page_title: German cruiser Deutschland
section_title: Operations in the Baltic
hierarchical_section_title: German cruiser Deutschland / History / World War II / Operations in the Baltic
caption_attribution_description: English: The German cruiser Lützow, damaged by British bombers, in the Kaiserfahrt canal (today Kanał Piastowski) in western Pomerania, Germany (today Poland), on 25 April 1945.
context_page_description: Deutschland was the lead ship of her class of heavy cruisers which served with the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ordered by the Weimar government for the Reichsmarine, she was laid down at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel in February 1929 and completed by April 1933. Originally classified as an armored ship by the Reichsmarine, in February 1940 the Germans reclassified the remaining two ships of this class as heavy cruisers. In 1940, she was renamed Lützow, after the Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruiser Lützow was handed over to the Soviet Union.
  The ship saw significant action with the Kriegsmarine, including several non-intervention patrols in the Spanish Civil War, during which she was attacked by Republican bombers. At the outbreak of World War II, she was cruising the North Atlantic, prepared to attack Allied merchant traffic. Bad weather hampered her efforts, and she sank or captured only a handful of vessels before returning to Germany. She then participated in Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Norway. Damaged at the Battle of Drøbak Sound, she was recalled to Germany for repairs.
context_section_description: Hitler was furious over the failure to destroy the convoy, and ordered that all remaining German major warships be broken up for scrap. In protest, Raeder resigned; Hitler replaced him with Admiral Karl Dönitz, who persuaded Hitler to rescind the order to dismantle the surface ships of the Kriegsmarine. In March, Lützow moved to Altafjord, where she experienced problems with her diesel engines. The propulsion system proved to be so unreliable that repairs in Germany were necessary. She briefly returned to Norway but by the end of September 1943, a thorough overhaul was required. The work was completed in Kiel by January 1944, after which she remained in the Baltic Sea to conduct training cruises for new naval personnel.
  On 13 April 1945, twenty-four Avro Lancaster bombers attacked Lützow and Prinz Eugen without success due to cloud cover. The RAF failed again two days later but on 16 April, eighteen Lancasters scored a hit and several near misses on Lützow with Tallboy bombs in the Kaiserfahrt. Despite sinking, the water was shallow enough that her main deck was still 2 m (6 ft 7 in) above water, permitting her use as a stationary gun battery against advancing Soviet forces under control of Task Force Thiele. She continued in this role until 4 May, by which time she had expended her main battery ammunition. Her crew rigged scuttling charges to destroy the hull but a fire caused the explosives to detonate prematurely. The fate of Lützow was long unclear, as with most of the ships seized by the Soviet Navy. According to the historians Erich Gröner and M. J. Whitley, the Soviet Navy raised the ship in September 1947 and broke her up for scrap in 1948–1949. The historians Hildebrand, Röhr and Steinmetz, in their book Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe, state that she instead sank off Kolberg, claiming that the Lützow broken up in the late 1940s was instead the Admiral Hipper-class Lützow that had been sold to the Soviet Union in 1940. The historian Hans Georg Prager examined the Soviet archives in the early 2000s and discovered that Lützow had been sunk in weapons tests, in the Baltic Sea off Świnoujście, Poland, on 22 July 1947.
caption: Lützow, sunk in the Kaiserfahrt, on 26 April
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