned to Norway from November 1942 to April 1943, joining the fleet in being at Bogen Bay outside Narvik without firing a shot, then trained in the Baltic through 1944 at a low state of readiness, spared even the shore-bombardment work most of the Training Squadron took on. Her last operation was Operation Titus on 13 January 1945, a minelaying run in the Skagerrak with 130 mines aboard. Fuel famine ended everything after that: she steamed to Copenhagen on 24 January with only 270 tons of synthetic oil left, and there she stayed.

On 22 May 1945 the British cruisers Devonshire and Dido arrived in Copenhagen to take her over, and she sailed for Wilhelmshaven with Prinz Eugen under escort. The Potsdam Conference awarded her to the Soviet Union; to forestall a repeat of the 1919 scuttling the Allies formally seized the German ships on 19 December 1945, while Nürnberg lay in drydock, and her Soviet crew came aboard the same day.

Renamed Admiral Makarov, she served the Soviet 8th Fleet from Tallinn, becoming its flagship in late 1948 under Vice Admiral Fyodor Zozulya, then reverted to her old trade as a training cruiser at Kronstadt from 1954 once new Chapayev-class cruisers arrived. She appears to have gone out of service by May 1959 and was scrapped by about mid-1960 — the longest-serving major warship of the Kriegsmarine, and the only one to see active service after the war's end, though never again under a German flag.