Career
Ordered:
Laid down:	February 1929
Launched:	May 1931
Commissioned:	1932
Fate:	Scuttled
General Characteristics
Displacement:	12,100 t standard; 16,200 t full load
Length:	610 ft (186 m)
Beam:	71 ft (21.6 m)
Draft (max.):	24 ft (7.4 m)
Armament:	Six 11 inch (280 mm) guns (2 triple turrets), eight 5.9 inch (150 mm) guns, eight 21 inch (530 mm) torpedo tubes (2 quadruple)
Armor:	5.5 inch (140 mm) turret face, 2.3 inch (58 mm) midships belt, 1.6 inch (41 mm) deck
Aircraft:	Two Arado 196 seaplanes, one catapult
Propulsion:	Eight MAN diesels, two screws, 52,050 hp (40 MW)
Speed:	28.5 knots (53 km/h)
Range:	8,900 nautical miles at 20 knots (16,500 km at 37 km/h)
Crew:	1,150

Deutschland ("Germany"), later re-named Lützow, was the first German large armoured ship built after World War I.

Its keel was laid down in February, 1929, at the Deustche Werke in Kiel; it was launched in May, 1931. It completed fitting-out in late 1932, and its maiden voyage was in May, 1932.

Its size and characteristics where severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles, which limited Germany to ships of no more than 10,000 tons displacement. A number of technical innovations used by the Germans to build a formidable warship within this restricted weight. Even so, the Deutschland was 600 tons overweight, although for political reasons its announced displacement was always given as the 10,000 tons of the treaty limit.

Two other very similar (but not identical) ships were built in its class, the Admiral Graf Spee and the Admiral Scheer. The class was termed Panzerschiff ("armoured ship"); they were designated "pocket battleships" by the British because of their characteristics: their guns (6 x 28 cm in two turrets) were substantially bigger than those of the heavy cruisers of her time, but they were faster (and much less armoured) than the standard battleships.

After the start of World War II, she was renamed Lützow in November 1939 because Adolf Hitler feared that it might be sunk in the imminent invasion of Norway, causing a significant psychological and propaganda defeat if a ship with the name "Germany" were lost.

In February 1940 she was re-classified as a heavy cruiser, and in April of that year she participated in the invasion of Norway. She participated in various minor events during the next years, but its only other significant service came starting in September 1944 in the Baltic Sea when she fired on land targets in support of the army, a service it would continue to supply in the coming months.

The ship was badly damaged by three 6-ton Tallboy bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force in April 1945 as it lay off Swinemünde, and it came to rest on the bottom. It was repaired, and then did further support of the army; it was finally scuttled by its crew in May.

Further reading

• Siegfried Breyer, Gerhard Koop, (translated Edward Force), The German Navy At War 1939-1945: Volume 1 - The Battleships (Schiffer, West Chester, 1989)
• Bernard Ireland, Tony Gibbons, Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century (HarperCollins, New York, 1996) pp. 42-43