A Battleship in a Treaty Suit
In 1939, Germany had three pocket battleships. They were called “pocket battleships” because they packed six 283mm guns, battleship-caliber weapons, onto a hull that weighed around 12,000 tons. Fast enough to outrun anything they couldn’t outfight.
The lead ship was named Deutschland. As in “Germany.”
She was built at the Deutsche Werke yard in Kiel and launched on May 19, 1931. The Treaty of Versailles capped any new German warship at 10,000 tons. Deutschland was officially within that limit. She was not. The sources disagree on by how much: Naval Encyclopedia gives about 10,600 tons standard and 14,290 fully loaded, while the design figure quoted elsewhere is 12,630 tons. Either number breaks the treaty.
Her eight MAN diesels were the other half of the idea. They gave her a range of at least 10,000 nautical miles at 20 knots, and some figures put it at 17,400 miles at 13 knots. She was built to disappear into the Atlantic for months and sink merchant ships far from any British base.
Her first casualties came in someone else’s war. On May 29, 1937, she was anchored off Ibiza during the Spanish Civil War, sent there as a neutral patrol ship, when two Soviet-piloted SB bombers of the Republican air force attacked her. The bombs killed 31 of her crew and wounded 74.
The City of Flint Affair
That August, before war was even declared, Deutschland slipped into the North Atlantic to wait for orders. When war came on September 1, she started hunting. But her cruise was unimpressive. She sank the British steamer Stonegate on October 5 and the Norwegian Lorentz W. Hansen on October 14. Two ships sunk in more than two months at sea.
Then came the City of Flint. She was an American freighter under Master Joseph A. Gainard, out of New York on October 3 with a mixed cargo bound for Britain. On October 9, Deutschland stopped her, declared the cargo contraband, and put a German prize crew aboard.
The prize crew tried to sail her home the long way, around the north of Norway. She called at Tromso on October 21 for water, and Norway ordered her out. Two days later she turned up at the Soviet port of Murmansk instead of anywhere in Germany. At 11 PM that night in Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a telegram to Laurence A. Steinhardt, the American ambassador in Moscow. News agencies could not even agree whether the ship was at Murmansk or somewhere else in Kola Bay. Hull wanted to know something more basic: who exactly had been interned, the Americans or the Germans?
The answer was the Germans. The Soviets interned the prize crew the next day, then changed their minds and handed the ship back to German control. The diplomatic fallout was immediate. The US was still neutral, and seizing American ships was not a good way to keep it that way. On the way south, a Norwegian minelayer stopped her off the coast and ordered her into Haugesund. Norway interned the prize crew and returned the ship to her American captain.
Afraid of a Headline
Meanwhile, Deutschland’s sister ship Admiral Graf Spee was having a far busier run in the South Atlantic, until three British cruisers cornered her at the River Plate on December 13. Graf Spee was scuttled in Montevideo four days later.
Hitler looked at the situation and had a thought: what if a ship called “Deutschland” gets sunk? The headline would write itself. “Germany sunk.”
When she reached Gotenhafen in mid-November 1939, the ship was rerated a heavy cruiser and renamed on Hitler’s own decision. The change took effect in early 1940. She became Lutzow, a name freed up because the unfinished heavy cruiser that carried it was being sold to the Soviet Union. Raeder hoped the swap would also confuse British intelligence.
The new name brought no better luck. In April 1940 Lutzow sailed in Operation Weserubung, the invasion of Norway, in the group sent up the Oslofjord. At the Drobak narrows the guns of Oscarsborg Fortress hit her three times with 15cm shells, on her forward turret and superstructure.
On April 11, on her way home, the British submarine HMS Spearfish put a torpedo into her stern. It blew off her steering gear and left her dead in the water. She had to be towed back to Germany for a long repair.
She returned to Norway and was torpedoed again in June 1941, this time by an RAF Beaufort, which knocked out her electrical systems and sent her back to the yard. In July 1942, during Operation Rosselsprung, a planned sortie against an Arctic convoy, Lutzow and three destroyers ran aground in the fjords. She never got near the convoy.
The Barents Sea
Under her new name, Lutzow had one more chance to matter. On New Year’s Eve 1942, she was part of Operation Regenbogen, a German attack on convoy JW-51B in the Barents Sea. The plan was a pincer: heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper from the north, Lutzow from the south, six destroyers in support.
It should have worked. The convoy’s escort was just six British destroyers.
But Lutzow’s captain, under standing orders to avoid risk, fired at long range and then withdrew without pressing the attack. The British destroyers, especially HMS Onslow under Captain Robert Sherbrooke, who won the Victoria Cross for that fight, held out until cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica arrived. The convoy got through.
Hitler couldn’t even get a situation report for hours because of communications failures. When he finally heard what happened, he was incandescent. He declared the entire surface fleet useless and ordered it scrapped.
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, resigned on January 30, 1943. He was replaced by Admiral Karl Donitz, the U-boat man, who managed to talk Hitler out of the most extreme measures. But the surface fleet was effectively sidelined for the rest of the war.
Last Stand at Swinemunde
Lutzow spent her last days being bombed by the RAF at Swinemunde, where the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen was also a target of the first raid on April 13. On April 16, 1945, a Tallboy near-miss from 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, tore open her hull and she settled in shallow water. Her main deck stayed above the surface, so she was used as a stationary artillery battery, firing at the advancing Soviets until her ammunition ran out. On May 4, 1945, her crew set scuttling charges.
The Soviets raised the wreck. For decades historians assumed it was scrapped. In the early 2000s, the historian Hans Georg Prager found in Soviet archives that she had been sunk in weapons tests in the Baltic off Swinoujscie on July 22, 1947.
