"Charlotte" was the last sailing ship of the German navy; she was authorized at the same time as "Nixe", and like "Nixe", she had little value as a warship. The sailing rig was retained in large part because the navy intended to use the ship for training and it still regarded sail training as important for ship crews. "Charlotte" was essentially a repeat of the "Bismarck" design, with a slightly greater displacement and heavier armament. Though "Charlotte" spent her career as a training ship, she was involved in international incidents while abroad, most notably the Lüders affair in Haiti in 1897 and the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903. In 1899, she was the first German warship to visit France after the Franco-Prussian War, a trip made to improve relations between the two countries. The ship remained in service until May 1909, when she was stricken from the naval register and thereafter converted into a barracks ship and tender for the training ship . She served in these capacities to the outbreak of World War I in July 1914; in October, she was briefly reactivated, the only time in the history of the German navies that a vessel that had been stricken was re-commissioned. In November, she was again removed from service and returned to support "König Wilhelm". In 1921, after the war, she was sold to a firm in Hamburg and hulked; her ultimate fate is unknown.