SMS Deutschland

The Second Naval Law of 1900, driven through by Tirpitz, funded twenty battleships over seventeen years. The Deutschland class followed the five Braunschweigs, broadly similar but with incremental improvements in armour and the secondary guns moved back from turrets to traditional casemates to save weight. Deutschland was laid down at the Germaniawerft in Kiel on 20 July 1903 under the provisional name "N", launched on 19 November 1904, and commissioned on 3 August 1906.

She carried four 28 cm SK L/40 guns in two twin turrets, fourteen 17 cm guns in casemates, twenty 8.8 cm guns against torpedo boats and six submerged 45 cm torpedo tubes. Three triple-expansion engines on twelve coal-fired Scotch marine boilers produced 15,781 indicated horsepower for 18 knots, the smoke venting through three funnels. Krupp cemented armour gave her a belt of 140 to 225 mm, 40 mm on the main deck and 280 mm on the main battery turrets. She could steam 4,850 nautical miles at 10 knots.

HMS Dreadnought was commissioned in December 1906, four months after her. Ten 12-inch guns in a single hull rendered every capital ship in the German navy obsolete, Deutschland and her class included, before the newest of them had finished her trials. She was the end of a line rather than the beginning of one — a soundly built pre-dreadnought that reached the fleet at the moment the type stopped counting.

She replaced the battleship Kaiser Wilhelm II as fleet flagship on 26 September 1906, when Admiral Prince Heinrich hoisted his flag aboard; the fleet was renamed the High Seas Fleet in February 1907. Heinrich drilled it hard in accurate gunfire and manoeuvring as a unit. In 1907 she lay in the Schillig roadstead for a review of 112 warships, and in July 1908 went into the Atlantic with the fleet, calling at Funchal and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

She won the Kaiser's Schießpreis in 1909, 1910 and 1911. During a periodic overhaul she was given additional pedestal-mounted searchlights and became the first ship in the German navy to be equipped with an X-ray machine. She carried Wilhelm II to Helgoland and to the opening of the Naval Academy at Mürwik, and hosted Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg at a review held for an Austro-Hungarian delegation that included Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Admiral Montecuccoli.

The dreadnoughts ended her run. Holtzendorff was relieved as fleet commander on 30 January 1913, and Ingenohl lowered his flag aboard Deutschland the very next day to transfer to the new dreadnought Friedrich der Grosse. The golden bow ornament that marked the flagship was removed and she went back into the ranks of II Battle Squadron, resuming flagship duties only briefly late that year while her successor was in dry dock.

From the outbreak of war, Deutschland and the rest of II Squadron were tasked with coastal defence at the mouth of the Elbe and the approaches to the German Bight. She made a sweep toward Bornholm in November 1914 that concluded uneventfully, and stayed on picket while her sisters covered the raid on the English coast that December. Ingenohl briefly flew his flag in her again in January 1915, and on 14 March she became II Squadron flagship under Konteradmiral Felix Funke, then Franz Mauve from August.

On 24–25 April 1916 she and her four sisters joined the dreadnoughts supporting the battlecruiser raid on Yarmouth and Lowestoft, an operation called off in poor visibility before the British fleet could intervene. A sortie against British ships off Horns Reef on 4 May came to nothing. It was unglamorous work, and it kept the oldest capital ships in the fleet occupied in a war they had not been built for.

At Jutland, II Battle Squadron possessed the weakest battleships present and was positioned at the rear of the German line, under strength with Pommern's sister Lothringen worn out and withdrawn. The pre-dreadnoughts were markedly slower than the dreadnoughts and fell behind in the pursuit; when Scheer reversed the whole fleet with a Gefechtskehrtwendung, they could not conform and ended on the disengaged side. Mauve considered dropping astern of III Squadron, then tried instead to place his ships at the head of the line.

Later in the day, with I Scouting Group hard pressed by the British battlecruisers, Deutschland and the other so-called "five-minute ships" came to their aid by steaming between the opposing squadrons. Poor visibility kept the exchange brief; she fired a single round from her 28 cm guns before Mauve judged the odds and ordered an eight-point turn to starboard. During the night march home, British destroyers attacked and she fired a few 8.8 cm shells into the mist without effect.

Pommern exploded under torpedo attack nearby and fragments of her rained down around Deutschland. Across the whole battle Deutschland expended one 28 cm shell and five 8.8 cm rounds, and was not damaged. Jutland settled the question of pre-dreadnoughts in a fleet action: she and her three surviving sisters went back to the Elbe, were left behind when the fleet sortied on 18 August, and were removed from the High Seas Fleet late in 1916.

She was decommissioned on 10 September 1917, disarmed, and moved to Wilhelmshaven as a barracks ship; many of her guns were converted for use ashore as coastal, field or railway artillery. Struck from the naval register on 25 January 1920 and sold the same year, she was broken up by 1922. Her bow ornament is on display at the Eckernförde underwater weapons school, and her bell lies in Prince Heinrich's mausoleum at the Hemmelmark estate.